future's end star trek voyager

Star Trek: Voyager (TV Series)

Future's end (1996), full cast & crew.

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Future's End, Part II (episode)

• View history
• 1.2 Act One
• 1.3 Act Two
• 1.4 Act Three
• 1.5 Act Four
• 1.6 Act Five
• 2 Memorable quotes
• 3.1 Story and script
• 3.2 Cast and characters
• 3.3 Production and effects
• 3.4.1 Time travel
• 3.4.2 Other series and works
• 3.5 Reception
• 3.6 Video and DVD releases
• 4.1 Starring
• 4.2 Also starring
• 4.3 Guest Stars
• 4.4 Special Guest Star
• 4.5 Co-Stars
• 4.6 Uncredited co-stars
• 4.7 Stunt Doubles
• 4.8 Stand-ins
• 4.9 References
• 4.10 External links

Summary [ ]

Tuvok, disguised in Los Angeles

In the morning in Los Angeles , Rain Robinson puts away items in her Volkswagen van and walks over to Tom Paris , who is working on the van's radio. She nonchalantly notes that Paris must have noticed that thieves tried to steal it the other night, he fought them off, and is now repairing the damage. Paris says that is exactly how it happened. She plays with Paris' combadge while sitting down with him, which he promptly takes back from her. Robinson asks him about his life as a spy , but he cannot tell her any more, since it is " classified. " She recalls that earlier he did not say he was a spy, rather that he was a secret agent, which nobody says. She remarks that he does things like this a lot… almost as if he does not belong in the current era. " Rain, you're fantasizing ", he tells her. " And you're insulting my intelligence! ", she snaps back. She talks of recent events , noting that yesterday she spotted a UFO in orbit and now her life is totally out of control. She tells Paris not to think that she is too stupid to notice this. He apologizes, but also asks her to accept that there are lives at stake and the more questions she asks him, the more difficult she makes it for everyone.

Changing the subject, Paris asks Robinson why she decided to become an astronomer . She recalls that her brother used to have a small telescope barely enough to see the sky in the treehouse next door, but it was enough for her. She remembers catching a glimpse of Saturn 's rings, and that they looked like jewels from a pirate 's treasure. " Good morning, " a voice from behind Paris and Robinson says. Tuvok walks towards the table they are sitting at with chili burritos , Goliath Gulps , and foot -long hot dogs for breakfast . Paris is unable to convert Robinson's radio to a locator signal, calling it " kind of crude. " Tuvok comes up with another option – using the radio dish at the Griffith Observatory , and the same setup that Robinson had to send a message to the USS Voyager in orbit. Tuvok and Paris require her assistance. " Not on an empty stomach , " she says as they begin to eat their "breakfast".

Act One [ ]

Voyager is in orbit of Earth . In the ship's briefing room , the senior staff is gathered. Commander Chakotay mentions that Henry Starling managed to download almost twenty percent of Voyager 's computer core while they were trying to beam the Aeon , the timeship he stole, up to the ship. Chief engineer B'Elanna Torres is trying to replace as many of the programs Starling took as soon as she can but notes that some are simply irretrievable – like The Doctor . Kes tells Captain Janeway that there is literally nothing left of the holographic physician . Janeway says that The Doctor is just only one of their problems. Voyager 's weapons are still offline, Tuvok and Paris are missing somewhere in Los Angeles, and they have been able to confirm Captain Braxton 's hypothesis. If Starling does indeed try to take the Aeon to the 29th century , it will most likely destroy the entire solar system . Ensign Harry Kim has analyzed Braxton's "schematic", written on a dirty canvas, and has found that the temporal technology used in his vessel is incredibly complex. Even if Starling is a genius, as Torres points out, he is not a trained pilot from the 29th century and without the precise calibrations, the timeship will rip the space-time continuum apart . There will not be a 29th century for Earth and Humanity if Starling does time travel to the distant future.

Janeway underscores the importance of capturing the timeship, but Torres reports that Voyager 's long-range transporters are still inoperative. To use transporters, they would have to drop to a low orbit, something which Neelix strongly recommends against. According to the Talaxian , a great deal of the legitimate news organizations have declared the videotaped footage of Voyager flying above Los Angeles to be a hoax, but the United States military is taking the situation much more seriously. Voyager could get intercepted by the Air Force if it descends lower. As Janeway comes up with a plan to get Starling, she is interrupted by a crewmember, informing her they are receiving a message from Lieutenant Tuvok, audio only.

Tuvok reports that he and Paris are currently at the Griffith Observatory in the Hollywood Hills . They have modified the satellite dish transmitter to carry and receive Voyager communication frequencies . However, the connection is terrible. Tuvok informs Janeway that they have become associated with a young woman who works at the Observatory and of her connection to Starling, who supervises her lab. Janeway reveals to Tuvok that Starling has the timeship and he is the one who will cause the annihilation of the solar system. Tuvok agrees that they must try to find a way to stop him. Janeway asks if they can trust Robinson. Seeing that she and Paris seem to be bonding on a " cross-cultural level ", he would have to say yes. Janeway wants Tuvok to ask Robinson if she would be willing to help the Voyager crew.

Meanwhile, at Chronowerx Industries , Henry Starling walks into his office and goes over to his desk. After tapping in a few commands to his keyboard , The Doctor materializes. After asking The Doctor how he has been, he responds to Starling that he finds his interest in his well being to be less than genuine. Starling asks him to be a little more grateful. As indicated in the schematics he took from Voyager , it showed him that The Doctor was stuck in sickbay for 24 hours a day. The Doctor notes that he recently had a severe program loss and is in the process of retrieving his lost memory files, but he has apparently been projected into other locations on occasion. He believes Starling is undoubtedly using a similar procedure. He points to his holographic simulator, which he and his staff use to test new microchip designs. He projected The Doctor through the holographic emitters in his office and notes his program really is not all that sophisticated. The Doctor demands to be brought back to Voyager but Starling tells him he cannot do that, as he has some questions he wants answered.

While The Doctor thinks he has medical expertise that he needs, Starling says that he believes all of Captain Janeway's claims of him causing a disaster is just a smokescreen to steal his timeship. Since the timeship is five hundred years more advanced than anything Voyager has in its possession, he believes that Janeway and crew are attempting to steal it for their own purposes and that he would be an easy target, since they probably consider him a " backwards 20th century Neanderthal who doesn't know what he's got. " The Doctor instead believes that Starling is paranoid and his responses are indicative of bipolar personality disorder. The Doctor recommends he visit a psychotherapist, as there are no shortage of them in Southern California in the late 20th century. He again demands to be returned to his ship. Starling goes to his desk and sits down. He reveals that during his download of Voyager 's computer core, he learned that the ship's weapons are down, the transporter is half-shot, but he did not gain access to all of the personnel files. He asks The Doctor for detailed information on Janeway's psychological profile, since he " must know my enemy. " " I'm a doctor, not a database , " The Doctor retorts. Starling begins to threaten him but The Doctor notes that since he is a hologram , he cannot feel pain nor experience the fear of death , so his threats mean nothing.

The Doctor experiences pain for the first time

Starling taps his keyboard and The Doctor grimaces in extreme pain. Starling taps another key and The Doctor falls to the ground. Starling notes that for a Human to be feeling what The Doctor is currently feeling right now… they would have to be on fire . Starling had reconfigured The Doctor's tactile response sensors for him to feel this way. The Doctor now agrees to cooperating with Starling. Just then, Starling gets called by Dave and is told that Rain Robinson wants to speak to him. He has her put through. Robinson expresses her fear that she will be found soon and she does not know what to do. Near her, Tuvok and Paris are listening in as she speaks to Starling on a cell phone . He tells her to take it easy and asks that she take a taxicab to his office. She refuses and Starling asks where she is. She tells him she is at Metro Plaza and specifically asks him to come get her and not anybody else. He says he will be there soon. Robinson tells Paris and Tuvok that Starling is on his way but that he sounded a little suspicious on the phone. Back at Starling's office, he tells The Doctor to get ready for a little walk. The Doctor incredulously informs him that he cannot go anywhere that does not have a holographic projection system. Starling exchanges looks with Dunbar .

Later, Starling arrives at Metro Plaza, driven by Dunbar in a black car . Starling gets out along with The Doctor, who inexplicably can now exist in an environment without holographic emitters. He wears a small, rectangular device on his left arm while Starling holds a small tube like device in his hand. Tuvok and Paris view them near the car and are utterly baffled by The Doctor's sudden, unexpected appearance.

Act Two [ ]

The Doctor's first use of the mobile emitter

Meanwhile, Chakotay and Torres are in a Class 2 shuttle heading down towards Earth. Torres announces that the shuttle's interferometric dispersion is on-line, which should scramble RADAR from detecting the spacecraft. As well, she has configured the shuttle's deflector shields to disguise their visual profile. Chakotay reports the shuttle's transporter is on-line and that they should be in range in ten minutes. While the shuttle enters Earth's atmosphere , Chakotay points out to Torres that he can see the entire Baja Peninsula from their position. He says he thought he would never see it again after being lost in the Delta Quadrant for the last two years . Torres remembers he trained as a pilot in his first year at the Academy in North America . Chakotay says he also learned how to handle atmospheric storms on Venus and dodged asteroids for a semester in the belt .

Torres remarks that his time at the Academy sounded a lot better than hers; she remembers dodging a few punches in the lab. " Only you, B'Elanna, could start a brawl in Astrotheory 101 , " Chakotay jokes. As the shuttle gets closer to Earth, Torres talks to Chakotay about the possibility of Voyager 's crew being stranded here in the past. Voyager 's first officer says there are still a few isolated places left in the 20th century but they would have to keep low profiles – and get jobs. Chakotay believes he would pursue archaeology or teach at a university . Or, he could participate in digs in Central America , as there were still many important discoveries to be made in this era. He jokingly thinks he could even win a Nobel Prize . Torres thinks she would seek an engineering position as she considers herself to be a highly qualified Klingon . " I'd hire you in a second, " Chakotay says sincerely. Their shuttle begins its descent.

At Metro Plaza, Tuvok scans with his tricorder and looks at Paris. Paris pulls out a cell phone and contacts Chakotay. He tells him that Starling has arrived – with The Doctor. " What?! How is that possible? " Torres asks. Paris does not know but Chakotay announces that the shuttle will be in range in two minutes. The Doctor looks around at his surroundings, trying to not look amazed while Starling observes him, noting that he seemed to be very quiet on the ride over. He says he is not programmed for small talk and assures Starling that it is just another environment for him. Seeing Rain Robinson heading toward them, Starling raises his device. Putting his hand on The Doctor's shoulder, he threatens " If your shipmates start any trouble, you'll be holodust. " Tuvok moves over to Paris and takes his phone. He tells Chakotay that he has triangulated the position of Robinson's van and is uploading it to the shuttle. He should be able to lock onto Starling when he is inside.

