WARNING: Contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Star Trek: Prodigy season 2!
Having watched every episode of the brilliant Star Trek: Prodigy season 2, I started to think that the showrunners, Dan and Kevin Hageman, might also be fans of 21st century Doctor Who. Given that Prodigy season 2 is an epic time travel adventure, it’s only natural that it crosses the fandom streams between Star Trek and Doctor Who. To be clear, aside from one bit of dialog that has entered our cultural lexicon, I only noticed Prodigy‘s crossovers between Star Trek and Doctor Who because I’m a huge fan of both franchises myself.
I grew up in the UK in the 1990s, and was raised on a steady diet of Doctor Who repeats and the 1990s Star Trek TV shows that Star Trek: Prodigy season 2 lovingly draws upon. Prodigy season 2 continues the story of several Star Trek: Voyager characters, and contains multiple references to other Trek shows. There are also plot similarities, character moments and dialog that appear to reference Doctor Who from 2005 onward. It might be deliberate, it might be a complete coincidence, but as a fan of both shows, I greatly enjoyed Prodigy‘s apparent love for the 21st century era of Doctor Who.
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Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2’s Doctor Who References Explained
“…this timey wimey stuff hurts my head.”
The most obvious reference to Doctor Who comes in Star Trek: Prodigy season 2, episode 1, “Into the Breach, Part I”, written by Dan & Kevin Hageman, and directed by Ben Hibon. As the Doctor – not that one – briefs the young Academy hopefuls on their time-traveling mission to save Captain Chakotay (Robert Beltran), Dal R’El (Brett Gray) mentions that “…this timey wimey stuff hurts my head.” While the phrase “timey wimey” has pretty much entered the cultural lexicon, it did originate in Steven Moffat’s script for the classic Doctor Who episode “Blink”. In “Blink”, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor described the time-space continuum as a “ball of wibbly, wobbly, timey wimey stuff.”
With “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff“, Steven Moffat created a perfect way to describe the vagaries of temporal mechanics. In Star Trek: Prodigy, both Dal and Janeway hate time travel, or at least hate the experience of getting their heads around the wibbly wobbliness of it all. So I completely understand why Prodigy adopts that description into their own vocabulary. While that’s the most overt reference to Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who scripts, there’s a weird similarity between Gwyndala (Ella Purnell) and the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) later in Prodigy season 2.
At the end of Star Trek: Prodigy season 2, episode 3, “Who Saves The Saviors”, written by Eric McNamara, and directed by Sung Shin, Gwyn is trapped inside an ancient tomb on Solum. In the next episode, “Temporal Mechanics 101”, written by Keith Sweet II, and directed by Ben Hibon, Dal and the crew of the Infinity are given coordinates to travel back through time and rescue her. The idea of using future knowledge to free someone from a prison cell in the past is effectively how the Eleventh Doctor gets himself out of the Pandorica in Doctor Who‘s season 5 finale, “The Big Bang”.
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The solution that Dal and the Star Trek: Prodigy kids receive is a lot less complicated than Steven Moffat’s solution in Doctor Who, but the similarity is there. One final similarity between Prodigy and Doctor Who is the introduction of the Loom, temporal beings that feast on aberrant timelines. The Loom is the true threat in Star Trek: Prodigy season 2, but the Loom’s motivations bear a huge similarity with one-shot Doctor Who villains, the Reapers, who fed on the alternate timeline created when Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) prevented her father from being killed in a traffic accident in Paul Cornell’s “Father’s Day”.
The Hageman Brothers Characterize Wesley Crusher As “A Little Bit Doctor Who”
One of the biggest surprises of Star Trek: Prodigy season 2 is the return of Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher, who has changed a great deal since his final appearance in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Watching Wesley in action as a Traveller, I was struck by Wil Wheaton’s performance, which seemed to be leaning more on the likes of Matt Smith and David Tennant in Doctor Who than TNG‘s Wesley Crusher. Wes even quoted Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor by observing: “time will tell, it usually does“. In an exclusive Screen Rant interview, Kevin and Dan Hageman discussed bringing Wesley back, describing their characterization of him as:
A little Doctor Who, a little Willy Wonka…
Doctor Who And Star Trek Have A Long History Together
Turning Wesley Crusher into Star Trek‘s answer to Doctor Who, while Dal quotes David Tennant, maintains a long relationship between both franchises. The recent Doctor Who references in Star Trek: Prodigy season 2 continue a long tradition going back decades. For example, a production designer’s joke in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s season 1 finale, “The Neutral Zone”, revealed the first five Doctor Who actors to be relations of Claire Raymond (Gracie Harrison), though this was later cut out for the Bluray remaster.
More recently, Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor implied that Star Trek and Doctor Who take place in the same fictional universe. What’s heartening about this continuing relationship between Star Trek and Doctor Who is that I grew up at a time when you had a choice of one or the other. Doctor Who was canceled in 1989 as the UK began screening Star Trek: The Next Generation, while Star Trek: Enterprise was canceled in 2005, just as Doctor Who returned to TV. As the future of Prodigy season 3 is uncertain, Doctor Who and Star Trek‘s 21st century second chances should give the Hagemans some hope.
19 years after Enterprise‘s cancelation, and Star Trek and Doctor Who are both jewels in the crown of their respective streaming services. And yet, if the affectionate nods to Doctor Who in Star Trek: Prodigy are anything to go by, neither franchise sees the other as competition, they take inspiration from each other instead. As a lifelong fan of both, I find it heartening that Doctor Who and Star Trek have never been rivals, but instead learn from each other and push their storytelling in new directions as a result.
Star Trek: Prodigy
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Star Trek: Prodigy is the first TV series in the Star Trek franchise marketed toward children, and one of the few animated series in the franchise. The story follows a group of young aliens who find a stolen Starfleet ship and use it to escape from the Tars Lamora prison colony where they are all held captive. Working together with the help of a holographic Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), the new crew of the USS Protostar must find their way back to the Alpha Quadrant to warn the Federation of the deadly threat that is pursuing them.
Doctor Who
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The latest season of Doctor Who introduces the Fifteenth Doctor, joined by new companion Ruby Sunday. Their first adventure begins with “The Church on Ruby Road,” where they face powerful new foes and unravel the mystery surrounding Ruby’s origins. The Doctor grapples with the aftermath of a unique regeneration event and battles enemies more formidable than ever before.
