Kate Mulgrew Is Furious Star Trek Blew A Chance To Explore The Prime Directive In This New Way

Kate Mulgrew, who played Captain Kathryn Janeway in "Star Trek: Voyager", was not happy after the cancellation of the children's show "Star Trek: Prodigy." The spin-off cartoon focused on a group of young aliens who want a way out of the Delta Quadrant, where Janeway and the crew of the Voyager found themselves during the events of the series. Janeway initially appears as a hologram, eventually showing up in person and joining the Voyager-A as they attempt to find a missing crew.

"Prodigy" is relatively unique to "Star Trek" as it doesn't take the point of view of a Federation-aligned set of characters. "Voyager" had the renegade Maquis onboard, but it was still focused on the plight of the lost Federation crew. This is one of the plot lines that inspired another all-time classic sci-fi show, "Battlestar Galactica." This is where Mulgrew's fury stems from, as "Prodigy" was canceled after its second season without digging deeper into how those who didn't grow up around the Federation would have acted or approached concepts like the Prime Directive.

"Star Trek's" Prime Directive is the rule that the Federation cannot interfere with a thriving civilization, lest they introduce technologies or ideas that it's not ready for. Many episodes see the various crews wrestle with it, whether to save a planet or even how to handle covert or undercover missions. The characters in "Prodigy," meanwhile, would only be learning to grasp it, rather than having it drilled into their heads from a young age.

Mulgrew said at a Trek to New Jersey panel that she was "furious" over the show being binned off. One of her hopes was that the show would allow "Star Trek" to tackle the Prime Directive with a wholly alien crew. She wanted to see it handled in "an entirely new and different way." This is, of course, down to who these characters are. "After all, they're all different species on that ship, they're not Star Trek, it's not Starfleet, they're all different. So I think to have learned it in a kind of gentle way over time would have been splendid."

Mulgrew agrees the scrapping of 'Prodigy' was a mistake. At the same panel, she further commented that she poured her "heart and soul" into the show, just for it to be canceled while the show found its footing. The actor added, "Why do they have it in stasis, to what end, when thousands, millions of young minds could be learning what we know and sharing it with their mothers, and their mothers with their mothers, the whole thing is just, I suppose, too elegant. The universe is just
too elegant that way."

It's a shame, as the last season ends with the cast from "Prodigy" being given their own training vessel. It's unlikely that a third season will ever happen, as currently, outside an in-development "Star Trek" movie, there are no in-production shows for the franchise. The last time this happened was after 2005, when "Star Trek: Enterprise" was canceled. It wouldn't be until J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot film, the highest-rated "Star Trek" movie on Rotten Tomatoes, that the series was brought back to life, but it was in 2015 that "Trek" returned to TV with "Discovery." It was followed up by "Star Trek: Into Darkness," which gave Abrams more than one reason for regret beyond just the way he handled Khan.