Stardate 47988: Picard finds himself slipping from one time to another: the present - seven years in the past, when he first took command of the Enterprise - and twenty-five years into the future, when his crew has scattered or resigned from Starfleet. He thinks that his time travels may be connected to an anomaly in the Neutral Zone, when suddenly Q appears and puts him on trial like he did seven years ago. Q admits that he is responsible for the time travel but claims that Picard was, is and will be responsible for the death of all humanity. He then takes Picard to primordial Earth where amino acids are supposed to combine, but they don't do that because of an anomaly visible in the sky that Picard is supposed to have caused. The captain and his various crews can't figure out what this anomaly, which is larger in the past, is about, until Picard gets the idea that it's an effect of antitime. Picard will create the anomaly by scanning the same region of space with an inverse tachyon beam in three different times, and this will cause an anomaly to grow backward in time. When finally the damage is repaired in the course of which all three Enterprises have been (temporarily) destroyed, Picard is back in his normal time, and he takes the opportunity to join his senior crew's weekly a game for the first time.

• E25 Previous