“Who Saves the Saviors”

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.

I appreciated the bird puns, not gonna lie. Humor is better when it doesn't call attention to itself.

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.)

Maybe it's time people stopped dismissing it as "just a kid's show".

@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.