This episode was written by Ethan Calk, writer of the 2007 Trek Fan-Flick "Of Gods and Men." Ethan also wrote the DS9 episode "Children of Time," and so it looks as if this writer has a good handle on writing stories where there are little "Time-Hiccups"— His other DS9 episode has similar conundrums: And what makes these stories interesting, is that they "Make it never happen" when it comes to future events witnessed by our principle cast, in this case, Miles Edward O'Brien.
In this episode, our writer uses the gimmick of the Forced Quantum Singularity: Which was introduced in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and according to that episode is the power source for a Romulan Warbird (TNG Ep "Timescape" s6e25).
This episode begins and ends with O'Brien's Dartboard: O'Brien had been shocked by some Ionic radiation while working in Ops. After Bashir fixes him up, O'Brien sets up his Dartboard in Quark's. As O'Brien tosses a dart, he is brought five hours into the future, where he witnesses Quark complaining to a future O'Brien that Klingons are destroying his Holosuites again. The original O'Brien is brought back to the past, right at the moment his Dart hits the "20" mark (The "20" mark is an actual target in a typical Dart game).
At first these little time jumps are just an interesting irritation for O'Brien, until he starts seeing himself killed in various ways. Each time he is able to "Change the Future" and prevent himself from being killed, only to have something worse happen the next time he has a jump.
Is O'Brien fated to die? Is he being prevented from preventing his own death? That's part of this puzzle: While this time-jumping thing is happening to O'Brien, there is a contingent of Romulans on the Station who are trying to dredge information about The Dominion from the crew of The Defiant who had been captured by The Founders. At the same time, there are three apparently drunk Klingons who are not what they appear to be, they are actually spies for Gowron: They plant a snooping device into the wall of the habitat ring, which O'Brien sees killing his future self when he tries to futz with it.
In the background of all these disparate events, there is always an invisible something, orbiting the station: It has qualities of a Black Hole, but it is orbiting the Station in an elliptical Orbit: Each time it passes O'Brien at a certain place in its orbit, it triggers his Time Jump—Every Five Hours like Clockwork. Now as I had seen every Next Generation episode, I knew what this was, but I had to see how it played out in the story at hand.
What makes this an outstanding Trek Time-Episode was that "The Future" that O'Brien was seeing, kept changing according to how O'Brien dealt with it, eventually he has dialog with his Future Self and Future Bashir which offers solutions for his present self and Station.
Using the solutions offered by those future versions of himself and Bashir, he prevents something insidious from happening to the whole station: But at the cost of his past self. And so, the O'Brien that is left at the end of this episode, is not the same O'Brien that began this episode. Or is it? So O'Brien gains about 3 extra hours of Memories, things that never happened: Until he gets back to The Bar with Bashir, and it happens again, this time without being shoved five hours into the future.
This episode is also similar to the Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect" (s5e18).
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