Before we get into the Tuesday TV Touchbase for this week, a word if I may on the passing of Barbara Walters at age 93 this weekend. OK, yeah, Barbara Walters had an odd way of speaking which begat the infamous "Baba Wawa" caricature on Saturday Night Live back in the 1970's. But Barbara was a true trailblazer, striving to give women a voice where women frequently had no voice.
- It's kind of weird to think about it when the modern Today show has two female co-anchors (Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb) but back in 1974, Barbara Walters struggled to be the first woman to co-anchor the Today show.
- She breached the barriers of another all men's club when in 1976, she was named as co-anchor of the ABC Evening News, the first woman to anchor a major network evening news program.
- She created The View in 1997. Wait a minute! A talk show where all the hosts are women? Really?
We take it for granted today to see women as anchors and hosts but it was Barbara Walters who often had to walk through the door first when women were not welcomed in those positions.
As Oprah Winfrey said, "We all now get to glide across that road that she literally laid brick by brick for us.”
Besides being important for being the first woman through the door, Barbara Walters was very good at what she did when she got there, delivering highly sought after and incisively revealing interviews with high profile news makers in politics and pop culture.
The importance of Barbara Walters to the advancement of women and to journalistic excellence cannot be overstated.
Last week, Andrea and I caught up to the season finale of Star Trek Prodigy and what a wild ride it's been.
OK, so here's the pitch: let's do an animated Star Trek series aimed at the kids who watch Nickelodeon.
And here's my response: And old people like me will not want to watch it.
But no! What Star Trek Prodigy became was one of the most wonderfully rich, complex and engaging Star Trek series we experienced in 2022.
I'll be honest, Dal R'El annoyed me a lot in the beginning, The 17 year old hot head who declares himself captain of USS Protostar was shallow, immature and, well basically as we old people would say, a punk.
One might argue that after spending his formative years as an isolated slave worker on a mining planet, he has a right to be a shallow, immature punk. OK, I'll let you have that one but once he declares himself captain of the Protostar, he needs to grow the hell up.
And he does. Dal R'El doesn't suddenly evolve into some kind of paragon of pragmatic maturity. He's still young, still impetuous and still a bit behind the learning curve but over the course of the series, Dal R'El has become someone who has learned to put the needs of the many over the needs of the few or the one (to quote Spock).
Some props to Dal R'El's voice actor, Brett Gray. In the episode "Mind Walk", Dal R'El's mind has switched bodies with Admiral Janeway. Brett delivers lines otherwise performed by Kate Mulgrew and we are convinced Janeway's marbles are living in Dal R'El's skull. (And hearing Kate Mulgrew delivering Dal R'El's dialogue while he's in Janeway's body is a lot of fun.)
The malevolent plot by Asencia, the Diviner and Drednok comes to it's brutal and tragic fruition. The Construct embedded in Protostar's core makes contact with Starfleet and it's insidious program turns Starfleet's ships, computers and weapons on itself.
All seems lost and Starfleet appears to be doomed to destruction. Then the Protostar crew determine can stop the destruction of all Starfleet ships but it will require sacrifice.
The Protostar itself.
And one of the crew.
OK, so this is a kid's show, right? Everything will be work out without....
Nope!
The Protostar goes boom!
And one of the crew goes with it.
Bummer!
But...
The day is saved, Starfleet is not destroyed and the kids of the late Protostar make it Earth to find their future with Starfleet under the guidance of Admiral Janeway.
The season ends on what would be a solid note if the series did not have a future. But the producers assure us work is proceeding on season 2 of Star Trek Prodigy and there are enough balls left in the air to feed plotlines going forward.
Season 2 will have a lot to live up to. Season 1 of Star Trek Prodigy delivered such a solid season of strong stories and excellent character work, making it one of the best of the new Star Trek shows.
We get a break from new Star Trek for awhile. The next new series is season 3 of Star Trek Picard which won't debut until next month. And season 3 has a lot to answer for after the debacle that was season 2.
And that is that for the Tuesday TV Touchbase this week.
Next week, I'm finally watching Sandman, y'all.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
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