The Cerritos is berthed at spacedock alongside the Archimedes, a brand-new ship under the command of Freeman's friend, Captain Sonya Gomez. The two are being briefed by Admiral Freeman for their upcoming first contact mission with the Lapeerians. It's expected to be a routine mission, with Archimedes taking care of first contact procedures and Cerritos following up in their usual second contact role. In addition, Admiral Freeman hints that Captain Freeman has just received some good news.
In a nearby corridor, Mariner is carrying a crate of contraband Romulan ale when she collides with Jennifer. After shooting some disaffected (and somewhat sexually-charged) barbs at the Andorian, Mariner continues on. She then ducks behind a planter as she sees her mother and Gomez leaving the briefing room. She overhears that Captain Freeman is being promoted to another ship... and that she probably won't be allowed to take her command staff with her. Mariner isn't happy to hear that at all.
The other three ensigns are in their usual repair bay. Rutherford is having some issues with his implant, which keeps throwing up distracting errors onto his field of vision. He asks Boimler to cover his shift so he can have it repaired, but Boimler is too busy preparing decorations for Captain Freeman Day. He doesn't care that it's traditionally a holiday for kids. Then Mariner barges in to tell them that the Captain is going to be replaced soon! But the other ensigns don't share her sense of urgency. Sure, no one likes losing a good captain, but it happens. They'd rather just be happy for her. Of course, they also don't depend on Freeman to cover for their insubordinate habits like Mariner does. With no support to be found from them, Mariner's next plan is to let the rumor mill do the dirty work for her.
As for Tendi, she has just found out that Dr. T'Ana wants to see her for an unspecified reason. She's paranoid that she has been underperforming in sickbay, but Rutherford reassures her that a great officer like her has nothing to worry about. But when Tendi returns to duty, she overhears T'Ana talking about her to another officer, saying she's "not cut out for Medical" before deleting her file from the computer.
The pair of ships departs for the Laap System. Captain Freeman checks in with her officers, but is met by strangely passive-aggressive responses to everything. Mariner leaked the news of Freeman's promotion to the other bridge officers earlier, which her smug face clearly conveys. The Captain orders them all into her Ready Room and confronts them. Ransom, Shaxs, and Billups are all angry and resentful to learn that their captain is leaving them behind. Freeman tries to explain that it's not her choice — Starfleet doesn't like to shake up the command structure of Cali-class ships — but it doesn't placate them. Even mild-mannered Billups lets loose an explosion of profanity at hearing Freeman's excuse.
Tendi rushes to Rutherford, panicked at what she overheard from the CMO. She's not just being transferred out of sickbay, but off the Cerritos entirely! Rutherford doesn't believe that someone as kind and capable as Tendi would get that sort of treatment, but he sees for himself that Tendi's name has been dropped from the roster. What other conclusion can they draw? Rutherford decides to console Tendi by taking her on one last tour of their ship. Tendi decides maybe she should lead the way after Rutherford, still blinded by his implant errors, smacks into a bulkhead.
Not long after arriving in the Laap System, an unexpected crisis occurs. A Red Alert wails, summoning the Captain to the bridge, where Boimler reports that the Lapeerian sun just emitted a massive solar flare directly in the path of a nearby unstable planetoid, shattering it! The Archimedes, which arrived first and is already partway in-system, is struck by an expanding wave of debris before anyone has time to react. Though the ship is intact, the radiolytic isotopes contained in the minerals have completely disabled its systems, leaving them in an uncontrolled descent towards the inhabited planet.
Cerritos watches from the edge of the system. They have 20 hours to rescue the Archimedes before it collides catastrophically with the planet. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done. The dangerously ionized planetoid fragments are still between them and the Archimedes, any one of which would send the Cerritos to the same fate if they got too close. Freeman looks to Mariner for one of her bespoke, crazy, rule-breaking ideas to save the day, but not even she knows what to do.
In desperation, Freeman heads down to the captain's yacht, tailed by her daughter. She plans to take it through the debris field, but Mariner doesn't trust her piloting abilities. The two argue as Freeman preps the ship for launch, not just about the plan, but about all the other grievances they have with each other: Mariner's rebelliousness, Freeman's promotion, on and on. They are overheard by Rutherford and Tendi, who happened to be touring the yacht at the time and hid in the next room, and Rutherford suddenly has an idea.
