Captain Janeway Didn’t Deserve This

Paramount’s decision to unceremoniously both renege on its season two greenlight for Star Trek: Prodigy and completely remove the show from its streaming platform has created a PR nightmare of its own making with many, many layers to it. But amid all the concerns, the thing I keep thinking about is just how rude it is to the legacy of one of Trek’s finest.

That finest is of course Kate Mulgrew’s Captain (now Admiral) Kathryn Janeway, the Voyager star who in Prodigy connected its young alien heroes to the wider Star Trek franchise, and acted as their guiding light onto the path of becoming a part of Starfleet themselves. The return of Mulgrew to the Trek franchise was a long time coming, announced as Voyager celebrated its 25th anniversary milestone. There were parallels between the approach to Janeway that echoed everything Star Trek was doing around the return of Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard to prominence, albeit with some notable caveats: Mulgrew was back in voiceover, not live action, her role wasn’t—at first at least—as Janeway in the here and now, but a holographic facsimile of her as she was around the time of Voyager itself. But it was still her moment: a legend of the franchise, brought back for the people who loved her and as a guide for the newcomers Prodigy was meant to onboard.

That role as teacher to a new generation was one that Mulgrew herself clearly relished in the run up to Prodigy’s release. “It was explained to me in detail and I thought to myself ‘Wow, this will be terrific to bring this to young people who may be watching this with their mothers who watched me as Captain Janeway in live-action,’” Mulgrew told CBR in 2021 about just why she came back for Prodigy, “and it will bring the entire family into the orbit of Star Trek and this is something that I very much want to do.” And it’s one that is perfect for anyone who ever loved Captain Janeway.

While there are many layers to Janeway—a bit of a hardass, a scientifically curious explorer, the occasional stabber of a giant virus bug or six—the view of her as a mentor is something that resonates throughout Voyager’s seven-season run. We see it from almost the very beginning with wayward Maquis rebel turned Chief Engineer B’Elanna, as she and Janeway butted heads over the potential of just who the young Klingon-Human woman will become now that she’s stuck aboard Voyager. We see it even moreso when Janeway takes it upon herself to help Seven of Nine adjust to life after the Borg. And yes, as Prodigy went on to show us, we saw it in her connection to children, from young Naomi Wildman, or with the young Borg children Voyager recovered. That desire to guide people, to help them realize the best version of themselves, was crucial to who Kathryn Janeway was as a Star Trek captain and as a person.

And it was there, in the beating heart of Prodigy. Sure, the Janeway we “met” aboard the Protostar wasn’t actually the woman herself, but she was Janeway in all the ways that mattered, especially her need to help Dal and his friends learn the ways of the universe they desperately yearned to see, to show them the ideals that Janeway believed in as part of Starfleet and the Federation were worth them also striving for. Even as the series came to a head over the kids’ desires to return the Protostar to its owners and the messy plans for vengeance enacted by Prodigy’s big bad, the Diviner, the Janeways we got—the hologram captain who just wanted her crew to be safe, the admiral who grew to admire that same crew even as she needed to learn just what happened to her friend Chakotay, the Protostar’s previous commander—always put that need to guide and inspire at the forefront of themselves.

Sure, it wasn’t the splashy return that Jean-Luc Picard got—there was no Star Trek: Janeway, no nostalgic, triumphant get-together of the Voyager stars. Hell, Jean-Luc even managed to nab one of them for his own celebratory series instead! But Mulgrew’s role, and Janeway’s return, in Prodigy, was the truest celebration of just what the Voyager star meant to the generation of Trek fans that grew up with her as their captain—and to a new generation that were meeting her and falling in love for the first time through Prodigy.

“I’m not a sentimental person—and neither is Janeway,” Mulgrew told me a few years ago at New York Comic-Con, ahead of Prodigy’s first episodes making their debut to legions of fans in attendance. “I can’t help but feel stirred up by what was, and what we are now going forward into a new future, and into a new way of telling this story. So, it’s moving, to me.”

Paramount wouldn’t dare treat what it’s done for Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard as a tax break. Casting aside everything that Prodigy stood for, and in the process doing the same to Mulgrew and Janeway’s legacy, is a cruel twist on what is already a cruel fate for the show.

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