Star Trek: Prodigy 1x5 "Terror Firma" Review

 rating: ***

the story: The characters escape the predator planet, and perhaps the Diviner, too.

review: In the second part of the "Dream Catcher" story, Prodigy appears to take a big leap and complete an arc begun at the start of the series.  

Now that everyone knows what kind of planet they've really found, escape is the main objective.  But there's also the question of what to do with Gwyn, the daughter of the Diviner, the tyrant who previously kept them all prisoner and who also wanted the lost Starfleet ship they found and escaped in.  As a new kind of Star Trek, it was difficult to know exactly how all this would play out, how long it would play out (and of course, there's hardly a guarantee that the Diviner arc ends here, although it's difficult to imagine him finding a way to credibly stay in close contact with them now).

Serialized storytelling is hardly new in the franchise at this point, and in most of it, the story stretches at least for a whole season.  In Discovery, however, there were elements that resolved within the first handful of episodes, such as Michael Burnham's status in Starfleet and the nature of the tardigrade helping power the spore drive.  Prodigy, as of "Terror Firma," seems to be following that model, an extended arc that traditionally would have played out in a pilot as setup for the premise.  New era, new rules.

The episode teases along the solution that rounds out the dilemma, the big mystery at the heart of the Protostar, which turns to be a protostar, a new propulsion system that surely would have been handy in Voyager itself, the series Prodigy seems so eager to evoke.  

In the process of working all this out, it's perhaps the first satisfying episode of the series so far.  Having discarded the familiar element that drove "Dream Catcher," "Terror Firma" instead is free to challenge the characters on their own terms, leaving Gwyn finally as an accepted ally, as she was clearly set up to be from the start.  That itself is a completed arc.

criteria analysis:

• franchise - Janeway's nudge this episode helps Starfleet's best service tradition remain true.
• series - A welcome conclusion to the initial arc of Prodigy.
• character - Gwyn finally joins the good guys.
• essential -  The lack of heroic resolve from the ostensible lead character, Dal, remains a drawback.