Robinson walks up to Starling. He tells her to ask her friends to come out or he will kill The Doctor. She feigns ignorance and claims she does not know what he is talking about. He looks around and gestures her towards his car. She wants to take her van instead but he insists they are taking his car. Paris and Tuvok see this change of plan and Tuvok pulls out his tricorder. Upon approaching Starling's car, Robinson recognizes Dunbar as the man who tried to kill her at the Observatory the day before. Starling insists that he was only trying to rescue her and says he will be taking her to his office where she'll be safe. Tuvok quickly ascertains the coordinates for Starling's car with his tricorder and tells Chakotay to beam him up. Inside Starling's car, he begins to dematerialize as Robinson looks on, terrified. Starling pulls the device he had earlier out of his jacket as he is beginning to disappear. The Doctor tells Robinson to run as he wrestles with Dunbar in the front seat. Torres informs Chakotay that some kind of device Starling has is interfering with their transport. Dunbar is punching The Doctor in the face repeatedly, with no success in knocking him out. The Doctor knocks Dunbar unconscious with one punch, surprising the hologram . He runs out of the car and shortly after, Dunbar drives the Lincoln away in a hurry.

Paris and Tuvok reconvene with The Doctor and Robinson after their escape from Starling. The Doctor explains how he can now exist away from holo-emitters: an autonomous mobile emitter . In short, he is now " footloose and fancy-free. " Back on the shuttle, Chakotay informs Captain Janeway that they have Starling in their pattern buffers but they cannot rematerialize him, since the interference is disrupting the computer pathways. On Voyager 's bridge , Ensign Kim tells the captain that they are close enough to the shuttle to use the short range transporter to get Starling on board. They head to transporter room 1. The shuttle's pattern buffers are purged. However, it is quickly losing altitude. In the transporter room, Janeway sees that Starling has a device he is trying to use to prevent himself from being beamed up. Kim isolates the device and suppresses the amplitude which allows Voyager to beam Starling aboard. He immediately falls unconscious on the transporter pad and Janeway calls Kes for medical assistance.

Chakotay is struggling to maintain control of the shuttle. Propulsion is offline and the shuttle is going to crash on the surface.

Act Three [ ]

Chakotay and Torres are held up in Arizona

Sometime later, Torres awakens in a dimly lit basement full of secondhand items. Her hands and feet are tied up. She finds herself right next to Chakotay who is similarily tied up. Suddenly, two men enter through a door and walk down the stairs towards them, one wielding a shotgun . " This one looks like an Indian . And that one… I don't know what her story is, " one of the men says. The other looks at Torres' cranial ridges with confusion and reaches out to touch them. She loudly growls and he jumps back. The man, identified as Butch , is told to be careful; Torres looks like a fighter. Chakotay asks them who they are and Porter asks him to go first. He asks if they are spying on them and calls Chakotay " chief ". Chakotay chuckles slightly at this and says they were just passing through. Torres adds that they had engine trouble and simply crashed. Butch and Porter have seen the shuttle they were flying in, and deduces that it is a stealth plane from the United States Government , sent to spy on them, as they saw USS on the shuttle and that Torres and Chakotay are wearing military uniforms. Porter calls the federal government "the beast", which Chakotay continues to deny and asks to be taken back to their "plane". At this point, Butch tells Chakotay to shut up and kicks him, which makes Torres reciprocate by knocking him to the ground. " That'll be all! Call for reinforcements, " Porter states, with his shotgun trained on both Starfleet officers. When Butch leaves, Porter claims it will be a long day.

Back in Los Angeles, inside Robinson's van, she goes on and on about what had just happened, such as seeing Starling begin to disappear, which she notes has happened to her with men on a first date, but never literally . While driving, she turns her attention to The Doctor, calling him "Mr. Leisure Suit", due to the appearance of his Starfleet uniform . She recalls him getting punched several times in the car by Dunbar but she can not see any bruises on his face. The Doctor tells her to relax, as she appears to be hallucinating, which she mocks. Paris, sitting in the front seat, apologizes to Robinson for getting her involved in all of this. At this moment, Tuvok receives a call on his phone from Janeway on Voyager . She tells her chief tactical officer that they currently have Starling in their sickbay but they have lost contact with Chakotay and Torres. They were lost somewhere over the state of Arizona . Kim will be transmitting their last known coordinates to Tuvok's tricorder and she orders him to find them. Tuvok suggests that Paris and Robinson head to Chronowerx Industries while he and The Doctor make their way to Arizona to locate Chakotay and Torres.

Back on Voyager , Kes announces to Janeway that Starling had suffered minor synaptic stress during the extended transport, enough to cause him to become unconscious, but she can not detect any permanent damage. Janeway asks Kes to wake him and she does so with a hypospray . Starling awakens and Janeway welcomes him to the 24th century . He searches his jacket pockets for his 29th century tricorder but Janeway took the precaution of removing it from him. He tried to use it to block the transporter from working on him, but, as he points out, it didn't work. Janeway responds that it does work perfectly – he just does not know how to use it properly. Starling asks Janeway to give him some credit, since he did pretty well for a primitive. She says she has won this battle between them and demands he deactivate the force field around Chronowerx housing the timeship. Starling refuses, tells Janeway she is in no position to be making demands and states that he has rigged the timeship to be destroyed if Voyager attempts to go near it or beam it up. If that happens, Los Angeles will look like the face of the moon .

Janeway reacts incredulously to Starling's threats. " You don't care about the future, you don't care about the present, does anything matter to you, Mr. Starling? ", she asks. He cares about the betterment of mankind but Janeway highly doubts that. Starling then reveals his true motivation for going far into the future – to get more technology. He has cannibalized as much as he can from the Aeon but now, there is nothing left to base a commercial product on. The future is just waiting to be exploited for his company. Starling points out that he created the microcomputer revolution. Janeway points out that he did that by using technology he should never have had in the first place. Starling calls that irrelevant, as his products benefit all of Earth. Without him, there would be no laptop computers , Internet or barcode readers . With this new technology he plans to reverse engineer, he can create the next ten computer revolutions. Janeway tells him that if he even attempts to travel into the 29th century, it will cause unimaginable devastation all through the solar system, causing billions of deaths. Starling tells Voyager 's commanding officer that he is willing to take the risk. Janeway quietly tells him that in her time, no Human being would even dare risk the future to gain an advantage in the present. Starling tells her that he cannot worry about the future right now, as he has a company to run and a whole world of people waiting for him to make their lives better. Janeway walks away and asks Voyager 's computer to activate the force field around the surgical bed. Before leaving, she turns to Starling and tells him " Chronowerx stock is about to crash. "

Chakotay and Torres' Class 2 shuttle crashed in Arizona

In Arizona, Porter has a drink and tells Chakotay and Torres about what he considers to be the two true forces in the world at work: the drive toward collectivity and the drive toward individuality. He tells the two they are the former and he is the latter. Torres again tells him they are not from the US Government. Porter rejects this again and tells her that the beast has many heads – and he is looking at one of them. Chakotay tells him that he used to think violence was the way to bring about change once, when he too was part of a revolutionary group but finds it is no longer the way. Chakotay thought he was once a freedom fighter, but notes Porter's gun will ultimately get him nowhere. Suddenly, Butch and three other anti-government followers open the door. He tells him the Feds are coming with three cars and a chopper , just two miles up Edgemont Road . " This is it, men, " he announces. Porter unlocks the door into a storage room and the men pass out weapons. Porter looks to Chakotay and says that his friends seem to still think violence is the way. It is too bad for him, he says.

Act Four [ ]

Back in Los Angeles, Robinson talks about what she has seen in the last day to Paris while they drive through the streets of the city together. She tells him she has seen every episode of Mission: Impossible , and Paris is hardly a secret agent. Paris reiterates that he cannot talk to her about his mission. As a scientist, Robinson cannot help but hypothesize. She thinks about alternate dimensions, close encounters, but Paris dismisses it. She calls Paris' "associates" a motley crew: starting with The Doctor, who she considers to have one of the worst tastes in clothing she has ever seen. She then finds Tuvok to be quite a "freak-a-saurus" and wonders if Paris has ever seen him crack a smile. " Not that I can recall, " he says. When she eventually comes to Paris, she calls him sexy, but in a Howdy Doody sort of way. She also finds him goofy but admits that sometimes she thinks he is the smartest man she has ever met. She calls him dedicated and that he seems to care more about what happens in his mission than what goes on in his own life. He asks if it is really all that unusual. Robinson says it is.

Dunbar tries to find Starling

At Chronowerx Industries, Dunbar is sitting in the cockpit of the Aeon . He has the artificial satellite SATCOM 47 activated in Earth orbit. He asks it to engage a location sweep for Starling. In Voyager 's sickbay, Starling paces around the surgical bed while under the watchful eyes of Crewman Foster and Culhane .

Tuvok contacts Voyager and reports to Janeway that he and The Doctor have successfully made it to Arizona, and they are thirty kilometers northeast of Phoenix, Arizona . Janeway orders them to get to the missing officers as fast as they can. Just then, Ensign Kim reports that an unauthorized transport is in progress to Janeway's shock and Starling is beamed away from sickbay. Kim reports that a satellite Starling has in orbit sent a transporter signal through Voyager 's shields like they weren't even there. Starling is back at Chronowerx and is typing away. He congratulates Dunbar on beaming him back and notes that it is time to get out of here.

Meanwhile, Robinson and Paris are now parked outside of Chronowerx. Paris is about to bid her goodbye. However, she asks if he is busy tomorrow night because she wants to hang with him. Paris tells her he cannot. She asks about the weekend and he is about to say no when she believes he is married . He replies that he is absolutely not, just very busy with his mission. She remarks he must be having to get back to Mars but he says he is going to Saturn instead, recalling back to their conversation earlier in the day. She is about to ask Paris for his phone number when Paris' tricorder detects something. He opens it and sees that it is picking up tachyon emissions coming from a semi truck . He thinks they are moving the timeship to somewhere else. He says "timeship" aloud and Robinson wonders what he is talking about. Paris turns to her and asks if she would not mind "hanging" with him for a little while longer. She smiles.

