12 Greatest ‘Star Trek’ Time Travel Stories Over the Past 60 Years, From TOS to ‘Strange New Worlds’
Explore the most iconic temporal journeys in 'Trek' history, from 'The Visitor' to 'First Contact'
Few storytelling devices have served Star Trek as reliably—or as imaginatively—as time travel. From its earliest days, the franchise has used temporal paradoxes, alternate histories and causality loops not merely as spectacle, but as a way to examine sacrifice, regret, destiny and hope. Long before modern time travel TV became a genre unto itself, Star Trek time travel episodes were already proving that such journeys could illuminate the present just as powerfully as any exploration of deep space.
What makes Star Trek’s approach distinctive is that time travel is rarely just about fixing a timeline. Instead, it becomes an exploration of character. In The Original Series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the price of restoring history is heartbreak. The Next Generation deepens the idea with “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “All Good Things…,” episodes that turn alternate timelines into reflections of identity and moral choice. Deep Space Nine transforms temporal displacement into profound meditation in “The Visitor,” while also delivering affectionate franchise celebration in “Trials and Tribble-ations.” Even The Animated Series contributed meaningfully with “Yesteryear,” adding emotional depth to Spock’s childhood.
The later series and films continued to evolve the concept. Voyager’s “Year of Hell” and “Blink of an Eye” experimented with prolonged devastation and accelerated civilizations. The feature films raised the stakes with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: First Contact, blending urgency, humor and historical consequence. Most recently, Strange New Worlds embraced temporal crossover joy in “Those Old Scientists,” proving the device remains fertile ground decades later.
Across six television series and multiple films, time travel has allowed Star Trek to revisit its own mythology, confront alternate futures and ask enduring questions about responsibility and redemption. The following 12 stories represent the franchise at its most daring—not just journeys across centuries, but into the very heart of what makes Star Trek endure the way that it does.
1. ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ (TOS)
Frequently cited as the pinnacle of Star Trek storytelling, this tragic masterpiece from writer Harlan Ellison (and a rewrite from D.C. Fontana) sees Kirk and Spock travel to 1930s Earth to stop a drugged Dr. McCoy from changing history. Kirk falls for social worker Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), only to realize that for the future to exist, she must die in a car accident he is forced to allow. It’s a haunting meditation on the “needs of the many” versus the heart of one man.
Behind-the-scenes
HARLAN ELLISON (writer): “The idea of ‘City’ came from the image of the City on the Edge of Forever—and it was an image of two cities, which is what it says in the script. The City on the Edge of Forever is the city on this planet. It was not a big donut in my script; it was a city. It was a city on the edge of time, where all the winds of time met. That was my original idea: all the winds of time coalesce, and when you go through to the other side, there is this other city, also on the edge of forever—New York City during the Depression. They’re mirror images of each other.”
“At the time, all I was concerned about was telling a love story. I made the point that there are some loves so great you would sacrifice your ship, your crew, your friends, your mother, all of time—everything—in defense of that love. That’s what the story was about. All of the additional stuff Gene Roddenberry kept trying to get me to put in took away from that. The script does not end the way the episode does. Kirk goes for her to save her. At the final moment, by his actions, he says, ‘F**k it. I don’t care what happens to the ship, the future, and everything else. I can’t let her die. I love her,’ and he starts for her. Spock, cold and logical, grabs him and holds him back—and she’s hit by the truck. The TV ending, where he closes his eyes and lets her get hit by the truck, is absolutely bulls**t. It destroyed the core of what I tried to do. It destroyed the art; it destroyed the drama; it destroyed the extra human tragedy of it.”
