“Who Saves the Saviors”
Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2, Episode 3 – Debuted Monday, July 1, 2024
Written by Erin McNamara
Directed by Sung Shin
The second season settles in to start exploring time and space and more importantly, some new character dynamics.
Here we go… again.
WARNING: Spoilers below!
RECAP
“We’re hurtling through a time hole!”
After a harrowing wormhole trip to the future, the Infinity crash-lands on war-torn Solum, where Dal, Jankom, and Zero quickly spot their old ship, the USS Protostar. They hide all Starfleet accoutrements and are soon captured, but this is a good thing as it should keep them out of temporal trouble… until they are thrust into the same cell as Captain Chakotay and his Aurelian first officer, Adreek. They try to play it cool: “Nice tattoo.” Smooth. Soon enough they realize that even though the Starfleet officers smuggled a tricorder into their cell, they have no plan to escape, so the kids figure it’s a causal time loop thing. “Who would think it was always us who helped them send the ship back to Tars Lamora?” Don’t get ahead (or behind?) yourselves, kids. As Dal and Maj’el bicker, Pog (in between dropping bird puns) gets to work using the tricorder to control his confiscated techno-mitt Thing-style to deactivate the jail cell. With one final bird gag (“Time to fly the coup!”) they head off to the Protostar and destiny. Chakotay is impressed with the offer to distract the guards so he can get to the Protostar. Time for some speeder bike action: Dal getting the Vau N’Akat’s attention with phaser shots and “Look how distracting I am!” Heroic, but he needs to work on his taunting.
If we don’t break out soon, I’m going to run out of bird puns.
“I will enjoy watching you perish.”
Meanwhile, back on present-day Solum, Gwyn’s nice new young dad gets her an audience with the elders, who agree to allow her to challenge Asencia to the Va’Lu’Rah ritual. The pair is taken to an ancient site. They set aside their personal heirlooms as a dais descends them to a chamber covered in hieroglyphs of the Solum’s past. Gwyn sorts out this place must be the original source of the Vau N’Akat heirlooms as golden dust permeates the air. Each can now conjure these telepathic weapons at will, and so their fight begins, and they trade dangerous stabs, parries, dodges, and blocks in a violent ballet. As they are evenly matched, Asencia uses the time to do some villain dialoguing, such as “You thought you were strong enough to save us from our fate? Ha!” Gwyn sees the futility of this and decides to use heirlooms as pitons to free-climb her way up and out, beating her rival to the top—and that’s when Dal’s future shenanigans intervene. 52 years later, the gang reunites at the Infinity and figures all is well until they realize they dropped a phaser rifle during the exciting chase and Chakotay is using it to fight his way onto the Protostar. The temporal warnings on the Infinity light up like a Frontier Day tree as Chakotay and Adreek pilot their way through the wormhole, which means that ship is not going to end up crashing on Tars Lamora, which means… Back in the past Gwyn’s climb is cut short as she starts fading away like Marty McFly, falling to the chamber bottom to be trapped. Asencia emerges as the victor, proven as true Vau N’Akat, hailed by the elders as their new leader. Time travel problems, am I right?
Why did it have to be snakes heirlooms?
ANALYSIS
This is no time to argue about time.
After the near-perfect season premiere, the follow-up delivers a solid episode that doesn’t try to do too much with the limited time on offer. (This is a good thing, as the complex 2-part opener set up three concurrent storylines.) Here we focus on the future and present events on Solum, with only a quick pop in to Janeway and the Voyager-A. “Who Saves the Saviors” ramps up the action, akin to early season 1 episodes, but with classic Trek elements. Who doesn’t love a jailbreak or ancient ritual fight? The former was the better of the two elements, with plenty of humor to be had, even in those groan-y bird puns. The Gwyn/Asencia fight was perfunctory, the season’s current baddie just a bit too mustache-twirly even for a show primarily aimed at younger viewers. The new character of Maj’el also shows promise, but at this point in her season arc, she is still a bit too much on the nagging Vulcan side, citing rules and regulations as a foil to the freewheeling Dal. What was very welcome was that we finally have our main characters interacting with Chakotay after he’d been seen only in recordings and flashbacks for over a season. Robert Beltran was able to have a bit of fun with his interactions with the kids while still delivering as a heroic Starfleet captain.
Janeway says “hi”… oops, forget I said that.
The future Solum storyline also isn’t shying away from complicated temporal mechanics storytelling. In our recent interviews with both the Hageman brothers and Aaron Waltke, it’s clear they put a lot of thought into how these different timelines interact and the consequences Dal’s actions are having. It appears that much of the rest of the season will be dedicated to fixing the timeline, and all of this is likely related to that mysterious Orb being warning them all in the season opener. One strong element from the present-day Solum storyline with Gwyn was getting more worldbuilding for the Vau N’Akat, as we can see their society isn’t entirely homogeneous. There is also a nice bit of allegory going on with Asencia’s campaign to paint Gwyn as a fake Vau N’Akat, playing on the society’s already established xenophobia to reject the message of peaceful contact with outsiders. Even the design of the elders and their ornamental face shields shows how they are blinded, claiming it is Gwyn spreading “poisonous rhetoric.”