In Arizona, the authorities yell to Porter that they want the mysterious "aircraft" and the occupants of said aircraft. Porter yells at them to get off his land. Torres, talking to Chakotay, wonders what will happen when the authorities find a half-Klingon inside. Just then, the officer asks who the two men approaching him are. Tuvok's voice is heard, asking the officer to step aside, and the officer gives them a final warning before he is cut off by the sound of phaser fire and gunshots. Porter walks down the stairs towards Butch and says " They've got lasers! A black man and some bald guy! " He takes a defensive position behind some boxes and aims his shotgun at the door. It opens and The Doctor steps inside, armed with a phaser. Porter and Butch unload their ammunition at The Doctor, which harmlessly passes through him and onto the walls behind him. Stunned, Porter says " God in Heaven help us. " " Divine intervention is… unlikely, " The Doctor responds and fires his phaser at both revolutionaries, incapacitating them. He sighs while walking down the stairs and begins freeing Chakotay and Torres. He reports that Tuvok is at the shuttle and is in the process of making repairs. When Chakotay begins to ask how The Doctor is here, he replies that it is a long story but suffice it to say, he's making a house call.

Outside of Los Angeles, Paris and Robinson are pursuing the semi truck. Paris contacts Voyager with his phone. Paris informs Janeway that he and Robinson have turned off the main highway onto a desert road. Robinson grabs the phone from him and tells Janeway herself that there is no traffic on the road currently and the person driving the truck will know they are following him. Janeway thanks Robinson and tells her she'll keep that in mind. Janeway tells Paris that they have scanned the area and detected a small landing area just ahead of them, which may be where Starling intends to launch the Aeon . Janeway reminds Paris that Voyager 's weapons are still off-line and Torres still has not finished repairing the shuttle. It may all be up to the helmsman to stop Starling. Dunbar, who is driving the truck, finally notices the Volkswagen van following him, makes a sharp turn, and pulls out his 29th century phaser. He aims it at the van but misses, thanks to Paris grabbing the wheel and moving it out of the way of the beam.

The Volkswagen continues to follow and Paris asks Robinson to move the van right behind the truck. She finally gets close enough and Paris fires his phaser at one of the tires. It explodes and the truck swerves around. The Volkswagen comes to an abrupt stop. Robinson keeps trying to turn the engine over, and Paris tells her it may be flooded and she should give it a second. Right then, the truck is heading towards the Volkswagen at full speed, intending to smash into it. Paris sees this right in time and yells for Robinson to jump out. They both make it out just before the truck is about to crash into the van, the Class 2 shuttle arrives and fires phasers at the semi truck, destroying it and killing Dunbar.

Chakotay contacts Paris and asks him for his status. Paris says they are fine and commends the shuttle crew for their shooting. Upon inspecting the ruins of the truck, Torres asks if the timeship was supposed to be inside. To confirm, Torres scans the debris . Chakotay finds that a temporal transponder was in the truck, set to give off tachyon signals. Chakotay immediately contacts Voyager and tells Janeway that it was a ruse. Starling will be launching the timeship from a different location.

At Chronowerx, Starling is sitting inside the Aeon and has the hyper-impulse drive engaged. He gives the command " Let's do it. " The timeship takes off through the building's windows, destroying them. As the ship begins to ascend, Starling's face takes on an excited and sinister expression.

Act Five [ ]

Kim reports that the timeship is entering Earth's upper ionosphere . Janeway orders he track Starling's course and that the shuttle return to Voyager immediately. Voyager 's phasers are still off-line. Janeway has armed the ship's photon torpedoes , but they still cannot fire them as the launch activation sequencers are not responding. Kim suggests an alternative plan but Janeway decides there is no time. She leaves him again in command and orders that the access portal to torpedo bay 1 be opened. She is planning to reconfigure a torpedo for a manual launch. Kim warns her that, since the activation sequencers are down, she will have to launch it from inside the tube when it fires. Kim calls Janeway's plan too dangerous because of the plasma exhaust that will result from the torpedo's launch. She overrules him and leaves.

Back on Earth, Torres reports she has the shuttle's transporters back on line and Chakotay tells Paris he will be beaming him aboard shortly. Paris acknowledges and turns to Robinson to say a final goodbye to her. Paris tells her he has never met anyone like her… and he probably never will again. She says likewise and asks him to say hello to Saturn for her. Paris and Robinson share a kiss just before he leaves.

In space , Starling tells the Aeon 's computer to initiate a temporal inversion . On Voyager , Janeway has arrived at torpedo bay 1 and begins the modifications. Kim announces that the timeship has jumped to warp 1. Janeway orders a pursuit course. The away team enters the bridge. The Doctor looks around the command center for Voyager for the first time and tells Kim it is a pleasure to finally be there. Chakotay is briefed about Janeway's plan and tells The Doctor to go down to the torpedo bay, as she will be undoubtedly injured when the photon torpedo is fired. However, The Doctor is not fully knowledgeable about Voyager 's internal layout, so Chakotay orders Ensign Kaplan to go with him.

Starling has engaged his temporal field generator and will be able to open a rift in only seconds. Kim and Torres both report that the rift is unstable and will create a temporal explosion . Tuvok notes that events are occurring exactly as Braxton predicted and theorizes that the disaster may well be inevitable. " Fate, Tuvok? I won't accept that. Close to within ten kilometers. We'll ram him if we have to! ", Chakotay orders Paris.

The timeship is destroyed

The Aeon 's computer reports to Starling that the ship's temporal core has reached cascade potential. The timeship is getting closer and closer to the rift. Janeway taps her combadge and informs Tuvok that the torpedo has been reconfigured for manual launch. She orders Tuvok to arm it and lock onto the Aeon . Before Voyager fires, Chakotay hails Starling. He demands he pull away from the rift. Starling mocks the commander, as his vessel's weapons are still down. He gloats " See you… sometime, " and terminates visual communications. Chakotay, seeing no other choice, tells Janeway to fire as the Aeon begins to enter the rift. Janeway fires the sole torpedo and is knocked out. She has a severe burn on her face.

Braxton arrives to take Voyager back to the 24th century

" Uh-oh! ", Starling exclaims before he is killed by the torpedo hitting the timeship. In a turbolift, The Doctor is scanning Janeway with a medical tricorder and insists she come with him to sickbay for further treatment. She says there will be plenty of time for that later. She and The Doctor enter the bridge. Janeway asks Chakotay if there is any chance of Voyager re-opening the rift. Kim announces that the rift is opening and something is emerging from it – the timeship. Receiving a hail from the vessel, the pilot is revealed to be none other than Captain Braxton. Upon Janeway's recognizing of him, he asks if she knows him. Chakotay says they do, unfortunately. Janeway recalls him trying to destroy Voyager in the 24th century and meeting him as a homeless old man in 1996 . He explains he never experienced that timeline . Braxton says he is here as the Temporal Integrity Commission detected Voyager in the 20th century and he will bring the Starfleet vessel back to its proper time and place to correct that.

Janeway asks that Braxton return them to the 24th century but keep them here in the Alpha Quadrant , as they have been lost in the Delta Quadrant for the past two years. Braxton declines, citing the Temporal Prime Directive . Janeway returns to her chair and reluctantly orders Paris to follow the Aeon in.

In the mess hall, Janeway leads the crew for a toast to the future. She turns to the The Doctor and asks him how long he'll be out and about. The Doctor says his newfound mobility is entirely up to him. Torres is still trying to figure out how exactly the mobile emitter works but downloading The Doctor back into the ship's computer should not pose too much of a problem. The Doctor tells Kes that since he is now able to exist outside of sickbay, her responsibilities there will now increase. She states she is up to the challenge. She wonders about how he will adjust now that there is more to his life than just sickbay. He believes it is nothing he cannot handle and asks Janeway to be assigned quarters . " One step at a time, doctor, " she tells him. Chakotay, Tuvok, and Neelix are gathered elsewhere in the mess hall to listen to Paris. He tells them that back on Earth, Tuvok spoke to a parking enforcement officer who came over to the van and the Vulcan tried to use logic to talk the officer out of giving them a parking citation . When Chakotay asks if it worked, Paris says emphatically, no. " Given Mr. Paris' alleged familiarity with 20th century America, it is a wonder we survived the experience at all, " Tuvok says. When Chakotay and Neelix walk away, Paris asks Tuvok if anyone has told him he is a " real freak-a-saurus. "

Memorable quotes [ ]

" Agent Tuvok, what's up? " " Breakfast is 'up'. "

" Will you please pass me a burrito? "

" They've got lasers! A black man and some bald guy! "

" If my history is accurate, Southern California in the late twentieth century had no shortage of psychotherapists, competent and otherwise. I suggest you find one. Now… return me to Voyager . "

" I'm a doctor, not a database. "

" I've been equipped with an autonomous self-sustaining mobile holo-emitter. In short, I am footloose and fancy free. "

" And you, Mister Leisure-suit. " " There's a name I hadn't considered. "

" What's good for Chronowerx is good for everybody. "

" Chronowerx stock is about to crash. "

" Activate hyper-impulse. " " Hyper-impulse drive engaged. " " … Let's do it. " " Command confirmed. "

" Talk about a motley crew. We have The Doctor – a guy with the worst, worst taste in clothing I've ever seen. Tuvok – what a freak-a-saurus! Has the guy ever cracked a smile? " " Not that I can recall. " " And you, Tom Paris – hmm, sexy, in a Howdy Doody sort of way, pretty goofy, although sometimes I think you're the smartest man I've ever met. "

" God in Heaven help us. " " Divine intervention is unlikely. "

" Doctor, how – " " It's a long story, commander. Suffice it to say, I'm making a house call. "

" Doctor, get down there. " " How exactly do I get to torpedo tube 1? "

" Fire! " (The Aeon 's computer beeps) " Uh oh! "

" Tuvok, has anyone ever told you you're a real freak-a-saurus? "

Background information [ ]

Story and script [ ].

