10 Worst Star Trek Time Travel Episodes
It's hard to tell a time travel story without any paradoxes, but these episodes didn't even try.
Time travel has become a common theme throughout Star Trek and the focus of countless episodes, both groundbreaking and unwatchable. We've already done a list counting down the ten best time travel episodes in Trek, so here we're gonna focus on the worst of the worst. Episodes filled with paradoxes, confusing timelines, pointless endings, and all that fun timey-wimey stuff.
A lot of the entries on this list had the potential to be much better and introduced some really cool concepts, but were either rushed or not well thought-out. The problem with time travel is that it can give you a lot of power as a writer, but it's so easy to get lost in paradoxes that turn your script into a confusing mess.
Keep in mind that, while these are the worst in terms of time travel episodes, a few of the entries on this list are okay, they just don't compare to time travel classics like The Visitor and Cause And Effect.
10. Non Sequitur - Voyager
If you ever wondered what Harry Kim's life would've been like if he was never stranded in the Delta Quadrant with Voyager, then Non Sequitur is the episode for you.
Somehow a transporter accident changed history so that Harry's friend Daniel Byrd got the job on Voyager instead of him, which also caused Tom Paris to never end up aboard the ship because, without Harry to come to his aid in the pilot episode Caretaker, Paris was arrested by Odo on Deep Space Nine for getting in a fight with Quark, losing him his temporary spot on Voyager's bridge. In the end the whole episode was undone by recreating the same transporter accident that changed history to begin with.
This concept could've gone so much further. The temporal anomaly that caused all of this was barely explained and we didn't even learn that much about Harry as a character, other than seeing that he would've been much happier (and actually able to have a normal relationship) if he had just stayed on Earth. The one redeeming part was seeing how much Paris changed because of being on Voyager. Non Sequitur brings back his sarcastic, slightly annoyed demeanour from the pilot.