Star Trek: 10 Terrible Ways To Time Travel

10. Romulans And Radiation Exposure

If you're interested in using the 'O'Brien must suffer' time travel method, you're going to need two things: a dose of delta-series radioisotopes from an exploding plasma conduit and a quantum singularity in orbit of your location. You'll meet your future self and then some! Must remember: Avoid panels on the habitat ring, and basilar arterial scan! Basilar arterial scan!!

The mode of time travel in Visionary might well be distinctly unadvisable, but it does work as a clever enough central conceit for a fun episode. It allows O'Brien to hop into the future with just enough, but not too much, regularity to keep the mystery going — and, ultimately (decades-old *spoiler alert*), to save the Station from destruction at the hands of those scheme-loving Romulans in their warbird. The real problem is the damn deadly radioisotopes. The 'original' O'Brien of the 'present' succumbs to radiation poisoning and is replaced with his future self, thus joining the duplicate club alongside Harry Kim.

The freelance writer Ethan H. Calk, who came up with the idea for Visionary, had a thing, it seems, for terrible time travel methods as he also has a story writing co-credit on the episode Children of Time. We all remember how dreadfully disastrous the temporal tamperings were for Gaia!