• The "Future's End" story arc originally included not only a second part but also a third and, at one point, a fourth. Supervising producer Brannon Braga explained, " Actually it started out as a four-part arc on Earth in 1996. The studio had some problems with that. They felt that it was too dangerous to attempt. The studio is not a firm believer [even] in two-parters. So we ended up reducing it to three parts, then two. I think it was a good idea, because it really made it a very taut and packed story line. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 109) On the other hand, Braga also stated, " Part of me wishes we had still done the four-parter, because we had Tuvok and Paris get trapped in a convenience store while it was being ambushed by gang members. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 84)
• Moments after escaping from Starling and Dunbar in this episode, The Doctor approaches Rain Robinson and smells a tree behind her. This plot point was devised by actor Robert Picardo , taking inspiration from his own childhood. " I added that, " he related. " Because I remember when I was a very young child, we took home movies of all the kids together feeding the ducks and all that. And all the other children were smelling the flowers and I'm just busy smelling a leaf. You know what I mean? I'm smelling something that's like a dead piece of branch, because I didn't distinguish between smelling a part of the plant and another part. I was imitating the behavior, but smelling the wrong thing. That kind of stuck in my head. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 14 , p. 17)
• The subplot involving the capture of Chakotay and Torres by an anti-government group originally featured much more in the episode's plot than it ultimately does. " They had to condense it, " director Cliff Bole remarked. " Basically, those were the Freemen, the guys in Montana . That could be a whole script! We had to just nail it for a vignette. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 15 )
• Some consideration went into the possibility of having Rain Robinson aboard Voyager , but this idea was vetoed by executive producer Rick Berman . Joe Menosky remembered, " Rick hated the idea. He just said, 'Forget it.' So we didn't do it. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 109)
• Brannon Braga cited this episode's vehicular activities as bigger action set pieces than had been usual for Star Trek . Referring to the writing team of Star Trek: Voyager , he stated, " We conceived of big action sequences […] And we crafted big action set pieces like the chase between a Mack truck, a shuttlecraft, and a Volkswagen van. " ( Star Trek: Voyager Companion  (p. ? ))
• The final draft of this episode's script was submitted on 15 August 1996 . [1]

Cast and characters [ ]

• In this episode, Henry Starling fits The Doctor with a mobile autonomous holographic emitter, allowing The Doctor to freely move about, outside of Voyager 's sickbay and holodecks, and even outside of the ship itself. Robert Picardo noted, " I'm mobile. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 91) Picardo had, during the second season of Star Trek: Voyager , suggested that his character of The Doctor go on a planetary mission. Shortly after completing work on that season, Picardo remarked, " I would be in some altered state, I would assume, because they would have to portabilize him. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 28, No. 4/5, p. 97) Furthermore, Picardo had also suggested – during that same season – that The Doctor should be modified for away mission usage in pieces, so that (for a while), his head alone would be sent on such missions. ( Delta Quadrant , pp. 150-151) Despite these suggestions – and much in the same ways as Rene Auberjonois reacted to Odo finding his people (in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ) – Picardo initially felt that giving The Doctor a mobile emitter would be a huge mistake and would ruin the character, before the actor eventually realized that it was the right decision. " I remember thinking it was a bad idea to give him mobility outside of sickbay, " Picardo stated. " I thought that part of the audience's interest in the character was because of the limitations the character had and the challenges he had to face in trying to make the best of his limitations. But Brannon Braga was really right in that idea of giving me the mobile emitter. It opened up whole new storytelling vistas and I was the first to tell him that I was wrong – that the mobile emitter was a great idea. " ( Star Trek: Voyager Companion  (p. ? )) Picardo also recalled, " I was concerned about the Portable Holographic Emitter because I didn't want to mess with a winning combination. The audience seemed to embrace The Doctor's character during the show's first seasons, and so much of his character is based on the notion that he is severely limited and has to cope with limitations such as the fact that he can only exist in Sickbay or in the Holodeck, and that he's different to an organic being. So it seemed to me that if we took the risk of making him more like everyone else, we were damaging part of his uniqueness. Fortunately, that does not seem to have been the case […] I am very happy that I was wrong about the Portable Emitter. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 30 , p. 17)
• Robert Picardo regretted that a joke he devised could not be included in this episode. " One of the great jokes I wanted to do this year but didn't get the chance to, " a laughing Picardo explained, at the end of the third season, " was that the first time I appeared on the bridge, to subconsciously relax in the captain's chair. You know, The Doctor comes on the bridge, decides that the captain's chair is the best place to see what's going on, and sits there. And then, Captain Janeway sees what he's doing and says, 'What the hell's going on?' But it just didn't fit into that episode, because there was so much else going on. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 30 , p. 17)
• In general, Robert Picardo enjoyed working on this episode's two-parter. When asked about favorite episodes at the 2001 Galaxy Ball charity Star Trek convention , Picardo commented, " 'Future's End' was one I really enjoyed. Kate [Mulgrew] and I were really close – I look back at that with fond memories. " ( Star Trek Magazine issue 89, p. 32) A certain part of this installment that Picardo liked was when The Doctor smells the tree, a moment that Picardo referred to as "touching." ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 14 , p. 17)
• Henry Starling actor Ed Begley, Jr. enjoyed working on this episode as well as the previous installment, and felt that this episode's existence was warranted. He enthused, " I loved that I got to battle the Voyager people for two episodes and that I put up a pretty good fight […] It was a very good story, worth spreading over two shows. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 11 ) Begley also said, " I thought it was great that Starling got to challenge them for two episodes. I have to say that he did pretty well for a man who was really just a 20th Century Neanderthal! " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 26 , p. 60)
• Although Ed Begley had been unfamiliar with Kate Mulgrew before guest-starring in this episode's duology, their work together here familiarized the actress to him. " I feel like I know her now, " Begley said, having worked on this installment's two-parter. " She's wonderfully talented–a very bright and funny lady. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 11 )
• Alternatively, Ed Begley had appeared alongside Robert Picardo once before. " I had […] worked with Bob Picardo on a St. Elsewhere episode, " Begley explained. ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 11 ) Despite this connection, he only learned of it while performing here. " Bob told me I was actually very nice to him then, " Begley laughed. " I don't remember it, but he certainly returned the favor to me on 'Future's End.' " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 26 , p. 60)
• Ed Begley enjoyed working with all involved in the making of the episode, finding that they made him feel extremely welcome, and he very much enjoyed his time on Star Trek: Voyager . ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 26 , p. 60) In summation, he noted, " I had a terrific time. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 11 ) He also remarked, " I just had the best time. I really did. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 26 , p. 60)

Director Cliff Bole with actors Tim Russ and Robert Duncan McNeill during the production of this episode

• Director Cliff Bole inherited the guest stars for this episode from David Livingston (who directed the first half of this episode's two-parter). However, Bole was admittedly perplexed that Ed Begley, Jr. had been cast as Henry Starling. Bole explained, " The show had already been cast; I just picked it up when I came in to prep Part II. I like to be part of the initial casting on shows I direct. In this case, I would have had something to say about their choices. Ed was different, but Ed is Ed. I don't think he was the right man for the part. But he brought something different to the table, and it worked. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 15 )
• Actress Sarah Silverman found that, like her character of Rain Robinson in this installment, she herself became more familiar with the Voyager personnel as time passed. " In both cases, on the show and in real life, " Silverman noted, " I got to know these people and what their lives were like and become a part of it. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 61)
• Regular cast member Robert Duncan McNeill liked the nature of the romantic relationship that developed between his character of Tom Paris and Rain Robinson. " That was a lot of fun, " the actor enthused. " I got to have a romantic interest that was very innocent. It was a nice change. That's something [we'd] been talking about for two years, how to deal with Paris' interest in the ladies without making him look like a cad. They did a really nice job of giving me a love interest that was sincere and affectionate without recalling all my casual remarks about the Delaney sisters . " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 11 )

Production and effects [ ]

• Several scenes of this episode, as with the previous one, were shot on location. For this installment, the locations used were in Los Angeles and in the Mojave Desert . The chance to go on location was enjoyed by cast and crew alike, including Cliff Bole. ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 15 , p. 34)
• The "park" in this episode's teaser is actually an area of the Paramount Pictures lot. Offices that can be seen in the background are actually the studio's administrative offices. ( Star Trek: Voyager Companion  (p. ? ))
• The square where The Doctor meets up with Paris, Tuvok, and Rain Robinson is actually outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. [2] (X)
• The scene set inside Henry Starling's car was filmed on a set. The production of that scene provided Sarah Silverman, who had often heard about the extreme level to which Ed. Begley, Jr. was an environmentalist, with an amusing anecdote about the actor. " I was so happy to be able to take home to my friends the quintessential Ed Begley moment, " Silverman recalled. " We were sitting in the back of a car on set but in between takes. He took out his cellular phone, dialed a number, and I heard him go, 'Hi. It's Ed. Listen, could you go to the garage and unplug my car?' He has an electric car! I just sat there silently thinking, 'Now I can officially finish this job and have a great story to tell my friends!' " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 62)
• At least part of the supposedly-Arizonan desert road was actually near the city of Victorville , situated in the Mojave Desert. ( Delta Quadrant , p. 151) The filming of the exploding truck, was near Palmdale . ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 16 )
• This episode, in common with the previous installment, uses modified shots of the Transit Building in Los Angeles to depict Chronowerx headquarters. One of the shots in this episode was especially modified for a particular scene. Visual effects supervisor Ronald B. Moore recalled, " We had the spaceship that had to bust out of a building […] We did the Transit Building, downtown L.A. It became the building and then we were able to manipulate it for the plane to fly out. " ( Red Alert: Amazing Visual Effects , VOY Season 3 DVD special features) Moore did not have enough time to add dust and debris into this shot, a fact he ultimately regretted. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 98)
• Before working on this episode (and the rest of Voyager 's third season), CGI supplier Foundation Imaging had regularly worked on Babylon 5 , although CGI Effects Director Ron Thornton thought the opportunities that Foundation was presented with on that series paled to the work provided to the company for this episode's adventurous two-parter. Thornton remarked, " We would never have had the opportunity on Babylon 5 to do shots like a truck exploding out near Palmdale, so it was very cool to do it on Voyager . " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 16 )

Continuity and trivia [ ]

• This is the last of eight episodes in which The Doctor leaves sickbay without use of the mobile emitter, which he obtains in this episode. Previously, The Doctor was able to regularly visit the holodeck (" Heroes and Demons ", " Projections ", " Twisted ", and " Lifesigns "), had been projected into Engineering (" Persistence of Vision "), was able to connect to an alien simulated environment hosted in a cargo bay (" The Thaw "), and had once been accidentally projected into space (" Basics, Part I ")
• Following its introduction here, The Doctor's mobile emitter would remain in place until the series' end. However, Robert Picardo initially doubted that the device would be reused. Following the production of this episode but still during the third season, he speculated, " I don't think we'll be able to repeat the method of how they got me off the ship. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 10 )
• The Aeon 's cockpit would later be reused in " Fury " and " Retrospect ".
• Janeway's request to Captain Braxton represents the eighth time besides the series premiere (after " Eye of the Needle ", " Prime Factors ", " The 37's ", " Cold Fire ", " Threshold ", " Death Wish " and " False Profits ") that the Voyager crew is presented with the possibility of returning home much faster than by conventional warp travel. In this case, Braxton invokes the Temporal Prime Directive to deny the request.
• The Doctor mentions having recently undergone a severe programming loss, and that he is still in the process of recovering his memory files, referencing events that take place in " The Swarm ".
• The Doctor states in this episode that he "experiences neither pain, not fear of death". However, he experienced pain once before during a holodeck malfunction in " Projections ". He may have forgotten this due to his memory loss as depicted in " The Swarm ", or may be referring to his regular programming.
• Chakotay mentions to his captor in this episode that he "was a freedom fighter", referencing his time in the Maquis.
• The Doctor's ongoing quest to adopt a name is referenced in this episode, when Rain calls him "Mr Leisure Suit" and The Doctor responds, "there's a name I hadn't considered".
• Voyager uses a photon torpedo in this episode, having previously used one in " Basics, Part I ". This brings the total number of torpedoes used to 18, of the irreplaceable complement of 38 established in " The Cloud ".
• Starling's company is called "Chronowerx," yet the inside of the timeship bay is emblazoned with "Chronowerks".

