Jake and Nog are rescued on their way to Ferenginar by a sister ship of the Defiant, called the Valiant. Unfortunately for them, it is crewed entirely by cadets and Starfleet didn't actually mean for them to be doing so.
This episode had a good premise, and there was a lot in the background that worked. The cadets had been given battlefield promotions, there was a captain, a commander, lieutenant commanders all running around in their grey cadet uniforms, and it was clear they really liked wearing those titles long before they had actually earned them. And the elephant in the room for all of them was that if the adults back at Starfleet knew their ship was still alive, if they ever actually contacted another Federation vessel, the first thing a real officer would do is tell them to fly home and all those temporary promotions would be taken away. No more playing captain, no more playing hero.
That's actually a pretty fun premise, but the writers just don't quite know how to pull it off. The crew is too simple, they do need to be fleshed out more, you need that one skeptic among the bridge crew, somebody, Jake probably, needs to give a Star Trek speech about how they can give themselves new ranks they didn't put the years in to deserve, and they can talk about glory and duty, but the reality is they're acting like exactly what they are, which is a bunch of cadets. But Jake remains more teen than man still in this episode and has nothing to say which might trump their youthful enthusiasm. I think perhaps that's why this episode would have worked better with Nog and a civilian adult. Somebody they didn't feel required to listen to, but who still had the years and wisdom to know more than all of those cadets put together. I can only imagine if this was on season 5 of TNG, it could have easily been an 8/10 given how much there was to work with.
Instead events just played out like they would on any old action TV show. And it missed what makes Star Trek, Star Trek. Also, the ending was just bad, too many things to go into, the last five minutes are the worst minutes of the whole episode. And it really makes the trope of the exploding console painful. Who keeps putting a half stick of dynamite under every typewriter in Starfleet? They really ought to be held accountable.