He suggests that they take the ship through the debris with all systems powered down. Freeman objects that this won't work. The hull itself is magnetized and can't be discharged in time. But Rutherford says they do have time to remove the hull. Only the outer layer is magnetized; the inner layer will be enough to maintain the ship's atmosphere. There's no question that it will be difficult and dangerous, but they're Starfleet, and there are lives to be saved. The Captain makes an announcement to the ship, calling all hands to action with a Rousing Speech!
Tens of spacesuited crew crawl the exterior of the Cerritos, taking the hull apart piece by piece as the clock ticks down. Rutherford is still having problems with his vision, so Billups gives him a quick scan to find the problem. He finds that his implant's storage is overflowing, a result of Rutherford constantly making redundant backups of his memories with Tendi. He's afraid to of losing them again like he did last year.
Rutherford: But what if I forget her again?
Billups: Son, if you can't keep making new memories, does it matter?
One last hull panel remains. An electrical discharge in the controls almost sends a crewman flying away from the ship, if not for Billups nearby to catch her. He kneels down with his tricorder and reports that the controls are inoperable. The panel will have to be disengaged manually. There's no more time to spare, so Freeman starts the ship on its course through the debris field as Rutherford and Tendi rush to the couplings inside the hull.
But Rutherford is still struggling to see through the constant stream of errors coming from his implant. Thinking back on what Billups said to him, and with the emergency still facing them, he reluctantly stops to clear his memory backups. His saved memories of Tendi flash before his eyes... but then, an entirely different memory suddenly appears in his mind. He sees himself looking up at a set of bright lights against which two humanoids are silhouetted.
Surgeon: We programmed that in. He'll think it was elective.
Rutherford is confused, but doesn't have time to ponder what he just recalled. He calls over to Mariner and Boimler for help. The four of them all enter Cetacean Ops together, where Kimolu and Matt, the ship's two beluga whale officers, are swimming. He says one of them has to swim down to the manual release switch for the hull panel.
Mariner secures her EV helmet, grumbling to herself that she has to risk her life while her mom gets all the glory, but her friends call her out on her attitude. They can tell Mariner is hiding behind her duties to avoid facing her feelings. However hurt she might feel about Freeman's promotion, the two of them might not get another chance to reconcile. Any of the ensigns can turn a switch, but only Mariner can make peace with her mother. She admits they're right and heads to the bridge, leaving Boimler to finish the job.
All systems will soon need to be powered down, so the bridge crew has suited up and removed the soon-to-be-useless viewscreen. Commander Ransom manually pilots the Cerritos gingerly towards the debris field. Mariner arrives and has a brief reunion with her mother, but there's no time for anything more. She and Jennifer take up positions on either side of the open bulkhead to serve as Ransom's eyes. Everyone waits with bated breath for the last panel to come off.
Deep underneath Cetacean Ops, Boimler struggles with the stubborn release valve. With a heave and a jolt, it finally comes free, launching the last hull panel into the infinite black of space. Boimler signs with relief, only to discover that the impact has ripped a hole in his EV suit. He pops off his helmet and swims back up the shaft, but gets trapped in a narrow passage. Flailing in panic to free himself, Boimler's world fades to black and his body goes limp...
The ship begins its passage. Ransom steers the ship as Mariner and Jennifer call out the incoming debris. Despite their efforts, several larger chunks glance off the hull. The damage is minimal, but one of the impacts sets Mariner flying out into space! She careens out of control, grasping in vain for handholds along the hull that are just out of reach, but a moment before she floats away forever, a hand grabs hold of her. Mariner looks down to see Jennifer smiling up at her.
Meanwhile, the whales have managed to find Boimler and return him to the surface, but he's not breathing! There's no time to get him to sickbay. Tendi leans over and desperately starts performing chest compressions. With a cough of water, Boimler sputters back to consciousness, clearly disoriented but otherwise himself.
Tendi: Uh, yeah, you know, it's probably best if you just keep that to yourself.
The Archimedes plumets towards the planet. Captain Gomez and her crew, their options exhausted, are resigned to their fate. The inhabitants below watch, ignorant of the danger, as the ship glows like a shooting star. Awash in the orange fire of atmospheric compression, the Archimedes starts to break apart...
