History Recap / StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS06E24TimesOrphan

* FiveSecondForeshadowing: O'Brien insists to Molly that he won't send her away anymore and they'll never be separated again. What happens only a short time later? And with a vengeance, since it ends up being for ten years from her point of view rather than just a day.

* ChekhovsGun: Molly puts on a bracelet when getting ready for the picnic, and it helps identify the older version of her.

The O'Briens bring Molly back to a park they build in the station's cargo bay and work on resocializing her. She is afraid of them and only dimly remember a smattering of language, so progress is slow. She recognizes her old doll, Lupi, and begins to speak a few words. She even draws a crude picture of herself and her parents at the picnic. When she asks for "home," the O'Briens take her to their quarters, but she's insistent on returning to Golana, which she now sees as her home. They take her to a holosuite, where she exults in returning to the wild, but the family's purchased time quickly runs out. When O'Brien ends the program, Molly freaks out and rampages through Quark's bar, stabbing a patron.

On the planet, the parents give Molly some survival tools and her doll Lupi, then tearfully bid her farewell. She steps through the reactivated portal and returns to Golana, but the adult Molly discovers the 8-year-old version of her hiding in the cave. As O'Brien prepares to destroy the portal, the adult Molly gives Lupi to her younger self and sends her back through the portal, sending her "home." In the process, the adult Molly ceases to exist.

A team of Starfleet scientists are on the case, and Dax explains that the device is a PortalToThePast built by an extinct species. Molly's been sent 300 years in the past, when the planet was uninhabited. With some science magic, they reactivate the device and beam Molly out, but instead of the cute 8-year-old they know, they pull out a feral adult woman, who promptly goes nuts and needs to be sedated. It seems they pulled Molly out too late, and she's spent years living on the planet by herself.

* BabyTalk: Worf is [[BlatantLies teaching Yoshi a Klingon hand-eye exercise]] by shaking a rattle and going "Gung, gung, gung."

* BittersweetEnding: The O'Briens getting their daughter back at the end is certainly happy, but it's tempered by the fact her adult self ceases to exist because of the resulting paradox. The scene at the end where Young!Molly draws the exact same picture as Adult!Molly is particularly heart-wrenching.
* ButtMonkey: And not just Miles this time. The whole O'Brien clan gets to suffer.

** Spin-off media confirms that time travel disrupts the subject's physical states in a manner that means that, after one trip through time, they must repeat the same process to go back or risk being thrown out of the universe.

* PrecisionFStrike: For British/Commonwealth/Irish viewers, at least: when a failure to repair the time portal causes an energy surge, O'Brien exclaims "Bollocks!" in response.

[[OnceASeason In this episode of "O'Brien Must Suffer"]], Molly gets sucked into an ancient portal device, and returned as an 18 year old who's reverted to a savage mindset. Elsewhere, Worf takes a crack at babysitting Yoshi.

* AdultFear: The O'Briens must not only deal with the grief of losing Molly when she falls through the portal, but the challenges of having a child they can no longer relate to once they manage to get her back. And that's ''before'' being faced with the reality their child is unable to function in civilization, and deciding that her only hope for a full life is to send her back to the past despite knowing they'll never see her again.
** Worf has one of his own while caring for Kirayoshi. The young boy accidentally hurt himself while he and Worf were playing. It was nothing serious, but Worf was scared that Kirayoshi's boo-boo meant he would be unfit to raise children with Jadzia.

* SanDimasTime: O'Brien pulls Molly back after 10 years of her time and just a few hours on his end.