"Visionary"
In this episode, Chief O'Brien can experience events from several hours in the future after an exploding plasma conduit knocks him unconscious while he was trying to re-route a phase inducer on DS9's bridge.
The Chief materializes about five hours into the future for about a minute each jump, then is returned to his proper time.
The good news is that events he sees can be prevented/avoided once known (though that of course denotes a temporal paradox, of which there are MANY in this episode--I don't tend to worry too much about them, when I'm just wanting to enjoy the story, here).
The bad news is that O'Brien will die unless Bashir does a "basilar arterial scan" on him and then does corrective surgery based on that scan's findings. (A good moment is when future Bashir tells time-traveling O'Brien that when he gets back to present Bashir, present Bashir must do that scan on O'Brien while there's still time. O'Brien relates this, and present Bashir asks incredulously, "Who told you THAT?!?" To which the Chief returns, "YOU did--in the future." To which Bashir replies, "Well, who am
I to argue with
me?" I found that an enjoyable moment.)
This is a suspensefully entertaining episode, as most "tormenting Chief O'Brien" episodes turn out to be, but it's better than most of them because of the engaging way the plot twists keep going off into dramatically new directions. First it's about preventing a fight at Quark's, then it's about saving the Chief's life in two different ways, and finally it's about protecting the station and the wormhole entrance (and perhaps also the wormhole alens?) from destruction.
Romulans are on the station to question the station's crew and denizens about their encounter with the Dominion's Founders (it was part of an agreement whereby the Romulans gave the
Defiant a cloaking device), and the two intelligence officers doing the questioning (Jack Shearer and Annette Helde) are quite demanding, accusatory, and relentless in their interrogation. (At one point, they demand to know of Kira if Odo has shown any physical feelings toward her, and she tells them they "can rip out the cloaking device" for all she cares, she's not and that they had better not ask that question of Odo unless they want to find themselves "floating out of the nearest bulkhead!")
Eventually, one of Chief O'Brien's future jumps shows the wormhole entrance being destroyed by a suddenly-decloaked Romulan warbird, followed by that warbird destroying the station. The B-story of the Romulan visitors becomes the explanation for the main plot point (O'Brien's time jumping. The information the Chief gains from these jumps foils the Romulan attack plans, and the special guest treatment is over for the pointy-eared probers.
When I looked up this episode in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, I discovered to my surprise that some of DS9's writers consider this episode a poor fit for DS9, with its sci-fi technical explanations more suited to The Next Generation than for a character-driven show like DS9. Ira Stephen Behr, a writer and later producer of DS9 seems especially to espouse this view. Have seen some posts by Trekkies on the web that agree that this episode is too much like a TNG story to work for DS9.
I don't agree.
I think the use of the regular DS9 cast in this episode plays to each character's strengths. Even though "Visionary" is an O'Brien story, it effectively gives most of the main characters a chance to shine. From Kira's anger with the Romulans ("that is the most riduculous thing I have ever heard, and I resent the implication!", and her meaningful look of "Good riddence!" when Sisko has them escorted to the transporters), to Sisko's blunt announcement to the Romulans that 50 photon torpedoes are locked on their ship
right now, to Bashir jokingly telling O'Brien "you have a sadly deficient fantasy life", to Dax discovering the orbiting singularity that affects the Chief's time jumps (and turns out to be thecwarp core of a Romulan warbird), to Odo's shining moments in his investigations concerning a booby-trapped surveillance device beamed
tightly into a wall panel, near where the Romulans are staying as guests:
SISKO: Do you have any evidence besides the fact that Klingons hate Romulans?
ODO: Not yet. But don't worry, I plan on investigating the Klingons, the Bajorans, Quark, the visiting Terrelians.
SISKO: You think Quark had something to do with this?
ODO: I always investigate Quark!
Another moment I like in "Visionary" with Odo and Sisko is when the former goes telling the latter all the contacts he has used to discover a device that can change a replicator to a transporter. Sisko has Odo get to the point, and after Odo does so, Sisko asks Odo why he had to first tell him about all the people he had to talk to get the information, instead of first relating his discovered information. Odo's reply, "Sometimes I have to remind you just how
good I am," is unusually self-congratulatory for him, and that made me regard the moment as amusing (we all know he's right about being so good an investigator, after all).
And I feel I must mention Quark's part in this episode, as I find it as entertaining as the rest of the character trajectories. Quark calls the Chief "DS9's fortune teller", which O'Brien finds unacceptable. Then Quark asks the traumatized Chief if he is in a future time jump and passing through the bar, "would it really hurt to look at the numbers coming up on the wheel? I can make it worth your while". That the Chief finds Quark's request outrageously insensitive makes it funnier to me. And
that moment sets up the final scene. The episode ends on a nice laugh about Quark. The Chief walks up to Quark, leans over to Quark and tells him calmly, "Quark...dabo," Then he walks away, leaving Quark puzzled ("Dabo?"). A few seconds later, the gambling patrons shout out, "DABO!!!" Quark hurries toward the Chief, hoping persuade him to take on more radiation to enable time jumps that could make both of them rich. The Chief laughingly dismisses Quark and walks on. This plays out nicely.
GREAT STORY!!! And I feel it's a great fit for DS9's main characters and setting.
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