JOSEPH PEVNEY (director, “The City on the Edge of Forever”): “The episode was toward the end of the first season. Harlan was very happy to get his story on Star Trek. He was down on the set thanking me. It’s great that Gene [sic] rewrote it, though, because Harlan had no sense of theatre. He had a great sense of truth, which was very nicely placed in there—all of the 1930s material was well documented. It was a well-conceived and well-written show, but in the original script’s dramatic moments, it missed badly.” (Star Trek: The Original Series is available for streaming on Paramount+)
2. ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ (TNG)
When the Enterprise-C emerges from a temporal rift 22 years into its future, reality shifts instantly into a timeline where the Federation is losing a brutal war with the Klingons. Guinan is the only one who senses the “wrongness,” leading to a heroic sacrifice by the time-altered resurrected Tasha Yar and the Enterprise-C crew to restore the proper flow of time. This episode proved that TNG could deliver high-stakes, cinematic sci-fi on a weekly basis.
RONALD D. MOORE (producer, episode writer): “I’d heard from time to time, ‘I wish you’d do some war stories,’ but this is the reality of war. It’s not a pretty place. But it was a lot of fun to watch that ship move and see Picard biting off Riker’s head. I wrote a couple of different story outlines on it. Somewhere during the course of that, I came up with the idea that the alternate universe would really be nasty and awful and militaristic—and that we’re losing the war with the Klingons.”
ERIC STILLWELL (writer, “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” assistant to Michael Piller): “Trent Christopher Ganino and I were inspired by ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ and ‘Mirror, Mirror.’ It started out as two different stories—one that Trent had written about an Enterprise from the past traveling through time, but without an alternate-universe scenario, and a story I had been developing as a Sarek story involving ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ which was also an alternate-history story.”
“Coincidentally, I had seen Denise Crosby at a convention in San Jose, and she had expressed interest in coming back to the show and said, ‘You should write a story for me.’ So Trent and I started tossing around ideas to bring back Tasha using a variation of the alternate-universe idea I’d been working on. The story was pitched, and Michael Piller called Sarek and the Guardian ‘gimmicks’ from the original series that he wanted to avoid at the time. But he was aware of Trent’s spec script about an Enterprise from the past and asked us to combine the two stories.” (Star Trek: The Next Generation is available for streaming on Paramount+)
3. ‘The Visitor’ (DS9)
In this emotionally shattering tale, a subspace accident “tethers” Captain Sisko to a single point in time, causing him to appear and disappear over decades. The story follows his son, Jake, who spends his entire life obsessed with saving his father, eventually making the ultimate sacrifice as an old man to snap the temporal cord. It remains one of the most poignant explorations of the father-son bond in television history.
Behind-the-scenes
MICHAEL TAYLOR (producer, episode writer): “Sisko and Jake was a powerful relationship on that show. All the characters resonated on different levels. Harry Chapin’s song ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ was going through my head when I wrote for them in ‘The Visitor.’ I remember sort of blubbering about that and then waking up out of that trance, saying that’s not my relationship with my dad—but still thinking about it, and thinking about this sense of time passing like snapshots, which led me to the whole idea for that story: what if there was some Star Trek anomaly? So maybe it’s my relationship with my dad, but whatever it is, it led to my first story for the show.”
RONALD D. MOORE: “Quite a tour de force. When we were breaking that show, we knew it was going to be a special episode. The format we chose—doing the flashback from the beginning, with the old Jake telling the tale to the young writer—was just a great concept, a great idea. It was a departure, which was another thing that was really good for us, because you need to do different things and keep stretching the muscles so the show doesn’t get boring. Just a great show—and Tony Todd [who played the older Jake Sisko] is a great actor.”
AVERY BROOKS (actor, “Captain Benjamin Sisko”): “The preparation for an episode like that is understanding that every day is brand-new. You wake up each day with the full knowledge—once you’re awake—to be grateful for that day, and therefore you go to work or do whatever it is you’re called to do. All I’m interested in is telling the truth. It’s so simple in another way, because I loved Cirroc Lofton then and I love him now. Most of what you witnessed in the exchange between us—and indeed with Tony Todd—most of what you saw was real.” (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available for streaming on Paramount+)
4. ‘All Good Things…’ (TNG)
The series finale serves as a perfect bookend, with Q challenging Picard to solve a temporal puzzle that exists simultaneously in the past (his first mission), the present and a possible future. To save humanity, Picard must coordinate with his crew across three different eras to stop a spatial anomaly that grows backward through time. It’s a triumphant celebration of the show’s legacy and the growth of its captain.
