Admiral Janeway is back for the eighth entry of her series of Star Trek Logs on Instagram (voiced by Kate Mulgrew and written by co-executive producer Aaron Waltke). This one picks up after episode 18 (“Mindwalk”), forcing Vice Admiral Janeway to get creative when making her new log.
Janeway sees hope… from the brig
The first season of Star Trek: Prodigy wraps up with a two-part finale; part one of “Supernova” arrives on Thursday. The previous episode showed the USS Protostar—under the control of the Living Construct—take the ship into the heart of Federation territory, where it was greeted by an armada of Starfleet ships. One might imagine that The Construct could immediately open a channel and infect all the Starfleet ships, but Admiral Janeway’s log explains how Captain Chakotay’s actions (revealed to her by Hologram Janeway in episode 18) made things a bit more difficult for the Construct:
Thanks to my holographic twin, I now know Chakotay – wherever he is – launched his ship prematurely from enemy hands. This means the weapon won’t activate without a manual uplink from the Protostar.
His sacrifice bought us a sliver of hope.
So it appears that even though The Construct has control over the Protostar, it cannot answer or open a hail to any Starfleet ships on its own. To complete its mission to infect Starfleet, it needs someone on the ship to do it manually.
The Admiral also outlined the threat on board the Dauntless and how exactly she is making a log following the episode 18 cliffhanger:
There are traitors on the Dauntless – Asencia! – and I’m trapped in the brig, using the security feed to record what happened here… if we survive.
Here is Janeway’s full log from the brig…
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Chakotay helps out from the future
While Admiral Janeway learned of Chakotay’s fate in episode 18, the details of his actions were actually revealed in episode 16, “Preludes,” when Asencia (The Vindicator) described to The Diviner what happened in the future after Chakotay and the Protostar passed through a temporal anomaly:
We took them prisoner and weaponized their ship with our last surviving Construct to be sent back in time to destroy Starfleet before they could ever make first contact. But on the eve of our launch, the Starfleet prisoners escaped. Unable to board or deactivate the weapon, they had one last resort… They sent the “Protostar” back into the time anomaly it came from, without a crew to guide it.
Now we know why having a Vau N’Akat crew to guide the ship is so important for the mission to attack Starfleet.
Chakotay watches the Protostar depart without the Vau N’Akat
Of course, the Vau N’Akat on board the Dauntless know this, so they would need to get onto the Protostar to complete their mission, which is teased in the preview images released earlier this week:
Angus Imrie as Zero, Brett Gray as Dal, Dee Bradley Baker as Murf, Rylee Alazraqui as Rok-Tahk and Jason Mantzoukas as Jankom Pog
John Noble as The Diviner, Jameela Jamil as The Vindicator, and Jimmi Simpson as Drednok
New episodes of Prodigy debut on Thursdays exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., and on Fridays in Latin America and select countries in Europe. The series is also carried on SkyShowtime in the rest of Europe with the second half of season one expected to arrive in 2023.
Keep up with news about the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com.
The Diviner will end up turning good and stop the weapon from deploying.
Or, perhaps the Diviner may be open to another solution.
For example, it might be possible for the Federation, warned of the impact of contact, to avoid first contact with the Vau N’Akat.
This may be a valid conflict between the Prime Directive and the Temporal Directive.
That would require his turning good, of course. He has to stop Asencia first before a diplomatic solution can be reached.
I imagine this arc concludes with the first season then the second season will be about rescuing Chakotay.
How do you rescue someone stuck in an alternate future you stopped from happening?
It’s like Doc Brown told Marty, if they went forward in time from the alternate 1985 they’d go to the alternate 2015. Same applies here.
If the future Chakotay is stuck in never comes to pass, they cannot travel forward to it to save him.
Janeway has to weigh sacrificing Chakotay (who would be stuck in an alternate future in a world that hates the Federation) in order to save that same world in her timeline.