Can you see anything? Who designed these things?
Final thoughts
Season 2 of Prodigy is off to an excellent start. The stakes are still bigger, but this episode doesn’t forget to have some fun along the way. This is a more complex season but they are allowing that time to develop and the 20-episode drop on Netflix makes this more serialized approach a lot easier to digest as you can just click on to the next episode.
Talk about being ghosted.
BITS
- Stardate 61860.1 (for “present day” Solum in 2385)
- The episode title “Who Saves the Saviors” is evocative of the TNG first contact episode “Who Watches the Watchers.”
- To hide her Vulcan ears, Maj’el creates a headband, as Spock did when he traveled back in time in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
- Maj’el cites previous causal time loops of the Bell Riots (DS9 “Past Tense”) and the Cochrane warp test (First Contact movie).
- For the second episode in a row, Maj’el uses a Vulcan nerve pinch, which was noticed by Chakotay but dismissed by Dal.
I think you did a little too much LDS.
TrekMovie’s Prodigy July binge-watch
Since all 20 episodes were released on Netflix at once, we’re binging it in five-episode arcs; we can’t stick to watching just one a week! Each All Access Star Trek podcast (every Friday morning) will cover five episodes, while written reviews for all five will publish throughout the week, with two-parters paired up.
This will all wrap up just as San Diego Comic-Con kicks off at the end of the month. We also hope to have more Prodigy interviews and analysis in July and beyond.
We welcome fans joining us through July covering 5 episodes each week. However, for those choosing to binge the show even faster, we ask readers to avoid spoilers for episodes beyond the latest recap/review in our comments section.
Season 2 of Prodigy is available to stream on Netflix globally (excluding Canada, Nordics, CEE, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Belarus and Mainland China) and season one is currently available on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern Europe with season two coming soon. Season two has launched in France on France Televisions channels and Okoo.
Keep up with news about the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com.
S2 is wildly entertaining and has lots of heart. I loved it!
I’m not sure yet but this may be my favorite episode so far because I love all the crazy time travel elements in it and this one is basically the catalyst of everything happening in the future (no pun intended ;)).
The twist was great and I can safely say I didn’t see coming. I loved all the stuff on Solum and how Gwyn is now suddenly in peril through the entire session. It was also great to finally see Chakotay in his actual appearance and his interactions with the kids are plain fun!
I absolutely love both this show and season. Its so entertaining and creative. If this was a live action show it would be a huge hit.
Oops meant season and not session.
Jankom Pog gets the best puns award.
Another enjoyable episode.
This episode was an absolute delight. I loved seeing Chakotay back and where he ended up has created a bigger mystery I was not expecting. I could not stop laughing over all the bird puns Jankom was making. So much goodness in all of it.
To the makers of Prodigy, you should be commended for the fantastic job you done with this show and managed to convince old birds like me to fall in love with it so quickly.
Prodigy just used a coda story line ahhhh
I like the Netflix user interface. I can easily skip the intro and fast forward and rewind with ease.
Weird having the convenience of a real streamer to work with, right? P+ has the worst user interface of any streamer, period. Netflix has the best. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why that is.
Really seems like not every studio needed it’s own streaming service. Should of just been content creators for others and let them worry about the infrastructure ect.
Chasing dollars and making life hard for consumers. 2 or 3 streaming services that carry everything would be ideal. The streamers, though, decided to become content creators themselves, so the studios felt threatened by that. Hopefully, the new owners of Paramount will see the wisdom of canning P+ and selling original content to Netflix, Prime, or Hulu.
I’m enjoying the 2nd season. Dal was very annoying in the first half. But I like the story.
I have other comments I’ll save for later.
Enjoy
Watched until Ep. 5 now and it’s simply great. Touching, great pacing and timing, heartful characters. True Trek. Love it like I love Season 1.
Another really strong episode. At this point, I was already surprised at how much more serialized season 2 was turning out to be, since by this time in season 1 we were already getting our first stand-alone story with “Starstruck.” But the future plot here does still work as an interesting story in its own way. I liked how it’s the first time the kids are seeing first-hand just how tricky it is to navigate time travel. And I liked Maj’el’s role here, still kind of being the outsider, but already starting to integrate into the group a bit more after her somewhat antagonistic role in the previous episode. The kids’ interactions with Chakotay and Adreek were fun (loved the running joke of Jankom’s bird puns).
And of course, more scenes with Gwyn on Solum which, as I said in the previous review’s comment, was one of my most anticipated plots of the season. Here, I loved seeing a more direct confrontation between Gwyn and Asencia. The action was really well done here. And they did a good job intersecting the plots a bit, as Gwyn starts to feel the effects of the other kids’ time travel actions. I felt so bad for her as she was falling at the end.