It actually introduced and developed an interesting new species over time. I don’t think we’ve seen that since the Kelpians?
Plus the villains were competent, which is a nice benefit
I understand what you mean, but they couldn’t resist the “end of the universe as we know it” trope. That was totally unnecessary in my opinion.
In Prodigy’s defense, they waited the equivalent of two seasons to play that card, and the execution was IMO, better than what we saw in Picard and Discovery.
That’s true, but especially for a show aimed at kids the survival or wellbeing of the crew would have been more than enough. There was absolutely no reason at all to bring up a plan to destroy the whole Starfleet…
The narrative problem with the kids arriving in Federation territory in a stolen ship was that the Protostar would be impounded and the kids would be sent packing.
They needed a narrative reason to give the kids a chance to command the Protostar and have their own adventures, which means dragging out returning it to Starfleet. But rather than resorting to stalling tactics, they opted to have the kids fight to keep it out of their hands, and for good reason.
With Picard and Discovery, I felt more like that trope was used because the writers had no better ideas on how to keep the stakes high.
With Prodigy, I felt that the stakes were made essential to its premise.