Preview The Season 3 Premiere Of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ With New Images From “Grounded”

Yes, if Lower Decks sticks to an episode a week without interruption, and then Prodigy does the same (starting the week after the Lower Decks S3 finale), then Prodigy will have its season finale on January 5, 2023, for a season that began in 2021. That’s nuts!

They’ve already said they intend to release the last ten episodes of Prodigy S1 in late 2022, which fits a release right after Lower Decks S3 (or perhaps even having a slight overlap between LD S3 and the back half of Prodigy S1, resuming with the latter’s next episode the same week they release the LD S3 finale, say, which would let them finish Prodigy before the year is over). Then Picard S3 could begin in January right after Prodigy finally completes S1. This fits the “early 2023” I’ve been seeing for Picard S3.

As to why they don’t just refer to the half-season we’ve gotten of Prodigy as S1 by itself and call the remaining half S2, I’ve had the same question. As I understand it, it has to do with how the season was originally ordered / booked / planned, with 20 episodes (or the equivalent thereof, making the first “two” a single, double-length episode) for S1 and another 20 for S2, and it wasn’t originally planned to have such a huge midseason break, but that it took longer to complete work on the episodes than planned, and they were delayed. You might remember there was a previous break in the season, a six-week hiatus between “Terror Firma” and “Kobayashi”, apparently to give them a little more time to complete the episodes from “Kobayashi” onward. I suspect the current ongoing massive hiatus since “A Moral Star, Part 2” was released way back in February (!) arose from another such need for more time, but that got stretched way longer than it needed for that alone – that is, that TPTB decided that as long as it needed a little more time anyway, they’d give it a much longer hiatus and fill it with all these other Trek shows, so that by the time Prodigy finally does resume, the Prodigy team would not only have finished the season, but gotten Season 2 well underway, so that hopefully there won’t be any similar ginormous midseason breaks needed for later seasons of the show.

To be clear, a lot of this is conjecture on my part, but I have read that the reason for the smaller, six-week break we had earlier was indeed because of production delays in completing episodes, and it makes sense to me that if they needed that hiatus of more than a month to complete and polish up those last five episodes, then even more time might be needed to finish the next ten we’re still waiting on. Hopefully, as series production progresses, they’re able to surmount whatever production pipeline challenges they’re facing. But just looking at the show, I feel like it makes sense. Animation is inherently time-consuming, and this show is easily the most visually lavish and ambitious of Trek‘s three animated shows so far, and arguably more so even than the three current live-action shows. In terms of sheer running time, a twenty-episode season is like four or five feature-length films, and they’re clearly doing their damndest to make it look as close to that standard as they can. It’s a little like Pixar trying to put out four or five movies in a year…

That’s what I’m thinking (well, that, and that hopefully they’ve not only been able to finish Star Trek S1, but gotten S2 well underway also). If they released one new Star Trek episode a week, beginning with this week’s Lower Decks premiere and then continuing with Prodigy, then Picard, then SNW, then Discovery, and then finally Lower Decks again (S4), they’d start Lower Decks S4 in August, the same month as each of the previous three seasons, and then they could continue with Prodigy S2 after that, and if they don’t take any breaks in it they can continue that second season of Prodigy until well into 2024.