Star Trek: 15 Greatest Ever Time Travel Episodes
4. Trials And Tribble-ations - DS9
Trials And Tribble-ations is another love letter to Star Trek: a nostalgic, kitsch exercise that sees the Deep Space Nine crew transported back in time to stop the assassination of James Kirk on the first Enterprise, which is all relayed in flashbacks. In a genius twist, the story is relayed to the Time Travel Police (or Temporal Investigators to be specific), who react with comic genius to Kirk's name, stating that he was a notorious temporal violator.
It's a great riff on more modern sci-fi shows' preoccupation with causality that simply didn't sit with The Original Series.
The episode is easily one of Deep Space 9's very best: it is hilarious, delightfully steeped in the spirit of the original show and there's genuine drama around the silliness. In other words, it is not simply a gimmick, despite how easy that could have been, and it's legitimately one of the most fun episodes in the entire catalogue.
The effects work of mixing the crews through cut footage also isn't horrible, which is a pretty big triumph, and the chance to see the Tribbles once more was almost as great as seeing Kirk's Enterprise in glorious high definition. A very worthy, hugely entertaining tribute to 30 years of Star Trek on its anniversary.