Behind-the-scenes
RONALD D. MOORE (producer, episode writer): “There was a lot of danger involved in trying to find the right balance—how much of a sci-fi mystery should it be, how much should it be a valentine to the characters, how funny should it be, how much action? What would the Q part of it be? It was certainly the first time we had dealt with a two-hour piece of the series where we didn’t feel like we had to pad it at some point. Usually, those two hours feel like we didn’t quite have enough story to keep going. This one had so much story going on that trying to keep it all together within two hours was the bigger challenge.”
BRANNON BRAGA(producer, episode writer): “For me, it evolved and, like any show, it came into its own. I just really think that if you look at the final two-hour episode, you’re seeing the show firing on all cylinders. You care about the characters, a sentimental bond occurred—we as writers bonded with the show. So when we have a tear in our eye at the end of the final episode, it’s more likely the audience will.”
MICHAEL PILLER (executive producer): “The episode is a true Star Trek adventure that works on a metaphorical level and deals with the human condition. It talks about all the issues that I think Star Trek really speaks to. The goal of the episode was not just to speculate about how families change, but also to talk about how it takes a lifetime—or many lifetimes—for a man, or for mankind, to create the problems he has to deal with in this existence. It also takes a lifetime for him to solve and address the issues and problems he has created.”
5. ‘Yesteryear’ (TAS)
Widely considered the best of the animated series, this story uses the Guardian of Forever to revisit Spock’s childhood on Vulcan. After a research mission accidentally erases his own existence, Spock must travel back to his youth to save his younger self during a dangerous rite of passage. Written by D.C. Fontana, it provides a deeply mature look at Vulcan culture and the origins of Spock’s internal conflict between logic and emotion.
Behind-the-scenes
DOROTHY FONTANA (writer, “Yesteryear”): “‘Yesteryear’ resulted from my looking back at the things we had done on the original series and remembering the time portal from ‘The City on the Edge of Forever.’ I thought we could use that for a legitimate trip, but then have something happen so that Spock has to return to Vulcan—to his childhood. We could probe into these characters and see the beginning of some of the trouble between Spock and Sarek, Amanda’s problems back then, and part of what made Spock Spock.”
LOU SCHEIMER (Filmation): “A pet’s death had never been done on a children’s program, but it was in ‘Yesteryear,’ and it was touching and provocative. Dorothy was instrumental in making it so creative.”
DOROTHY FONTANA: “I felt strongly about dealing with the death of a pet—in this case, Spock’s sehlat [a large teddy bear with fangs, as it was described in the show]. It was a very serious thing for kids. We were trying to put across a lesson to children that when it comes time for an animal to die, if he must go, it should be with dignity.” (Star Trek: The Animated Series is available for streaming on Paramount+)
6. ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ (DS9)
To celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary, the DS9 crew travels back to the 23rd century to prevent a Klingon spy from assassinating Captain Kirk. Using seamless digital editing, Sisko and his team are inserted directly into the classic 1960s footage of “The Trouble with Tribbles.” It’s a joyful, technically impressive love letter to the Original Series that remains a fan favorite for its humor and nostalgia.
Behind-the-scenes
ALEXANDER SIDDIG (actor, “Dr. Julian Bashir): “It was such a fun episode and a lovely nod of respect to Gene Roddenberry. We poked fun at ourselves, the genre and Star Trek. And we had those hairdos. Colm Meaney and I looked like the Monkees. I loved doing that show, and the guys from the original series came around and they were great. I’m pretty certain George Takei and Walter Koenig were there, just having a laugh. That episode was also the first time I felt part of history. What’s funny is that on DS9 we had to sullenly fall in line and go, ‘Okay, no one likes the sh** we’re peddling, but we’ll do it anyway.’ Then, with this episode, it was, like, ‘You want us to do Star Trek? This is Star Trek. Old school, big as you like, tribbles all over the place.’ I actually felt like I was doing the Star Trek I grew up with—and then we were back to doing DS9.”
