Warning! The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Prodigy’s midseason finale “A Moral Star, Part 2.” Read at your own risk!
Star Trek: Prodigy went into hiatus recently, but not before leaving its fans with some pretty big reveals. We got to see the actual Admiral Janeway out in search of the Protostar, and we saw The Diviner suffer a pretty brutal fate at the hands of his former captive and Prodigy character Zero. Surprisingly, the Hageman brothers didn’t get a bunch of pushback for that scene, though there was another dark moment in the first half of Season 1 that Nickelodeon asked to tweak.
First, let’s revisit Zero’s confrontation with The Diviner. The Medusan unbuckled their armor and revealed their exposed non-corporeal form to the villain. As Star Trek fans know, looking directly at a Medusan drives most life forms to madness and can even cause organ failure and death. I asked the Hageman brothers if that very-non Starfleet punishment received any pushback, and while that wasn’t the case, Dan Hageman shared another part of the struggle in that scene and how they’ll move forward with Zero’s trump card.
I mean, I think what was difficult was that option’s always been there. So, it’s tough because you have a nuclear weapon aboard the ship. When do you use it, and how do you set that up? And, it’s something that Zero doesn’t want to have to use, ever, but Zero, they got to a place where their back was against the wall. And it has ramifications in terms of Gwyn. Zero’s not gonna use that again, that ability. I don’t want to spoil anything, but we don’t want to have at the finale of every season Zero unbuckles their suit and reveals themselves, and the big bad is dead. That would be poor screenwriting.
For the record, I think Hageman might’ve spoken figuratively at the end of that quote there. While Medusans exposing their true form can have a fatal effect, Star Trek: Prodigy showed The Diviner rattling on and making etchings (which could have some significance based on previous background images in scenes) by himself following the Protostar’s departure. It’s possible he did die, though I’m personally hoping not because it’d be great to see him again.
Starfleet may not approve of Zero’s method for taking out The Diviner, but it seems Paramount+ and Nickelodeon were okay on that front. One thing the show needed to tweak, however, came from “Time Amok.” Apparently, there was a point in which the episode (which might be my favorite so far though the holodeck episode is a close second) described exactly how long Rok-Tahk was trapped in the time anomaly. That said, in the final cut of the episode, Hologram Janeway (which just makes me want to see Kate Mulgrew appear as Janeway in live-action again) just gave the answer “too long.”
Dan Hageman shared that he and brother Kevin know exactly how long Rok was stuck, but they aren’t telling.
We know. We can’t say. Nickelodeon said we can’t say. You can’t do that in a kid’s show. I’ll leave that up for every viewer to decide for themselves.
My conservative guess is Rok sat in the time anomaly for anywhere from 3-5 years alone, which is depressing to think about. Of course, she also picked up a lot of knowledge about engineering, which might help her escape her role as Security Officer on the Protostar. We may never know the real answer for how long Rok was isolated, but given how sad the montage of her in isolation was, that might be for the best.
Star Trek: Prodigy’s first batch of episodes is available to stream right now on Paramount+. New episodes arrive later this year, so be sure to get a Paramount+ subscription to catch that, and all the other new Trek shows arriving in 2022.
