So I’m binging DS9, it being the only Trek series I’d seen only a few episodes of (and liked). I’m almost done with season 5.
I have one question: How many more “time travel story where they have to unravel a delicate paradox (usually involving a main character’s death or the obliteration of a time-travel-created population) by invoking a new use of the doubletalk generator” eps do I have to sit through?
While I’m at it, how many more “strange alternate universe that is actually an induced dream state where we really could die” stories are waiting to be plodded through?
The minute - the *minute *- ST: Discovery throws in a time-travel paradox story, I quit on the series. Promise.
Since the excellent episode The City on the Edge of Forever, some morons believe that time travel is a must in a Stark Trek episode. “Look how popular COEOF was!”
There were some painfully bad early episodes. But other than the repeated returns to the two trope stories I mention, it’s been “just okay” to “excellent” across the five first seasons. Two or three are among the very best TV sf I’ve seen. Oddly, they all seem to focus on Kira, and give her the final shot.
In the Pale Moonlight is the best episode of all the Treks, ever.
I liked it because it was gritty. There were no saints. Sinners could be heroes and heroes had their flaws. The arcs toward the end of the series were excellent.
I really like “The Visitor” and “Past Tense” as well. DS9 time-travel episodes were generally pretty good. (DS9 in general was less uneven then the other Trek series, though there were a few weird episodes (like the kindergarten one) where the writers seem to have forgotten to come up with a plot and the characters just kinda kick around the station for 50 minutes).
Anyhoo, the war stuff takes up a good chunk of the last two seasons, so I think you’re through most of the time-travel stuff. The only one I can remember from the end of the show is where a character has a vision that they’re in the 20th century, and so is only debatably “time travel”
DS9 mostly plays the time travel episodes for the adventure or drama, or comedy, not for mind-bending paradox. I don’t believe any of them involve a paradox, although it’s an arguable possibility in a couple occasions. More like the DS9 characters venture into the past and end up being involved in something significant. They’re all about the characters.
And DS9 tried its best to avoid random technobabble. They didn’t totally avoid it, but it’s by far the least bad of all Star Trek series in that sense, except maybe the Animated Series.
Don’t overlook Trials and Tribble-ations as one of the best time travel episodes. The Defiant goes back to the time period of The Trouble With Tribbles and mixes DS9 with TOS in a very entertaining way.
And I know that episodes with the Ferengi aren’t everyone’s cup of prune juice, but I liked Little Green Men, in which Quark, Rom, and Nog, en route to delivering Nog to Starfleet Academy, crash in Roswell, NM in 1947, with Odo as a stowaway, cause you know the Constable doesn’t trust those shifty Ferengi.
And then Harlan Ellison doesn’t write–er–block it out. I can visualize his reaction when they asked for another, “I did it once, and you guys fucked it up! Why would I do another?” And when the van full of money didn’t arrIve he slammed the door.
We are rewatching DS9 from the beginning thanks to Amazon Prime. I hardly remember the show, since I have never seen it in reruns, and because we lived overseas, we didn’t see the entire 6th season.
I could only think of Trials and Tribble-ations as a time-travel story before reading this thread.
Voyager was worse than any ST series for time-travel, and created a temporal prime directive that would have been nice if introduced earlier.
