Scotty, Odo, Spock And Crusher Just Returned To Star Trek And Teamed Up On A New Series
Star Trek: Prodigy is the new Paramount Plus Star Trek animated series aimed squarely at kids. It fills a niche similar to the one Clone Wars filled for Star Wars. A few episodes in to the show’s run, it’s proven to be entertaining, but set in a world that largely ignores Star Trek’s past. Until now. In the most recent episode titled “Kobayashi Maru”, some of Star Trek’s greatest legends teamed up on the series to guide Prodigy’s young captain. For the first time ever Star Trek gave us Spock, Scotty, Uhura, Dr. Crusher, and Deep Space 9’s scowling security officer Odo teamed up. Better still they did it on the bridge of the Next Generation’s USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D.
It happened on the holodeck of the show’s hero ship, the USS Protostar. There, the Protostar’s self-appointed captain Dal decided to test himself against a training simulation called “Kobayashi Maru”. As any Star Trek fan knows, the Kobayashi Maru is a no-win scenario. There is no way to beat it, the entire point of the test is for the person in charge to lose and then gauge how they deal with total and utter defeat. But no one told Dal, so he went into the Kobayashi Maru determined to win.
To assist him, the ship’s holodeck assigned a holo-crew composed of the greatest officers ever to serve in Starfleet. Spock appeared to serve as Dal’s Science officer…
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Odo, as the greatest security chief of all time, got a station… though not at security. For some reason he ended up at the helm…
Dr. Beverly Crusher appeared to give advice as one of Starfleet’s greatest Chief Medical Officers (though come on, we know that the greatest is actually McCoy)…
Uhura, as Starfleet’s greatest communication specialist appeared and landed at, for some reason, Ops…
And last but not least the greatest Starfleet engineer of all time, Scotty, appeared to man the engineering station of the Enterprise D…
All five legendary Star Trek characters got screen time and even lines. In the case of Spock, Odo, Uhura and Scotty the show used sound clips from the past performances of the actors who played them. Three of those actors, Leonard Nimoy, René Auberjonois, and James Doohan are sadly deceased, but fans got to hear their voices again. In the case of Dr. Beverly Crusher, Gates McFadden cameoed to deliver new dialogue for her character.
The Enterprise D herself was an important character as well, with perfectly accurate beauty shots of her amazing bridge…
And here’s how the classic bridge looked on Star Trek: The Next Generation for comparison…
We also got an exterior beauty shot of the classic NCC-1701-D, right before Dal accidentally blew her up…
Star Trek: Prodigy has been a light affair and sometimes a blatant ripoff of Star Wars, but as the series progresses it’s beginning to round into form. Making use of classic Star Trek characters and classic Star Trek ideas is a great way to not only get the show off on the right foot, but also to introduce those figures to brand new, young viewers who might be watching Star Trek for the first time.
