3x17 Visionary

O'Brien must suffer! A fairly unique time-travel episode with a cool idea behind it. It stumbles a little bit because as it goes on, more and more it bugs me that things don't quite make sense. Especially once O'Brien travels ahead for the final time, why hasn't the Miles he meets already done the same thing? "I hate temporal mechanics" indeed!

It's most memorable for doing a very non-Star Trek thing, and that's killing the main character! It somehow feels quite daring that they decided to kill of "our" O'Brien and use the future O'Brien for the rest of the series (this echoes back to the original plan with Thomas and Will Riker, which the producers eventually thought went too far). Even though there's no real difference between them, the script does reflect the viewer's own thoughts in that somehow it's like he doesn't belong here. I wonder if he ever told Keiko and Molly about it?

The Miles/Julian friendship is pretty firmly established now, through their dartboard being set up in the bar and the amusing argument they have about letting Miles die. The show made this friendship grow very naturally across the past seasons, and I love it.

The Romulan stuff is surprisingly boring. Kira's outrage feels a bit stale, and why they even bother to interview Quark I don't know. Odo's stuff is much better and he's quite funny all the way through - I especially like his fake indignation in regards to what Kira tells him. It does seem more than a little obvious that the singularity orbiting the station is a cloaked Romulan ship, though, why did none of the crew think of that?

[7.9/10] If you read enough behind-the-scenes material about Star Trek, you start to discover that the producers buy spec scripts as much for the neat science fiction-y thought experiments in them as they do for any high quality writing. There’s something low-key inspiring about that. Not everyone has the talents to write a pristine script with good pacing, dialogue, and character development. But it’s more within the grasp of we poor hoi polloi to dream up some neat sci-fi scenario that, with the right luck and gumption, could make its way to the screen.

But the idea itself isn’t enough to make a good episode. An outing like “Visionary” has a cool premise to build on. Thanks to a strange burst of radiation, Miles O’Brien is continually flung roughly five hours into the future, with the chance to witness what his future self does in those few moments, before he’s snapped back into the present, somewhat worse for wear. It’s the sort of timey-wimey yo yo-ing business that Star Trek does well. And it creates plenty of stakes when Miles tries to use his newfound abilities to avoid medical mishaps, the station’s destruction, and his own death.

What puts “Visionary” over the top, though, is how it connects to the ongoing conflicts that run through Deep Space Nine, and the broader Star Trek universe. Miles isn’t just popping back and forth in time on a normal day at the office. It comes when there’s Romulans aboard to extract intelligence on The Dominion in exchange for their cloaking device, not to mention a trio of Klingons whose stay seems accidental, but isn’t. The timing is a touch convenient, but it means there’s a mystery (frankly, many) to be solved aboard the station, ones Miles is uniquely positioned to help with, that play on longstanding tensions between the different groups aboard.

The episode is clever in how it integrates the two elements. There is an escalation and differentiation for each of O’Brien’s time skips, First he just sees himself having a normal conversation with Quark. The next time, he’s in the middle of a bar brawl between the Klingons and Romulans. Soon, he’s witnessing his own death from a booby-trapped panel. Then, when that seems neutralized, he sees his body post-autopsy with a warning about a malady Dr. Bashir missed. And if that weren’t enough, in his final vision, he sees the station destroyed as he’s evacuating.

That’s just enough occurrences, with enough variety and build among them, to make it so the audience never gets tired of the idea. The simpler interactions show us how these little journeys work. The ones that threaten Miles’ life put something meaningful at stake and connect with both the practical and political intrigue aboard the station. And the DS9-threatening crescendo allows the franchise to indulge in one of its favorite pastimes -- showing the destruction of the ship/station/planet before playing a time travel-scented game of take-backsies. There’s parceled throughout the episode well, and provide time for the viewers to acclimate and anticipate what happens next.

That comes down to increasing degrees of brinksmanship among the Federation, the Bajorans, the Romulans, and the Klingons. Ruon, the Romulan representative, insinuates that Odo is in league with his fellow Founders and suggests, to Kira’s chagrin and disbelief, that he might have protected her because he has feelings for him. His interrogation of Starfleet and Bajoran officers advances the ongoing tensions between the allies of convenience, with an added combustible element given how the Klingons and Romulans seem to harbor nothing but antipathy for one another in Quark’s. And it also advances the slow-simmering connection between Odo and Kira as well. The air of suspicion adds to the mysteries at play, that Miles uses his time-jumps to help solve.
Those mysteries are: Who set the booby trap that killed O’Brien? How does the ship gets destroyed? And what exactly is triggering these time jumps for the chief and why?

Each of the answers is satisfying. It turns out the Klingons set the booby trap, as they had setup secret surveillance equipment to keep tabs on the Romulans. The solution gives Odo a nice win, getting to show Sisko “just how good” he is at this job, not to mention the amusing reveal that “I always investigate Quark.” But without Miles’ tip, they wouldn’t be able to arrest and stop the Klingons before they’re able to lay the trap.

The ship turns out to be destroyed by a cloaked Romulan warbird just outside the station. Miles gets the intel that confirms who’s responsible, and it makes sense. It’s a little easy that Sisko’s able to deduce their exact motivation, but there’s something very Romulan about the visitors deciding the best way to stop the Dominion threat is to collapse the wormhole, and take DS9 out in the process to eliminate any witnesses and have some plausibly deniability. Theirs is a Gordian knot solution, and a knifing in the dark, so the explanation makes sense.

Hell, I even like the answer to why O’Brien’s making these jumps. Of course, it requires a little technobabble, but the notion that his radiation burst made him magnetically attractive in a temporal sense, to where when a quantum singularity with the same radiation signature pulled him into the future when it passed by him, passes the smell test. I particularly love the twist that the quantum singularity that does the pulling is the warp drive of a cloaked Romulan ship, something established back in the Next Generation days with Geordi and Ro having a similar dimensional hiccup. The setup and payoff works, weaving Miles’ condition and individual experience together with the political elements and mysteries in play in a way that feels natural.

And while the episode veers into “Miles must suffer” territory, I like that it focuses on the oddness and interiority of his experience as much as on the crazy happening of the week. He finds it suitably bizarre to (once again) come across his double. He’s psychologically affected by seeing himself killed from a third person perspective. They never quite resolve these feelings, but I sort of like that. Hell, the only part of it that doesn’t really work for me is how blase Julian seems about the whole thing.

Even there, Miles saving the day with his powers comes at a cost. I like the cleverness and sacrifice that come with Miles re-dosing himself with radiation so he can go back to the future and talk to his future self about what’s going to happen with Romulans. (I relate to, and died laughing, at the duplicate Miles saying “I hate temporal mechanics” in unison.) The fact that the Miles who makes the journey is too debilitated by the radiation to make the trip back to the past, but rather future Miles who uses the special device to warn Sisko and company ahead of time, adds a certain eeriness to the proceedings.

As Miles himself acknowledges, this bizarre scenario allowed him to save the day, but he also feels like he’s living someone else’s life. It’s only a few hours, but he has memories of the future, and feels as though he stepped into another man’s shoes. It’s the psychological hangover of all this time-dilated excitement, something that boosts the episode along with everything else.
Therein lies the glory. The thought experiment here is a humdinger. But it’s melding it with Miles’ experience, ongoing tensions with the Romulans and Klingons, the threat of the Dominion, the peril of a ship about to be attacked, the the scientific grounding already laid out elsewhere in the franchise, that makes this a great DS9 episode, not just a good one.