A holodeck malfunction traps the crew in a mish-mash of all their favorite holoprograms.
Tropes:
- Cliffhanger: The episode ends with the Protostar out of the Neutral Zone and face-to-face with the Dauntless.
- Danger Room Cold Open: The episode starts with what looks like an Action Prologue with our heroes trying to keep from being captured by the Dauntless until Dal ends the simulation.
- Everyone Knows Morse: Averted. The crew run a simulation where they attempt to communicate the danger in morse code through missed phaser shots, but the Dauntless just sees it as hostility.
- Genre Roulette: The merged holodeck program shifts from Zero's Kid Detective / Room Escape Game hybrid to Pog's Tellarite Beat 'em Up to Murf's Vic Fontaine-style nightclub simulation to Dal's pirate Swashbuckler, with interruptions of Rok's cute Medical Game.
- Heartbreak and Ice Cream: Everyone's feeling down about the current situation, especially Dal, with his continued angst about his origins and their quest to join Starfleet. Jankom treats everyone to ice cream to help take their mind off their problems.Jankom: Sounds like you earned yourself two more scoops of sadness!
- Holodeck Malfunction: Subverted — it looks like the holodeck is going wonky by combining various programs into a never-ending mystery, but it's Holo Janeway (being manipulated by the Living Construct) who's constructing the narrative while jumping the Protostar out of the Neutral Zone.
- Manchurian Agent: When the crew gives up on contacting the Federation, the Living Construct takes over Holo Janeway and uses her to trap the crew and hijack the ship so it can complete its mission.
- Once More, with Clarity: Once Holo Janeway's betrayal is revealed, flashbacks show how she engineered the situation to trap the crew and get Dal's command codes so she could gain helm control and lock the crew out.
- Proscenium Reveal: The episode opens on the crew trying and failing to convince the Dauntless about the danger they pose, but their efforts only lead the Dauntless to destroy them. Dal ends the simulation moments before the fatal torpedo.
- Riddle for the Ages: It is never revealed if Gwyn had a favorite holodeck program, and if so what it was.
- The Singing Mute: Murf unexpectedly sings a jazz solo in the holodeck. The crew is shocked that Murf can both sing and dance, though Zero suggests he's just good at lip-syncing.
- Spotting the Thread: Zero picks up on several inconsistencies about the supposed malfunction. At first, the simulation tricked them into thinking everything was normal, only for other programs to suddenly start bleeding in after a while. The program is supposedly malfunctioning, but it's drawing on very specific programs familiar to them, rather than the whole library. Finally, all the elements are designed to distract and the clues only lead to additional distractions.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Holo Janeway is abjectly horrified to discover she was subverted by the Living Construct to betray the crew.
- Win to Exit: Subverted. Zero initially reasons that, since the holoprogram began as a Cellar Door Society mystery, solving it should end the program. However, thanks to Rok noticing that it is specifically drawing on their holoprograms, Zero realizes that the point is to distract them, and thus the only exit is to allow themselves to lose.
