“Brink”
Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2, Episodes 17 – Debuted Monday, July 1, 2024
Written by Diandra Pendleton-Thompson
Directed by Ruolin Li
A covert mission turns surprisingly kooky, but with some serious character and season arc consequences.
Nothing up my sleeves…
WARNING: Spoilers below!
RECAP
“You’re on your own.”
A flashback shows us how Asencia captured Wesley, who was apparently caught off guard after he walked right into her wormhole machine lab to warn her about monkeying with spacetime. The Voyager has been ordered to stop Asencia’s buildup without triggering a war. Gwyn volunteers to lead a covert team to Solum through the diplomatic loophole that they are technically not part of Starfleet—especially once they put on their old outfits. Their mission, which they decide to accept: infiltrate Solum to gather intel on Asencia’s time tech and rescue Ilthuran, now part of the Vau N’Akat uprising. If caught, the Secretary Starfleet will disavow their actions. Maj’el resigns from Nova Squad to come along, since Wesley said she was part of the gang. Dal backs up Gwyn and says he is ready to follow her lead. The team is given key bits of tech: a one-shot site-to-site transporter for a return trip and a cloaking bubble to conceal themselves, as no amount of disguise is going to fool anyone into thinking Rok, Murf, and Pog are locals. After beaming into Solum, they find the society transformed, the population cowering in fear from patrolling Dreadnok and Watcher bots. Struggling to keep it together under their too-small cloak dome, the team picks up a call from the Uprising, leading them back to Ilthuran’s abandoned observatory. His nice robot is there, deactivated, so who sent the message? Uh oh, it was Asencia, and she’s pointing a gun right at them. Where’s Ackbar when you need him?
Pog probably should have washed his old outfit.
“This is not part of the stratagem.”
Wait! That’s young Asencia, who considers her older self a monster. She briefs the team on the “temporal acceleration vaults” building a fleet with tech drained from the mind of Wesley. This changes things. After a brief debate, Gwyn splits up the team for two simultaneous, equally important rescues. She leads Rok, Zero, and Murf to the lab holding Wesley, where they have to knock out a few guards when their cloak bubble stops working. Meanwhile, Dal, Pog and Maj’el have it a bit easier, sneaking onto the prison train holding Ilthuran and some bonus Elders. They rescue them, then hand them off to young Asencia and the Uprising. Things get slapstick for Gwyn’s team, especially when Zero has to puppet an unconscious guard, Weekend at Bernie’s style, but they make it to Wesley, who was expecting them. His capture was all part of a plan. Zero, who painfully lost a body during the subsequent attack on the Voyager, is not amused. Wes explains he needed Asencia to build the wormhole machine so they can use it to send the Protostar back in time to fix the universe. Unfortunately, the torture has weakened him so he can’t think them back to the Voyager, so they head outside, where he realizes the whole kid team isn’t all together, the one super-important thing he’d made clear since the beginning. Gwyn is devastated that her decision to split them up has thrown off his time calculations… oh and now the old and mean version of Asencia shows up, with the rest of the team captured… pause for villainous gloating. Gwyn seems defeated, but she gives Dal a covert sign and he uses his dingle dangle (head tail) to throw the transporter gizmo to Wesley with a “Two to beam out!” Ilthuran and Crusher arrive on the Voyager, where the Traveler collapses, warning Janeway the kids (and pretty much everyone in this timeline) are in big trouble.
According to this equation, Murf is still cuter than Bribble.
