10 Worst Star Trek Time Travel Episodes

One of the worst tropes of time travel episodes in Trek is when they press the reset button in the end and somehow make it so the events of the episode never actually happened. This was a serious problem with the iconic Voyager episode Year Of Hell, but at least that one was well-written enough to make up for it. The same cannot be said about Time's Orphan.

In the episode, Keiko and Miles O'Brien's daughter Molly was accidentally sent back in time on an alien world. When the crew was finally able to bring her back to the present using the same tech that took her, she appeared as an 18-year-old, 10 years older than she had been before. Apparently the device malfunctioned somehow and locked onto her 10 years after her arrival. When she returned she had lost most of her social and communication skills and was openly hostile to people. The only time she would calm down was when revisiting the planet in the holosuite.

This would've been an amazingly deep and dark direction to take Molly's character, but unfortunately it wasn't long at all before a solution was found to get the younger Keiko back, and then the whole episode devolved into a debate on whether they should erase the older Keiko's life from history to bring her younger self back to the present, which is eventually what ended up happening (though, not exactly the way they planned it).

This episode took what could've been an intense and beautiful story of surviving hardship and readjusting to society, and made it completely pointless.