Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Prodigy: Who Saves the Saviors

My "trek" through season two of Star Trek: Prodigy continues with the third episode, "Who Saves the Saviors."

Dal, Zero, Jankom Pog, and Maj'el arrive in the future, four hours before Captain Chakotay will undertake actions necessary to preserving the timeline. Though the cadets resolve to stay out of the way, they quickly find themselves imprisoned with Chakotay himself... and then realize that perhaps they were always meant to help him escape. Meanwhile, in the present, Gwyn challenges Asencia to ritual combat to prove her claims. But her friends' actions in the future cause ripples that thwart her in a key moment.

"Predestination paradox" is a fun science fiction device in general, and a good tool in the Star Trek kit in particular. (A couple classic Trek stories about it even get name-checked in this episode.) I'm glad to see Prodigy take it on, for both short-term fun and, apparently, to set up a longer story arc for the season.

I worried in my last review that the series might have some story "problems" this season with centering its young protagonists in the action. I think this episode showed that there are both plusses and minuses to this. Having a character like Dal is great when you need to deliver some exposition; characters on Prodigy rarely have to explain to other characters things they should already know, not when someone like Dal really doesn't know them. That's a big plus to young characters in the spotlight. On the other hand, Chakotay has a shocking lack of curiosity about where these kids really come from and why they're acting so weird -- a rather jarring minus.

Overall, though, the episode does a pretty great job putting its protagonists in the heart of the action. It's great that Zero tries to steer them clear of temporal shenanigans, only to lead everyone directly into them. And it's really great that Jankom Pog gets a big hero moment when he literally engineers everyone's escape from captivity. And while the heroes ultimately don't succeed in saving the day, it really does feel like a chance accident, not stupidity on Dal's part, that sends everything sideways. (Still, it might have been nice for someone other than Dal to have dropped the fateful weapon where Chakotay would pick it up. Dal already "screws up" plenty.)

I still like that Gwyn's story line is a disguised parable about xenophobia. Maybe it was a bit too disguised this episode, as it mainly took the form of a long hand-to-hand combat, but hey... we can't just sit around and talk all the time. And I do think the scenes on Solum are making good use of animation as a medium, showing huge sets and ornate costumes that themselves reinforce the story. The planet and its people feel alien (more than Star Trek normal, at least) -- and I don't think it's a coincidence that the Vau N'Akat leaders wear helmets that seem to literally blind them to what's really going on around them.

At this point, I think the season is still cruising along well. I give "Who Saves the Saviors" a B+.

No comments: