Gwyn arrives at Solum to press her case with her people, only to find that Asencia has arrived first and has already poisoned the governing council against her. Gwyn goes on the run, meeting a younger version of her own father. Meanwhile, on Voyager, Admiral Janeway reveals the nature of their mission to the young cadets: they will be rescuing Captain Chakotay from the other side of a wormhole leading to the future.
I found the Gwyn story line of this episode to be the more compelling, and kind of surprisingly so. There's unexpected depth to her mission with the Vau N'Akat, as Asencia works to play up her people's isolationist tendencies. I guess it's not surprising that Star Trek would dramatize real world politics like this in a science fiction wrapper, but it does impress me that the writers of Prodigy have managed to do it here in a kids' show in a subtle but effective way.
I also like the twist of having Gwyn meeting a younger and more loving version of her father. Maybe this just stems from wanting to find a way to include John Noble in the second season after he was such a big part of the first, but I enjoy that this time-hopping conceit gives Noble the chance to play almost a different character. The young Diviner, or Ilthuran (as I'll never remember to call him without looking it up), is a nice shake-up of the classic "there is good in the villain" trope -- as there's essentially no evil in the villain yet at this point in time.
Meanwhile, the Voyager part of the story is fun, though I think it does illustrate something I expect to be a recurring issue of season two. The heroes of this kids' show are a bunch of kids. Season one was able to sidestep a lot of issues with this by essentially "removing all the adults from the room." The kids were supervised only by a hologram, and so you never really had to question why they were involved in plot (they were driving it), and why they got away with making foolish mistakes as kids do (no one was around to stop them).
Now that the former Protostar crew is interacting with adults on a regular basis, these things might become a "problem" for the show. Well, at least... I think we're just going to have to learn to overlook this issue because that's the nature of Star Trek: Prodigy. Once Admiral Janeway finds out that these cadets know about her secret shuttlebay and its contents, she could confine them all to quarters (or something) to keep the secret safe. Instead, she "reads them in"; it makes no sense objectively, but it's necessary to involve the main characters of this series in the story. When they accidentally launch the shuttle at the end of the episode with most of them on board, this is what has to happen for the main characters to be at the center of the plot... and we just have to accept that there's nothing the adults could have done to stop it. (Just as later, we're going to have to accept that they won't really be "punished" for anything bad that comes of it.)
I admit, I'm probably going to stumble on that "looking the other way" for a while here. But at least this is the second season of Prodigy and not the first. I've already had time to grow to like a lot of these characters. The nominal leader Dal is kind of the worst (but that seems to be the formula for a lot of kids' shows), but I really like the earnest enthusiasm of Rok-Tahk, the odd melancholy of Zero, and even at times the cutesy antics of Murf and Jason Mantzoukas-ness of Jankom Pog. (Of course, I like Gwyn quite a lot, though she's siloed in her own separate story for now.) Basically, these characters all have a track record of accomplishment to remember in any future moments when their child-like antics infuse artificial jeopardy into episodes.
Overall, I quite liked this episode and the story it seems to set up for the future. I give "Into the Breach, Part II" a B+.
No comments:
Post a Comment