This episode was okay, I guess? It feels very strange to be sitting on one half of an obvious two parter from this show, and recent Trek shows have left me with an instinctive suspicion of mystery-related plots. This is a good writing team so I have hopes they'll carry this rather bizare setup into a satisfying resolution that actually makes sense, but I'm much more nervous than I usually am.

To play it all out: why the heck is Nick Locarno flying around in a little ship capable of disabling the systems on larger warships, transporting(?) the ships and crews to some planet while leaving wreckage behind? If this turns out to be another figurative Kelpian dilithium tantrum I'm not going to be pleased.

I like what they were trying to do with Mariner in this episode, but for whatever reason it didn't land quite right with me. Her whole pivot into even-more-than-normal overtly reckless behavior three episodes after the supposed precipitating event felt very abrupt, and the scene where she talks it over and appears to resolve her issues with Ma'ah felt rushed, almost forced. The Sito Jaxa makes reasonable sense as a backstory component, but I found it distracting and it does add to the "small universe" syndrome that expanding IPs risk falling into. Further, the "your dead friend wouldn't want you to have emotional problems" bit is a cliche that rarely lands with me, and this time was no different: these aren't problems that people can typically resolve simply by recognizing that their emotional reactions are irrational, so being won over with a rational argument isn't very convincing. It speaks well of Mariner and Rodenberry's future humans that this worked, I guess, but it does make it less relatable.

Maybe I'll be sold more easily on rewatch. We'll see.

The B-plot with Freeman and her deception was decent, although as noted elsewhere Rutherford's presence feels oddly tacked on. I guess they wanted an engineer around, just in case?

The Jaxa connection does give us a better shot at nailing down Mariner's actual age, which was presumably somewhere between 17 and 22 (and likely on the later end of that range) at the time of the Nova Squadron incident in 2368. That puts her in her early- to mid-thirties, and lines up well with her service record. We can also confirm that Mariner was not a young child aboard the Enterprise-D, which launched when she was in her mid to late teens.