...and then it stops. Gomez opens her eyes to find her ship motionless above the planet. The flames have been replaced by a blue glow, and the crew looks up to see themselves suspended in a tractor beam. The Cerritos has arrived just in time. Her exhausted crew breathes a sigh of relief as Ransom reports that the crisis is over with no fatalities, on either ship or the planet.
With her ship in far worse shape the the Cerritos, Captain Gomez gives Freeman her blessing to take charge of the mission. Freeman beams down to the planet, Mariner at her side, as she calms her nerves and prepares for her first first contact with another species. A delegation of Lapeerians approaches them. Freeman begins her formal, diplomatic greeting, but their leader bursts into a smile, pulling her into a welcoming embrace and inviting her crew to celebrate amid a tide of cheers!
Things slowly return to normal with the arrival of more support ships from Starfleet. Tendi is seeing to the casualties in sickbay when Dr. T'Ana calls her into her office. Expecting the worst, Tendi pre-emptively acknowledges that she doesn't belong there. T'Ana agrees... because Tendi is far too capable for such a menial position. So T'Ana has decided to sponsor her for senior-level science officer training. Tendi is so happy that she pulls T'Ana into an effusive hug, which even the curmudgeony caitian decides deserves a contented purr.
Mariner finds Jennifer at the bar to thank her for saving her life. The two finally realize that they don't actually hate each other. Mariner has learned from recent events that she has a bad habit of instinctually pushing away people she likes. Speaking of which, Mariner isn't the only one who has come to terms with Freeman's impending promotion. After everything they've been through, the senior staff have acknowledged that no one is more deserving of one than her. But Freeman has had a change of heart. A group from Starfleet Command, who arrived with the support fleet, are preparing to come aboard, and Freeman says she'll be letting them know that she would rather stay in command of the Cerritos.
There's just one problem: they're not here to promote her. Freeman enters the conference room to find a commander flanked by three security officers wearing grim expressions... and phasers. Not noticing the red flags, Freeman starts to decline the anticipated offer, but she doesn't get the chance to finish. One of the officers slaps her in handcuffs while his commander explains that Freeman is under arrest on suspicion of conspiring with Klingons to bomb the Pakled capital city. No one on the Cerritos has even heard of such an attack, since they were busy saving the Archimedes when it happened. The crew have no idea why Starfleet is so convinced their captain was involved, but Freeman tells them to stand down and trust that the truth will come out. The security team marches their prisoner off to their ship, and the crew watches solemnly as their captain is warped back to Earth to stand trial.
Tropes:
- And the Adventure Continues: Subverted to hell and back with Captain Freeman being arrested and the crew likely under suspicion.
- Apocalypse How:
- The Archimedes crashing into Lapeeria would be a Class 1 at the very least, adding another layer of urgency to stop the ship besides saving the crew. Truth in Television — at interplanetary velocities, even a relatively small impactor can cause damage on a regional or global scale, and that's not even counting the antimatter fuel for its warp drive that runs the risk of detonating after impact (though starships have crashed enough times for that to be a low probability).
- The destruction of Pakled Planet looks to be a Class 4 or Class 5, as a huge chunk of the crust has been blasted off and the remaining surface appears devoid of life.
- Artificial Gravity: Curiously, the Archimedes still has gravity after being otherwise completely disabled. Of course, this is standard for live action Star Trek because of special effect limitations, but no such constraints exist for animation. (And indeed, the Rubidoux did lose gravity when they had to shut down main power in season 1.)
- Asteroid Thicket: The Cerritos flies through the remains of a recently-destroyed planetoid to save the Archimedes.
- Badass in Distress:
- The Archimedes crew are clearly an experienced team who know their stuff, but the circumstances simply leave them nothing to work with.
- Mariner briefly gets ejected from the Cerritos while running the Asteroid Thicket, but Jennifer saves her a moment later.
- Big Damn Heroes:
- The Cerritos manages to save the Archimedes from plunging into the planet's gravity well. This is a noted parallel to the first season finale, in which the Cerritos was the ship being saved; the shots of the Gunship Rescue reveal are even framed the same.
- Jennifer reaches out and saves Mariner from being ejected into space after a debris impact on the bridge.
- Bilingual Dialogue: The Beluga Whales speak in subtitled sounds, with the regular characters speaking English.
- Brick Joke:
- Boimler notes early in the episode that a senior officer leaving the crew is usually a cause for celebration, with the crew lining the halls for a final send-off. This ends up happening at the end, when Freeman tempts fate by ordering her senior staff (and Mariner) to keep her arrest secret from the rest of the crew.
