“Time’s Orphan”
Written by Joe Menosky and Bradley Thompson & David Weddle
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 6, Episode 24
Production episode 40510-548
Original air date: May 20, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Keiko, Molly, and Yoshi have returned to DS9. To celebrate, the entire O’Brien family is taking a trip to the Bajoran colony of Golana for a picnic. They were last there when Keiko was pregnant with Yoshi. While there, Molly announces (while Keiko brushes her hair) that she’s going to be an “exobologist” when she grows up. O’Brien also makes it clear that, war notwithstanding, he’s not sending his wife and kids away again. If the station is ever in danger again, he’ll put in for a transfer.
Molly goes wandering off—and then screams. O’Brien finds her in a cave, where she’s hanging over a cliff (ahem). She slips, falls into a pool of water with a strange accompanying special effect—and then the water disappears.
Kira leads a team to Golana where Dax determines that it’s a time portal and that Molly was sent three centuries into the past. They’re trying to reactivate the portal with varying degrees of success. According to Odo’s research, the civilization that built the portal disappeared 2000 years ago, and the planet was uninhabited between then and when Bajor colonized it seventy-five years ago. Which means Molly’s all alone in the past.
They get the portal working again, and they punch a transporter beam through it to beam Molly back—but the girl they bring back is eighteen years old, and completely feral. Bashir has to sedate her until they can get back to DS9. Her language skills are eroded, and she barely remembers her parents. Sisko converts a cargo bay into an environment similar to that of Golana three hundred years ago, and O’Brien and Keiko try to reconnect with her (they leave Yoshi with Worf and Dax). They offer her food, give her the doll she slept with, and play ball with her. She also responds to Keiko brushing her hair, remembering when Keiko brushed Molly’s own hair. She also makes a crude drawing of Golana.
Eventually she speaks actual words: Molly, home, Mommy, and Daddy. The O’Briens take her to their cabin—but that’s not the home she’s talking about. She wants to go back to Golana. So they re-create Golana on the holosuite, and Molly is indescribably happy. But when O’Brien’s time in the holosuite is up, he has to deactivate the program, and Molly goes batshit crazy, tearing Quark’s apart, attacking dozens of people, including a Tarkalean she stabs with a broken bottle. Unfortunately, the Tarkalean is pressing charges, and they have no choice but to institutionalize her. However, she can’t even handle being in one of Odo’s cells without being sedated, which is not a long-term solution.
O’Brien has a plan which he stupidly thinks he can keep from Keiko until she pretty much beats it out of him: they’ll steal a runabout, take her back to Golana, and send her back through the portal to the world she actually knows and can survive in.
However, Odo is a better security chief than the O’Briens are thieves and they’re caught before they can take the runabout. But then Odo lets them go anyhow. They send her through the portal with a knife, as well as the hairbrush and her doll, and a couple of big hugs.
Molly goes through the portal—and finds herself as a little girl, even wearing the same bracelet that she herself has been wearing all along. Once again, O’Brien got the exact time wrong, instead opening the portal to when it was when Molly first fell through. Older Molly leads younger Molly to the portal and sends her through, along with the doll. As soon as she goes through, older Molly says, “Molly home” and then disappears in a puff of illogic.
Keiko and O’Brien completely lose it and hug the stuffing out of Molly and bring her home. Everyone lives happily ever after (after a token mention of a hearing, which O’Brien will get through unscathed by virtue of his being in the opening credits), and Molly gives them a drawing that looks almost exactly like the one older Molly made of Golana.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Dax uses chroniton decay to determine how far back in time Molly has gone, because chronitons are made from plot-conventientium.
The Sisko is of Bajor: O’Brien says that Sisko will represent him at his hearing, which is hilarious given that his sole previous legal experience was defending Worf against a totally nonexistent crime…
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira takes care of Yoshi while O’Brien and Dax work to reactivate the portal, and she is very good with him—unsurprising, given that she hauled him around in her womb for five months. She also allows as how she might want a kid some day, which gives Odo pause, since he is unlikely to be the father of such.
There is no honor in being pummeled: Worf takes his and Dax’s roles as Yoshi’s caretakers very seriously because he wants to prove to Dax that he will be a good father to their children. Given how horribly he raised Alexander, you can understand why Dax would be gun-shy on the subject of having kids with him. But it also means he overreacts when Yoshi gets a minor bump while roughhousing, though he eventually realizes his overreaction, especially when Yoshi imprints a bit on the big lug.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo captures the O’Briens when they try to smuggle Molly off the station, because he’s just that awesome. Then he lets them go anyhow. Dating Kira has turned him into a total softie.
