Okay, well then. Here we get a look into what the Protostar crew looks like on something approximating “a mission” – something they very broadly tried in “Dreamcatcher”, but that was really just setup for everyone to have some character insight. This is a proper mission.

It’s also… They are really not eager to make the setup for the galaxy straightforward, are they? So, as we learned last week, Protostar has hopped from the Delta Quadrant over to the Gamma quadrant, and everyone is very clear that their hustle here is much faster than a normal sort of hustle. And yet this week they run into someone from Dal’s past. A Ferengi who Dal had traveled with before being sold into slavery. So Protostar might be fast, but a Gamma-to-Delta trip isn’t untenable at this point in history, not even for an Alpha Quadrant race. Jumping to the Gamma quadrant has gotten them out of The Diviner’s reach, but only for the moment: the bounty on the Protostar is already known in the quadrant, and we can expect that he’ll catch up either next week or the one after. And if Dal was raised by a Ferengi – one who knows about and recognizes the Federation – why was Dal completely ignorant of them? The gang also discovers transporters for the first time (This was obliquely hinted at last week when Dal was surprised to be beamed aboard the Klingon ship). Again, despite knowing about Klingons, Pog being a Tellarite (The fact that Pog was raised on a “sleeper ship” does leave open the possibility that he’s from a subculture that predates the televised era), and Dal having been raised by a Ferengi. You might want to justify this as them knowing about transporters but never having seen one, but they’re uncertain whether it will work on something living (They try it on Murf).

Timeline is still curious. The presence of Chakotay would seem to confirm that Protostar itself originates not long after Voyager, (Assuming that actually was Chakotay and not another hologram), but how much time has passed since then? We have Ferengi, Telarites and Klingons with access to the Delta Quadrant, travel between Delta and Gamma, no mention of the Borg, plus now the character of Nandi. Ferengi women’s rights were a thing that were just starting out at the tail end of Deep Space Nine, so the fact that a Ferengi woman would be wearing clothes and operating her own ship and this is seen as utterly unremarkable would seem to hint that we’re quite a few years divorced from ’90s Trek status-quo.

This episode really feels like a very straightforward approach to adapting a traditional Trek story to the “for kids!” format, and it works taken that way. It’s a little thinner than a “proper” Trek episode would be, but it hits the major points. Dal’s former mentor offers them a cloaking device in return for helping to con a pre-contact species out of a MacGuffin. As sold to Dal, it’s not a huge con; they just plan to buy one off of them in an unfavorable deal. Caveat Emptor. And besides, Nandi is in deep to the mob and is gonna have his lobes cut off if he can’t deliver the goods. So Dal talks the crew into it selling it with only the very modest lie that they’re going to do some diplomacy.

It all goes south because the MacGuffin is load-bearing and the Ferengi isn’t willing to take no for an answer, and he’s setting them all up to take the fall, and also he totally sold Del to the Diviner because he thought he was “too soft”. The day is saved because Dal slips his commbadge onto the MacGuffin so they can retrieve it despite the betrayal, and the day is saved despite a dressing down from Janeway over their betrayal of Starfleet ideals. But Dal himself largely escapes being an object lesson: he should’ve known better than to trust the Ferengi, but hey, it’s as close as Dal comes to having family. There’s a nice moment of kinship with Gwynn over their shared sense of betrayal and their shared guilt over being complicit in their respective parent-figures’ crimes.

I like the sophistication of the moral storytelling here. Nothing as simple as, “Dal lied; lying is always wrong.” Because Dal was as much a victim as they were, and he got victimized precisely because of his vulnerability.

The other thing about this episode worth noting is that the planet of the musical sand beings is really a visual extravaganza and also in places an auditory delight. I’m not crazy about the character animation in Prodigy. It’s fine, but only incremental progress over what we saw a while back in “The Girl Who Made the Stars”. A little plasticky. But man, they can do something more abstract like a planet of animated sand.

As to our ongoing plot, with Nandi ratting them out, we can assume The Diviner will be on Protostar’s trail soon. And Janeway’s use of freeze-frame and zoom reveals the image of Deathlok preparing to breach the Protostar’s bridge during the mysterious backstory battle, a reveal which is shocking in just how unsurprising it is. I’m hoping we make some progress on the story soon, but honestly, I’d also be okay with more like we just got.