Young Molly O'Brien stumbles into a time portal on an alien planet and is lost in the distant past. Though she is rescued in a matter of hours, 10 years have passed for her -- a decade she lived in total isolation, regressing to a state from which she may never recover to reintegrate with her family. As Miles and Keiko struggle to help their daughter, their son Yoshi stays with Worf and Dax, the former determined to prove his child-rearing abilities to the latter.
In the early days of Deep Space Nine, some of the stories were reworked concepts first conceived of for Star Trek: The Next Generation. You'd think that by late season six, nearly four years after Next Gen ended, those days would be over. But "Time's Orphan" was indeed a rejected idea from Next Gen writer Joe Menosky, which he concocted as a way to write the character of Alexander Rozhenko (who he didn't like) off of the show permanently. Then-executive producer Michael Piller had rejected the idea (reportedly because Alexander was his mother's favorite character), but René Echevarria, who moved from Next Gen to DS9, liked the concept and would periodically pitch his new series show runner, Ira Steven Behr, on reviving the idea. Behr finally agreed, adding his own idea of Molly as a "wild child" to the mix.
Speaking of mixed: the end results. Perhaps it's that O'Brien has endured so many other potent hardships. Perhaps it's that "Children of Time" had already presented "a time-traveling family problem" to such great effect. For whatever reason, this episode doesn't pack much of a punch for me.
There are a lot of contradictions. Early on, Keiko dismisses the notion of trying to rescue a younger Molly from the past, before her 10 years of isolation, for rather flimsy and hand-wavey reasons. (Because we have to have an episode, is the real reason.) Yet in the end, what Keiko says it's not okay to do is exactly what the writers do. In the teaser, it's all laid on super-thick that Miles never wants to be apart from his family again. But when it seems Molly is going to be sent to some kind of facility for rehabilitation, there's no talk at all that her parents might accompany her there -- it's just immediately framed as a separation. The episode needs this to be an either/or proposition.
Still, if the framework doesn't feel rock solid, there are still a number of great moments to be found within it. Kira's rapport with Keiko while the team is working to rescue Molly is a nice nod to their history. A short while later, there's a fun little scene where Kira talks about maybe wanting a child of her own someday, and Odo avoids the topic. (The fact that he conveys so much while saying nothing suggests this was all Rene Auberjonois; there's no dialogue in the script.) Odo has another great moment when he catches the O'Briens trying to steal a runabout, shakes his head that Miles couldn't pull that off, and then lets them go.
Apparently, while they were filming this episode, they quickly realized it was going to come up around nine minutes short. Seizing on an already-filmed scene that everyone liked (Worf covers for playing with Yoshi by claiming he was testing the baby's warrior reflexes with a rattle), the writers decided to create a subplot around Worf trying to prove his chops as a father to Dax. (Also influencing the desire to do this subplot: the writers knew that -- SPOILER!!!! -- Jadzia was about to be killed off, and they wanted to play with the marriage one last time.)
As with the A-plot, there is a part of the framework in the B-plot that doesn't quite work for me. Worf's previous parenting of Alexander is mentioned briefly, but isn't really dealt with; I feel like Worf would want to prove to himself that he could raise a child just as much as he would want to prove anything to Dax. (He backed away from a challenge once. Never again.)
But also like the A-plot, there are moments throughout that I enjoy quite a bit. That "gong-gong-gong" rattle moment that inspired the whole thing is pretty cute. Dax's soft but firm reaction to Worf ("don't put words in my mouth") is the perfect way of refusing to play the adversary he's unwittingly trying to cast her as. And the reliable contrast between easygoing Dax, who has parented many times, and super-serious Worf works especially well.
Other observations:
- At the start of the episode, Molly wakes her parents up at "almost 7:00." To hear my parenting friends tell it, this would be a luxurious sleep-in.
- Chester the cat is back.
- Because Molly falls into the portal in the beginning, you get some "child stuck in a well" vibes in the opening minutes of the episode. You know, with a sci-fi twist.
- The scene in which Molly tears up Quark's bar features a lot of great stunt work, and very few camera cuts. It's a nicely done bit of action.
- Sisko is going to have to pull off some mighty off-screen lawyering after what happens here, but O'Brien seems sure the captain will be able to persuade the powers-that-be to be lenient over the whole stabbing/jailbreak/grand theft serial spree.
- In a fun little challenge for the show's art team, we see similar crayon drawings from eight-year-old Molly and "devolved" 18-year-old Molly. I can imagine quite a run of those images being created before they settled on just the right amount of "primitive."
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