Prodigy: Time Amok

I've written before about how Star Trek: Prodigy is clearly the Star Trek series meant for kids (and how I'm fine with it carving out that space). But then along comes the latest episode, "Time Amok," an episode that with only slight changes could have felt at home on any of the previous Star Trek series.

A temporal anomaly splits the Protostar into parallel ships, each with only a single crew member aboard, each experiencing time at a different rate. Only the Janeway hologram can move from one ship to another, striving to help her "cadets" learn the lesson she's already been trying to teach them: they must work together as a team.

Prodigy sometimes gets a bit heavy-handed with its moral of the week, yet so far it has always presented an engaging story to bring that moral into focus. Here, by showing how dire things can get when the crew is separated, the importance of teamwork was presented in a clever way. Really, this episode perhaps only needed a full hour to feel like full fledged "Star Trek for adults."

I can imagine a one-hour version of this that might have tried explaining the anomaly a little more specifically. I doubt that more technobabble was really what was needed here -- the timey-wimeyness already felt pretty dense -- though the "rules" surrounding Janeway's awareness of each timestream felt a little vague.

An even better use of one-hour would have been to devote more time to Rok-Tahk's long stretch alone in the slowest timeline. That would no doubt be too bleak for a children's show, yet I was struck by just how much the episode already succeeded in making her story impactful. Even though the character is voiced by an actual child, I find it easy to forget that she is the youngest character on the show. Children that age don't often have the language or self-awareness to really put their feelings into words, but if the episode could have spent more time on her story, it could have shown us more.

Or maybe the half-hour version would have been just fine had the episode not also stuffed in big moves in the ongoing story lines. The crew came clean to Janeway, with Dal revealing that they're not Starfleet cadets. (Not a moment too soon. Janeway's obliviousness to this truth was putting her character's intelligence at risk.) The Diviner and Drednok figured out a way to reach across the galaxy and still menace the Protostar crew -- in a subplot that kept the mystery of "what happened to Chakotay's crew?" still near the foreground.

In any case, I guess it's not really a bad thing when the main criticism you can levy against a show is that you wished there had been more of it. "Time Amok" was a nicely dramatic episode. I think it earns a solid B.