- Freeman makes a joke about preparing for hangovers as Gomez describes the potential celebration after making first contact. When Freeman returns after making first contact, she's completely hammered.
- The Bus Came Back: Captain Gomez is the same Sonya Gomez who was in a couple of episodes of the second season of TNG. When interacting with a clumsy subordinate she admits she made similar mistakes, except with a much more intimidating captain.
- Call-Back:
- Boimler nearly drowns trying to save the ship. When he is revived, he mentions having a vision of a koala. Tendi nervously tells him not to worry about that.
- Freeman's reasoning for not telling the senior staff of her promotion? She didn't want to bring about conflict.
- When the Archimedes is saved from certain doom at the very last second and the Cerritos is revealed to have caught her in a tractor beam, the ensign on the bridge points at it excitedly and exclaims "It's the Cerritos!" in exactly the same way (right down to the framing of the shot) as Boimler did with the Titan in the last season finale.
- Freeman's cease fire mission on Pakled Planet comes back in the worst way, with Starfleet security believing that she was there to collude with Klingon extremists to blow up the planet with a Varuvian bomb, which was given to the Pakleds by Captain Dorg.
- Rutherford once again has memories of Tendi deleted, except this time he deleted redundant copies that he made in fear of forgetting about her again.
- Tendi reminds Rutherford of when they watched a pulsar together.
- Character Overlap: Sonya Gomez, last seen in TNG: "Samaritan Snare", returns to the screen as captain of the Archimedes, also becoming the fifth character (after Q, Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and Tom Paris) to appear in both live action and animated forms.
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with a classic Trek 'To Be Continued' screen after Freeman is arrested.
- Cluster F-Bomb: After hearing that Captain Freeman is getting a promotion and might leave the ship, Billups defends the ship while swearing multiple times, shocking Freeman.
- Colony Drop: The crew of the Cerritos must make a dangerous rush through an Asteroid Thicket to keep the Archimedes from crashing headlong into Lapeeria, with catastrophic potential effects on the planet.
- Comically Missing the Point: During the argument over Freeman's anticipated promotion, Ransom pleads that he deserves to stay on as her XO because he always agrees with her, completely forgetting that one of the most important responsibilities of a First Officer is to play Devil's Advocate to their captain and brainstorm alternative solutions.
- Continuity Nod:
- With her skin detached, the Cerritos has a coppery-colored inner hull and looks more like ships like the NX-01 or the Discovery.
- Sonya Gomez, the captain of the Archimedes in this episode, first appeared as an ensign in a couple of episode of The Next Generation. She alludes to the time that she spilled hot chocolate on Captain Picard.
- The HUD on Ransom's suit shows a piloting display similar to that on the suits used by Kirk and co. in Star Trek Into Darkness. He even gets his helmet cracked by a stray rock, though his HUD doesn't fail.
- The actions required to remove the hull plating are almost the same as detaching the deflector dish in Star Trek: First Contact.
- The destruction of the planetoid rather resembles the destruction of Praxis. Bonus points for the Archimedes being clearly inspired by the Excelsior.
- Sonya tries to reactivate one of the Archimedes' shuttles so they can tow the ship to safely, much like the crew of the NX-01 did in "Similitude".
- Captain Freeman Day is obviously the Cerritos's equivalent of Captain Picard Day from "The Pegasus".
- Contrived Coincidence:
- Of all the days for the Lapeerian sun to release a solar flare and blow up its inner planetoid, it just happens to be the day that the Archimedes and the Cerritos are on their way to make contact with the system's inhabitants.
- Commander Mandel thinks that it's very convenient that Pakled Planet blew up while the Cerritos just happened to be off on a mission far away from them. He believes that this is part of Freeman's plan to establish an alibi.
- Cool Starship: The U.S.S. Archimedes, an Obena-class starship. She's explicitly based on the well-used Excelsior-class (specifically the Enterprise-B upgrade), but she incorporates elements of the Sovereign-class like an oval-shaped saucer section, modern warp nacelles, and diagonal pylons instead of right-angled ones. This may qualify as a shout out towards Star Trek Online, where such custom ship designs are common.
- Declining Promotion: Freeman is offered a promotion to a new ship after she completes her mission with the Archimedes, but after her adventure trying to save the ship, she realizes that the Cerritos is her home and decides to decline the promotion. Not that she was going to get it in the first place, given what happens afterward.
