If I think abstractly about what Star Trek: Prodigy really is — a Nickelodeon show, ostensibly for kids — then any enjoyment I derive out of it should be purely incidental; just a bonus, really. Then an episode like “Time Amok” arrives, and all that gets thrown out the window.

The more simple and elegant explanation? Prodigy is just this genre’s version of Star Trek. Trek does different genres all the time: westerns, action movies, thrillers, romances, comedies, and in this case, “kid’s show.” This episode more than any other thus far shows that Prodigy is really another side of Star Trek, and the “kids show” label does not push it into some category separate from the rest of the Trek catalogue.

“Time Amok” is a time-bending adventure whose sci-fi conceits would be worthy of ANY of the previous Star Trek series, and whose lessons of working together and of personal growth through challenging circumstances are as relevant and relatable to anyone — regardless of age.

This episode is striking, in ways so many truly great episodes of Star Trek are. A technical problem with a deadline, but one whose solution is secondary to the actions and — reactions — of extraordinary characters without whose growth, ingenuity, and will to survive would otherwise end in disaster. The “damped sine wave temporal anomaly” is an extremely clever idea, and it’s used here to full dramatic advantage.

High concept sci-fi at it’s finest. But combined with that, it’s also watching the stars of the show — especially our beloved Rok-Tahk — solve the problem and incur real consequences that really elevates this episode into just outstanding Trek.

The crew’s failures from the last episode haven’t been forgotten, as we begin with Training Officer Janeway running a team building exercise for our crew in the holodeck: the classic fox-chicken-grain problem. It was a lot of fun watching the crew try to work out the solution — with Zero the only one actually trying to puzzle out the solution — while the chicken tries to fly the coop, and Murf takes off with the boat.

My kids and I had a good time talking about this after the episode and working out the solution together, and while my son said he could understand why they got frustrated, my daughter thought it would have been a lot more fun if we had a holodeck!

Dal’s frustration leads to him coming clean about how they came to be in possession of the Protostar in the first place, and I have to admit that I really believed Janeway was just humoring the kids’ claim of being Starfleet cadets. Her reveal that she truly didn’t know was a bit of a surprise to me, but either way, she reiterates throughout this episode that they are her crew and she has a duty to help them, no matter how they came aboard.

Just before the Protostar crew gets tossed into this week’s adventure, we step back to the Diviner and Drednok — last seen before the winter hiatus — as the starship they’ve been hunting has blasted far out of their range. Lucky for them, a Ferengi comes calling, as DaiMon Nandi shares where she left Dal and crew after “First Con-tact” last week, which gives the baddies a way to catch up with the Protostar — at least, over subspace.

With the coordinates of the Protostar in hand, the Diviner is able to transmit a signal to the starship — don’t ask us how he can tap into the starship’s systems from 4,000 light-years away, much less how Nandi can have a live conversation from that distance — but after connecting, the ship’s Vehicle Replicator kicks into gear.

It’s a terrifying hack, too — while Drednok remains on the Diviner’s ship, the robotic henchman is able to be duplicated aboard the Protostar as the Vehicle Replicator builds a copy of the droid (called “Dred 2” in the credits), allowing the spindly-legged robot to infiltrate the ship from afar.

And then we hit a tachyon storm! Tachyons are a Star Trek classic — a theoretical particle capable of faster-than-light speeds and involved in way too many time-travel shenanigans to count — and here they cause our temporal anomaly by way of a tachyon storm (“whatever that is”, Jankom says, which made me laugh).

You would think after 800+ episodes, there wouldn’t be any more ways of exploring temporal funny-business, but here Prodigy manages to tackle a unique and interesting idea, one which also places our heroes in a perfect position to have to work together (albeit separately) in a unique way to solve the problem.

Having the tachyon wave take the shape of a damped sine wave — meaning it’s amplitude gets smaller and smaller with distance — is a clever idea that is so high-concept that it would not have been out of place in any of the live-action shows.

