10 Most Messed Up Deaths In Star Trek: The Next Generation
3. I Shot A Spooky Doppelgänger Of A Man — One Picard, Another Enterprise-D
In some mythologies, the appearance of your ghostly double is considered to be a harbinger of death. I suppose, in this case, death depends on who was the omen for whom. Things were already messed-up from the very beginning of Time Squared: Doctor Pulaski was clearly expecting an omelette, but Riker made (rotten) scrambled eggs instead!
It was out in the middle of nowhere, for Starfleet and the Federation at least, that the Enterprise-D bumped into the ashen-faced "facsimile" of Captain Picard from six hours in the future. Suffering from some major 24th century jetlag, dazed and confused whilst his body clock realigned, this 'other' Picard spent his final hours alive in a semi-unconscious, nightmarish state being shouted at by himself aboard the ship, his ship, he'd seen destroyed not long before.
In order to 'end the cycle,' the non-temporally displaced Picard barely hesitates in grabbing a phaser from the handily located, and hardly secured, shuttlebay locker. Picard shoots his other self dead without batting an eyelid and then goes back to the bridge to leave Doctor Pulaski with the mess. More effed-up still than all that, O'Brien then has to bear witness to his dead Captain?! Why? Isn't he going to suffer enough?