Time travel [ ]

• These episodes present a different interpretation of temporal causality than " Time and Again ". In both episodes, a terrible disaster occurs, someone returns to the past and ends up trying to prevent the same disaster. In the season one episode, when the disaster is averted, the characters lose their memories and everything is exactly as it was before the disaster. Here, the characters retain their memories and are still in the 20th century after Braxton's ship is destroyed.
• Before returning to the 24th century, Voyager leaves some technology behind, including Captain Janeway's combadge (in part 1), her tricorder (in part 1), and The Doctor's holographic combadge. Considering that everything was undone when Voyager destroyed the timeship, these may have been erased from existence on Earth as well. Admiral Kirk and his crew also left technology behind in the 20th century (a phaser and a communicator) in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home .
• Although this episode posits 29th century Federation technology as having been responsible for the microcomputer revolution of the 1990s, the fact that the episode ends with Janeway apparently bringing that timeline to an end makes the reasoning no longer applicable. Robert Picardo came up with another explanation for the technological revolution: " Bill Gates is the guy that plundered the other alien ship that crashed, since the one that Ed Begley Jr. plundered now never happened. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 110)
• The Voyager crew's apparent willingness to keep and use The Doctor's mobile emitter seems to be at odds with Janeway's earlier concern for polluting the timeline.

Other series and works [ ]

• Star Trek: First Contact – which includes the Borg Queen threateningly saying the line, " Watch your future's end. " – was released in the week after this episode first aired.
• Rain, Dunbar, Butch, and Porter all later made appearances in the novel The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Volume Two .
• Rain claims to have seen "every episode of Mission: Impossible . " Leonard Nimoy ( Spock ) played "The Great Paris" on this Desilu series following the cancellation of Star Trek: The Original Series (albeit, for only two seasons).

Reception [ ]

• Regarding the success of the two-part episode of which this forms the second half, Brannon Braga enthused, " It was a charming, fun episode. " ( Star Trek: Voyager Companion  (p. 121))
• Similarly, Rick Berman once described the "Future's End" two-parter as "wonderful". ( Star Trek: Communicator  issue 109 , p. 14)
• Other members of cast and crew – including Janeway actress Kate Mulgrew, Tuvok actor Tim Russ , Chakotay actor Robert Beltran and executive producer Jeri Taylor – also liked this episode's two-parter. ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 14 , p. 32; Star Trek: Voyager Companion  (p. 179); Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 93; Star Trek Monthly  issue 31 , p. 11) Kate Mulgrew counted both parts of the "Future's End" duology as being among her eight favorite installments of Star Trek: Voyager 's third season. ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 14 , p. 32) Tim Russ opined, " It was a great two-parter. " ( Star Trek: Voyager Companion  (p. 179)) Citing the two-parter as one of the highlights of Voyager 's third season, Jeri Taylor commented, " I think that probably many people's favorite was the 'Future's End' two-parter where the crew came back to Earth. That really was so much fun. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 31 , p. 11)
• This episode achieved a Nielsen rating of 5.8 million homes, and a 9% share. [3] (X) Jeri Taylor once reckoned, " 'Future's End, Part II' […] is the highest I think we had all year. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 107) However, this episode was actually the second most watched episode of Star Trek: Voyager 's third season (on first airing), topped by the third season premiere " Basics, Part II ".
• Cinefantastique rated this installment 3 and a half out of 4 stars, referring to the episode's duology as " A terrific two-parter that was great fun. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 97)
• Star Trek Magazine scored this episode 5 out of 5 stars, defined as " Gold -pressed latinum !". ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 26 , p. 59)
• The unauthorized reference book Delta Quadrant (p. 152) gives this installment a rating of 8 out of 10.
• Brannon Braga was extremely pleased with the response to this episode. He noted, " 'Future's End,' although it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, was a critical success, and a ratings success in a big way. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 84)
• The fans of Star Trek: Voyager wholeheartedly embraced, or at least seemed to embrace, the concept of the mobile emitter and its use by The Doctor. At the end of the third season, Robert Picardo remarked, " The audience seem to enjoy seeing me on Away Missions and in other parts of the ship […] I'm […] very pleased that the audience hasn't written in hundreds of thousands of letters complaining that by using 29th Century technology in the 24th Century, we're clearly breaking the Temporal Prime Directive. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 30 , p. 17)
• One aspect of fan reaction to this episode that Joe Menosky became aware of was disappointment that Rain Robinson does not get to beam aboard Voyager in the episode's two-parter. ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 109) One such fan was writer Lou Anders , who had been secretly hoping that Robinson would somehow join the crew at the episode's end. ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 62) In fact, Rick Berman ultimately regretted that the writing team of Star Trek: Voyager had not gone ahead with bringing Rain aboard the ship. Joe Menosky remembered, " I think in retrospect, after the whole thing was done, Rick said, 'Maybe it would have been OK if we would have had her.' " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 109)
• Both Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor believed this episode's two-parter had an impact on subsequent installments of Star Trek: Voyager . Braga noted, " We began to hit our stride with 'Future's End'. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 34 , p. 13) Additionally, he observed, " I think, after the first two-parter we did together – which was a time travel show, I think, called 'Future's End' – it was just so much fun to paint on a bigger canvas. " ( Braving the Unknown: Season Three , VOY Season 3 DVD special features) He also said of the "Future's End" two-parter, " That was really, the turning point, when Voyager became a little bit more fun again. I think I speak for everyone here, in terms of the season. The show kind of started to rejuvenate, and we were doing much more what we wanted to do. " ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 109) In agreement, Jeri Taylor described this episode's two-parter as "the show that kind of began to swing us back to a more adventure-oriented sense of fun." ( Cinefantastique , Vol. 29, No. 6/7, p. 84)
• Straight after working on this episode, Sarah Silverman appeared on The Larry Sanders Show . " I actually did 'Future's End' and Larry Sanders back to back, " she remarked, " which were unbelievably opposite experiences, although they were both a blast. Another character from Larry Sanders is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Penny Johnson – and we were talking about [the preciseness required of the dialogue in Star Trek ]. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 61)
• Also after appearing in this episode, Sarah Silverman was surprised by the popularity of both Star Trek in general and this installment's two-parter in particular. " I'm shocked , " she exclaimed, " because I can't believe how many people watch that show. I've never been recognized so often for one or two shows. I was walking out of this studio to my car, and there was some guy building sets, with his back to me, and I said, 'Excuse me, do you know what time it is?' He went, 'Rain Robinson! You're Rain Robinson! I recognized you from your voice.' There are a lot of Trekkies out there that you never know. " ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 62)
• Following his work on this episode's two-parter, Ed Begley, Jr. considered returning to Star Trek . " Who knows? Maybe I'll do another Star Trek in the future, " he speculated. " Considering how much I enjoyed 'Future's End,' I would certainly welcome the opportunity. " ( The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine  issue 11 ) This episode and the previous one constitute his only appearances on Star Trek .
• Similarly, Sarah Silverman decided that, although she would welcome the opportunity to reprise her role of Rain Robinson if a credible means presented itself (an opportunity that, ultimately, never came to pass), she would be too scared to join the main cast if Rain became a member of Voyager 's crew, as Silverman was generally very anxious about commitment. ( Star Trek Monthly  issue 25 , p. 62)

Video and DVD releases [ ]

• UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 3.5, 7 April 1997
• In feature-length form, as part of the UK VHS release Star Trek: Voyager - Movies : Volume 1 (with "Basics"), 14 August 2000
• As part of the VOY Season 3 DVD collection

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

• Kate Mulgrew as Captain Kathryn Janeway

Also starring [ ]

• Robert Beltran as Commander Chakotay
• Roxann Dawson as Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres
• Jennifer Lien as Kes
• Robert Duncan McNeill as Lieutenant Tom Paris
• Ethan Phillips as Neelix
• Robert Picardo as The Doctor
• Tim Russ as Lieutenant Tuvok
• Garrett Wang as Ensign Harry Kim

Guest Stars [ ]

• Sarah Silverman as Rain Robinson
• Allan G. Royal as Braxton
• Brent Hinkley as Butch
• Clayton Murray as Porter

Special Guest Star [ ]

• Ed Begley, Jr. as Henry Starling

Co-Stars [ ]

• Susan Patterson as Ensign Kaplan
• Christian R. Conrad as Dunbar
• Majel Barrett as Computer Voice

Uncredited co-stars [ ]

• Bobby Baier as militia member
• Majel Barrett as Narrator
• Debbie David as Russell
• Damaris Cordelia as Foster
• Andrew English as operations officer
• Tarik Ergin as Ayala
• Tim Garner as militia member
• Jim James as militia member
• Julie Jiang as operations lieutenant junior grade
• Susan Lewis as operations officer
• Louis Ortiz as Culhane
• Jennifer Riley as sciences officer
• Richard Sarstedt as William McKenzie
• Unknown performers as Los Angeles citizens

Stunt Doubles [ ]