- Disaster Dominoes: A badly-timed solar flare in the Laap system's sun causes an unstable inner planetoid to explode, creating a radioactive debris shower that disables the Archimedes and sends it tumbling unpowered right at the inhabited planet they are supposed to contact.
- Drama Bomb Finale: Even more so than "No Small Parts". In order to save the Archimedes and the planet Lapeeria, the Cerritos crew have to dismantle the ship's outer hull and fly through a deadly Asteroid Thicket unpowered and unprotected. Rutherford learns that it wasn't his choice to receive the implant, but it's not explained why he has it. Boimler nearly drowns in the process of removing a defective panel that would've gotten them all killed, and Mariner and her mother finally reconcile their strained relationship amidst all the chaos. And that's not even mentioning the Sudden Downer Ending...
- Dramatic Irony: The natives of Lapeeria look up at the bright light that is the Archimedes entering the atmosphere with curiosity, unaware that the light is a starship about to crash into their planet with catastrophic consequences.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Pakled Planet has been destroyed by a Varuvian bomb, blasting a huge chunk out of the planet and rendering it seemingly lifeless.
- EMP: The effect of the radioactive Asteroid Thicket is described as this in Layman's Terms, since it completely drains the power from any ship that it interacts with. Even the shuttles on the Archimedes aren't spared.
- Et Tu, Brute?: The Cerritos bridge crew is understandably pissed off that Captain Freeman is taking a promotion without telling them, or even offering to bring any of them with her to the new ship.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Rutherford gets the idea to save the Archimedes after overhearing Freeman and Mariner arguing, with Freeman telling Mariner that she needs to drop her defenses. This gives Rutherford the idea to strip off the Cerritos' entire outer hull so they can maneuver through the Asteroid Thicket without being disabled by the plasma reactions.
- First Contact: The whole reason that the Archimedes is out here is to make official first contact with a new race. The episode gets its title because Freeman ends up being the one who gets to do it, it being the first time that she's been the lead on such a mission.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Freeman gets word that a team from Starfleet Command is requesting to come aboard, she assumes that the team is here to give her the promotion to a different ship. When she enters the conference room, all the officers are in gold uniformnote with phasers on their waists and serious expressions on their faces. This is a red flag that this team isn't here to give her a promotion.
- Frame-Up: It's quite clear that Captain Freeman is being framed for colluding with Klingon extremists to destroy Pakled Planet, as the evidence that they use as proof of collaboration is from the episode "The Spy Humongous", where we know the context to it— that Freeman was there to push a cease fire and only learned of the bomb at the end. However, both the viewer and the crew of the Cerritos are missing a lot of context as to what happened.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Rutherford deletes his excess backup memories, there are several images of him and Tendi not from any episodes: the two of them playing Diplomaths, at what appears to be a 2381 New Year's party, trapping a wasp under a glass, stuck in a Chinese Finger trap together, and sketching Commander Ransom in the buff.
- Friendly, Playful Dolphin: The Beluga Whale crew really want people to swim with them. Preferably naked.
- Godzilla Threshold: With no other viable options to save the Archimedes and the Lapeerians, Freeman has the crew strip off the Cerritos' entire outer hull so they can maneuver through the Asteroid Thicket without being disabled by the plasma reactions.
- Handwave: One would think that just warping around the debris field would allow them to get to the Archimedes in time, but apparently it's such a terrible idea that everyone on the bridge minus the guy that suggested it (Kayshon) starts angrily shouting their objections all at once, conveniently preventing the audience from hearing why.
- Hypocritical Humor: Matt berates Kimolu for taking months longer than the rest of the crew to learn that Captain Freeman is Mariner's mom. Then Matt asks Rutherford to jump into the water tank, which Kimolu already asked.
- Irony: Freeman and her crew spend most of the episode in a desperate struggle to rescue a disabled starship and avert a planet-wide catastrophe, only for Freeman to be arrested for apparently causing a completely different planet-wide catastrophe.
- It Has Been an Honor: Said by the Archimedes' first officer as the ship is about to begin entering the planet's atmosphere.
- Just in Time: The Cerritos manages to pull the Archimedes to safety just as the latter hits Lapeeria's atmosphere.
