WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Trek: Prodigy, streaming now on Paramount+.

A group of escaped prisoners find an abandoned Federation starship hidden beneath tons of rock and use it to chart a course into the unknown, but not before ensuring their safe passage by kidnapping one of their jailers. This is the premise for Star Trek: Prodigy, whose untrained crew  must learn the necessary skills to operate and maintain the USS Protostar, despite being short 30 or so appendages, with only the ship's Janeway hologram as their guide.

Navigating the Delta Quadrant is a perilous feat in and of itself, as the Voyager crew demonstrated, but their greatest and most frightening threat may lie in the form of their pursuer, a being of unknown purpose and impressive will who is highly motivated to recapture all the things that have been taken from him: The Diviner.

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The Diviner furious from Star Trek Prodigy

Tars Lamora is a prison planetoid on the Delta-Beta Quadrant border rich in a valuable mineral called chimerium, mined by the enslaved prisoners who are often provided by the Kazon. The warden of this planet-wide dungeon is among the last two living members of the Vau N'Akat race, and he is called The Diviner. Swarms of tailed scarab like robots called Watchers serve as his overseers and deploy themselves across the mines at his behest to corral or punish as he sees fit. His daughter Gwyn attends to his affairs and has been taught the tongues of many worlds but his primary advisor is a robot named Drednok.

Voiced by John Noble, The Diviner spends much of his time immersed in a huge tank of liquid, or serum, that can be shielded with bands of metal and seems to fulfill some medicinal purpose for some unknown condition. When outside of the tank he wears a suit embedded with flowing hoses that seemingly mimic the beneficial effects of his submerged state. The treatment could be used to offset some anomalous deficiency but it could also be employed to augment some of his natural abilities beyond their previous thresholds, like increasing his physical strength. He also seems to have an innate racial defense against mental intrusions which make it difficult for empathic or telepathic penetrations of his mind and the mind of his daughter.

Both he and his daughter have displayed an ability called neuroflux that allows them to telekinetically manipulate various objects. This control of matter has not been displayed to a great degree by The Diviner at this point in the series but there are indications that it outstrips his daughter. Gwyn has a metallic armband that she can fashion into a slender curving blade or a rounded shield and presumably other useful configurations. Activating the neuroflux manifests visually in the form of bio-luminescent streaks across their skulls and eyes.

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Drednok in Star Trek: Prodigy

One of the Diviner's most fearsome qualities are the minions at his disposal, especially the intimidating mechanical major domo known as Drednok. A tall, soft-spoken artificial intelligence, the robot bleeds shadowy menace. It prefers interrogations weighted towards torture instead of subtle manipulations but is also capable of sophisticated stratagems. It is designed to be modular and can adept various arrangements of its body to suit specific circumstances. When not aligned as a cloaked figure of intimidation it can adopt a spider like lower body engineered for agility and razor sharp ferocity and seamlessly shift into an anchored precision laser cannon capable of tremendous power.

Lastly, and perhaps most notably, is the contribution of Noble's (Fringe, Return of the King) unique control of pitch that lends The Diviner his true sense of dread. In an interview the actor indicated that much of his cues for bringing the character to life came from the quintessential Star Trek villain himself, Khan Noonien Singh, who was portrayed by Ricardo Montalban in both the original Star Trek series and The Wrath of Kahn. Vacillating between peak anger and resolute determination, The Diviner inspires devotion and breeds terror in those around him.

The Diviner from Star Trek Prodigy

It is still unknown what The Diviner's plans are for the Protostar, considering he has access to not only a ship but an extremely powerful cloaking device capable of hiding the entire penal colony from detection, but he has spent years trying to find it and set it to his purpose. The Protostar's crew has found something in engineering that defies identification. The vessel seems to be a prototype for a new class of ship, and because it is in the Delta Quadrant, perhaps it is capable of propulsion that allows it to travel at speeds far beyond warp.

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The Protostar is also capable of not only replicating food and simple tools, but entire ships as well. Although that drains a substantial amount of power, the potential applications of a system that can quickly and efficiently assemble something as complex as a shuttle craft, equipped with engines and life support, could be repurposed to arrange molecules ways never previously possible in the franchise. The fact that The Diviner knows more about the ship than either its crew or the audience adds a level of frightful anticipation to his pursuit.

The Diviner seems to have a vested interest in the survival of his people, and has entrusted his daughter with fulfilling that legacy. The ship may allow him to do that in some way that has yet to be defined. As an experimental ship it could also potentially replace or improve his reliance on the serum tanks or suits that he seems dependent upon at present. He also seemed to imply in a conversation with Drednok that retrieval of the ship was more important to him than rescuing his daughter.

As The Diviner's plans unfold, his hunt for the Protostar and her fledgling crew will create more opportunities for he and his henchbot to demonstrate how far they are willing to go to see his ultimate objective achieved. It is safe to assume in doing so that he will further develop his Khan-like influences that have helped shape a uniquely memorable and dangerous Star Trek villain.

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