Ephraim, a humble tardigrade, is flying through the mycelial network when an unexpected encounter takes her on a bewildering adventure through space.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Jerkass: A mild case. Space Abraham Lincoln was the perfect gentleman in "The Savage Curtain", whereas here he seems quite annoyed by the Enterprise buzzing past his head and shakes his fist angrily at them.
- Adaptational Wimp: The space tardigrade species itself. Ephraim may be The Determinator when it comes to safeguarding her eggs, but she's not the unstoppable death machine that Ripper was when pissed off.
- Art Shift: This, along with "The Girl Who Made The Stars", is an animated rather than live-action episode.
- Continuity Nod: Several.
- Audio clips from "Space Seed" and "The Naked Time" are used along with new animation of those scenes.
- While fleeing down a maintenance corridor, Dot gets pelted with Tribbles from an overhead compartment.
- After being ejected from the airlock and during her pursuit of the Enterprise, Ephraim sees a giant green hand, the planet killing machine, the Enterprise trapped in a Tholian web, a giant Abraham Lincoln, the refit Enterprise and the Reliant doing battle, and a Klingon Bird-Of-Prey attacking the refit Enterprise.
- Ephraim and Dot's fight in the engine room has several elements of Kirk and Khan's fight in the same room in "Space Seed", along with the iconic fight music from "Amok Time".
- Heroic BSoD: Ephraim looks heartbroken when the Enterprise is destroyed and she thinks her eggs were lost.
- Mama Space-Waterbear: Ephraim follows the Enterprise on a Stern Chase spanning two decades and an entire quadrant of space in order to protect her eggs.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When Ephraim thinks that her eggs were destroyed, she's about to tear Dot apart until the droid reveals that it saved the babies.
- Remember the New Guy?: There was never any indication in the original series or even the more futuristic The Next Generation that Starfleet ever had anything even remotely close to autonomous, technologically advanced robots like Dot on board their ships (Data, who came almost 100 years later, was a unique prototype and frequently described as exceptional). The most logical explanation is that he's a retcon based on the droids seen in Discovery.
- Series Continuity Error: Despite the above, a few do crop up.
- A registry number of "NCC-1701-A" is briefly visible on what's supposed to be the refit original Enterprise, "no bloody A, B, C or D."
- When Dot is fighting fires on the refit Enterprise following the attack by Kruge's Bird-of-Prey, the engine room of the Enterprise is still depicted in its Original Series configuration.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: The events Ephraim sees and experiences are both compressed in time and not seen in the original order they happened, which brings up the question of whether tardigrades don't experience linear time like we do or if it's a case of Unreliable Narrator.