The slug in your belly: Dax has had nine children over the course of the symbiont’s life—five as a mother, four as a father.
Victory is life: Apparently the war hasn’t affected the station all that much—and indeed, there’s been very little actual fighting anywhere near the station, all the war stuff we’ve seen has been elsewhere—so O’Brien feels safe bringing his family home.
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: The O’Briens re-create Golana in one of Quark’s holosuites, but he can only reserve it for short periods of time, and having home taken away from her just makes Molly crankier.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Keiko and O’Brien are so focused on smooching, that they don’t notice Molly cartwheeling off into the distance.
Keep your ears open: “I am a Klingon warrior and a Starfleet officer. I have piloted starships through Dominion minefields. I have stood in battle against Kelvans twice my size. I courted and won the heart of the magnificent Jadzia Dax. If I can do these things, I can make this child go to sleep.”
“Talk about losing perspective.”
Worf quoting the 24th-century version of Go the Fuck to Sleep and Dax not being impressed.
Welcome aboard: Rosalind Chao is back as Keiko, having been absent since Yoshi’s birth in “The Begotten.” Keiko, Molly, and Yoshi were established in “Call to Arms” as having gone to Earth where it was safe in anticipation of war breaking out. Molly is played by both Hana Hatae (as usual) and Michelle Krusiec (as an adult).
Trivial matters: Joe Menosky’s original pitch for this episode was as a TNG episode with Alexander as the child who fell down a rabbit hole and came back aged. It was meant as a way of writing Alexander off the show, but Michael Piller didn’t go for it, in part because it turned out that Alexander was Piller’s mother’s favorite character on the show. (Oh, what we might have been spared if Piller’s mom had liked someone else instead…) Menosky’s pitch was reworked somewhat into “Firstborn” on TNG, but Rene Echevarria pitched it to Ira Steven Behr, who finally went for it and assigned the script to Bradley Thompson & David Weddle.
O’Brien’s use of the expletive “Bollocks” was censored in the UK. It’s not the first time European profanity was used on modern Star Trek—twice, Jean-Luc Picard was seen to mutter, “Merde.”
This episode is the second and final appearance of Chester, the cat that Bilby gave to O’Brien in “Honor Among Thieves.”
Worf’s reference to Kelvans indicates that there are still Kelvans floating around the Trek universe after “By Any Other Name,” and that they are now in their true form rather than the humanoid form they adopted in that original series episode.
Walk with the Prophets: “Bollocks!” Not much to say about this one. It all feels very perfunctory. I can’t point to anything and say, “THIS IS BAD!” It doesn’t have the character extremes of “Valiant” or the vomit-inducing awfulness of “Profit and Lace” or the cartoonishness of “The Reckoning” or the complexity and intensity of “In the Pale Moonlight,” or the airy entertainment of “His Way,” it’s just a fairly standard plot that we’ve seen a thousand times before and twice since Tuesday.
Or, rather, twice since Tarzan. It’s pretty much the usual expose-the-savage-to-civilization storyline, except in this case it’s a character who has spent the last several years as the O’Briens’ cute kid.
And that’s a big part of the problem. Molly just isn’t a significant enough character for this to have any kind of emotional resonance. Molly’s biggest moments in Trek history have been to not recognize the kid-ified Keiko in TNG’s “Rascals,” to adorably call Kira her aunt in “Body Parts,” and to throw up on O’Brien after Lwaxana fed her candy in “Fascination.” Oh, and of course the entertaining circumstances of her birth in TNG’s “Disaster.”
But Molly isn’t really a character. We know the O’Briens care about her because they’re her parents, but we’re given no reason to be engaged with her as a character. The other parent-child relationships on modern Trek—the Crushers, the Siskos, Rom and Nog, even Worf and Alexander—are actually developed, the kids in question allowed to be actual people. Molly, though, is a moppet. Her sole function is to be adorable. Her (adorable) declaration that she wants to be an “exobologist” is the first time in the character’s existence that she’s even come close to expressing any kind of actual personality.
