Review

A decent reset button-style episode with a lot of wasted potential. It tries to be like DS9: The Visitor but on a larger scale but unfortunately it doesn't quite work. The two episodes are nearly identical in cause, effect, and implications, but this episode puts the whole experience over the top. Life is full of choices that lead to many other possible realities that will never exist as a consequence of your choice. Which of your lovers will you marry? Should you have sympathy for the children who will never be born because you didn't marry any of your other lovers? Of course not. But that's what this episode is asking us to do. The difference between "killing" and "never existing" is a subtle, but important one. Sisko's crew had every right to want to leave that planet and deny existence to their hypothetical descendants. I don't care if their hypothetical descendants could see, and talk, and feel things as a consequence of a time travel paradox. They don't deserve to exist at the expense of Sisko's crew's suffering. The episode failed to fully explore that moral dilemma, but what's worse is the entire debate is moot anyway because due to the observer effect, those descendants were doomed the moment Sisko met any of them to begin with regardless of whether or not he had succeeded in recreating the time travel and crash landing. The fact that they had already met their descendants would mean that they were slightly different people than the original version of the crew that never had that experience. As such, events the second time around would be slightly different, leading to entirely different descendants. All in all, it was a decent, moving episode, but way more could have been done with it.