Ooh boy, a Nickelodeon Puzzle Box. I kind of love it. “Time Amok” (clever!) is a Temporal Shenanigans episode that showcases incremental problem solving in a very lovely way. Rok is really the showcase character here, though her role is a little bit liminal – what we’re dealing with from her involves a lot of off-stage growth and things that aren’t made explicit. We again reinforce the symmetry between Dal and Gwynn and get some development for Dal in particular that showcases his growth into his leadership role. Plus, we get some tantalizing hints about the ongoing story.

Also, we start out on the holodeck with the gang literally trying to solve the fox-chicken-grain puzzle as a training exercise, which is hilarious. And you know what? They never actually solve it. They don’t circle back to that plot point and have them figure it out, and that’s weird but shows a certain level of trust in the audience that they don’t need to be spoon-fed. One thing I do dig here is that while they don’t bother showing the solution, they do show Zero having the key insight: “Wait,” he says, “There’s nothing that says we can’t take one thing over and then bring a different thing back.” Again, the emphasis here is on the process of solving the problem, not the solution.

And then Dal, frustrated by their inability to function as a team, reveals their secret to Janeway: that the ship is stolen and they aren’t really cadets. And I am fascinated here that everyone assumes this will be a problem, but Janeway just rolls with it, and she appears to have already decided to roll with it before the ship gets smeared across different time periods by the tachyon MacGuffin.

That’s when we get into the iterative problem solving. Pog, the engineer, is able to identify the problem with the protodrive, but his accelerated time frame means that he can’t solve it in time. Janeway next visits Rok, whose time frame is massively slowed. And we see her conflict: her upbringing as a slave has left her unequipped emotionally and psychologically for the weight of making decisions for herself, but it’s also left her desperate to choose her own path, and resistant in the face of being told what to do. She doesn’t trust herself or her abilities, but she bristles at being ordered around, so she simply rejects Janeway’s attempt to get her to save the ship. Zero is able to work out a solution, but as his time is also accelerated, he can’t implement it. Since Murf isn’t really one for engineering, it falls to Dal to build the necessary device, and here he’s beset by his own self-doubt. Self-doubt is a big element for Dal, Gwynn and especially Rok; not at all for Pog or Zero – I’m curious what it’s going to look like when we finally get an in-depth character study for Pog in particular, since he seems far and away the best adjusted of the gang. And Dal almost manages to save the day, but for an incompatible coupling, which I think is probably a Parental Bonus reference, since Janeway just moments earlier had referenced Apollo 13, and I’m guessing that if you’re in the age range of the expected audience’s parents, one of the big details you remember about Apollo 13, from the Tom Hanks film, is solving the problem of the carbon dioxide filters not being compatible between the modules.

Gwynn’s scene is where we get into the ongoing story elements. We’d established before the break how easily her people can seize control of the Protostar, and more recently hinted that there’s some element of their culture embedded in the ship. The Diviner’s ship is now revealed to be “months” away (Speaking of timeline, don’t think I didn’t notice Janeway giving a six digit stardate. Production error, or hint?), but communications between the Gamma and Delta quadrants is now real-time, so he’s already received the intel from Nandi, and that’s enough for him to email Deathlok to the Protostar’s vehicle replicator. And man, he just owns the crap out of Gwynn, admitting that, while he’s been ordered not to harm her, he reckons he should because she’s bad for his boss’s mission. He also has enough insider information about the Protostar to trivially find the necessary coupling and to outright murder Janeway, using Chakotay’s command codes. There’s enough similarity between Deathlok’s voice and Robert Beltran’s that if we hadn’t seen him in the background on the flight recorder and this weren’t a For Kids! show, I’d almost be expecting a twist a la The Black Hole where Deathlok is eventually revealed to be a somehow transfigured Chakotay. Gwynn bests him in the end, but only by sacrificing the ship.

You might – I was kind of hoping – they might pop back and have Murf somehow save the ship. But that’s a bit less satisfying than what actually happens. No, in her slow-time reality, Rok has already spent an unspecified amount of time alone – long enough that it’s weighing on her as she’s created props of her missing friends to talk to. But eventually, Gwynn’s farewell recording catches up with her, explaining how to save the ship and apologizing for the pressure they’d put on her. Gwynn, of course, has since her face turn started showing kinship to each of the others in turn. She bonds with Zero over the sense of alienation at being cut off from her culture. She bonds with Dal over the weight of responsibility and parental abandonment. Now, she bonds with Rok over the feeling of being pressured to do things she’s not comfortable with. Wondering what she’ll bond with Murf over. So, over the span of a very long time, Rok teaches herself enough engineering to build the necessary device, find the necessary coupler, and even restore Janeway – since her deletion only occurred “seconds” earlier in sidereal time, all her data is still in the cache, and it’s just a matter of recompiling her. We don’t know exactly how long Rok spends on this. She doesn’t age visibly, but we don’t know what the aging process for her species looks like. We do know it’s a long time, but if there’s any lasting psychological damage from that, we don’t get to see it. We are told – I think we’ll see this as the show goes on, but I don’t think it was honestly conveyed in as much detail as it merits on-screen – that she’s had time to mature and “find herself”.

I really liked this episode. It felt good. Prodigy is doing at least one thing that the other streaming-era Treks seem to struggle with: giving us a good solid one-off adventure that works by the traditional Star Trek methods for a problem-solving ensemble story, while still feeling entirely fresh and 21st century.

Damn, I think I kinda like this show.