Which makes it really hard to give a good goddamn when she becomes Sheena, Queen of the 300-Year-Old Jungle. This part of the storyline is, at least, well constructed, as we see the process by which the O’Briens (very patiently) try to bring her home, as it were, and the fact that it doesn’t work is tragic, but inevitable.
Also, why didn’t someone tell them that the holosuite was a terrible idea? Giving her a taste of home and then literally turning it off is unbearably cruel—what the O’Briens do to Molly there is the exact same thing the Founders did to Odo in “Broken Link,” and that was the most severe punishment they could come up with for someone who committed their first-ever murder. And then they bring her through a crowded bar—it’s almost hard to believe it went horribly wrong…
I kind of wish they’d gone all the way with it, and had Molly actually murder the Tarkalean, because that would have made the ending much more intense. As it stands now, it’s just a minor inconvenience, and ooh, that Tarkalean is mean for pressing charges against the crazy woman who stabbed him with a broken bottle because it means a girl will be taken from her parents—which is kinda what happens when your daughter stabs someone with a broken bottle—and then O’Brien breaks her out of prison by committing assault on a deputy.
Yeah, I got to the end of this episode hoping for O’Brien to do some serious time here, because damn. That poor Tarkalean got stabbed with a broken bottle, and he gets no justice for that. But he’s not in the opening credits—he doesn’t even get a name!—so he doesn’t count. And anyhow, the person who stabbed him has been erased from existence, so it’s all okay!
I can see some lawyer having a field day with this one, tying Sisko, O’Brien, and Odo up in court for years to get justice for the Tarkalean—or heck, make it a class-action suit by all the people she assaulted in Quark’s!
Which, ultimately, would be more interesting than this relentlessly mediocre episode. It’s good to see Keiko and the kids back in theory, but in reality they haven’t been missed because the show hasn’t had the first clue what to do with any of them from jump, and this episode just shines a light on that.
Warp factor rating: 4
Keith R.A. DeCandido encourages everyone to pick up his latest work: Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: Far Horizons, which has his short story “Time Keeps on Slippin’,” Kobold Guide to Combat, which contains his essay “Gaming the Novel,” the Firefly: Echoes of War supplement Things Don’t Go Smooth, which has his adventure “Merciless,” and the Sleepy Hollow novel Children of the Revolution, reviewed on this very site.
Hmm – this might be my own bias from parenthood, but for me, I didn’t need Molly to be a well developed character for the story to have emotional resonance, because the thought of losing my child and then getting them back but so much altered is scary enough. (Althuogh, as a parent, it was kind of hard to believe the O’Briens being so blase about Molly wandering off in the first place and basically turning their backs to her. But our kid is full of mischief and curiosity so we have to be hyper vigilant)
Which is not to say this story isn’t crazy illogical, as you point out. Still, I was actually quite surprised at the way they Tarkelian was handled, and a little bit at your reaction to it, because she’s clearly mentally ill and it seems a bit unenlightened to press charges. What is to be gained? Should she be punished? What additional justice does he need aside from being healed (which I’m assuming is free in the Federation)? It seems a better alternative could have been found that could have taken into account both what was best for her cotinued rehabiliation and the safety of the others, than just sticking her in an institution.
Also, I’m curious if there are any child psychology experts around, but would something like that – which would surely be traumatic, no question – erase an 8 year old’s language and socialization skills so completely, as well as their memory? I thought the mind was a little more resilient but I could be totally wrong. I know that if something like that were to happen before the language skills were formed, they’d more or less lose that window to develop them, but once developed I assumed they’d stick around.
Let’s not forget the Tarkelian couldn’t have actually gotten stabbed, because big Molly never existed because big Molly sent little Molly back through the portal before she could become big Molly, and …
oh dear, I’ve gone cross-eyed.
See, to me, this is what a truly terrible episode of Star Trek looks like. This is the one I would give a zero to.
The whole thing is just so poorly thought out it beggars belief. Okay, Molly falls down the time portal, comes back as a young adult. So far, okay. And then when it is suggested that they can try again and bring her back from the correct time, the O’Briens reply “no, we can’t take those years away from her.”
I’m sorry, what? YES YOU CAN! Of course you can. This was a little girl who must have been utterly terrified, and gone through a hellish existence while learning to fend for herself in this totally empty world, and you get to take all of that away and hit the reset button. There is not a set of parents in existence who wouldn’t say “okay, let’s do that then.”
