10 Best Star Trek Episodes That Revisited Other Episodes

While serving aboard the USS Potemkin, William Riker was accidentally duplicated by a transporter malfunction while beaming up from the planet Nervala IV. No one aboard noticed this, and the other Riker was stranded on the planet for eight years until the Enterprise-D returned to gather some abandoned research and discovered him. He eventually decided to take on the name Thomas, his former middle name, to avoid people confusing the two of them.

Thomas and Will had turned into completely different people after one spent eight years stranded alone, and the other eight years in dedicated Starfleet service. The two argued for a while and Thomas was eventually transferred to the USS Gandhi to continue his career at the end of the episode, but, unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for him to join the Maquis in their fight against the Federation, as we learned later in Deep Space Nine.

In the DS9 episode Defiant, Thomas posed as William and stole the Defiant in order to locate a secret Cardassian fleet. Eventually, he found the hidden fleet, but he agreed to serve life in prison in exchange for the Cardassians allowing his Maquis friends to escape the death penalty. It was already exciting to see Jonathan Frakes make an appearance in DS9, but no one was expecting it to be Thomas.