Freeman said she planned to take them to Earth to have them figure out how to keep everyone alive, but my guess is that inside, she was using this to pass the buck to someone else and privately was pessimistic about the chances of figuring out a way to separate them without Janewaying them. That feels like a very Freeman thought process. But yeah, they ought to have said something on screen.
Weird way to spell Link Hogthrob.
My 8-year-old daughter loves Prodigy, and we’ve started dipping into Voyager (after 50,000 rewatches of every Lower Decks episode except the Billups one), and she loves it, but every time Harry Kim is on screen she lets out this teenagery exaggerated groan of annoyance (I’ve never connected more with another human being). I’m so hoping he shows up on Prodigy because it would be hilarious how angry she’d be.
Barclay’s actor has become a truly odious person in real life –– I don’t think the TNG cast (Stewart in particular) would have agreed to have him on the show.
Knowing a few people who have worked on series that ended up looking for new networks, I feel pretty confident that for zillions of reasons (both legal and promotional) they would never have shown this footage if it wasn’t basically a done deal –– this is just marketing to see us go bananas over the Doctor before they reveal the streaming deal. Which –– I could not believe it when I woke up this morning because I was totally sure all the “new home” stuff was entirely wishful thinking and that Prodigy was fully dead.
I wish this had been addressed, but I feel like it would be easy to see Fleet Formation as a response to both the PRO and LD incidents. If you have a ship that’s compromised (like the Protostar or one of the Texas class ships), Fleet Formation lets you immediately deprive that ship (or any other infected ships) of autonomy by locking it into a unidirectional control from Starbase One. If it really can override anything else, that would mean that in the event of a Living Construct or whatever, Starfleet could just lock everything in Fleet Formation and the ending of PRO would never happen. But I guess they didn’t anticipate a threat coming from inside Starfleet.
The Bill thing at least is a joke about TNG season 1 - they had Troi call him Bill and it was in the early series bible that Picard would call him William and he would be called Bill by “close female friends.” I hate these shorts (although I’m glad they exist for the animation, at least), but that was a pretty funny callback.