And then, when they find after hardly any time that she doesn’t seem to be readjusting to modern life, rather than let the expert psychologists see if they can help, they say “no, let’s send her back to that completely empty world where she can live out the rest of her life with no companionship until she ends up dying alone.” Really?
So they steal a ship and go back ot the time portal. Which is just sitting there in the cave with all the equipment still sitting next to it. Oh, by the way, we don’t have time portal technology but let’s not send teams of scientists in to find out how it works, let’s just leave it there, in that cave, and all this equipment, yeah, we don’t need that any more, we’ll just abandon it here. That seems like the logical thing to do.
This episode bugged the hell out of me. Nothing in it happened for a logical reason. Everything happened simply for the reason that, otherwise we don’t have a story to tell. A truly horrible, pointless episode.
The O’Briens (save for Miles) have never really been that interesting. Keiko’s best moment is when she takes on the Bajorans over teaching real science at the end of season one, but that gets ruined by the school being blown up, and eventually the war (or the threat of it) closed it for good.
As for this episode, feral children and language/understanding barrier are usually fascinating. This was pretty stock stuff. Nothing outstanding, but nothing terrible. Just bland.
Two real stinkers in a row. Frankly, I think you’ve been kinder to this than it deserves merely because it is less bad than the previous episode. Having all this happen to Alexander might not have worked. Unlike with Molly, where fans didn’t really have an investment in the character, they might have cheered at seeing Alexander get swallowed by a time thingy. Molly’s greatest claim on viewers’ hearts was largely that she was neither Alexander nor Naomi Wildman.
Worf fails to mention his experience in sitting Spot, while listing his accomplishments. That might have been more applicable.
This is one of the worse episodes. I would have given it much less than 4.
@3 – NO KIDDING. I forgot to rant about this, but yes, the fact that they a)don’t want to take what were probably horrible years away from her (as well-intentioned as that sentiment is) and then b)are content to send her back to that horrible place kind of boggled my mind (even if I do think putting her in an institution, at least the way O’Brien seemed to describe it, wasn’t necessarily the right thing either).
this episode, not one of my favorites
Wonder if Big!Molly ended up in the same place as God after the
Babel fish incident…
Many thanks to TorChris for that YouTube video, which provides the entirety of the Worf-cares-for-Yoshi subplot, which is by far the best part of the episode. You can just watch that video and never have to watch the rest of the episode ever. :)
And yeah, I’m probably being kinder to the episode than it deserves, but it has the very distinct advantage of coming right after the absolute nadir of DS9 as a TV show, so anything this side of “Threshold” would come off looking good.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I have nothing of note to say about proto-Molly. But I am compelled to say that She-Ra was the Princess of Power, not the Queen of anything.
I’m compelled to say this by the theme song, which popped into my head. Sigh.
Thank you, Keith! I had to go to the bathroom because of those last four paragraphs. Easily the funniest review I’ve read in years!
Now I can’t help but think about Time’s Orphan and the idea of actual lawyers defending the Tarkelian. You picked up a forgettable episode and made it a fun analysis.
And you’re absolutely on the spot. Star Trek still had the curse of sparing the main characters from long-term penances because they were in the opening credits.
Into Darkness side note: when it comes to real character consequences, I was revolted when McCoy came up with the blood cure for Kirk’s death; they didn’t have the guts to let Kirk stay dead on that movie.
As for Molly O’Brien, I have to agree. That’s one of the reasons I never really warmed up to this story. We never really got to know her as a character. Even René Picard, who only had one episode (plus the XMas scenario on Generations) had more character than she did.
My biggest Molly memory is her using Julian’s first name on the series finale, trying to convince her father to tell him about the academy transfer.
At least on Hard Time, we were dealing with O’Brien’s personal mindfuck when he snapped at her. It was about him, and his becoming a threat to his own family. It wasn’t about her.
The fact that Menosky pitched this idea back in TNG shows that not all the writers had a consensus when it came to using Alexander. I’m guessing it was Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor who pushed for using the character that often. It became a bloated soap opera. Unsurprisingly, they really dialed down the use of Alexander in those final two seasons.
On the plus side, Michelle Krusiec was gorgeous. I would’ve been very happy if she’d stuck around permanently.
