Review Text
Dal, Jankom, Zero, and Maj'el travel through the wormhole and crash-land on Solum (52 years in the future), where they do their best to stay out of Chakotay's way so they don't alter the events of the empty launch of the Protostar into the past and thus the timeline. But then they're quickly captured by the Vau N'Akat and thrown into a cell ... with Chakotay and his birdman first officer, Adreek-Hu. How do you avoid changing the timeline when you're in the cell with the ones you're supposed to avoid? But, wait! Maybe, as Zero says, we were always supposed to be here to help them break out in the first place! (Maj'el cites the Bell Riots and Zefram Cochran's first-contact flight as examples of a causality loop, and Dal just goes, "Huh?" Back to the books, dude.)
The escape from the cell is perhaps too easily accomplished, and while I realize the youngsters are the stars of the show, I'm not a fan of making the adults (including a legacy character) look so passive and helpless in the participation of their own escape. Anyway, everything seems to be going as close to plan as possible, but then Dal accidentally drops a phaser, which is later picked up by Chakotay and enables him and Adreek-Hu to board the Protostar and pilot its escape, which vastly alters the timeline, since the ship is instead lost in the wormhole with Chakotay and no longer arrives empty on the mining prison colony of Tars Lamora where Dal was supposed to find it. It's the one moment of the episode that had me genuinely intrigued at where this was going, how disastrous the timeline paradox fallout might be, and how it could possibly be fixed — but those are questions for the next outing.
In the parallel plot in the present, Gwyn returns to the Solum council chamber and challenges Asencia to the Va'Lu'Rah, which resembles any number of Trekkian Cultural Combat examples (like Spock's Pon Farr battle). I'm not sure why this battle should adjudicate who's telling the truth, but, sure, why not. But then Gwyn loses the Va'Lu'Rah when the timeline's sci-fi effects cause her to (temporarily) phase partially out of existence (like Marty in Back to the Future) and lose her grip and fall from her position of advantage, allowing Asencia to win. (This is apparently not a battle to the death, because, well, it's a kids' show. But it makes one wonder why they fight at all instead of just racing to the top of the pit, which seems to be the goal.)
This action sequence is serviceable in the general sense, but I'm still waiting for this show to dig a little deeper and reveal a method to the madness and not just rely on a grab bag of Trekkian tricks while stringing us along from one serialized chapter to the next. At the very least, they seem to be moving the overall plot along at a reasonable clip. I'm just not yet seeing a spark of inspired storytelling.
As a sidebar, I'm not sure why the first two episodes of the season were labeled "part one" and "part two" when this separately titled episode is "part three" and segues into what will be "part four." This is as ongoing and serialized an arc as the first season had, so it seems puzzling that they granted some of the episodes the same names as if to group them together. Maybe they ran out of title ideas.
Previous episode: Into the Breach, Part II
Next episode: Temporal Mechanics 101
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7 comments on this post
Karl Zimmerman
I watched three episodes this afternoon, and I'm honestly having difficulty remembering where Who Saves the Saviors ends and Temporal Mechanics 101 begins. This is due to a combination of factors, including the short run time, the more heavily serialized nature of this season, and the way that Netflix drops episodes, making divisions between them pretty much unnoticeable. This is a long way of saying I had to re-open the episodes and skip through them even to remember what happened.
Regardless, three plot threads are woven pretty well together here.
First, Dal, Jankom Pog, and Zero are stuck in the past with the new Vulcan cadet character - M'Jel. I like that she's being set up as a foil for them and also that they pretty clearly named her as a tribute to Majel Barrett. That said, I don't think the character comes across as particularly Vulcan. I'm not sure if it's a fault of the voice actress or an attempt to make the show more kid-friendly by making her more expressive, but she seems too emotive to me. Regardless, the show wastes no time having them bump into Chakotay and his first officer, and they come very close to actually "fixing" the timeline before a few minor changes effectively begin rewriting history. It's a nice intro to the whole pitfalls of time travel for Gen Alpha, I suppose.
At the same time, Gwyn is attempting to face off with Asencia in some sort of ritualized combat/trial thing. I continue to love Gwyn, but Asencia is such an awful mustache-twirl of a character that seeing them face off quickly becomes tiresome. Gwyn almost wins, until the mistakes that Dal & company make cause her to start phasing out of existence, meaning Asencia wins.
We also have a single scene with Rok-Takk and Murf back on Voyager (I forgot they hadn't gotten on the ship). There's nothing much here yet, but this is something to watch for future episodes.
On the whole, it's a collection of interesting scenes, but it very much doesn't feel like an episode, blending into the one before and after pretty seamlessly.
Brandon
I appreciated the bird puns, not gonna lie. Humor is better when it doesn't call attention to itself.
Jeffrey's Tube
Is it just me, or is this whole time travel plot EXTREMELY complicated for a kids' show?
Not that I care. I was the kid who would have understood it, back in the day, and I'm sure it would have lit my imagination on fire. Let the Star Trek kids' show be for the smart kids only. I'm 100% okay with that. I'm just kind of surprised Paramount/Nickelodeon were! (Perhaps they weren't, and that's why it's now on Netflix.)
I'm enjoying this so far. Kind of surprised how much, actually. If it holds up, I won't be surprised if Prodigy becomes a Star Trek fan favorite with time as more of the fandom discovers it. (Anecdotally I don't think a lot of the fandom has even given it a chance, turned off by the "kids' show" label. At least that's what I've tended to notice around the internet.)
Bryan
Maybe it's time people stopped dismissing it as "just a kid's show".
Chris W
@Jeffrey's Tube: "is this whole time travel plot EXTREMELY complicated for a kids' show?"
---> Yeah, I'd agree with that. But I, too, would have been one of the kids that would have understood it (or worked through it) and enjoyed it in the process, so I'm happy they kept the complications in there.
Black Oatmeal
Is this a flub? When the kids first meet Chakotay, Zero tells him that they are "galactic traders." Later in the episode, Chakotay refers to them more than once as "galactic RAIDERS." In fact he does it again in a later episode. Am I missing something?
Jeffrey's Tube: "is this whole time travel plot EXTREMELY complicated for a kids' show?"
Yes. Probably needlessly so. On top of that, Star Trek really has a bad habit of playing fast and loose with the rules of time travel. Too often they write themselves into a corner and just handwave contradictions away by having characters throw up their hands and saying "I hate time travel!". It annoys the hell out of me.
Trek would have benefited from having someone like Mark Gruenwald on staff, or some old school sci-fi writer who would insist on playing by their universe's rules.
Karl said: "That said, I don't think the character comes across as particularly Vulcan. I'm not sure if it's a fault of the voice actress or an attempt to make the show more kid-friendly by making her more expressive, but she seems too emotive to me."
Agreed. This is another situation where I don't know whether I'm criticizing a kid's show, or a show for adults. The overly emotive delivery by most of the cast is great for a kid's show, not so good otherwise.
Black Oat
The Diviner and other Vau N'Akat frequently repeat the phrase "There is no barrier we cannot overcome, for we are Vau N'Akat."
Could the "barrier" referred to in this mantra be the walls of the pit the Vau N'Akat are thrown into a part of the Va'Lu'Rah ritual? The pit is the source of their heirlooms and those heirlooms can be shaped by the wills of the Vau N'Akat to climb out of the pit or in other words "overcome a barrier."
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