In his review for "The A.V. Club", Zack Handlen called the episode a "delight" and a "lark". He thought that having Brill film new scenes showed some continuity between the old and the new, and that the special effects worked well enough. He summed it up by saying, "It's not tightly plotted, and once the initial rush of nostalgia fades, there isn't a lot of depth or suspense to replace it. But there are laughs, more than enough to justify the experiment, and the nostalgia never fades away entirely." In the book "Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos", Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen compared the temporal agents seen in "Trials and Tribble-ations" to the police detectives seen in the television series "Dragnet". Gem Wheeler, in her list of the best episodes of "Deep Space Nine" for website Den of Geek, listed "Trials and Tribble-ations" as the sixth best. In a list of the top 100 episodes of the "Star Trek" franchise, "Trials and Tribble-ations" was placed in 32nd place by Charlie Jane Anders at io9.