On the minus side, what the O’Briens were willing to do to “help” Molly was obscene. Humans are an intrinsically social species. That’s how we evolved. We require personal interaction and touch for the sake of our physical and mental health. Depriving children of human contact and social interaction causes actual physical brain damage. In adults, solitary confinement is so psychologically and emotionally damaging (even to the point of inducing psychosis in formerly sane individuals) that it’s recognized as a form of torture, and America’s increasing use of solitary confinement in our prison systems is in violation of international laws and treaties and has been condemned by the International Red Cross and other organizations worldwide.
So I don’t care how well-intentioned the O’Briens were — sending an 18-year-old human being to a planet where she would be condemned to spend the rest of her life alone is an unconscionable act of abuse. Molly had been damaged by the years she spent alone, and it was insane for the O’Briens to think that the way to cope with it was to return her to that damaging state of existence. That’s like treating a burn injury with a hot poker. They should’ve been declared unfit parents right there and had both their children taken away for their own protection.
Of course, the real fault isn’t theirs, but the writers’. Realistically, 24th-century medicine and psychology would understand the human need for social contact even better than we do, so Bashir or any other expert they consulted should’ve been able to tell them that sending Molly back was the worst thing they could possibly do to her. But Menosky, Weddle, and Thompson didn’t understand human psychology well enough to realize that what they were portraying as a kindness was actually a horrendous act of cruelty. The very premise of this episode was ill-conceived and misguided, and the story simply should not have happened as shown.
Had some intense reactions to some parts of the plot, but overall can’t ignore the flaws as pointed out. Really poorly thought out writing ruined some actually good acting. And I like the idea behind it all. Variations have been done before, but it’s still interesting to me at least.
Meredith: You are correct, it should’ve been Sheena. Will fix….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It was Sheba queen of the jungle.
Also feral Molly learned to make some high quality cloths for someone learning to survive.
joel
So, timey-wimey, etc on Molly getting back.
The thing that annoys me about this is slapping even more stigma on mental health issues. Lets be clear, Future!Molly has significant Mental Health problems and an institution might be where she needed to be. Because institutions are not bad, maybe up until the 1980s, yeah and mainly because we were still operating on the mental health=uncontrolable criminal mindset of the times. Even when this episode aired mental health treatment had come on in leaps and bounds, and going for the old “ohes noes institution” reaction and equating it with jail (which we know even from TOS is nothing like modern jails) was just bad.
F!Molly needed treatment, and she wasn’t going to get that with Miles and Keiko muddling through, and she wasn’t going to get proper rehab with Bashir in his high-street health centre on the station. A proper rehabilitation regime, over several months if not years, in a dedicated facility would have been the order of the day, along with support for Miles and Keiko too. Instead we get the hoary old cliche about anything being better than a mental health institution, and even living feral being better than a recovery plan. As I’ve said so often recently, so much for Gene’s ideal future.
Oh, and didn’t Sisko act as Jadzia’s defender when she was put on trial for a crime she hadn’t committed either? Back in S1.
@10 Really? I dare you to rewatch Sub Rosa again.
Yeah the entire plot was stupid but was there a reason that neither of the O Brians could go with her? They obviously can’t both go because they can hardly bring Yoshi with them or leave him behind but out of a very sh*tty situation/plot splitting the parents is the only viable sh*tty option…
… then we can have The Temporal Parent Trap.
I vote Keiko goes with Molly and Miles stays with Yoshi, let’s face it the chief will get bored with nothing to tinker on and the botanist may know what is safe to eat in lonely eden
I think one of the most bothersome things about this episode is that Old Molly gives Young Molly the doll back, but then just drops the rest of the duffle bag. Maybe since it stayed in the cave for 300 years on an uninhabited planet, they can dig it up again in the future.
@12: I think the reason we never got to know Molly is because Hana Hatae was all of 11 when the show ended. For most of her time on the show, she was a very small child; in this episode, she’s only nine. She has also never really done anything besides Molly, save for an episode of “Kitchen Nightmares.” By contrast, David Tristan Birkin was 13 for “Family” and had some acting credits already; he’s also done quite a bit more since then. There just isn’t much for us to get close to with Molly, because of Hana’s limited range as a small child. (There are plenty of child actors with greater range, but we’re talking about Hana Hatae, not those actors.)
@17: Oh wow, I hadn’t even realized it, but you’re right. Throw in the demonization of mental health care, and it makes this episode even more hideously wrongheaded. Basically the O’Briens here are portrayed like those fanatical parents who refuse to let their kids get medical care because it’s ungodly or something. Or like the idiots who’ve bought into the anti-vaccination movement today.
