WHY WE LIKE IT: Good action. Good temporal shenanigans. The bird dude.
WHY WE DON'T: Chakotay can't spot a Vulcan?
REVIEW: They may have left the two combat monsters in the present for a reason, making it a lot harder for Dal and the rest to survive and do well on future Solum. Their mission is to wait a few hours for Chakotay and his actually pretty cool avian first officer (the bird jokes are dumb, but the character is not) to escape and send the Protostar into parts unknown, securing the timeline before they can be extracted. Unfortunately, they get caught, thrown into the same cell and become part of events that affect the past, our present. Okay, cool! They were always meant to do this, right? I've read my Temporal Mechanics 101 manual! This is just like the Bell Riots! Cool! Except Dal drops a disruptor during the escape that gives Chakotay a sudden edge and creates a butterfly effect. He escapes WITH the Protostar, it never finds its way to the Prodigy's pilot episode, and on Solum, Gwyn starts to fade in and out of reality!
There's a lot of fun to be had here. Jankom's hand ensuring the escape and fighting a robotic scorpion really makes the cybernetic Tellarite shine. The time travel shenanigans are well set up. And Chakotay being impressed is nice too. I'm less enthused about the presence of the Vulcan Nova Squadron initiate - now I need to learn her name, oh, it's Ma'jel? That really calls attention to itself - who acts as a Gwyn stand-in, continually questioning Dal's decisions, etc. She's not particularly engaging, and I don't understand the bit where she presumably hides her ears with a bandana on a planet where they're ALL aliens. And if hidden - because Chakotay wonders where she might have learned the Vulcan nerve pinch - why does the animation not really hide them at all? And beyond that, what's the point? Okay, you'll pose as traders to protect the timeline, but why can't a Vulcan be a trader? Everything I don't like is basically tied to this one character.
Meanwhile, Gwyn faces off against Asencia in an ancient Solum ritual - a fight using free-range heirloom particles, or not a fight exactly, just an "escape the pit before the other can" - and it looks really cool. We're kind of ignoring the fact that just by being there and contacting her future father, she's changing history. So when she starts to blink in and out of existence because of Dal's mistake, it had me wondering why this wasn't already happening because of her own actions. The next episode is called Temporal Mechanics 101 so perhaps we'll get answers. For now, she appears to be an anomaly, because she never does disappear entirely. It just helps Asencia win, leaving her trapped in the pit. Has she been Schrödingered? I'm not expecting watertight answers in the next ep (Trek's take on time travel is all over the place), but there's hope.
LESSON: Not one line!
REWATCHABILITY - Medium-High: Cool action on two fronts is enough to dazzle us out of asking too many temporal questions.
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