10 Best Foreshadowing Moments In Star Trek
Dipt into all the wonder of Star Trek's future, how far can our human eyes foresee?
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Foresight is even better. Foreshadowing is an artform within the artform, providing indications of the shape of things to come. It can be as subtle as a musical cue, as innocuous as an object in the background (and foreground), or as long and large as lines of dialogue and the flow of time itself.
Star Trek is also full of Shakespeare. Play within the morality play, The Conscience of the King, for example, began with a nod to Macbeth and ended with Hamlet. If you want a hint at what's ahead, you should brush up on your Latin.
In the past, we've explored those moments of foreshadowing you might not even have noticed. For this list, we'll be looking at some of the best, even if that might mean some of the more obvious.
And remember, there are no spoilers except the spoilers that spoil themselves. Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.
10. Synaptic Potential
All of Benjamin Sisko's life was foreshadowed. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, however. Struck by yet another addition to Quark's rap sheet in Rapture, the Emissary's synapses showed future potentials.
Behold, B'hala, and let's get biblical! Before the rivers and the waters of the Alpha Quadrant ran red, there were the locusts, "billions of them," heading towards Cardassia. Zocal's Third Prophecy proved accurate. Sisko's pagh'tem'fars were far from farfetched.
"The coming war with the Dominion"? The writers had a plan.
"Here we actually did know what we were doing," writer/producer René Echevarria noted in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion. "[Through the locusts], the Prophets are telling the Bajorans, 'Don't join the Federation, because if you do you will be embroiled in this war." The prophecy was fulfilled and all-out war with the Dominion began at the end of the same season in Call To Arms.