Kate Mulgrew will be returning to the final frontier as Captain Janeway in the new animated kids series Star Trek: Prodigy. While discussing her appearance on Mr. Mercedes, Mulgrew revealed how Janeway gets folded back into the story now, years after the end of Star Trek: Voyager.
“In Prodigy—this new animated series—five kids are incarcerated on an obscure planet in an uncharted part of the galaxy,” Mulgrew explained. “And they escaped from their imprisonment and race across the planet to find a defunct starship buried in the sand of the planet’s surface. They go in and of course the prison guards are coming after them. And they can’t get it up and the shields won’t run or the thing won’t do… And suddenly somebody hits a button and [hologram startup sound] ‘Hello, kids. I see you’re a little bit stuck here. Can I help you out?’ And it’s Captain Janeway in a holographic form.”
Kate Mulgrew to appear as a hologram in Star Trek: Prodigy
As a hologram, Janeway can interact with the cast in ways that wouldn’t be possible in live-action. Though the show is geared toward younger fans, it will also appeal to older fans who have missed Captain Janeway and want to see her in new and exciting adventures with a brand new cast of characters.
This is the first time fans have heard that the crew aren’t just the “outcasts” described in synopses for the series, but that they also start the series as prisoners. Prodigy is set in the same area space, the Delta Quadrant, as Voyager, but it’s unclear whether there will be much overlap between the series.
Mulgrew is very excited for Prodigy to reach younger generations of Star Trek fans, or would-be fans, noting that the original franchise has always been geared toward “20- to 35-year-old males.”
She hopes that the animated series will allow new fans to learn about the franchise that might already be popular in their families. “If they can sit with their mothers who watched me in live-action, and their fathers who loved the other guys, then we’ve got a family affair and that will bring it full circle.”
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