And the sad thing is, the only reason they set it up that way, most likely, was reset-button thinking. They knew things had to be back to normal by the end of the episode, so they manufactured a contrived scenario that required sending the older Molly back so the young one could return by the end of the episode. Never mind that the reasons for not keeping her around made no damn sense and were criminal and obscene in-universe — the reset button still had to be pressed, no matter what.
Except — and here’s the real tragedy — it didn’t. Hana Hatae was an occasional guest star, and as we’ve mentioned, her youth didn’t allow establishing much of a personality for Molly. If they’d swapped her out for Krusiec permanently, then Molly could’ve really emerged as a character at last. And it would’ve made more sense than Alexander’s sudden growth spurt — or, for that matter, Molly’s own case of Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome prior to “Rascals.” So it’s a shame they felt they needed to restore the status quo, when making the change permanent would’ve had more advantages — and would’ve avoided portraying the O’Briens as horrifically irresponsible in their parenting choices.
But apparently, according to the DS9 Companion, Behr and Beimler couldn’t stand the idea of parents missing out on seeing their children grow up. That’s why they resisted doing the story for so long. So I guess they demanded that they get young Molly back at the end.
Frustratingly, the book also says that the original draft had Molly lost among a pre-industrial alien community, so at least she would’ve gotten a healthy amount of socialization and it wouldn’t have been such an evil obscenity for Miles and Keiko to think sending her back was a good idea. But for some reason they thought the “wild child” idea made a better story. The bizarre thing is that they actually did consult with child psychologists when working out the story, and yet somehow they still didn’t get the message that sending a teenager to live out the rest of her life in absolute solitude was a horrible act of abuse.
I had forgotten about this episode completely. Seeing the review reminded me of an episode that did the “Character-Goes-Into-Time-Anomaly-And-Comes-Back-Older” plot much better, but it wasn’t an official Star Trek episode. It’s part of the Phase II series, “World Enough and Time” which guest stars George Takei as the aged Sulu.
@22: Wow, that would’ve been really interesting if they’d had her living among an alien society (or possibly Bajoran settlers, since yong Molly would’ve been familiar and comfortable with Bajorans). Not only would it have been better for her development, but it would bring up all sorts of issues of whether she should go back with her biological parents now (though I suppose they explored that in “Suddenly Human.” And it kind of makes the choice more weighty (and more logical) of sending her back at the end. It would also make Old Molly’s actions into a sacrifice…here she’s expecting to go back with her alien family, and she knows she could point young Molly towards the alien family too, but sends her back instead.
Depends what you mean by justice. After all, Teenage!Molly was sent to solitary confinement on an alien planet 300 years before she was born. Is that a punishment? She ended up being altogether eliminated from existence. Is that justice?
Or is what happened to her Mercy?
And if so, should Teenage!Molly have been tortured before sending her back? For Justice!
I have a rather different perspective on this episode now that I am a parent than from when it was first broadcast. But in general, I agree that it is an “eh” episode. It’s fairly clear from the start that the reset button will be pushed, and the events in the episode never seem to have resonance of any sort in the rest of the series.
However, I was intrigued by this comment:
“I can see some lawyer having a field day with this one, tying Sisko, O’Brien, and Odo up in court for years to get justice for the Tarkalean—or heck, make it a class-action suit by all the people she assaulted in Quark’s!”
I think someone should write that. It does make for an interesting idea – if the person who assaulted you never existed because of a time paradox, and yet the assault did in fact take place, how would a court handle that?
— Michael A. Burstein
But what would that lawyer be suing for though? Prosecuting the crime (assuming Bajor allows private prosecutions)? They can’t arrest the person who did it, they no longer exist and little Molly is below the age of criminal responsibility? Medical expenses? Bashir hands out free health care, so that is covered. And that takes care of loss of earnings too, Federation medical care is so advanced that a stab wound is treated so easily that it is gone within ten minutes and in any case the O’Briens have no money due to the Federation no longer beliving in it. They may have a claim for psychological damages, but we run up against the “no money” thing again. In any case, since it happened in Quark’s I bet that nifty little Ferengi genius has some sort of blanket disclaimer that injuries in his bar are the recipients own fault and by coming in they waive all rights to sue anyone. Because if the Tarkelian could sue the O’Briens then they may also be able to sue Quark (that is what happens still in the 21stC, get hurt in a bar brawl and you sue everyone including the bar owner). So Quark probably has saved the O’Brien’s bacon.
