Starring Brett Gray, Ella Purnell, Rylee Alazraqui, and Kate Mulgrew
Distributed by Netflix
Episodes: 40
Rated TV-Y7 for fantasy violence and fear
Children are naturally curious about the world, but all too often, they lose their interest in science, technology, and nature in their high-school years. As science popularizer Carl Sagan once put it, “Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.”1
How can we change this situation? Short of radically overhauling the education system, one effective way to keep kids’ passion for science alive is through exciting children’s TV shows that celebrate curiosity and scientific thinking, along with other life-serving values. A number do this for young children, but there is a dearth of such series for older children and teenagers who are ready for more challenging material. Star Trek: Prodigy, now available on Netflix, helps fill this void with a captivating story about the values of curiosity, responsibility, courage, and leadership.
Making Star Trek accessible for kids isn’t easy. The franchise has always focused on heady ideas—both scientific and philosophic—often making it hard even for adult audiences to get into. Understanding many Star Trek shows requires knowing a least a bit about the franchise’s sprawling lore, which can make them difficult to follow for the uninitiated. Plus, recent installments have trended toward more adult story lines than their 1960s and 1990s predecessors.
Clearly, the creators of Prodigy understood these challenges. . . .
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Endnotes
1. “Interview with Carl Sagan,” Psychology Today, January 1, 1996, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199601/carl-sagan.
2. Janeway’s use of “equality” in this context refers to the equal treatment of life forms from different races and planets in the Star Trek universe—an allegory for racial equality on Earth. The word’s economic meaning doesn’t readily translate to Star Trek because the franchise is set in a post-scarcity moneyless society.
