Movies News Talk
Star Trek: Prodigy season 2 ramps up the risk factor of Star Trek time travel with the introduction of the Loom, brand-new Star Trek villains with an appetite for timelines that shouldn't exist. Usually, responsible Time Travelers address potential consequences by creating clean causal loops in the Star Trek timeline. The time-traveling Borg in Star Trek: First Contact are thwarted by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and humanity's first warp flight proceeds. Commander Benjamin Sisko ensures the 21st century Bell Riots go on as intended in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 3's "Past Tense". These events were always meant to go this way.
Far more likely, however, are Star Trek's temporal paradoxes. Throughout the decades, Star Trek characters change the past when they go back in time, creating new alternate timelines, whether with full intent to rewrite history, as Admiral Kathryn Janeway does in Star Trek: Voyager's finale, "Endgame", or by accident, like Star Trek: Prodigy's young cadets. Repeated erasure and rewriting of events already wear down the fabric of Star Trek's space-time, and in Star Trek: Prodigy season 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.
The Loom in Star Trek: Prodigy are 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 of Star 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 of Star 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 in Star Trek.
Star Trek: Prodigy reveals just how important Travelers are to maintaining Star Trek's Multiverse. The Travelers are Star Trek's stewards of time, tasked with maintaining temporal order to the best of their ability, but their ranks have grown thin after the Temporal Wars from Star Trek: Enterprise took a toll on the number of Travelers in the multiverse. As one of the few Travelers left, Wesley Crusher brings Star 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 in Star Trek's Prime Timeline.
The original Traveler visited the crew of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation season 1, episode 6, "Where No One Has Gone Before". The Traveler returned in Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7, episode 20, "Journey's End", and invited Wesley Crusher to become a Traveler.
Wesley Crusher's Traveler powers let him relay both scattered information about the expansive nature of Star 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 to Star Trek: Prodigy alone, and just might pose a real threat to Star Trek's other timelines.