ANALYSIS
This episode will self-destruct…
Things get deadly serious in this espionage-tinged episode with the kids sent in on a covert mission as the series indulges in another genre, evoking some classic Trek, especially “Chain of Command.” But here they balance the serious stakes out with a lot of slapstick and physical humor as the local law enforcement proves to be more like Keystone Cops than deadly enemies. The end result is a bit of a mishmash of tones. This is the difficult balancing act this show sometimes struggles with as they try to tell adult Star Trek stories but still have to keep their younger audience in mind. Zero confronting Wesley was a nice way of acknowledging consequences, but it’s notable that there has been no discussion about the losses faced by the Voyager since the Loom attack, something a live-action show would have certainly addressed. Wil Wheaton’s frazzled Wesley Crusher fits right in with both the lighter tone moments and the galactic stakes they are all playing with. Ella Purnell stands out as Gwyn steps into her growing leadership role and gets tested by making a call that could have dire consequences. The shifting dynamic with Dal and Gwyn is the most interesting part of the episode and is clearly leading somewhere. It all adds up to this being a fun but imperfect entry for an excellent season.
Seriously Pog, it’s called a sonic shower, use it.
“Brink” did go a long way to expand on the world-building for Solum, revealing it to be transformed into a police state with a growing underground resistance fighting for freedom. This is all part of the cautionary allegory the season has on the back burner, warning about how stoking fear is never a good idea for a society. Asencia remains one-note as a would-be dictator, but it’s good to see her younger self has joined the light side. Things got a bit overly complicated setting up the kids as non-Starfleet so they could be the ones sent on the covert mission. While there was a mention of them as “civilians” back in 201, this flies in the face of all we have seen over the season, especially the previous two-parter. Also, it’s unclear how the situation with the Vau N’Akat is still constrained by the Prime Directive after Asencia declared war and attacked the Voyager. All the exposition spent on Starfleet regulations only confused things, yet they never bothered to explain why the site-to-site transporter meant to bring them all home could only end up transporting two people. The show got a lot of mileage (and humor) exploring the workings of the cloaking shield and Gwyn’s choice to use the transporter the way she did could have had more character impact if the audience was in on how she was making a sacrifice at that moment (à la Data in Nemesis). With only 22 minutes of runtime, the show has to pick its battles when it comes to exposition, but in this case maybe less legal mumbo jumbo and a little more technobabble would have been better.
Yes, apparently we both grow up to be huge a-holes.
Final thoughts
A mixed bag episode still offers plenty of fun and tense moments. The introduction of Wesley Crusher as the season catalyst continues to pay off in a big way, setting up the final three episodes.
When did you guys stop carpeting your ships?
BITS
- Stardate 62083.5 (with a flashback to 61914.3).
- Wesley’s torture left him feeling like a “Nausicaan punching bag.”
- The site-to-site transporter they use is similar in function (but not design) to the emergency transporter Data used to transport Picard to safety when he sacrificed himself in Star Trek Nemesis.
No, I welcome our new robot overlords.
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 be published 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.
NEW: Full spoiler open thread!
We welcome fans joining us through our July coverage of 5 episodes each week, and we ask our readers to keep comments related to the season up to the episode being reviewed.
For those choosing to binge the show even faster, we have created an open thread where you can post all the spoiler comments you want for the entire season.
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.
Now that you bring up Data in Nemesis. Did they forget about the Emergency transporter arm bands? Or do those only work with shuttle and runabout transporters?
Yes.
Is anyone watching this show (or reading these reviews)?
yes. watching and reading the reviews.
Yes to both for me.
It seems like the instant release of the whole season all at once hasn’t done the discussion any favours. Prodigy never got as many comments as the other shows on this site but this time you have some people who binged the whole season when it dropped (almost a month ago) while others may be watching along with Trekmovie’s review cycle (at least some said that they would) or take an even slower pace or not watch it at all.
I’ve watched it several times now! I’m only now getting around to the reviews … I didn’t see them right away.
wonder why there isn’t more discussion and enthusiasm for this show here?
aside from being marketed as a kids show, prodigy is really well written and avoids the discovery mistakes like overemotionalizing, fleeting mistakes, canon mistakes etc.
the characters are likeable and i took many of them to my heart after just a few episodes, something i didn’t even manage to do after 5 seasons of discovery!
i had my reservations about YA shows, but prodigy has cleared that up and also increased my curiosity about SA.
it’s a really entertaining experience, especially as a binge watch with friends.