7. ‘Year of Hell’ (VOY)
This harrowing two-part saga follows Voyager as it is systematically dismantled over a year of constant combat with the Krenim, a race using “temporal torpedoes” to erase their enemies from history. While Captain Janeway struggles to keep her dying ship together, she must face a scientist whose obsession with restoring his own lost timeline has caused untold devastation. It is Voyager at its most gritty and desperate.
Behind-the-scenes
BRANNON BRAGA: “One of the criticisms the show got was that there was little carryover from episode to episode. There was a two-part episode called ‘Year of Hell,’ which was arguably the best two-parter we did. My original pitch for that was, ‘Let’s do a season called “The Year From Hell,” where Voyager gets its ass kicked and the entire season is about the ship barely surviving,’ and we would play real continuity between episodes. I don’t remember the specifics, but I know it was rejected and the show did not become serialized. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do a two-parter that takes place over the course of a year,’ and that’s the closest I ever got.”
BRYAN FULLER (story editor; co-creator, Star Trek: Discovery): “One of the things Brannon really wanted to do was acknowledge that they didn’t have a Federation starbase nearby to get backup supplies from, so he wanted to start cobbling together an aesthetic for the ship that was a mixture of new technologies found in the Delta Quadrant. It was that desire to really change the aesthetic of the show and do something different with Star Trek. And what he was told was that Voyager had to look like a starship.” (Star Trek: Voyager is available for streaming on Paramount+)
8. ‘Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’ (Film)
Known affectionately as “the one with the whales,” this film sees the Enterprise crew travel to 1986 San Francisco in a captured Klingon Bird-of-Prey. Their mission is to bring two humpback whales to the 23rd century to answer a probe that is destroying Earth. It’s a lighthearted, fish-out-of-water comedy that proved Star Trek didn’t always need a villain to be a massive success.
Behind-the-scenes
LEONARD NIMOY (director, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) “The feeling on the first film was that we had to do a ‘motion picture.’ Nick Meyer brought a jauntiness back to it. I tried in Star Trek III to do a dignified job of resurrection—to approach it with a sense of mysticism, a sense of wonder and, above all, to really capture the loyalty these people have for each other, their willingness to sacrifice themselves and their careers for the purpose of helping Spock. Having done that, I really wanted to have a good time. Somebody had been constantly dying in the films, and this time I said, ‘Nobody’s going to die. I don’t want anybody hitting anybody,’ or any of that stuff. If anyone was going to be injured, it would be accidental. I insisted that there be no bad guy. We had done two pictures in a row with black-hat heavies, and I didn’t want a villain anywhere.”
“Circumstances would be the problem—lack of awareness, lack of concern. Ignorance would be the problem, not a person. With this one, we really went full circle and came home, which is why, in a sense, we called it The Voyage Home. We’re saying, ‘Enjoy yourself, have a good time, and don’t mind us as we drop off a few ideas along the way.’” (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is available for streaming on Paramount+)
9. ‘Cause and Effect’ (TNG)
This episode pioneered the “time loop” trope in sci-fi years before Groundhog Day made it a cultural staple. The Enterprise is trapped in a loop where it is destroyed in a collision every few hours, with the crew only beginning to realize the truth through mounting feelings of déjà vu. The tension builds masterfully until Data manages to send a subconscious clue to himself across loops to break the cycle.
Behind-the-scenes
“Cause and Effect” originated with writer Brannon Braga, who set out to build a time-loop story that avoided the usual complications of alternate realities or branching timelines. Instead, he structured the episode around repetition—the Enterprise caught in a causality loop, reliving the same catastrophic collision over and over until subtle variations allowed the crew to break free. Braga deliberately anchored the increasingly abstract premise with something grounded and familiar: the senior staff’s poker game. That recurring scene became both a narrative touchstone and a clue-delivery mechanism, allowing audiences to track incremental changes without losing emotional footing. Perhaps most boldly, Braga chose to open the episode with the destruction of the Enterprise itself—a startling cold open designed to immediately grab viewers and signal that this would not be a typical hour of The Next Generation.