- My Skull Runneth Over: Rutherford keeps getting error messages that obscure his vision because he's maxed out the storage on his implant, filling it with triple-redundant backups of his memories of Tendi just in case.
- Mythology Gag:
- In an especially deep cut, Cetacean Ops is based on an early idea for Star Trek: The Next Generation that was quickly discarded, that Federation ships would use whales as navigators due to their innate ability to move in three-dimensional space.
- In an even deeper cut, Tendi makes a throwaway reference to "the rubber duckie room," itself an in-joke Freeze-Frame Bonus from TNG.
- The piston mechanics for disconnecting each individual hull plate is based on the locks located on the hull used to disconnect the emmitter dish in Star Trek: First Contact.
- The use of space suits with an internal Heads-Up Display to navigate a debris field is similar to a space jump done in Star Trek Into Darkness.
- Negative Space Wedgie: The plasma-storm planetoid debris field that shuts down the Archimedes and blocks the Cerritos from rescuing it is the major obstacle in the episode.
- No OSHA Compliance: The control node to manually release one of the hull panels can only be operated from a console underwater in Cetacean Ops, and can't be released by the Beluga Whale crew manning the station because it requires hands to pull. Mike McMahan says that the panels were designed to be accessed while in spacedock by a Starfleet crew with hands, not while the ship is in service.
- Not What It Looks Like: Commander Mandel concludes that Freeman is colluding with Klingon extremists because they have a photo of her talking with the new leader of Pakled Planet while Rumdar is standing with them wearing a Cerritos t-shirt. What really happened is that Freeman was trying to trick Rumdar into revealing any Pakled secrets, and the shirt was from Rumdar visiting the gift shop during his inept spying attempt.
- Open Air Driver: The main viewscreen is taken off of the bridge so that they can optimize driving without the computer controls using their suits navigation and just calling out debris with line of sight. Mariner nearly falls out and a couple bits crack Ransom's suit but otherwise they make it through.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Boimler reports to Captain Freeman about the potential destruction the out of control Archimedes will cause if they don't stop it in time, he sounds dead serious. Then it's followed by Mariner, who's usually fast on her feet when it comes to creative solutions to problems...not knowing what to do for this.
- Out-of-Context Eavesdropping: Tendi overhears Dr. T'Ana talking about her to another officer, saying she's "not cut out for Medical". In Tendi's defense, it is very hard to interpret that in anything but a negative way, but what the CMO meant is Tendi isn't cut out for Medical... because she's way too smart to be confined to only one field of science.
- Parting-Words Regret: Defied: A frustrated Mariner says to Freeman's face that she's glad that Freeman is transferring and never wants to work with her again. When Mariner admits to her friends that she is upset that Freeman is transferring and tells them about her outburst, her friends tell her that the Captain needs everyone's support, especially hers, and to apologize and make up with Freeman before the mission is over.
- Perp Walk: When she is being arrested, Freeman tells the others not to tell the crew. Sadly, they had been waiting outside the conference room to celebrate her turning down her promotion, so they all get to see her cuffed and escorted out by Starfleet Security. Though it may seem excessive to humiliate Freeman in front of her crew this way, especially when transporters exist, The Reveal in the next episode shows that Starfleet has a good reason for wanting all the proceedings to be as showy and public as possible.
- Plot-Demanded Manual Mode: Since the Cerritos must navigate through a plasma-spewing asteroid field with its primary systems switched off, Ransom must fly the entire ship with manual controls and by eye. Mariner and Jennifer play lookout, since Ransom has to pilot from his chair and can't see through the walls.
- Poor Communication Kills: A minor part of the A-Plot and the reason of the B-Plot:
- Mariner discovers that Freeman is being transferred to a new ship and decides to tell the rest of the senior staff since she won't. Said staff is not happy with all of this, especially seeing as not only would that mean they're not joining Freeman, it seems like Ransom wouldn't even be promoted to Captain to replace her.
- In the B-Plot, Tendi discovers that she's being kicked off the medical team at T'Ana's suggestion. However, she believes that she's being kicked off the ship and panics. She spends the entire episode hiding from T'Ana while trying to get in last goodbyes until the end, where we find out that she's instead being promoted to the senior science officer crew because she's too good for grunt medical work.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Dr. T'Ana has no idea who Jadzia Dax is when Tendi refers to her.
