WHY WE LIKE IT: Answers.
WHY WE DON'T: More questions than answers.
REVIEW: It's already pretty hard to get one's head around that past events are occurring in the future, but perhaps showing clips from the Temporal Mechanics 101 manual will help? Not really, though it's fun that a real-world astrophysicist appears as herself as the instructor. What we need to understand is that Chakotay re-entering the wormhole aboard the Protostar means the ship won't be there for the kids to find, which creates a paradox. I can get around that, of course. Just find Chakotay, make him leave the ship in the Delta Quadrant with a programmed Janeway hologram and history is back on track. The REAL damage is to Solum by having Gwyn - though at this point, it's just as much Asencia's fault - go back there to prevent the civil war and therefore the Diviner going back to the past, overshooting, creating her, etc. Starfleet should never have greenlit this mission. And Gwyn interacting with a sweet version of her future father is a mindboggling turn of events. If this creates another timeline (possible, "Parallels" is referenced), then why is she phasing in and out of reality? The implication is that she can exist even if she's not created, but she CAN'T exist if the kids don't find the Protostar. It's all a bit convoluted and at least the events of the episode get ALL the kids back together, which is one narrative complication we didn't need.
But here's another to replace it! It seems Murph is talking to a future self (or just a very gummy Mysterious Figure) just like the one that directed the Suliban during the Temporal Cold War. They are seemingly influencing events to unravel the paradox, sending messages to Dal and Gwyn (including a Save the Cheerleader, Save the World notice) and magically fixing the Infinity so it can fly again even after Jankom built a time machine out of it. That's a lot of heavy lifting, but then Murph is basically the character that can do anything, in danger of deusing all our machinas.
I'm with Dal on this one. There's too much technobabble for this to be a great episode, and for some reason, I feel like the characters are speaking more slowly than usual. There's some wit ("It's simple... we have to build a time machine"), and if you're 'shipping Zero and Ma'jel, you'll get some joy. Zero's new armor can fly, which is cool and useful.
LESSON: Always bring a spare domino.
REWATCHABILITY - Medium: A fair continuance, but Prodigy is getting into dangerous temporal territory the same way Enterprise and yes, Voyager did.
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