Star Trek: Prodigy (2021-2024) Review
Not rated
Forty episodes across two seasons, computer animated, about a group of young aliens who escape a Delta Quadrant prison colony aboard a stolen Starfleet ship they don’t know how to fly.
There’s no number on this page. I haven’t seen it, I barely registered that it had been made, and a borrowed verdict presented as my own would be dishonest. This is a survey of what happened to it and what people who watched it say.
The reason it’s worth a page anyway is that this is the best reviewed Star Trek ever made by the only numbers available, and almost nobody watched it. Its second season sits at a hundred percent with critics and ninety-six percent with audiences. It was also canceled, deleted from the service that made it, rescued by a fan campaign that flew an aeroplane over Netflix, released to those scores, passed over for a third season, and then removed from Netflix as well. It currently exists on disc and nowhere else.
I’m annoyed with myself for missing it and a lot more annoyed with Paramount for making it so easy to miss. A Star Trek with a perfect critical score should have been impossible to overlook, and the company that owned it did nearly everything it could to bury it, a baffling choice.
Nobody Has Seen It and That Is the Story
The fact that a long-time Star Trek viewer can barely recall this show existing is the most informative thing about it, and it’s a distribution story instead of a quality one.
It premiered in October 2021 on Paramount plus and on Nickelodeon. It’s the first signal. A Star Trek aimed at children, dual-released to a kids’ cable channel, marketed to an audience that doesn’t overlap with the people who watch the rest of the franchise.
Twenty episodes ran across 2021 and 2022, split into two ten-episode arcs. It won a Children’s and Family Emmy, which almost nobody in the adult Star Trek conversation registered.
Then in June 2023 Paramount canceled it and removed it from the service entirely, as part of a broader content purge tied to the Showtime merger. Cancelled and then deleted, which in streaming is a tax position instead of an editorial judgment.
A second season was already in production at that point and was allowed to finish post-production in December 2023 while the show was shopped elsewhere. That’s an unusual arrangement and the only reason the episodes exist.
So the show’s obscurity is the result of being aimed at children, placed on a cable channel, then erased from the platform that commissioned it before the second half was ever shown.
That’s the answer to why somebody with forty years of Star Trek behind them has no impression of it at all.
Obscurity is usually a distribution fact instead of a quality one, and the two get confused constantly. A work nobody has seen hasn’t been judged, it’s been unavailable. The same point runs through my Animated Series review. That show spent two decades formally outside its own canon and supplied the holodeck.
Note who a work was aimed at before concluding anything from your own reaction to it. A children’s series on a cable channel was never going to reach the people who argue about Star Trek online.
The Premise
Kevin and Dan Hageman created it, having previously written the first nine seasons of Ninjago, and the structure they built is the cleverest thing anybody has done with the franchise’s premise in thirty years. The central group are teenage prisoners on a mining colony in the Delta Quadrant called Tars Lamora, none of them human, none of them educated, several of them not from cultures that would recognize any of the Federation’s ideas. They escape by stealing a derelict Starfleet vessel, the USS Protostar, that nobody has told them anything about. They can’t fly it, don’t know what its rules are for, and have no idea what the insignia on the hull means.
What the ship has is an emergency training hologram, in the form of Captain Janeway, whose function is to teach a crew how to be Starfleet officers. Kate Mulgrew voices both that hologram and the real Admiral Janeway later.
The premise, then, is a program teaching a group of outsiders the Federation from scratch. That means the show has to explain every Star Trek value the franchise usually assumes out loud to somebody who has a reason to doubt it.
That’s a good solution to the problem of writing for an audience that’s never seen Star Trek. A character teaching a class can give the audience everything it needs to know, and the students get to argue with her. I think it’s a smarter way to bring newcomers into this universe than anything the live-action shows tried, and it’s the idea that makes me most want to see the thing.
It also inverts what Voyager did. That show put Starfleet officers a long way from home, and this one puts people a long way from Starfleet and has the institution come to them.
A character who has to be taught your premise turns exposition into drama. The teacher has authority, the students have reasons to resist, and every value in the work gets argued instead of assumed.
That’s the single most useful device available for writing an entry point into an established world, and almost nobody uses it.
Make your newcomers foreign. These aren’t humans who haven’t joined Starfleet yet, they’re aliens from cultures the Federation hasn’t reached. That means the objections are real.
Invert your predecessor instead of repeating it. Voyager sent the institution far from home and this brought the institution to people who had never heard of it.
What the Reception Says
The numbers on the second season are the reason this page exists and they’re not ambiguous. A hundred percent with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and ninety-six percent with audiences. A perfect critical score is rare for anything and unheard of in this franchise, and the audience figure being that close to it rules out the small-sample explanation.
Kate Mulgrew was nominated for an Emmy for the role. That’s the second award recognition the show received after the Children’s and Family Emmy for the first season. What reviewers consistently say is that it’s the modern Star Trek most interested in exploration. That’s the criticism most often made against Strange New Worlds on the page next to this one. The other recurring assessment is that it works for adults. Several people making that claim are long-time viewers who watched it expecting a children’s cartoon. That’s the same pattern my Animated Series review describes from 1973.
Mulgrew herself has been unambiguous. She said she was furious that Netflix didn’t order a third season, wanted to follow the Janeway and Chakotay relationship further, and called the Hagemans geniuses. None of that is my judgment and I’m reporting it. What I can say is that a hundred and ninety-six is the strongest reception any Star Trek has recorded, and it belongs to the one almost nobody in the franchise’s core audience has watched.
