Summary
WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Prodigy season 2
Star Trek: Prodigyseason 2 ramps up the risk factor ofStar Trektime travel with the introduction of the Loom, brand-newStar Trekvillains with an appetite for timelines that shouldn’t exist. Usually,responsible time travelers address potential consequences by creating clean causal loopsin theStar Trektimeline. The time-traveling Borg inStar Trek: First Contactare thwarted by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), and humanity’s first warp flight proceeds. Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) ensures the 21st century Bell Riots go on as intended inStar Trek: Deep Space Nineseason 3’s “Past Tense”. These events were always meant to go this way.
Far more likely, however, areStar Trek’s temporal paradoxes. Throughout the decades,Star Trekcharacters change the past when they go back in time, creating new alternate timelines, whether with full intent to rewrite history, as Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) does inStar Trek: Voyager’s finale, “Endgame”, or by accident, likeStar Trek: Prodigy’s young cadets.Repeated erasure and rewriting of events already wear down the fabric ofStar Trek’s space-time, and inStar Trek: Prodigyseason 2,the actions of the former USS Protostar crew, while well-intended, have ripped open a hole that unleashes the Loom:terrifying draconic creatures resembling snarls of thick yarn with creepy, probing vine-like limbs.
10 Most Important Star Trek Time Travelers
Time travel is a staple of Star Trek stories, and several time traveling characters have had a significant impact on the Star Trek timeline.
Star Trek: Prodigy’s Multiverse Eating Villains The Loom Explained
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The Loom inStar Trek: Prodigyare interdimensional scavengers that eat dying timelines, which occur when botched time travel infects time with paradoxes. When time travelers create a timeline that can’t exist, the temporal paradox will inevitably alert the Loom, drawing them out of the fabric of space-time like carrion eaters attracted to a fresh corpse. Horrifyingly, the Loom’s victims don’t just die; instead,each individual consumed by the Loom is wiped clean from their own timeline,like they never even existed in the first place. Worse, the Loom don’t always wait for the timeline to heave its last breath before descending.
Like real-world scavengers, the Loom have an important role to play in the ecology ofStar Trek’s multiverse. Certain natural abilities make it easier for the Loom to eat redundant or impossible timelines and keep the multiverse tidy. With cloaked thread-like probes, the Loom can sniff out temporal paradoxes before attacking.The Loom can manipulate time, causing it to slow or even stop,putting their individual targets at a disadvantage. The Loom’s cable-like limbs are strong, and they’re impervious to energy weapons like phasers and shields. Glowing coloration can determine the Loom’s intent: white when benign or frightened, and red in predator mode.
Presumably, the Loom have always been a part ofStar Trek’s interdimensional cosmology, but as time travel becomes more common, the Loom collectively grow stronger, feasting on the dead branches of reality created by rampant unregulated time travel inStar Trek.
Prodigy Revealed How Important Travelers Really Are To Star Trek’s Multiverse
Can The Loom Return To Threaten Star Trek’s Multiverse?
Star Trek: Prodigyreveals just how important Travelers are to maintainingStar Trek’s multiverse.The Travelers areStar Trek’s stewards of time, tasked with maintaining temporal order to the best of their ability,but their ranks have grown thin after theTemporal Wars fromStar Trek: Enterprisetook a toll on the number of Travelers in the multiverse. As one of the few Travelers left, Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) bringsStar Trek: Prodigy’s cadets into the fold to give them a fairly extensive explanation of exactly what’s at stake if they don’t work together to patch the holes that the cadets' mismanaged time travel created inStar Trek’s Prime Timeline.
The original Traveler (Eric Menyuk) visited the crew of the USS Enterprise inStar Trek: The Next Generationseason 1, episode 6, “Where No One Has Gone Before”. The Traveler returnedStar Trek: The Next Generationseason 7, episode 20, “Journey’s End”, and invited Wesley Crusher to become a Traveler.
Wesley Crusher’s Traveler powerslet him relay both scattered information about the expansive nature ofStar Trek’s multiverse, and dire warnings about the Loom. As a force of nature,the Loom can’t actually be wholly defeated, only held back. The Loom are tied off from realities when time travel paradoxes are repaired, but it takes guts, skill, and deep knowledge of temporal mechanics to devise the plans that will ward against the Loom, and keep them out of timelines that aren’t fixed yet. That means the Loom aren’t confined toStar Trek: Prodigyalone, and just might pose a real threat toStar Trek’s other timelines.