They have a really great balancing act here, of leaving in all the glorious technobabble that I live and breathe for, but also then explaining things in a way that kids can understand the gist of what is happening. Holo-Janeway brings up a well-designed graphic while explaining things to Rok-Tahk — causing my youngest to let out an audible “oooooh” as she finally understood at least enough to follow along with the sci-fi conceit.

And it’s a concept as well-engineered as Zero’s warp matrix, as we watch Janeway bounce from time-space to time-space. Poor Jankom tries to fix things, but almost has no time at all thanks to his proximity to the engine, as suddenly the Protostar explodes — à la “Cause and Effect” — in a beautiful burst of supernova blue energy, no less. (Of course, you hate to see the ship explode, but the animation on it was incredibly satisfying.)

Luckily, Janeway just gets thrown into a different time pocket and meets up with Rok-Tahk, who is in the slowest-moving portion of the oscillating time wave. Rok is too scared and confused to be able to help, a stark reminder of just how much younger she is compared to Zero, Dal, Gwyn and Jankom.

She gets so scared that she sends Janeway away before the hologram can help her, which zaps her next to Zero’s timeline, and it’s a completely different story. The Medusan has figured out not only what is happening — it’s Zero who gives us the wonderful explanation of the damped sine wave — but also has figured out a solution.

Their fix involves rerouting the power from one of the warp cores to the protodrive, but it requires installation of a warp matrix device.  Zero doesn’t have enough time to build it, so they send Janeway off to the next crew member with the schematic before they blow up as well…

…and then a much needed comedy break, as Janeway thinks the next person will save the day but finds Murf cheerfully squawking in a corridor. Again, my kids loved this! Prodigy is doing a great job so far of giving us a dose of Murf at exactly the right times for maximum impact and not over-utilizing him.

Next is Dal, who needs some gentle encouragement from Janeway to build the device. The Apollo 13 history lesson about was a nice addition, and gave my kids something else to learn about after the episode — fun and educational!

Dal and Janeway share a lovely moment when Dal discovers he is missing a key component, and knows he has once again failed at an important task. Janeway keeps his spirits up, though, telling him he added a key piece to the puzzle — and they poignantly hold hands as the Protostar explodes around him.

Gwyn, on the other hand, doesn’t need any hand-holding to get the job done. As always, she works quickly and efficiently as she looks for the missing coupler — but before she can make much progress, Dred 2 finally emerges, storming the bridge. This part is very illuminating, as he appears to have extremely intimate knowledge of the ship — and its systems.

He knows exactly where to go to find the missing component; he speaks to Janeway with familiarity; and most disturbing of all, not only knows Chakotay’s access code, but the bot is able to relay it using Chakotay’s voice. There is still a lot we don’t know, but it is very obvious between this episode and “Kobayashi” that the Diviner and Drednok have both spent quite a bit of time on the Protostar.

This is a real heroic turn for Gwyn, as she tries to fight off Dred 2 by herself, but ultimately is unsuccessful — as he works to commandeer the ship, he manages to delete Janeway from the Protostar computer, which spells bad news for the temporal crisis underway.

With some real badass energy, Gwyn manages to flush Dred 2 out of a rear airlock, but in her last-ditch attempt, the constructed warp matrix device follows the bot out into space. Before she runs out of time, Gwyn thinks quickly and manages to record an encouraging video message to Rok-Tahk, the only member of the crew still living in an active time-space.

And boy, is Rok-Tahk’s journey a mix of both heart-wrenching and heart-warming moments, as we see her grow — in both knowledge and in confidence — within her prison of infinite time. I was so struck by the way the episode expressed the tragedy of her exquisite loneliness, as her defeated “I can’t!” echoed outward through the ship and out into the vastness of space. Just… wow.

While I would have loved to see some of her self-schooling, as the young Brikar found the strength to teach herself advanced science, engineering, and math, the payoff when she manages to reactivate Janeway for the last piece of the puzzle was incredibly satisfying — as was the crew reunion when the time anomaly is resolved.

Rok finally gets the contact she has been craving with the most genuinely lovely group hug, and I felt the group’s love for each other in my soul. I really hope Rok’s time alone doesn’t get memory-holed, and that maybe we’ll get to see some portion of her solo journey somewhere down the road. (I mean, she even made herself a Murf doll!)

