10 Star Trek Episodes They Should Have Made (It's Never Too Late)

Children of Time is one of those episodes that's easy to overlook given its timing. But it's a touching 'what if' story that leaves you thinking long after it ends.

Thanks to Dax using her best 'pretty please' voice, the Defiant passes through an energy barrier to survey a mysterious planet...and gets damaged in the process. When the inhabitants below make contact, Sisko is shocked to find they're descendants of his crew. It seems that the Defiant's destiny is to be thrown 200 years into the past, resulting in the crew founding the very colony they've just made contact with.

As time travel conundrums go, it's deceptively simple, but it creates a very Star Trek moral dilemma. Now they know their fate, they can try to avoid it...but that would mean 8000 people and their flourishing colony would cease to exist.

When we meet these descendants, they've had 200 years to build something remarkable. But how satisfying would it have been to see the founding of the settlement? The recovery of the Defiant crew after the crash. Their first steps in building the future, falling in love and starting families. Worf teaching the way of the warrior to a new clan. The Dax symbiont passing from one generation to the next. And Odo watching on as the years passed.

Seeing those original crew members and their descendants actually build the colony would have been beautiful, no matter the fate that awaited them at the end of the journey.

And if Wesley Crusher taught us anything in Prodigy, it's that every thread of reality matters in the delicate tapestry of time and space.