Episodes like this are why time travel gives me nosebleeds.
@28 The turbulance and unexpected heavy landings are why it gives me nosebleeds…
…Greetings! From the world of tomorrow!
Yeah … this episode REALLY benefits from coming right after three terrible episodes. But it’s still … pretty bad, really.
Part of the reason that Worf, Dax, & Yoshi are the best part of the episode is because that’s the ONLY thing that doesn’t get reset-buttoned. The only reason why skipping this episode would even be noticeable by someone watching all of DS9 without prior knowledge. (Specifically the fact that Dax & Worf are even discussing having kids. But then that subplot is another can of worms anyway …)
Then there’s the myriad of things that don’t make any sense. The technobabble in a dominant role. The O’Briens’ behavior. The O’Briens’ and psychologists’ attempts to help older-Molly out. Odo’s behavior. The temporal paradoxes.
But actually, the plot hole that bothered me most is the contrived existence of the time travel portal at all. (And, as @3 astutely pointed out, the fact that such a temporal marvel doesn’t become an object of scientific, military, or fanatical interest.)
In the episode’s defense, getting stabbed with a bottle isn’t exactly a very dangerous experience in the 24th century, on average …
(To contribute to the list of favorite moments where Molly almost felt like a real character, I vote for her antipathy towards young-Keiko in Rascals.)
Now that I consider Christopher’s comments, it would have made a great ending if the entire O’Brien family had decided that going back through the portal together was the right thing to do. That would have at least solved the social problem, but also made for a great character choice for Miles and Keiko.
Of course they reset button would be readily available in that version too.
And now I can’t think of anyone but Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman as the prime choice to defend the Tarkalian.
@3 and 30, the lack of interest in the temporal portal seems like a throwback to the early seasons when there are amazing advancements (cloning is the only thing I remember off the top of my head) but nobody cares after it stops directly one of the main characters.
Has there been an equally long stretch of bad episodes back to back in any other season? 6 is really closing out on a low note here. At least the next episode breaks the streak (if I recall correctly).
@34
A string of bad episodes? Personally, I still think Valiant was pretty good.
The Sound of her Voice is next. I find it to be a quiet, if somewhat harmless, inoffensive character piece. Not nearly on the level of either Body Parts on In the Cards, but definitely watchable.
correction: either Body parts or In the Cards
@17: Personally, I think that putting a teenager in an ‘institution’ (and away from his/her parents), no matter how enlightened their procedures may be, is not something to be taken lightly. Yes, Molly needs treatment. But she also needs her parents,who are willing to take care of her. Now, I fully understand that in our own time (the early 21st century), institutionalization can – at times – be the lesser of all evils. Sometimes it is simply unavoidable. But in Trek’s 24th century world, which has transporters and holodecks and sophisticated long-range sensors, it simply doesn’t make any sense. Why take a child away from his parents, when the Docs can do all the monitoring and everyday care from afar? The writers could have done so much with this idea. For example, Starfleet Medical could tell the O’Briens that Molly must return to earth. They could have given the O’Briens a list of required modifications for their house on earth, in terms of monitoring and such. They could actually make it… you know, interesting. Instead, we got a standard boring ‘authorities-threaten-to-institutionalize-a-child’ plot, which is just lazy writing.
I didn’t have as much of an issue with this episode as most of you did. And, yes, it is probably because the two episodes before it annoyed/offended me so much. Was it ridiculous? of course. But so much of Star Trek is, that it hardly phases me anymore. I thought the episode was pretty well acted and the directing was inoffensive. I guess I am just looking at it less from a scientific point of view and more of a media piece. I thought grown-up Molly was interesting and fun to watch. Ms Chao was overacting a bit…but this is Star Trek, you kind of expect that.
I should probably double-check this but my memory is that O’Brien wasn’t facing criminal charges at the hearing mentioned at the end, it was the hearing established earlier in the episode for the assault committed by Molly, who now doesn’t exist and has been replaced by a younger version of herself, which is why Sisko’s confident he can get the charges dropped.
Valiant, Profit and Lace, and this episode I lump together as the ‘Season Filler Trilogy’ that I normally just skip because they’re either annoying (Valiant), bad(Profit and Lace), and pointless (This one)
I mean there’s so little I want to say about them that its all wrapped in this episode rewatch as ‘filler episodes till we get to one of the better episodes that remind us the War exists.’ And I know Valiant kind of shows war, but Red Squad is so annoyingly arrogant that it doesn’t count as ‘the war exists’ where they just go after a Dominion ship twice Valliant’s size.