• Bobby Burns as stunt double for Brent Hinkley
• Brett Jones as stunt double for Robert Duncan McNeill
• Patricia Tallman as stunt double for Sarah Silverman

Stand-ins [ ]

• Debbie David – stand-in for Robert Duncan McNeill and Brent Hinkley
• Sue Henley – stand-in for Kate Mulgrew
• Susan Lewis – stand-in for Roxann Dawson and Sarah Silverman
• John Parsons – stand-in for Ed Begley, Jr.
• Lemuel Perry – stand-in for Tim Russ
• J.R. Quinonez – stand-in for Robert Picardo
• Jennifer Riley – stand-in for Jennifer Lien
• Richard Sarstedt – stand-in for Robert Beltran and Christian R. Conrad
• Simon Stotler – stand-in for Ethan Phillips and Allan G. Royal
• John Tampoya – stand-in for Garrett Wang

References [ ]

20th century ; 24th century ; 2371 ; 29th century ; 30th Street West ; Alpha Quadrant ; Arizona ; asteroid ; Astrotheory 101 ; astronomer ; astronomical laboratory ; Baja Peninsula ; Bank of America Plaza ; barcode ; bar code reader ; Beretta 92 ; bipolar personality disorder ; burn ; California ; car ; cellular phone ; Central America ; chief ; chili burrito ; citation ; Class 2 shuttle ( unnamed ); Colt AR-15 ; communication frequency ; damage ; debris ; Delta Quadrant ; dilophosaurus ; divine intervention ; Dodger Stadium ; Dorothy Chandler Pavilion ; Earth ; Edgemont Road ; electric fan ; enemy ; fast food ; fear of death ; Feds ; Figueroa at Wilshire ; figuratively ; first year cadet ; foot ; Ford Crown Victoria ; Ford Tempo ; fountain ; Franchi SPAS-12 ; freedom fighter ; freakasaurus ; God ; Goliath Gulp ; Grand Park ; Griffith Observatory ; Heaven ; helicopter (aka chopper ); Highway 101 ; Hollywood ; Hollywood Hills ; hologram ; holographic projection system ; holographic simulator ; homeless ; hot dog ; Howdy Doody ; hyper-impulse drive ; Indian ; interferometric dispersion ; International 8300 ; internet ; ionosphere ; John Ferraro Building ; Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration ; Klingon ; landing field ; laptop computer ; laser ; Lincoln ; Lincoln Town Car ; logic ; long range transporter ; Los Angeles ; Los Angeles City Hall ; Los Angeles County Department of Health Services Building ; Magnifying glass ; Mars ; Marvins Hot Dogs ; Mazda GLC ; Metro Plaza ; microchip ; microcomputer revolution ; Militia ; Mission: Impossible ; Mister Leisure Suit ; mobile emitter ; motley crew ; mutant lizard ; Neanderthal ; night ; nightmare ; Nissan Sentra ; Nobel Prize ; North America ; northeast ; pain ; paranoia ; parking enforcement officer ; pattern buffer ; peace symbol ; personnel file ; Phoenix ; psychological profile ; psychotherapist ; pirate ; pushcart ; RADAR ; ram ; refractor ; Robinson's brother ; SATCOM 47 ; satellite ; satellite dish ; Saturn ; sexy ; sleep ; short range transporter ; small talk ; Sol system ; Sol system asteroid belt ; Soviet Union ; space-time continuum ; Starfleet Academy ; Starling location sweep ; status report ; stealth ; stealth plane ; stereo ; stock ; storm ; Sun of May ; surface street ; synaptic stress ; tachyon ; tactile response sensor ; taxicab ; telephone ; teleporter ; telescope ; temporal core ; temporal field generator ; Temporal Integrity Commission ; temporal inversion ; Temporal Prime Directive ; temporal transponder ; toast ; Toyota Avalon ; Toyota Camry ; Toyota Celica ; Toyota Cressida ; traffic ; transceiver ; transporter buffer ; transporter lock ; Transporter Room 1 ; transporter signal ; treasure ; treehouse ; tricorder ; truck ; turbolift ; UFO ; unconsciousness ; United States Air Force ; United States Government ; United States military ; USS ; van ; Venus ; Volkswagen Type 2 ; Vulcan ; weapon ; Wells Fargo Center ; World Trade Center ; Westin Bonaventure Hotel

External links [ ]

• "Future's End, Part II" at StarTrek.com
• " Future's End " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• " Future's End " at Wikipedia
• " "Future's End, Parts 1 and 2" " at MissionLogPodcast.com , a Roddenberry Star Trek podcast
• 3 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

• More to Explore
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Published Nov 13, 2014

18 Years Later... Voyager Two-Parter "Future's End," with Sarah Silverman

And then there was that time Sarah Silverman was on Star Trek ... Wait, what? Sarah Silverman was on Star Trek ? Some of you are saying, "Come on, everybody knows that." And, sure, longtime Trek fans, Voyager diehards and, of course, Sarah Silverman aficionados surely know that the funny lady appeared on Trek, but for those who don't... yes, a very young Silverman played Rain Robinson in the Voyager episodes, " Future's End, Part I " and " Future's End, Part II ," back in 1996. In fact, "Part II" debuted 18 years ago today. The character was a human scientist tasked with searching for extraterestrials as part of Earth's SETI program, and it was she who picked up Voyager's warp signal, triggering a series of events involving Henry Starling (Ed Begley Jr.), the timeship Aeon, Earth's possible destruction and a kiss between Robinson and Tom Paris.

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Recap / Star Trek: Voyager S3E8 "Future's End"

Edit locked.

The one with an evil version of Doctor Ehrlich , and Sarah Silverman .

This episode has the following tropes:

