Recap: Star Trek: Prodigy - Time Amok

It’s pretty clear that time travel will play a role (and already has been playing one) in Star Trek: Prodigy. In this week’s episode, “Time Amok,” the crew must work together across a fractured timeline to save the ship from a warp core breach.

It starts out innocently enough — Janeway is running a holodeck program trying to encourage the crew to work together in the wake of their First Contact failure. Dal gets fed up with the exercise, and the admonition that he’s letting failure tear his crew apart. Dal finally admits to Hologram Janeway that the crew isn’t composed of Starfleet cadets and that they, in fact, stole the Protostar. It was a big confession for Dal and it shows how much he’s changed over the past few episodes.

Back in the Delta Quadrant, DaiMon Nandi delivered the information about the Protostar’s whereabouts to the Diviner. While he doesn’t have the ability to reach the ship because it’s traveled so far, he puts another plan into motion. This can’t be good, but right now, the Protostar has bigger issues to deal with: a tachyon storm.

Gwyn mentions the storm might mess with the ship’s gravity, which raises a red flag for Jankom Pog — gravity is the only thing that’s keeping the protodrive stable. Hologram Janeway tries to help him and affirms her commitment to her crew — Starfleet or not, these are her people now. A strange ripple occurs, but before Janeway has time to get to the bottom of what’s going on, Jankom Pog realizes there’s a core breach in progress and he has 10 minutes to fix it. But just a few seconds later, the ship explodes.

Hologram Janeway reappears and finds Rok-Tahk in the mess hall. It turns out that there’s a time anomaly affecting the ship. Each member of the crew seems to be in their own time phase, unable to interact with the others. Hologram Janeway can travel across them, though, because of her programming. She discovers that time is moving differently in each of these phases — the ship blew up so quickly because Jankom was moving fast, but Rok’s is much, much slower.

However, Rok doesn’t want to be responsible for fixing the ship. The responsibility is too much — her friends have already been trying to force her into the position of security officer (one she doesn’t want) and she isn’t ready to save the ship. She deactivates Hologram Janeway, and Janeway jumps to the next person’s time phase — Zero’s.

Unfortunately, Zero’s time is moving almost as fast as Jankom’s. There isn’t enough time to do what needs to be done to save the Protostar. Instead, they create a schematic for the warp matrix that needs to be built to save the ship — Zero can’t do it alone, but Janeway can help the next crew member try and finish the work they started.

That person is Murf. Onto the next time phase!

Hologram Janeway encounters Dal, who has no idea there’s even anything wrong. She brings him up to speed, but it turns out the vehicle replicator is offline, so it’s going to be more of a challenge to build this warp matrix than they’d hoped. Dal pulls himself together and manages to do the seemingly impossible deed. There’s just one problem: He’s out of time and the matrix won’t connect because Dal still needs a dilithium coupler.

Finally, it’s Gwyn’s turn. As she searches for a dilithium coupler, the Diviner’s plan comes to light: He somehow connected with the Protostar and is building something with the vehicle replicator: Drednok. How does he have this kind of access to the ship? What does this mean for the crew?

Janeway recognizes it immediately: the sinister figure that boarded the ship in the Chakotay hologram. It immediately becomes clear how the Diviner accessed the ship and commanded it — he has Chakotay’s command codes (and Drednok sounds eerily like Chakotay when he delivers them to the computer). Drednok uses them to delete Hologram Janeway from the Protostar.

Drednok locates the correct coupler and heads down to Engineering with the warp matrix to save the ship and return it to The Diviner. Before he can plug it in, though, Gwyn vents Engineering. She succeeds in getting rid of Drednok but the warp matrix is gone too.

Back in Rok-Tahk’s time phase, she’s completely alone and time is passing very, very slowly. But it turns out Gwyn hadn’t given up on her: She recorded a message instructing Rok on how to save the ship (and apologizing for trying to force her into a security role). Rok doesn’t believe in herself, but Gwyn believes in her, so Rok gets to work.

She manages to bring back Hologram Janeway — despite the fact that the program was erased, her memory stayed intact. It allowed Rok to rebuild the program — from scratch. The amount of time it must have taken (and hence how long Rok must have been alone) is astronomical. It’s safe to say Rok-Tahk will be feeling the repercussions from that for a long time.

Rok isn’t sure what to do with the warp matrix, but Janeway assists her. Stabilizing the Protostar’s warp drive brings everyone’s time phase back into alignment — and the crew is reunited. While this ordeal is over, and Rok has found her calling, it’s clear that Gwyn is worried about Rok — and that the crew may have not seen the last of Drednok.