It Is the Actual Sequel to Voyager
This is the thing that should have brought the adult audience and didn’t, because nobody told them.
Janeway is in it properly, in two forms, voiced by Mulgrew. Chakotay is in it. The Doctor is in it. It’s set in the Delta Quadrant, the region Voyager spent seven years crossing, and the Protostar’s story connects directly to that history.
Voyager’s continuation, with its captain, its first officer, its holographic doctor and its setting, was made as a children’s animated series on Nickelodeon and then deleted from the streaming service before most Voyager viewers knew it existed.
That one stings. I’d have watched a Voyager sequel with Mulgrew back as Janeway in a heartbeat, and I had no idea it existed. Somebody decided the right home for it was a kids’ cable channel, and then the company pulled it before most of the Voyager audience ever heard its name. My Voyager review argues that show wasted its premise by resolving the Maquis conflict in three episodes and resetting every consequence. On the reception, this one does the opposite. That’s the kind of correction the franchise almost never manages. The Janeway material is also reportedly the show’s spine instead of a cameo. A hologram version teaching cadets the rules, and later the real admiral. That lets the series examine the character from outside for the first time.
That structure is novel. A legacy character rendered as a training program is a way of asking what somebody’s principles look like when abstracted from the person. That’s a better idea than any of the legacy returns in Picard.
Whether it delivers on that I can’t tell you. That it was attempted, in a show marketed to children, is documented.
The Cancellation and the Aeroplane
The production history is the part of this story anybody can verify and it’s impressive on its own. Paramount removed the show in June 2023 with the second season in production. The episodes were finished anyway, post-production wrapped in December 2023, and the Hagemans and producer Aaron Waltke showed a four-minute preview at the Las Vegas convention in August with no platform to put it on. The fan campaign is the part that worked. A GoFundMe raised around a hundred and twenty-five percent of its goal in five days and chartered an aeroplane to fly a banner over the Netflix offices on the twenty-fourth of August 2023.
Netflix acquired it that October. Season one arrived on Christmas Day 2023 and all twenty episodes of season two dropped in a single day on the first of July 2024. That made this the first Star Trek series not streamed on Paramount plus since the franchise returned in 2017. At the Star Trek Day presentation in 2023, while all this was happening, the show received a single indirect mention in a count of spinoffs and was otherwise not acknowledged by the company that made it.
Then Netflix passed. The reported viewing figure was around three point four million views across 2023 and 2024, against twenty and a half million for Blue Eye Samurai in the same window. That’s the comparison that explains the decision. The licenses then expired in sequence. Season one left Netflix on the twenty-fourth of June 2025 and season two at the end of December, removed in January 2026. Paramount’s own publicity now describes season two as the final season.
A work can be finished, excellent and unavailable, and all three at once is more common than anybody admits. This one has a perfect critical score and no distribution. Nothing about that is a judgment on the work. It’s a licensing calendar.
An organized audience can change a commercial decision, and it happened twice in this franchise. The Trimbles bought the original series a third season with letters in 1968 and this campaign bought a second season a platform with a chartered aeroplane in 2023.
Note what the parent company did while the fans were doing it. A single indirect mention at its own anniversary presentation. That tells you where the show sat internally regardless of its reviews.
Where It Is Now
As of the beginning of 2026 there’s no streaming service anywhere carrying this show. It exists on Blu-ray and DVD and as a digital purchase through Apple and Fandango at Home. The Hagemans confirmed the departure themselves on social media and said plainly that they hoped somebody would pick it up, because the next generation of Trek fans deserved it. They also moved on. Both are now writing a live-action Ninjago film. That means the people who would make a third season have other work, and Mulgrew reported hearing nothing at all and not even knowing the show had left Netflix. As it stands, forty episodes of the best reviewed Star Trek ever produced are locked behind a disc purchase, with no platform, no third season and no publicity from the company that owns them.
Whether it can be revived is a licensing question instead of a creative one. Paramount holds it, Paramount deleted it once already, and nobody has expressed public interest since Netflix let the rights lapse.
If you have Voyager on your shelf, you can buy its continuation, with the same captain and the same setting, and you can’t stream it.
I’ll watch it and then this page gets a number and my own account. Until then the survey above stands so anybody can see what the reception was and what happened to it.
Own a copy of anything you care about. Two seasons of an award-winning series with a perfect critical score are currently unstreamable, and the only people who can watch it are the ones who bought a disc.
That’s not a nostalgic point. It’s the condition of almost everything made in the last fifteen years. Say when you haven’t watched the thing. A survey of reception is useful and a borrowed verdict isn’t, and the difference costs nothing to state. A work’s availability is part of its history. The Animated Series was exiled from canon for two decades and this one was exiled from distribution inside three years, and neither had anything to do with the episodes.
Should you watch Star Trek: Prodigy?
Unrated, because I haven’t watched it and barely knew it existed. A hundred percent with critics and ninety-six with audiences for its second season, a premise that turns exposition into a class an outsider can argue with, the direct continuation of Voyager with Janeway and Chakotay in it, a fan campaign that chartered an aeroplane over Netflix to save it, and no streaming service anywhere carrying it as of 2026.
No number yet, and I’m not going to fake one. What I can say is that the way Paramount treated this show was shameful, and the Voyager connection alone is enough to put the discs at the top of my list.