But Chakotay has the instinct to truly perceive time – it’s moods, it’s colors.
He might, but that would not help him if Janeway changes history to prevent the timeline he’s trapped in from existing. It may be erased or just cut off from the prime timeline.
I posted a response but it’s waiting for approval. Weird.
If it has a link, it will be held for moderation.
It didn’t. Maybe it was flagged for spoilers about Chakotay.
I doubt it has anything to do with that. You probably just included a word that gets automatically kicked to moderation. It still happens to me from time to time too.
Ah, ok. I see they posted it.
Yes I get the idea the by the end of all of this Jamila Jamil will be the true bad guy, the Diviner will go good and reunite with Gwen
Indeed. That does seem to be where they’re going with it.
And then he opens a bar on Deep Space 12
”They sent the “Protostar” back into the time anomaly it came from, without a crew to guide it”
Wait, so the Protostar comes from the past or the future? Does that mean that both Protostar and Dauntless are ships out of time?
Watch the episode “Preludes,” it’s all explained pretty clearly.
Ok thanks. I think I saw it but I’ll rewatch,
No, the Protostar fell into a temporal anomaly which sent it into the future. But when it arrived, Chakotay managed to send it back in the past. That’s what Janeway is referring to. So both ships are from the ‘present’ day.
I will admit though, I too thought originally we were going to get a lot of time travel shenanigans because we had The Diviner 50 years from the future that was now for some reason searching for a ship around the same year of the third season of TNG. It was confusing lol. I also thought maybe the Dauntless also came from the 25th century as The Diviner did.
But these writers came up with a really clean and easy way to explain it. It’s not overly convoluted like I thought it was going to be and the show takes place in like four different timelines or something. This is how you write a well thought out time travel story without a ton of plot holes. Take notes Discovery.
Ahhh thanks for the explanation. That does make a whole lot more sense. Because if Janeway and Chakotay were from the future I’d have a hard time understanding why she would be reporting to Admiral Jericoe in the present lol.
I really do have to rewatch this season. Usually by the time I am watching my trek shows it is the end of the week. And by the end of the year at my job things get so ramped up trying to finish things by end of the year deadlines that by friday night or saturday I am totally exhausted!
I’m assuming the Dauntless was build after Voyager got back or sent to Starfleet when they could communicate with them. They could then copy its design from Voyager’s database. And developed the quantum slipstream technology because of it. Hope and Fear was the Voyager episode that featured the fake Dauntless.
Yep I remember hope and fear. Great ep. It really showcased the consequences to the entire quadrant from Janeway’s actions to get just 100+ people home. If you ask me, I am on Arturus’ side with that argument.
I generally think the animation is good on this show, although they’re not as good at depicting humans. Were it not for the tattoo, Chakotay wouldn’t really be recognisable. What the heck though, I’m enjoying this more than I expected to.
I will say Jelicoe wasn’t at all recognizable to me in his ep. Except for his voice of course
For some reason the movement of humans looks extra jittery, too.
But, the construct did activate without a manual uplink from the Protostar at the relay station.
The kids had linked the ship to the station to share data.
After all, they were trying to deliver Protostar to the Federation at that point.
They manually uplinked to the relay station to transfer their logs. The chaos didn’t start until Barnis Fracks said he was uplinking to download the data from the Protostar — then he accidentally triggered it.
If they change the future would that not erase the current kids and the ship from this timeline?
Most likely no. Trek time travel has shown that altering the future does not always result in the person instantly disappearing. Take Admiral Janeway is Endgame – the minute she traveled back she altered the past by giving Voyager the future tech and urging them to return to the Nebula. Her future ceased to exist, but she remained.
If the entire fleet is destroyed in the past then first contact would not have happened and the construct would not have been installed in the Protostar and so then the fleet could not self destroy. Isn’t it like a paradox or something to that effect?
Why is it that in every iteration of Star Trek the federation is always one madman away from destruction?