actually Jankom didn't stop it from poisoning the place. what Jankom did was fix the shuttles long range transmitter, allowing it to act as a signal booster for their commbadges. which is why the trio could tell Zero and dal what the source of the illness was.
they actually didn't stop it from poisoning the place.. which is why the Enderprizians phasered the cave opening shut (to prevent the toxic materials from continuing to spread and keep any of the locals from entering the most contaminated area) and they left behind one of the Protostar's medical field kits of the sort Zero used, to make more antitoxin. if anything with the shuttle dropping directly into the toxic lake, it probably would get worse since it isn't just a small drip of contamination any more. but perhaps without that drip the 'eruptions' might happen less often.
Without the drip, the eruptions would probably stop alltogether because the shuttle ended up falling into the pit and was submerged... so any remaining plasma would have likely burned off.
Problem is, the kids likely didn't know how to better deal with the subsequent radiation/fumes that the cave was still full of (perhaps fully trained SF crew would have been able to do that).
So, the next best thing was to seal off the cave - which to me seems superficial. I'm hoping the kids and the Protostar managed to fully contain the plasma and fumes to the mountain and stop it from potentially finding its way into the local water supply.
Also, that cave was full of dilithium. Might be worth to access it again if these people develop Warp capability (which will probably happen sooner than later)... but in that case, they'd need environmental suits to access it or find other deposits (unless they develop a power source which doesn't need dilithium - which is more than doable.
a lot closer than when they started the series at least, though federation ships are known to roam quite a long way from their home borders when doing exploration missions.
TOS Enterprise was going all over the galaxy if the dialogue was any indication. Warp speed in some instances was insanely fast at the top said speed being about 1000 Ly's per day.
Sure, with that, you can easily cut across the galaxy within a year (with latest estimates the Milky way is about or more than double the size of previous estimations - aka 200 000 to 250 000 ly's).
Some suggested that those episodes with exceptionally fast Warp drive took place in alternate realities (not prime universe)... but given that a lot of the places newer Trek is revisting or referencing from TOS (some of which is very far away), it stands to reason the prime universe SF explored those same areas, or in the prime universe they were much closer than in those hypothetical alternate realities with faster Warp.
pretty much agree. something happened to the shuttle that threw it too far from the Enterprise for Spock to narrow down the search, and eventually kirk had to just write it off as MIA.
Likely. SF isn't short on encountering random anomalies or even entities that could be 'playing' with it for experimentation.
A shuttle is far more vulnerable than a fully crewed larger ship.
definitely helps narrow down the locations. and romulans would be interesting, though i suspect not given that it would be yet more groups to have to explain to the younger viewers. but then, i didn't expect the Borg from last episode to show up either.
Explaining Romulans to new/younger viewers would take all of few second of dialogue like holo Janeway did with the Borg... so its not really an issue.
But I suspect it won't be the Romulans as they don't necessarily venture out of their space too much, and given the mid-season promo we saw which featured Okona on the Protostar (and Murf hatching)... I think Okona might have been the person to rescue Frex.