As you may have heard, Paramount cancelled Prodigy, halting production on its almost-complete second season, and removed the show from its service. The primary reason to do this, other than to streamline their content in light of the service’s upcoming merger with Showtime, was to generate a tax loss – a disturbing trend among streaming services.
Placing the commercial question aside, this has implications for the franchise. If Prodigy has effectively been deleted from the historical record and is no longer available to watch, is it still canon? The last time something equivalent happened was when the original Animated Series was unavailable for decades, and it was largely not treated as canon by subsequent shows. Nowadays it is counted as official canon (which introduces some complications), but it’s also widely available. The likelihood that they will tell a story in the future where this makes a difference is low, but it’s still worth clarifying.
What do you think?
It’s canon until it’s not (ie, explicitly contradicted by some other Trek installment). And even then, canon in fiction is rather a silly concept anyway, and is largely more up to the collective opinion of the fan base than whatever big corporations owns the rights to it.
Canon Trek is rife with contradictions. The rest of your comment is a healthy approach to thinking about canon, though.