• Accidental Time Travel : Given that Braxton was trying to destroy Voyager , not send it (or himself) back in time.
• Aliens Steal Cable : Voyager herself does this, with Neelix and Kes doing the monitoring. And of course, they both get addicted to soaps .
• Apocalypse How : Earth's solar system in the 29th Century was/will be obliterated by Starling stupidly flying the time ship there without properly calibrating it.
• Applied Phlebotinum : Starling discovers and downloads Voyager 's Emergency Medical Hologram, which he projects using the holographic system in his office . He demands the Doctor come with him as a hostage, which Doc points out is impossible. Cue the Doctor stepping out of Starling's limousine, staring in awe and delight at everything around him. It's all thanks to a piece of 29th Century technology called a "mobile emitter", which the Doctor wears on his arm and can store and project his entire program.
• Artistic License – Geology : It is mentioned by Janeway that during an earthquake, half of California sunk into the ocean. While this is a popular notion , the San Andreas fault is actually a strike-slip fault, meaning that instead of sinking, the Los Angeles area would instead be moved upward.
• Artistic License – Physics : When Voyager makes her low-level flight over Los Angeles, she's traveling at impulse speeds (which are well over the speed of sound), yet there's no indications of any sonic booms from an object the size of a modern-day aircraft carrier moving at supersonic (if not hypersonic) speeds through the lower atmosphere.
• Asteroid Thicket : Chakotay mentions that he spent part of his pilot training dodging asteroids in the belt.
• Attack Hello : Braxton doesn't even try talking to Voyager . He just blasts away with a Wave-Motion Gun and only talks because they're able to knock it out temporarily.
• Batman Grabs a Gun : After being punched several times by Butch, to no effect, the Doctor punches out Butch — a personal first, and very uncharacteristic for a medical hologram programmed to take the Hippocratic oath.
• Battle Discretion Shot : Tuvok and Doc in the phaser battle with whomever was outside the militia hideout.
• Beard of Sorrow : Spending nearly 30 years in the 20th century really hasn't done Braxton any favors.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished : Janeway gets some fairly extensive first-degree burns on the right side of her face when she launches a photon torpedo from inside the tube .
• Big Damn Kiss : You just know Tom and Rain are going to end their partnership with one.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands : Tuvok hits Dunbar's super-phaser, giving him, Tom, and Rain time to escape.
• Blatant Lies : Rain Robinson gets annoyed at the increasingly ridiculous fibbers she's being told by our heroes. Tuvok's Pointy Ears are a family trait; he's very sensitive about them. Tom Paris claims they're secret agents and the so-called UFO she detected is actually a KGB satellite. Rain has to inform Voyager 's " expert " on this century that the USSR broke up five years ago. Paris: That's what they want you to think!
• Bond One-Liner : "Divine intervention is unlikely."
• Brick Joke : Tuvok, the "freakasaurus".
• Broad Strokes : Because their surveys had shown most people who watched the series weren't hardcore Trekkies, the producers decided to just leave out all reference to the Eugenics Wars and have events take place in the contemporary Earth the viewers were familiar with , rather than confuse them with a Great Offscreen War that was only mentioned in a single Original Series episode (later episodes in Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek Into Darkness would mention the wars without specific dates ). While the changes to the timeline could mean that these events never happened , there's a model of the S.S. Botany Bay in Rain's room, which fits with a later Expanded Universe trilogy Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars that tried to handwave the issue as a Secret War amid actual conflicts of the 1990's.
• California Collapse : Janeway mentions an earthquake that caused the Los Angeles region to sink under 200 meters of water to become one of Earth's largest coral reefs.
• All the way to the TOS episode "Space Seed" . Rain has a model of a DY-100 interplanetary spaceship, canonically in use in 1996, in her office.
• Rain also has a Talosian figure on her desk...
• Janeway complains that using 20th Century technology is like using " stone knives and bear skins ".
• While trying to scan past one of Starling's force fields, Chakotay can't find a control panel or an access port .
• Janeway has to adapt a photon torpedo manually .
• Captain Crash : Chakotay crashes yet another shuttle, right after boasting of his piloting skills at Starfleet Academy.
• Neelix and Kes are monitoring TV broadcasts. Would that include a popular television franchise called Star Trek ?
• Rain mentions watching Mission: Impossible , made by the same studio as Star Trek: The Original Series and sharing several production staff and actors including Leonard Nimoy (Spock).
• Humorously averted; the crew beam down in 20th Century dress, but on seeing the denizens of the Santa Monica boardwalk, Tuvok states that they could've worn their Starfleet uniforms and no-one would've noticed. Also a Shout-Out to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in which the Enterprise crew just wore their regular off duty 23rd century outfits with only the rank insignia removed in 1980s San Francisco.
• Tuvok's statement is mostly confirmed later when the Doctor steps into a public square in his uniform and no one so much as raises an eyebrow at him (though Rain later refers to him as "Mr. Leisure Suit " and says he has the worst fashion sense she's ever seen). Also, the survivalists evidently assume that the captive Chakotay and Torres' unfamiliar uniforms are merely those of one of the many secret government agencies they always suspected of existing though they'd never encountered it before now.
• Chekhov's Gun : The tattoo on Starling's arm shows that he's the hippie from The Teaser .
• Chekhov's Gunman : Captain Braxton will return in "Relativity".
• The Chew Toy : Braxton. He crashes his timeship and has to spend thirty years in a primitive society , including being drugged in a psychiatric centre for speaking a Cassandra Truth , until he Goes Mad From The Revelation that he caused a disaster which destroyed the entire solar system by going back in time in the first place. And then there's what happens to him in "Relativity".
• Classified Information : How Tom and Tuvok justify not telling Rain anything . Given that she's already detected a UFO in orbit and seen a large pickup truck vaporized, the explanation that they're secret agents is rather unconvincing.
• Cold-Blooded Torture : The Doctor isn't impressed when Starling tries to make him deliver information on Voyager until Starling adjusts his tactile sensors to give the Doctor the same sensation as a Man on Fire .
• Come Alone : Except Starling is aware of this and brings along the Doctor as a hostage and Dunbar as backup.
• The Doctor mentions a recent memory loss ("The Swarm").
• Rain has a model of the S.S. Botany Bay and a poster of its launch (TOS " Space Seed ").
• Corrupt Corporate Executive : Henry Starling
• Crazy Homeless People : Braxton ends up as one, though his sanity was already questionable.
• Being shot over a dozen times by Crazy Survivalists doesn't inhibit the Doctor's ability in this area one bit. Porter: God in heaven help us! EMH: Divine intervention is unlikely.
• Tom Paris tries to go for the Everybody Laughs At The Vulcan Ending , but Tuvok turns it around on him. Paris: You should have seen it when the parking enforcement officer came over to the van. Tuvok tried to use pure Vulcan logic to talk her out of giving us a citation. Chakotay: Did it work? Paris: Of course not! Tuvok: Given Mister Paris' alleged familiarity with Twentieth Century America, it is a wonder we survived the experience at all. Paris: Tuvok, has anyone ever told you you're a real freakasaurus?
• Death by Materialism : Take that, you 20th Century Neanderthal!
• Decoy Getaway : Our heroes follow Dunbar driving a semi-trailer out into the desert and blow him up . Turns out false signals were being used to make them think the timeship was on board, and Starling is about to launch it from inside the Chronowerx Building back in Los Angeles.
• Disintegrator Ray : The 29th Century phaser wielded by Dunbar. Ironically it doesn't do anything that ordinary phasers can't do (at least on ST:TNG ).
• Doomsayer : The crew find Captain Braxton as a crazed hobo , putting up signs saying "The End is Nigh". Well, give or take nine centuries...
• The Dragon : Dunbar. Doesn't stand out much as a character, but has the wherewithal to free his boss from Voyager after he's captured.
• ET Gave Us I.T. : The computer revolution happens because a timeship crash-lands next to a 60's hippie who becomes a 90's yuppie ( probably based on Steve Jobs ) by reverse-engineering its technology. Since the Federation tend to put all of human knowledge into the computer of every single starship , Sterling was able to quickly learn what he needs to just by asking the right questions. His progress is stunted when he gets to (then) modern-day technology, however, claiming that he had reached the limit of what he could adapt from the timeship. He is planning a trip to the future to get more technology, apparently too egotistical to realize all the problems this would entail.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good : Starling refuses to believe Janeway's story about an impending cataclysm if he launches the timeship , concluding that she wants to steal its future technology like he did, and are targeting him because they can steal it more easily from a "20th Century Neanderthal", as he puts it.
• Fade to White : When Voyager travels through time.
• Failed Future Forecast : Star Trek: The Original Series predicted that Earth would suffer the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, during which Khan Noonien Singh would come to prominence. As for that California Collapse in 2047, we'll just have to wait and see on that one .
• Failure Is the Only Option : At the end of the Two-Part Episode , Voyager ends up right back where it started.
• Fan of the Past : There's a clever subversion of the common trope of the Fan of the Past taking charge—Tom Paris is indeed an expert on the twentieth century, but given how far in the past it is, his knowledge isn't quite specific enough and he keeps dropping out-of-date phrases and references, including using the term "Groovy" in complete seriousness and invoking the now-defunct Soviet Union as the enemy causing this mess.
• Fanservice : Rain's bustiness is on display while running down the steps of Griffith Observatory after Tom and Tuvok. She also jiggles quite visibly when she flounces down into her chair after calling Sterling to report her discovery of the signal he wanted to know about.
• Foreshadowing : Janeway says she doesn't know what her contemporary ancestor is up to. In " 11:59 " we find out.
• The shuttlecraft is used, but not until the second part of a two-parter episode and long after the audience are scratching their heads wondering why they aren't being used. Voyager tended to vary the number of shuttlecraft according to what they needed for an episode, so when the shuttlecraft crashes no one mentions taking a second one down to locate the first.
• The 29th Century tricorder recovered from Starling isn't seen again.
• Averted when the mobile emitter is used by the Doctor from now on. The writers specifically introduced it because they were sick of the Doctor being restricted to Sickbay or the holodeck. It also served as a useful weakness; despite being Immune to Bullets and most other threats, damage to the emitter could be used to shut the Doctor down if the plot required it .
• This has been acknowledged in at least one of the spin-off novels, which explains that time-travel leaves characters' molecularly out of phase with their current time period; the only way for them to get back to their own time is to repeat the circumstances that sent them through time in the first place, otherwise... well, it gets theoretical, but it's generally agreed it wouldn't work. Other novels have suggested that the slingshot only ever worked for the Enterprise crew, for various reasons. Star Trek: Picard would finally make use of the Slingshot Effect in the second season.
• Funny Background Event : When Ensign Kim contacts Captain Janeway regarding Rain's attempt to communicate with them , all the nearby Los Angelitos take out their mobile phones and beepers in response to her communicator's beeping.
• The Future Will Be Better : As per usual for Star Trek — Rain is impressed with Tom Paris' selfless dedication. You'd never find that in a handsome, unattached male who majored in astrophysics and shares her taste for B-Movies in her century!
• Geeky Turn-On : Tom and Rain bond over their love of B Movies .
• G-Rated Drug : After being told to monitor the electronic broadcasts , Kes and Neelix get hooked on soap operas .
• Hair-Trigger Temper Chakotay: Only you, B'Elanna, could start a brawl in Astrotheory 101.
• Have We Met Yet? : When Voyager's crew encounter Captain Braxton for the last time and mention their two previous encounters , he just says he's not familiar with that timeline.
• Hollywood Hacking : Starling is using a 29th century computer. Somehow this lets him instantly hack into Voyager, download (and wipe) a third of its database, and control and disable its systems at will. This is despite only having 20th century hacking skills despite Voyager's systems being completely unfamiliar to him, and despite Voyager's computers being five-century-old legacy technology as far as his tools are concerned, in a field where a ten-year gap is usually insurmountable.
• The Doctor enjoys the freedom of his new mobile emitter. Then he's told to go to the launch tubes to treat Captain Janeway, and has to admit that he doesn't know how to get there, having never been outside Sickbay or the holodeck, or walked from Point A to Point B before . Thinking on his feet, Chakotay promptly orders an ensign to escort him there.
• Even before that, when the Doctor escapes from Starling's henchman he's clearly struggling to work out how to run, as he's literally never had to do it before.

