A Brief History of Star Trek’s Time Travel

With Star Trek: Picard Season 2 taking Jean-Luc on a time-bending adventure, we look at how the franchise has used time-travel in the past, present, and future.

By James Whitbrook Published July 9, 2021 | Comments (0) |

Loops, portals, and branched realities—just three different ways Star Trek has used time travel as a conceit to tell its stories, time and time again. Image: CBS/Paramount

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Time travel and Star Trek have gone hand in temporally adjacent hand since practically the beginning of the franchise. Like time itself, the narrative fluidity time-travel stories provide has allowed Star Trek in all of its iterations to explore its themes and characters in unique and compelling ways over the years. Now that Picard’s second season is diving into that well too, io9 takes a look back at some of the franchise’s best uses of it, and how time travel lets Star Trek shine.