Time Squared

"Visionary" Plot Summary:

A temporal accident flings O'Brien into the near future, where he witnesses his own death and the destruction of the station. He is able to prevent the latter, but not the former, and must take his own place in the altered timeline.

Analysis:

I feel much better. I recognized all the characters this week! Kira was AGGRESSIVE! Sisko was FUMING! O'Brien had that befuddled look, Bashir sound like a jerk--"Oh, yeah, you died, I could do anything about it, sorry"), and there were aliens and a real plot and....ahhhh. They made a DS9 episode!

About the plot, well, that was a TNG episode. I was confused why the Romulans needed that surveillance thing in the wall, but I didn't care. I was further confused about what was causing all the time-shifting for O'Brien, but I loved him getting to see himself dead so many times. The ending seemed off to me -- if the right Worf couldn't stay in the wrong timeline on TNG's "Parallels," how come O'Brien could here? But WTF, it's SF and they've done much worse. The fighting scenes for once did not seem gratuitous, and I really DO enjoy episodes where we get to see the ships and stations blow up; don't you sometimes get the feeling the writers wanted an excuse to blast the models just to get their frustrations out, and wrote the plots around that notion?

This may have been Kira's best episode since "Second Skin" despite that annoying suggestive exchange with Odo (yes, we DID know they were going to overplay that storyline once Bareil was dead, but even Odo must thinking about something else some of the time..) I relished listening to her bitch out the Romulans, I loved that she talked back to Sisko (that "emissary" stuff was killing me), and I was so relieved to see her sassiness back in general.

O'Brien is really getting to be a superhero; seems like every episode he's in, he almost gets killed. Now if only they can find a way to reintegrate Keiko into his life in a non-annoying fashion...and remind him that he has a KID once in awhile!