10. ‘Star Trek: First Contact’ (Film)
The Borg travel back to 2063 to prevent Zefram Cochrane from making humanity’s first warp flight—the event that attracts the Vulcans’ attention and leads to the birth of the Federation. Picard and his crew must stop the Borg on the Enterprise-E while Riker and Troi ensure that history’s most important flight stays on track. It is a high-octane action thriller that redefined the Borg as a terrifying threat.
Behind-the-scenes
PATRICK STEWART (actor “Captain Jean-Luc Picard”): “Jonathan Frakes [as director] brought a history to the film in a way that no one else could. In fact, the first day he walked onto the set as a director during the making of the series, everyone knew he was indeed a bona fide director. Jonathan had a knowledge of the actors not only in terms of what they could do, but what their potential was as well. The energy he brought to it—the good humor and fellowship—was exemplary. It’s thanks to Jonathan that throughout production our spirits were high and positive. We had the reputation, while doing the show, of being the nicest production to guest on, but also the most undisciplined. That’s a very happy combination.”
JONATHAN FRAKES (director/actor, “William T. Riker”): “It was kind of thrilling—and certainly daunting—to have this as my virgin outing as a film director. It was sometimes overwhelming, exhausting, exhilarating and terrifying, but I’m thrilled with the finished product. It was a great gift, and I thank Rick Berman publicly for trusting me to direct this script. Fortunately, it happened to be a wonderful script, and my job was not to screw it up, because the script holds up much better than any of the other Star Trek movies. It also holds up as a movie that just happens to be a Star Trek movie, which we were all hoping would be the case.” (Star Trek: First Contact is available for streaming on Paramount+)
11. ‘Blink of an Eye’ (VOY)
Voyager becomes trapped in orbit around a planet where time passes thousands of times faster than on the ship. The crew watches as a primitive society develops into a spacefaring civilization in a matter of days, with “The Sky Ship” becoming a central figure in the planet’s mythology and religion. It’s a unique, thoughtful take on time dilation and the unintended consequences of the Prime Directive.
Behind-the-scenes
“Blink of an Eye” was conceived as a classic high-concept science-fiction story built around extreme time dilation. The premise allowed the writers to explore centuries of societal development within a single hour of television. Rather than focusing on a traditional antagonist, the episode examines the unintended consequences of Starfleet’s presence, as the planet’s inhabitants come to mythologize the starship hanging in their sky. The story was designed as a largely self-contained allegory, closer in spirit to the philosophical storytelling of earlier Star Trek than to the increasingly serialized arcs of late-1990s television. At its heart, the episode explores the Prime Directive under extraordinary circumstances, asking what responsibility—if any—observers have when their mere existence alters the course of history.
12. ‘Those Old Scientists’ (SNW)
This modern classic features a crossover between the live-action Strange New Worlds and the animated Lower Decks. Ensigns Boimler and Mariner are sent back through a temporal portal to the era of Captain Pike, resulting in a hilarious clash of personalities and eras. Beneath the meta-humor, it’s a moving tribute to how the “old scientists” of the 23rd century inspired the generations that followed.
Behind-the-scenes
A fitting capstone to any list of Star Trek’s greatest time travel stories is “Those Old Scientists.” Where earlier entries like “The City on the Edge of Forever” or “The Visitor” mined tragedy and sacrifice from temporal displacement, this 2023 installment proves that time travel in Star Trek can also be pure celebration. By transporting animated ensigns Brad Boimler and Beckett Mariner from Star Trek: Lower Decks into live action aboard Captain Pike’s Enterprise, the episode turns the franchise’s own history into narrative fuel. The result is not just a clever gimmick, but a love letter to six decades of continuity, fandom and tonal evolution.
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