I know part of it will persist, as this plotline exists to give Rok a logical reason to have scientific knowledge and abilities, and hope that we’ll get some fun Rok/Zero science-time team-ups in our future, but I hope they also remember how traumatizing this must have been for her.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Hologram Janeway opens the episode with a training log with “Stardate 607125.6” — series writer/producer Aaron Waltke shared on Twitter this morning that Janeway actually had the Stardate wrong, because the Protostar computer was already being impacted by the nearby temporal anomaly.
   
• Rok gets the focus this week, but I loved that the writing team didn’t forget what Dal learned in “Kobayashi” after Jankom makes the ridiculous suggestion to eat the fox: “It’s my duty as Captain to listen to my crew… but when they say stuff like THAT, I’m gonna ignore it!”
   
• Along with another use of Vau N’Akat computer programming to commandeer the Vehicle Replicator, the evidence is growing that Drednok knows a lot more about the Protostar than we might think: during Dred 2’s attempted takeover, he uses Captain Chakotay’s access code “Chakotay Zulu X-Ray X-Ray 4-7-5” — recited in Robert Beltran’s voice.
   
• My kids LOVED that Snake got a mention as the game Dal was playing, thrilled to learn that kids using Snake to avoid doing work survives all the way to the 24th century! Also, while physically different, Dal’s game padd is reminiscent of Alexander Rozhenko’s gaming device see in “A Fistful of Datas.”

• “Time Amok” is a nice blend of Voyager’s “Shattered” (where different parts of the ship exist in different era) and TNG’s “Timescape” (where the speed and direction of time changes around a massive temporal anomaly) — along with a little bit of Discovery’s “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” where holo-Janeway gets to serve as the conduit between time periods, like Paul Stamets’ role in that episode’s time loop.
   
• Dred 2’s remote appearance aboard the Protostar reminded me of another long-distance arrival, the Doctor’s transmission from the Delta Quadrant to the USS Prometheus in “Message in a Bottle.”
   
• I got a strong Terminator vibe from Dred 2’s destroyed body as one glowing red eye flared up at the end of the episode… he’ll be back!
   
• Jankom “distinctly remembers not being alive.” That’s pretty messed up. I wonder if he saw Shaxs’ “black mountain”? Best not to ask!
   
• The idea of the team working together — yet independently — strongly reminded me of the Science Olympiad event “Write It Do It,” where one teammate writes down instructions to build something and then another teammate gets just those instructions and has to try to build it. Ah, memories!
   
• Seeing the giant heads of our young crew took me back to the slingshot time-travel journey back to 1986 in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where versions of the Enterprise crew’s heads were seen during temporal transit.

Just how long was young Rok-Tahk alone, I wonder? Janeway saying “You haven’t aged, but you’ve certainly matured!” gives me hope that we are not talking about an “Inner Light” or “Hard Time” scenario, but my estimate is definitely predicated on my desire to make it as least traumatizing as possible for Rok.

Since we don’t know how fast Brikars age, how often they need to eat, and the rate of falling objects in her timeframe don’t seem consistent, there are no clues there.

If each attempt at fixing Janeway’s holomatrix took a day (276 days right there), followed by a crash course in quantum science, computer engineering, and “so much math!” along the way… if you estimate a month for each topic, that puts her solo stint over a year, and that’s not even counting the time she spent puttering around the ship by herself before she started working to save the day!

My kids guesses ranged from two to a hundred years — “Did you SEE all those dirty bowls?” She didn’t even try anything else from the replicator system that entire time…. I don’t even want to think about it! I’m gonna go cry now.

“Time Amok” — even just the title itself is perfect— is a worthy addition to the pantheon of time bending Star Trek episodes. Just unabashedly great science fiction and a top-tier episode, no matter what age you are. But if it’s specifically for my kids, I just have to think how lucky they are to have this caliber of a show aimed right at them.

Star Trek: Prodigy returns for its next episode Thursday, January 27 on Paramount+ in the United States, Australia, Latin America, and the Nordics, as well as on CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada.