Prodigy Season 2’s Time Travel Explained as Simply as Possible

Star Trek Prodigy’s Use Of Time Travel And Causality, Explained As Simply As Possible
“Star Trek: Prodigy” was initially billed as a Trek series for younger audiences. It was released not by Paramount, but by Nickelodeon, and the main characters were all teenagers, learning about the existence of Starfleet for the first time. A hologram of Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) was there to usher the teens toward a life of decency and heroism, and also to assure Trekkies that this show did connect to extant Trek lore at large.
That said, the plot of the show’s first season was somewhat complicated, and made use of unusual time travel conceits that a younger audience might have trouble wrapping their heads around.
The plot centered on the mystery of a lost and abandoned Starfleet vessel called the U.S.S. Protostar. The ship was found by Dal R’El (Brett Gray), Gwyn (Ella Purnell), and a few other teens who were escaping slavery. They fled in the Protostar, chased by the Diviner (John Noble) a bitter villain and their former owner. While the teens learned about Starfleet from Hologram Janeway, the Diviner desperately sought the Protostar for his own nefarious ends.
It was eventually revealed that the Diviner’s homeworld will, at some point in the future, be visited by the Federation to engage in First Contact. Typically in “Star Trek,” First Contact is a mind-opening experience for the species that experiences it, and entire planets tend to unify once they know they are part of a larger, galactic community of aliens. For the Diviner’s homeworld Solum, however, First Contact instigated a vicious Civil War between the planet’s progressives and xenophobes. Eventually everyone was killed.
The Diviner — real name Ilthuran — helped invent an unbeatable, self-destructive computer virus called the Living Construct, and escaped 52 years into the past … Well,the plot only gets more complex from there.