Star Trek: 10 MORE Greatest Time Travel Episodes
5. Past Tense, Part I, Past Tense, Part II
Before story and social commentary, the best thing about any Star Trek time travel episode is the conceit: the device or clever trick of technobabble employed by the writers to shift our favourite protagonists about history. The "explosion of a microscopic singularity" that shifted chroniton particles in the Defiant's "ablative armour matrix" into a "high state of temporal polarisation," redirecting the transporter beam through time, not space, is about as gloriously 'technobabbly' as it can get.
Admittedly, we must ignore the improbability of beaming into San Francisco versus the vacuum, because the transporters seemingly compensate for centuries of stellar drift. In this case, 'how' is almost immaterial, however, as, like Future's End, the question is "not where, [but] when," and everything in between.
'When' is also not left to chance by the skill of episode writers Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ira Steven Behr. Their future of the early 21st century is now as forebodingly dystopian as they had imagined. The 'Bell Riots' should have made their mark nearly two years ago. In 2026, the message of Past Tense lies in another epoque. Like for Kira and O'Brien, as for all of Star Trek, we must hope that 'flower power' is still timely, and never too far away.
However briefly, the Bell Riots also feature in the next episode on our list…