If this episode left any lasting impression with me it’s that Guinan was used as too obvious a plot device for my taste. To me it almost looked like the writers had come up with an interesting idea, but then suddenly realized that they couldn’t “reset” the story and had written themselves into a corner, until someone came up with the bright idea to play the “mysterious alien power” card.

Guinan you say? Ahh, but she’s an El-Aurian, don’t you remember? They are supposed to have this sort of sensitivity to time and space, not available to any other humanoid races. You must have read Travis Anderson’s “Special Investigations Division”? Or, there’s this movie (I don’t remember it since Trek movies as well as the animated series are sort of… off cannon for me).In this movie, a mad scientist wants to destroy the whole solar system or something? Could it be “Nexus”? Anyway, the scientist is an El-Aurian as well. And I’m sure it has been mentioned about Guinan. They’re called listeners and they know more than they’re willing to admit. It doesn’t seem so unbelievable for me that she’d sense something’s not right. Actually, it was one of the brighter spots of the episode for me.

Still… in this episode it just strikes me as wrong that she can recall (even faintly) something that is not supposed to have happened in the timeline she finds herself in. But perhaps I’m just overanalyzing Trek science, which almost always leads to a headache anyway, especially in the case of changed timelines and parallel universes.

But to me it still feels like there was just a bit too much “deus ex machina” in this episode. After all, how could the episode have turned into a “regular” TNG episode if the writers hadn’t pulled the “Guinan trick”?