Profit and Lace is embarrassing to watch.
And this one is boring and stupid and the ending makes it entirely pointless.
They were so worried about tying up all the loose ends in season 7, surely they could’ve used three episode slots in Season 6 for that, we didn’t need Valiant, Profit and Lace, and the episode where Molly falls through a random time portal.
Okay, back to forgetting these episodes exist.
The most realistic part of this episode is when Keiko breaks down in tears after they unsucessfully tried to retrieve Molly from the portal. If had been my kid, I would’ve cried my head off (just for reference, I don’t have kids, but if I had, and s/he would went missing…).
It all starts to decline when they decide to just go with 18 year old Molly because “it would erase her from existence”. What kind of reasoning is that? Don’t they just rob the young Molly from having a normal life?
And of course in the end all the “messing with time”-shennanigans work out in everyone’s favor and they all lived happily ever after.
EDIT: Oh, and the same thing I said on “The Visitor” of course holds true here as well: Nothing of what we see here is of any consequence. 18 year old Molly disappears in a puff of logic, so anything she did can’t have happened. Which also means she couldn’t have stabbed that poor guy (“but she didn’t want to hurt him!”) and couldn’t possibly have beamed out of that portal, because she wasn’t in there for 10 years…
Maybe in America it would be considered justice to lock up what is essentially a feral, unsocialised child who almost certainly has no understanding of right and wrong and who clearly would meet no reasonable test of criminal responsibility. In most other places, where lawsuits aren’t ingrained in the cultural fabric, the Tarkalean would have to suck it up.
There is precedent in the real world: the uncontacted North Sentinelise tribes-people who turned missionary John Chau into a dartboard weren’t rounded up and charged with murder and somewhat surprisingly, the United States government didn’t even ask India to take any action. Arguing that O’Brien should be charged with a crime doesn’t add up either. Again, in the real world if your kid shanks someone, you don’t go to jail for that, even if you’re the worst parent on the planet.
Ace Rimmer: I wonder if you’d feel likewise if you were the one stabbed.
Anyhow, I don’t blame Feral!Molly, I blame the O’Briens for their spectacularly poor judgment in putting her in the holosuite like that and then, after taking her heart’s desire away from her violently, putting her in a crowded bar, as I explained in the rewatch entry. The crime the O’Briens are guilty of is reckless endangerment, not to mention theft of a runabout (Odo letting them go doesn’t change the fact that they stole it).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I guess someone has to be the bad guy here, and I’m accustomed to that role, so here goes:
When Molly went running off to Parents-Suddenly-Ignoring-Me-Land, I thought to myself, “I hope she dies.” Then when she falls down the well, er, thingy, and disappears, I pumped my fist and gutterally exclaimed “YES” over and over again.
When I realized it was a time-travel episode, I stopped watching, because I knew I’d be disappointed when they eventually got her back in pre-opening-credits condition.
@44: I get not liking kids on tv shows, but jeez louise! And hey, believing someone has to be the bad guy: not very Star Trek, pal. ;)
But yeah, I like kids enough to have two of my own, and this episode enrages me. I’m doing a rewatch of my own right now, but I refuse to rewatch this one. I looked up the video of the scenes of Worf and Yoshi, and that’s it for me and this episode. As far as I’m concerned, this one and the last one should be declared apocryphal.
I really like the Miles and Keiko relationship (even if Trek never knew what to do with Keiko), the story of an actual well-adjusted married couple living and working with Starfleet in the 24th century and raising a family, and this episode just dumps gallons of equine excrement all over that. Good parents don’t abandon their children when they’re in trouble, especially not to an isolated hellscape.
Gar……….bage.
Lockdown rewatch. Another confirmation of my theory that starting with “The Reckoning” the show stepped off a cliff and was in free fall for a good while. Any positives from this? Well Rosalind Chao gets to do something, Michelle Krusiec was cute and it’s not as bad as Profit and Lace.. apart from that one to watch with one eye on doing something else.. 2 out of 10 from me and I’m being generous as one of those marks is that twenty years ago I really fancied Michelle Krusiec.
This gets a 4 and Profit and Lace gets a 0? What’s below 0? “Time’s Orphan”. Wow.