Well, it's well-deserved, Time's Orphan is a terrible episode, down to Keiko's remark that started the whole thing. When it was question of trying to pull Molly out at an earlier age she said: "If we do there'll be no one to grow up and become this Molly, we'd be robbing her of ten years of her life!"
My answer was "What? Is she insane? these ten years crippled her daughter, making her an outcast possibly forever and she's worried about removing them?" Talk about stupid and insensitive. Besides, in the end, that's exactly what happened. It's like Keiko's IQ was lowered below sixty for this episode.
Part of it is amazing, they took the concept seriously and without joking it up... but the attempt to milk some draaaaaaaaaama about sending her back versus "MUH TIMELIIIIIIIIIIINE!" was as galling as it was embarrassing. Or as embarrassing as it was galling. She was stuck in a confined environment of no "temporal consequence" or whatever (which happens to be something TOS figured out in 19-frigging-66 with the Air Force dude and all) so there is no problem in going through the treknoabble to restore her and her whole family to normal conditions. Talk about minutiae...
O'BRIEN: We pulled her out ten years too late.
BASHIR: It's a miracle you managed to get her back at all, Miles.
KEIKO: Maybe if you tried again you could pull her out when she was still a little girl.
BASHIR: If you do that, there'll be no one to grow up and become this Molly. You'd be erasing her existence.
O'BRIEN: Yes, but we'll have our Molly back.
KEIKO: Miles, this is our Molly. Just because we missed the last ten years of her life doesn't give us the right to take those ten years away from her.
BASHIR: She's been deprived of human contact for a long time. It's not going to be easy for her to reassimilate. Her language skills are rusty. In fact, you two are the best hope we have of helping her recover them.
KEIKO: She doesn't remember us.
O'BRIEN: She was so scared I doubt she even got a good look at us.
BASHIR: It's possible that she's blocked out all memories of her earlier life in order to cope with her isolation.
KEIKO: So what do we do?
BASHIR: I'm going to keep her under sedation until we get back to Deep Space Nine. I've asked Captain Sisko to create a safe environment for her. He's having one of the cargo bays converted. I want you two to be there with her when she wakes up.
KEIKO: What happens then?
BASHIR: A case like this, there are no rules. We'll just have to feel our way through the process.
Bashir starts out with being hoity-toidy about the rules involving "MUH TIMELIIIIIIIIINE!", and then chucks it into the trash at the end.
Keiko siding with Bashir is even more glaring
, why would she use radical acceptance
so readily when they can keep trying for an entire hour until they got her back at her proper age? (Then we'd be deprived of the re-growing up story, which is surprisingly engaging and well-acted, but the lead-up to it is
Treknobabble Stupor-Supreme (TSS)...)
Worse, Molly was violated; robbed of an entire decade. Now, how many decades do humans live, again? We can't do an average based solely on Admiral McCoy being 137 either, but if that's the closest point of comparative reference, then let's say that in the 24 and a 1/2th century Trekville, humans live on average to 96 years instead of today's 76. In the bigger scale of things, a decade is still just shy of 1/10th of her entire life wiped out, with terrible results. Never mind ramifications they go on about with her mental state - that's her entire life for crying out loud.
As Miles might say:
Truer words were never spoken, to say the very least.
I'd still,
overall, put this above "Profit and Lace" and only because of terms of originality and doing something innovative with gut-wrenching soap opera shtick that is anything but cliche, but P&L does tackle a real life and more substantial issue (and without bypassing and shrouding its originally-intended theme in the process, making it gutsier than a handful of TNG shlock), even if it fumbles (and horribly so) in its execution. That dumb rationalizing argument on not sending Molly back was the lowest season 6 got.
