6x24 Time's Orphan

[8.8/10] Star Trek has tons of big affecting moments. Spock’s sacrifice, Picard’s torture, Sisko’s loss of his wife, all rend the heart in ways these stories earn. But they’re also massive, critical moments, of extreme duress, life or death, rife with grand gestures. That is its own kind of difficult--to go big and make it convincing--but it’s also easier to modulate big emotions to big moments.

What’s so powerful about “Time’s Orphan” is that it is one of Deep Space Nine’s most affecting episodes, at least in my book, and it does so with moments that are so much smaller. A feral young woman tosses a ball back to her father after much encouragement and much trial and error. A long lost daughter not only allows her mother to brush her hair the way she did when her kiddo was eight years old, but seeks it out. The curmudgeonly, justice-minded constables doesn’t throw the book at the beleaguered parents breaking the law to protect their child, but instead encourages them to finish their task without a moment’s thought.

Maybe these moments did move you. Maybe you were (not unreasonably) distracted by the prehistoric time portal or the convenience of the situation that forces the O’Briens’ hand. But they moved me. The notion of losing the ability to guide your child for a decade of development, only to see her start to regain a measure of it, is heartening. The sense of losing that connection between mother and daughter through a terrible accident, only to find that bit of intimacy anew is touching. And the least outwardly sentimental character on Deep Space Nine showing compassion, and breaking his own rules to help two people in need, is powerful.

These are not grand moments. They are, instead, tiny gestures. Yet, they’re no less potent, no less full of earned emotion, and no less meaningful.

The trick to it all is in the approach that “Time’s Orphan” takes to its plot. Make no mistake, this is one of the more out there high concept premises Deep Space Nine has attempted in a while. On an O’Brien family picnic, Molly falls into a time gateway. By the time they’re able to retrieve her, due to the temporal relativism, the girl they bring back has not only aged ten years, but had to fend for herself, alone in the wilderness, for all that time.

Despite the wildness of that premise, I like the story on two fronts. First and foremost, because the episode takes an outlandish setup seriously. To have your kid come back feral, need to adapt to her old existence again, and the toll it would take on a family, is a lot to process. “Time’s Orphan” doesn’t shy away from the impact it has on Miles and Keiko, the challenges for Molly to adjust after so long away, the steady but arduous progress made in habituating her to the basics. Much like Miles’ own recovery from an outsized sci-fi struggle in “Hard Time”, the episode gains strength from exploring what the readjustment would be like for both a child and their parents in this situation with commitment and conviction.

Second, I like this because it’s a family story, something we don’t get enough of on Deep Space Nine. Considering that three main characters are parents, the writers typically find ways to sideline their kids (and in Miles' case, their spouse), since it doesn't fit in with either traditional Trek or the dark edges of the series. So it’s nice to have an episode that acknowledges that part of Miles’ character, that recognizes the hardship of being apart from his wife, that sees him put his duties as a member of Starfleet behind his duties as a father.

To the same end, I like the B-story here, which is simple but sweet. With the O’Briens dealing with Molly, the Worf/Dax family agrees to look after Yoshi while they’re occupied, and it becomes an opportunity for Worf to prove himself as a good father in Dax’s eyes. Now, you just have to go with this one, even more than the wild sci-fi plot in the A-story, because surely several years parenting Alexander outweighs a brief time babysitting someone else's kid. But if you can set that aside, Worf trying to prove himself with a baby is a winning setup.

There’s something inherently endearing about the station’s gruffest resident (give or take Odo) looking after its tiniest tyke. Worf struggling with a crying infant while Dax goes “Are you sure about this?” is sitcom-y stuff, but it’s cute. Him feeling like a failure when Yoshi ends up with a bump on the noggin is sympathetic. And his sense of surprise and pride when the little fella has internalized the Klingon technique Worf used on him, is downright adorable. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the “grumpy dude becomes a good dad” trope. I liked it on TNG, and I like it here.

But Worf’s is the much simpler story. Rehabilitating a child who’s been unintentionally abandoned for years is much trickier, and none of it would work without a stellar performance from Michelle Krusiec as the older Molly. It would be so easy for someone playing a feral child, unable to fully vocalize and more wild and stunted in her development, to devolve into something that seems ridiculous. Instead, Krusiec fully commits to the role, creating a version of Molly who is believable in her animalistic movements, convincing in her fear and distress, and heart-rending in the moments where she reestablishes a connection to her parents. It would be a challenging performance under any circumstances, and that doesn’t stop the actress from nailing it.

The performance is also tricky because, like The Babadook, the story in “Time’s Orphan” also works as a sci-fi abstraction of the challenges involved in raising a child with special needs. The stirring moments of progress, the dispiriting setbacks, the challenging outbursts, and the pitfalls of a system that isn’t built to handle those who fall outside the norm, all give this story a little extra impact in how Miles and Keiko try to look out for their daughter’s interests, despite all the bumps along the way.

Some of those bumps are pretty big. If I have a significant complaint, it’s that at about the two-thirds mark, a plot that’s moved at a very measured pace suddenly kicks into overdrive. Molly lashes out and wounds a patron of Quark’s; the Federation wants to evaluate her at a facility she may never return from; Keiko and Miles steal her away and aim to send her back to the time and environment she knows. It’s all very sudden, and unlike the painstaking and open-hearted parenting we get to see as the O’Briens slowly bring Molly along, you can practically feel the creative team realize they’re running out of time and need to get this one to the finish line.

But I like what it comes down to. While I wish the choice had more time to breathe, Keiko and Miles deciding that they’d rather parted from their daughter forever than be with her and see her suffer in a cage of one kind or another is the kind of self-sacrificing parental act that moves the heart and stirs the soul. Sure, it’s a little convenient that when they do, older Molly sends her younger self back to the present, restoring the status quo. But I still feel the power of the O’Briens losing someone they love most in order to protect her, and poetically, regaining them through their putting her needs before theirs.

Seeing Miles and Keiko reunited with the Molly they know in the end is reassuring, and the little one’s drawing that matches her older counterpart’s is a nice touch to show that the young woman they came to know over the past week lives on. But the emotional high point of the episode comes when that young woman says three simple words: “Molly loves you.”

It may not have the energy of Kirk yelling into the ether when his son is killed, or the punch of Lal telling Data “Thank you for my life” before she shuts down forever. The moment is simpler, shorter, more understated. Sometimes, though, it’s the small, down-to-earth nature of those moments, that makes them hit as harder, or harder, as any more grandiose wallop in the Star Trek pantheon.