rating: ***
the story: Our crew ends up split in time.
review: Well, gosh darn it...I may actually be a fan of this show now.
This is my favorite episode of the first ten. Typically I'm fairly generous with four stars/classic status (I guarantee you will find very few fans who have not only watched the whole franchise but enjoyed a lot of it). It's true that even calling "Time Amok" my favorite I'm still not awarding it four. I reserve that for when I think a real contribution has been made to franchise lore. What I mean to say about this episode is that it has officially made it safe for me to believe Prodigy will reach that point.
There will be newer fans who will be absolutely flabbergasted even at that. This is a version of Star Trek we've never seen before. It's a true entry point, and it's perhaps for some new fans the only Star Trek that is going to make any sense at all to them, at least for the foreseeable future. That's a plain fact.
For me, until this point, the series was too self-conscious, too caught up trying to justify itself, too worry about what its characters were doing to just allow them to inhabit an episode. In this one, for the first time ever, Janeway challenges them and they're...ready. They just are, and all it takes in one purple wave to run through the ship and split them up.
The biggest beneficiary is Rok. For all her early appearances this was the "gentle giant" whose main distinguishing factor was the little kid's voice. While Dal spends so much time doing a bad impression of a Lower Decks we're-not-gonna-grow-up!!! attitude (which is mostly absent from the episode, another point in its favor), Rok has been waiting patiently for a spotlight. The best tradition of Star Trek storytelling is that every main character eventually gets at least one. What helps sell it is that the episode doesn't even worry about it, but just lets it happen. In fact, other than the recurring bit about not wanting to be seen as "security material," there's no indication at all that this is a Rok episode until it turns into one.
It's truly organic storytelling. Sometimes serialized TV finds this the hardest accomplishment, so busy just trying to move a story along. Other than Gwyn's daddy arc, it really seemed as if Prodigy simply wasn't interested, and so my attention had faded.
It's not lost on me that the title of the episode deliberately riffs on a classic one (from the original series, and I will not tell you which one, even if you are new to Star Trek).
criteria analysis:
franchise- Here's where I nominally dock a point. You don't need to be an existing fan to understand this one at all, which is actually a good thing.- series - Achieving a longstanding goal of getting the crew to function together by splitting it up. Brilliant!
- character - Rok, who, as it turns out, rocks.
- essential - For Prodigy, a breakthrough moment to be celebrated.
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