The crew struggle to reach the Protostar, but their pursuer won't let them go without a fight.
Tropes:
- Ambiguous Syntax: When the Protostar escapes with Gwyn on board, the Diviner laments "She's gone." Does "she" refer to Gwyn or the Protostar? (Especially as the Diviner had minutes earlier chosen the ship over his own daughter.)
- Bait-and-Switch: It seems as if the Diviner is about to board the Protostar when Janeway opens the ramp for the incoming lifeforms. It's actually Dal who's reached the ship, while the Diviner has been tricked by the vines.
- Broken Pedestal: The Diviner ditching his daughter for the Protostar ends any respect she had for him. Coupled with the crew saving her when they didn't have to, she pulls a Heel–Face Turn and helps them escape.
- Captain's Log: Dal does a supplemental log after he and Gwyn figure out how to find the ship.
- Chekhov's Gun: The vines’ mind reading and shapeshifting come back into play when the Diviner thinks he’s found the Protostar, only to realize too late it's just a large vine construct.
- Death World: Jankom decides that "Murder Planet" is an appropriate name for this world. Dal ends up agreeing.
- Evil vs. Evil: The vines treat Drednok and the Diviner no differently than the crew.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: A brief shot of Dal's food bowl suggests Jankom managed to find some gagh in the Klingon Bird of Prey. One can only hope
it was well-preserved... - Friend-or-Idol Decision: The Diviner beams down to the Protostar, only to find it and Gwyn being entangled by the vines. Despite her pleading, he prioritizes the ship over her.
- Genius Loci: The vines not only cover the surface, they can rearrange the topography and control the weather. Zero points out that they could ask the planet its name and tries to contact it through telepathy, only to get shut down when they learn it's not interested in communicating beyond eating everyone.
- Go Through Me: Gwyn tries to defend the crew from Drednok this way. Drednok simply shoots her metal leg brace to disable her and takes aim at the crew.
- Guns Akimbo: Dal wields two phasers against the vine monster (after taking one from Zero, whose aim is less than reliable).
- Heel–Face Turn: Gwyn completes hers here, after the Diviner leaves her for dead to save the Protostar.
- Hostile Weather: After escaping the forest fire Gwyn unintentionally starts, acid rain begins falling, which is how the vines break down food they capture.
- Hyperspeed Ambush: The Diviner's ship manages to lock onto the Protostar's warp signature and follow it into warp, easily catching up.
- Hyperspeed Escape: The Protostar jumps to warp to escape the Diviner. Subverted when the Diviner pulls a Hyperspeed Ambush to catch up — and then Double Subverted up to eleven when the Protostar jumps to protowarp and escapes.
- Immune to Bullets: The larger constructs made by the vines are immune to phasers.
- I Will Only Slow You Down: Gwyn says this several times because she has a compound fracture in her left leg, compromising her ability to walk.
- Kill It with Fire: Gwyn gets the idea to burn the vines when phasers don't work. Unfortunately, fire spreads, so the threat of being burned alive soon follows.
- Ludicrous Speed: When the ship goes to protowarp, it vanishes from the Diviner's sensors in an instant.
- Malaproper: Gwyn refers to a group of stars as a "constipation".
- Man Bites Man: It's a Man-Eating Plant but it is sentient, so the Diviner biting it in order to escape its grip counts.
- Mega-Maw Maneuver: The Diviner attempts this with the Protostar, attempting to draw it into his much larger ship with a tractor beam. Gwyn triggers the protowarp to break free.
- Mythology Gag: The Diviner's ship catches up to the Protostar while in warp, with the warp tunnel effect and the visuals matching that of the Vengeance catching the Enterprise in Star Trek Into Darkness.
- No One Gets Left Behind: Gwyn is almost completely engulfed by the vines when the Protostar shows up and Dal rappels down to rescue her.
- The Reveal: The Protostar's third reactor is a "gravimetric protostar containment"; in other words, an actual protostar compressed into a reactor. When activated, it allows the Protostar to move much faster than standard warp speeds.
- Shout-Out: The crew hiding from Drednok is framed in the same manner as the Hobbits hiding from the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
- Villainous Rescue: Done twice by the vines.
- First time, they snatch Drednok just as he is about to shoot Dal.
- Second time, they trick the Diviner with an illusion of the Protostar in an effort to trap him, thus enabling the kids to escape with the real Protostar.
- What Would X Do?: Hologram Janeway asks herself what the real Janeway would do, given her limited options, then decides to deploy the ship's hull cleaning droids to clean the vines off the ship.
- The Worf Effect:
- By implication. The crew finds the shipwreck of a Klingon Bird-of-Prey. Gwyn notes that if Klingon warriors failed to escape, it doesn't speak well of their odds.
- Later, Drednock appears only to quickly be overwhelmed by the vines. He is able to fight his way free, but not quickly enough to prevent the kids' escape.
- You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: When Gwyn calls for help from the Diviner, she calls him "Father" instead of "Our Diviner". Not that doing so gets him to rescue her.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Dal, when the planet destroys their vehicle to make it harder for them to reach the Protostar.