- Race Against the Clock: When the Archimedes is disabled their natural momentum will carry them to the planet, but they have little hope of restoring power in order to avoid crashing. The Cerritos crew has 20 hours to devise a plan and actually get to the Archimedes in time to stop a major disaster.
- Rescue Romance: A subdued example when Mariner and Jennifer patch things up and have an actual conversation after Jennifer saves Mariner from flying off into space. They wind up holding hands at the end.
- Rousing Speech: Freeman gives one to the entire crew on the intercom saying that everyone, no matter what their usual duties are, have to work together to strip the entire outer hull of the ship in order to save Archimedes. Then she concludes her speech by saying that the ballroom dancing competition on the ship will have to be postponed.
- Season Finale: This is the final episode of Season Two.
- Ship Tease: After reconciling with Jennifer, Mariner all but admits that their Sitcom Arch-Nemesis rivalry was based on Belligerent Sexual Tension. Jennifer picks up on this, but Mariner changes the subject before it can be explored further. Shortly after, they're seen holding hands.
- Shout-Out: Boimler having to dive underwater to perform vital repairs and nearly drowning while managing to get the job done is similar to a sequence in U571, except there the sailor died.
- Simple Solution Won't Work: Apparently warping around the debris field is such a terrible idea that everyone on the bridge simultaneously chews out the guy who suggested it (and conveniently drowns out any specifics).
- Space Friction: Zigzagged. The starships avert this: the Archimedes, once disabled, is sent flying towards an inhabited planet drawn in by its gravity and their own momentum, and the Cerritos, in order to get through the debris field without being disabled itself, has to shut down main power and coast on inertia while using thrusters to dodge fragments. The debris field itself, on the other hand, plays the trope straight, as there's apparently no danger of it raining down on the inhabitants.
- Sudden Downer Ending: After the mission is a complete success with no lives lost, the Cerritos successfully makes first contact with a new species, substituting for the Archimedes, and things seem to be going great for all the characters. As Captain Freeman prepares to turn down her expected promotion so she can stay on the Cerritos, she is arrested for the destruction of Pakled Planet and escorted off the ship in cuffs in front of the crew.
- Tempting Fate: Freeman orders her senior staff (and Mariner) to keep her arrest a secret from the rest of the crew until they know more about the destruction of Pakled Planet. Unfortunately, the crew has gathered in the corridor outside the conference room for a send-off and all of them see it happen.
- Title Drop: Ransom congratulates Freeman for her first First Contact after saving the day.
- Took a Level in Badass: Boimler's level grinding throughout the season comes to its culmination in this episode, in which his actions save an entire planet.
- True Companions: When Mariner waffles about apologizing to Freeman, Tendi spells it out for her.Mariner: You guys don't know anything about my family!
Tendi: We are your family! We will always be there for you, and right now we're heading into a pile of crazy dangerous space debris! - Uncertain Doom: With Pakled Planet destroyed, we don't know the fate of any surviving Pakleds that are off planet.
- Unknown Rival: After two seasons of such odd animosity towards one another, turns out that Mariner and Jennifer each had no idea why the other might have hated them. They patch things up at the end of the episode.
- Violation of Common Sense: With a highly radioactive asteroid field between them and the Archimedes, any attempt to go into the field with their shields up or main power online will only attract debris to them and shut down their systems like what happened to the Archimedes. The answer was to disengage their magnetic outer hull plating and navigate the field on minimal power, momentum and maneuvering thrusters. The Cerritos is beaten up pretty good with no shields or outer hull, but succeeds in getting through the field and catching the Archimedes with a tractor beam before it crashes into the planet.
- Wham Episode:
- When purging his redundant memory files, Rutherford gets a brief memory of his surgery receiving his implant, and learns that the procedure might not have been his choice…"What if someone asks why he has it?"
"We programmed that in. He'll think it was elective." - Tendi is transferred from medical to sciences, and thus from Sickbay to a bridge crew position.
- And the big one: Pakled Planet has been destroyed, and Captain Freeman has been arrested on suspicion of planting the bomb that caused it.
- When purging his redundant memory files, Rutherford gets a brief memory of his surgery receiving his implant, and learns that the procedure might not have been his choice…
- Wham Line: "You're under arrest for the destruction of Pakled Planet."
- Worst Aid: When Boimler is found not breathing, Kimolu and Matt's advice is to keep him wet as though he were a beached whale. To be fair, they ARE whales. They're trying.
