10 Times Star Trek Stole From Itself

E² is very similar to the earlier Deep Space Nine episode Children of Time, with both episodes featuring the main cast meeting their own descendants. Writer Mike Sussman noticed this similarity straight away and brought it to the producers, though they overruled him. They felt that enough time had passed that people would not pick up on this. They were, however, wrong.

Both episodes feature the children and grandchildren of the main cast. Both episodes feature an older version of one of the originals. It is Odo in the Deep Space Nine episode and T'Pol in the Enterprise episode. Finally, both episodes end with either the colony or generational ships vanishing.

Odo's actions in Children of Time are a deliberate attempt to rewrite history, a plan that works perfectly but erases Gaia from existence. Lorian, T'pol and Tucker's son, attempts to first overpower Enterprise, then protects it. He and his ship have a more ambiguous fate, as they simply never emerge from the subspace corridor. It is possible that they were destroyed by enemy vessels, or that they were wiped from time by Enterprise's successful journey.