• Illogical Combat Roll : Tuvok during his battle with Dunbar.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder : Starling demands information on Captain Janeway. The EMH replies, "I'm a doctor, not a database." Starling points out that he's actually a bit of both.
• Immune to Bullets : Two Right Wing Militia Fanatics shoot the Doctor full of bullets and shotgun pellets, which pass right through him to perforate the wall on the other side. They stand gaping in amazement until Doc stuns them with his phaser. B'Elanna and Chakotay are no less surprised, given that Voyager 's Emergency Medical Hologram shouldn't be able to walk into the room in the first place. Chakotay: Doc, how...? EMH: It's a Long Story , Commander. Suffice it to say, I'm making a house call.
• Incredibly Obvious Tail : Tom and Rain follow Dunbar in their van, but Rain points out they're on a desert road with no other traffic so he must know he's being followed. Sure enough a phaser-battle quickly ensues.
• Innocuously Important Episode : While a handful of Star Trek episodes featured time travelers from the future relative to the characters, this episode established that Starfleet of the 29th century has a Time Police with casual Time Travel , with their primary job trying to keep people from their own time period in check rather than all instances of Time Travel across all time. This would indirectly inform the Temporal Cold War Myth Arc of Star Trek: Enterprise which involved a myriad of time travelers trying to influence history to their advantage, and continue with Star Trek: Discovery where the 32nd Century is said to be when all powers involved outlawed time travel to prevent another Temporal Cold War.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall : While stealing cable , Kim makes some pithy comments about how oddly passive it is to just watch TV, compared to the more interactive forms of entertainment they have in the 24th century.
• The Main Characters Do Everything : Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, and Tom Paris beam down to the surface to handle the Crisis of the Week, leaving Harry Kim in charge .
• Missing Backblast : Averted; when Captain Janeway launches a photon torpedo manually, she's knocked down and scorched by the exhaust gasses. Knowing this, Chakotay made sure the Doctor would be on hand to treat her.
• Mundanization : This is a Star Trek: Voyager episode Recycled ON EARTH!
• My Car Hates Me : Rain's van stalls when Dunbar is about to ram it head-on with his semi-trailer. Tom and Rain dive out the doors, when suddenly the semi explodes as Chakotay arrives in a shuttle for a Big Damn Gunship moment.
• Noodle Incident : Tuvok's attempt to use Vulcan logic to avoid getting a parking ticket.
• No Time to Explain : Though you'd think someone manning a Time Machine would have plenty of time!
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore : After two seasons, the entire writing crew was beyond fed up with the Doctor being limited to sickbay or the holodeck, so this story was primarily designed to get him the 29th century mobile emitter. From now on, he can go anywhere he wants.
• Odd Couple : Tom and Tuvok.
• Rain understandably freaks out when Dunbar and Tuvok shoot Death Rays at each other. And then again when Starling gets beamed away right in front of her.
• Starling just before a photon torpedo blows him up.
• Tom and Rain when Dunbar's truck tries to ram their stalled van.
• Ominous Message from the Future : Captain Braxton of the timeship Aeon comes back from the 29th century with information that the entire solar system has been destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion and that Voyager was somehow involved. Now he's here to destroy them before that can happen.
• Phlebotinum Breakdown : To make this episode work, the Voyager had to be without its transporter and weapons systems. Those would have made Voyager's job all too easy.
• Pintsized Powerhouse : The Aeon is a tiny one-man Time Machine armed with a subatomic disrupter that is able to seriously damage the much larger Voyager .
• Poor Communication Kills : Dear God, Braxton. From his Attack Hello against Voyager to his You Have to Believe Me! rants, it's no surprise that nobody takes him seriously.
• Pop the Tires : Tom phasers a tire on Dunbar's truck, hoping to crash it. Unfortunately it's a fourteen-wheel rig, so Dunbar just turns the vehicle around and tries to run his pursuers down.
• Prim and Proper Bun : This is the last episode in which Janeway wears the Bun of Steel. On beaming down to Earth she changes to a bun-and-ponytail combination, and keeps the hairstyle when she returns to Voyager .
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits Rain: Talk about a motley crew. We have the Doctor, a guy with the worst taste in clothing I have ever seen . Tuvok, what a freakosaurus! Has the guy ever tried to smile? Paris: Not that I can recall. Rain: And you, Tom Paris. Sexy, in a Howdy Doody sort of way . Pretty goofy, although sometimes I think you're the smartest man I've ever met .
• Ramming Always Works : Chakotay is fully prepared to do this to stop Starling.
• Reed Richards Is Useless : Just the technology Starling managed to reverse-engineer from the Aeon and had installed in his office alone should have been more than enough to revolutionize numerous industries (and make him far richer than he already was). But that was just a fraction of the actual technology inherent in the timeship which he hadn't manage to figure out how to duplicate! Yet his 1996 Earth does not appear to be any more advanced than it was in the real world, clearly indicating that the majority of the technology he had puzzled out still had not been brought to market.
• Reset Button Ending : When Starling and his timeship are destroyed, an entirely non-hostile Captain Braxton appears to investigate what Voyager is doing out of its proper time. He denies any knowledge of himself as a Crazy Homeless Guy saying it must be an Alternate Timeline , and says he will return Voyager to its correct place in the space-time continuum . That's space -time, as due to the Temporal Prime Directive he can't return Voyager to Earth in the 24th Century, but must send them back to the Delta Quadrant .
• Right-Wing Militia Fanatic : Ex-Maquis freedom fighters Chakotay and B'Elanna Torres crash their shuttle in Arizona, where they're captured by paranoid survivalists convinced that these uniformed strangers in an apparent stealth aircraft are part of some Government Conspiracy (a far more plausible explanation than the truth, actually). Chakotay is just starting his peaceful warrior speech when said government forces turn up, demanding they hand over the shuttle and whoever was piloting it. Unsurprisingly bullets start flying, but fortunately Tuvok and the Doctor intervene with a Big Damn Heroes . The Doctor's ability to be Immune to Bullets and stun them with a Ray Gun would hardly make them less paranoid and disbelieving of nutty conspiracy theories in the future. (Ironically, Starfleet's intervention probably saved their lives, since the Doctor and Tuvok put a stop to what could have been a deadly gun battle by merely stunning everyone with their phasers. Also, when the feds fail to find much of anyone or anything they were seeking at the compound, the survivalists are likely to get nothing worse in court than a few plea-bargained light sentences for assaulting government agents.)
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens : The survivalists find B'Elanna's forehead ridges rather suspicious, but they figure the Beast comes in many guises . When a man tries to touch them, B'Elanna snarls and tries to bite his finger. Porter: (laughs) Careful, this one's a fighter.
• Rule of Three : Our heroes have three encounters with Captain Braxton — the distraught attacker, the crazy homeless doomsayer, and the calm Temporal agent.
• San Dimas Time : Implied; Braxton begs Janeway to let him destroy Voyager to save the future. Janeway refuses to condemn her entire crew to death on the basis of a ten-second conversation and wants more details, but Braxton just shouts " No time! " and opens fire again.
• Saying Too Much : When Rain asks where Tom learned astrophysics he replies "Starfleet Academy", then realizes his blunder and says that it's an "East Coast school".
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy : Captain Braxton's attempt to stop a temporal explosion that destroys 29th Century Earth by attacking Voyager accidentally sends both ships back to 20th Century LA, putting his ship in the hands of an unstable tech CEO who wants to launch it to the future, causing the explosion Braxton was trying to stop in the first place.
• Series Continuity Error : Official Trek lore states that the Eugenics Wars occurred between 1993 and 1996. It is also known that while a good portion of North America was involved and affected (specifically, the eastern coasts,) "Future's End" served to establish that Los Angeles and the west coast in general was still one such area where life continued on as normal. This is a bit of a Hand Wave though, as the west coast is still a part of the same country as the east coast. Plus, a great deal of the west coast's economy is based on trade with Asia, which was being ravaged by war at the time.
• Ship Tease : While on Earth, Janeway and Chakotay walk very close to each other, for all appearances a couple. At one point they're discussing what their ancient relatives were up to during the time period. During the conversation, Chakotay makes a comment that simply can't be approved under Starfleet regulations towards a ship's captain. Janeway : ( a random woman on skates bumps into the pair and apologies before she skates away ) For all I know she might be my great-great-great- great grandmother. Chakotay : ( smiles mischievously ) She does have your legs.
• Shout-Out : Captain Braxton's diagram and explanation of the predestination paradox (A leads to B leads to C leads to A) with chalk resembles Doc Brown's explanation of alternate timelines in Back to the Future Part 2 .
• Shrine to Self : Janeway takes note of Starling's "I Love Me" wall. There's even a framed photograph of Starling shaking hands with Richard Nixon . (Apparently, his having been a hippie didn't stop him from making friends with the hippies' least-favorite President once he started using all that future technology to advance his career.)
• So Much for Stealth : At the end of Part One, Voyager does a low run over Los Angeles at night so they can beam up Janeway and Chakotay, who are being held at gunpoint. Someone catches it on video and the image is broadcast all over the news.
• Some Kind Of Forcefield : Starling in Sickbay. There's also a forcefield around the timeship, preventing Voyager from just beaming it up.
• Stable Time Loop : As explained by Braxton . Despite being insane when he does so, he's more comprehensible than most people on this series . While Voyager managed to break the cycle, it's never explained how it got started in the first place.
• Status Quo Is God : Played straight when a second Captain Braxton shows up to return Voyager to their previous time and location in the Delta Quadrant, refusing to return them to 24th Century Earth due to the Temporal Prime Directive. However, he doesn't bother to confiscate the Doctor's new mobile emitter, allowing him to function away from Sickbay or the holodecks for the rest of the series.
• Stealth in Space : There's references to adjusting shields to scatter radar beams and such-like. Unfortunately Starling is expecting someone from the future to come after their timeship , and is using Rain's SETI program to scan for emissions from a warp-powered starship.
• Subterfuge Judo : Rain Robinson ( Sarah Silverman ) tries, with Tuvok and Lt. Paris, to lure him to a business plaza somewhere in Los Angeles. Starling takes the bait, coming to "rescue" her, and bringing the now-mobile EMH. Rain tries to get Starling into her van note  (so Chakotay and B'Elanna can beam him up in one of Voyager's shuttlecraft) , but Starling seemingly is suspicious, as he twice insists taking his limousine instead, forcing Paris and Tuvok, hiding somewhere in the plaza, to quickly change their plan: Henry Starling: Let's go. Rain Robinson: [pointing back] Oh, my van is this way. Starling: [insistent] We're taking my car. [They begin to continue walking] Robinson: [turning back] Oh, well, I left my stuff in the van. Starling: [insistent again] I'll send somebody back for it. [They pause for a beat] Starling: [seemingly suspicious] Is there a problem? Robinson: Nope.
• Surveillance Station Slacker : Rain has her feet up on the desk and is eating Chinese food when she first detects Voyager.
• Swiss-Cheese Security : Justified as Starling and his minion have access to technology 500 years in advance of Voyager 's, so they can break into their computers, or beam someone out through their shields.
• Sword over Head : Averted; Starfleet principles or no, when they've run out of options our heroes don't hesitate to kill Starling and Dunbar.
• Teleporters and Transporters : Much shenanigans with these. First Janeway and Chakotay are beamed out of Starling's custody. They then kidnap Starling by luring him into a place of which they know the co-ordinates and beam him up to Voyager , despite his efforts to stop them with his 29th Century tricorder, leading to a mild case of Teleportation Sickness . Then Dunbar uses 29th Century technology hidden in a Chronowerx satellite to beam his boss out through Voyager 's shields.
• Tempting Fate : Janeway swore she'd never let herself get caught in a temporal paradox. Voyager will get involved in so many temporal disruptions it drives Captain Braxton to insanity by Season Five.
• That Came Out Wrong : Tom says Rain's curves note  her Fourier spectral analysis don't look so good, and Rain demands to know what Tuvok has in his pants note  his tricorder .
• Time Is Dangerous : An incorrectly-calibrated timeship is enough to destroy the entire solar system.
• Timeline Altering Macguffin : Braxton's timeship kickstarts the computer age thanks to it being found by an enterprising hippie.
• Time Police : Captain Braxton is implied to be Starfleet's version of this in the 29th Century. This is confirmed in "Relativity". This would be further elaborated on in the Temporal Cold War Myth Arc of Star Trek: Enterprise which featured 31st Century agents.
• Time Travel Episode Janeway: Time travel . Ever since my first day in the job as a Starfleet Captain I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes . The future is the past, the past is the future . It all gives me a headache .
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit : Having adapted all the technology he can from the timeship, Starling has rebuilt it and intends to steal more technology from the future.
• Timey-Wimey Ball : The disaster was caused by Starling stealing Braxton's time ship from Earth. Braxton's time ship was on Earth as a result of his mission to destroy Voyager . Braxton undertook his mission to destroy Voyager because of the disaster. Braxton was reduced to a homeless man screaming about the end of Earth and manages to explain a Stable Time Loop to Janeway, but other than stopping Starling from traveling to the distant future it's never explained how this got started.
• When Janeway and Chakotay follow Braxton to where he lives, they walk past a pole where a cardboard sign Braxton posted says "Future's End."
• Took a Level in Badass : The DS9 episode " Trials and Tribble-ations " introduced the Department of Temporal Investigations. In the 24th century all they did was take reports about time travel incidents after the fact, not that there was really anything they could do about them. At some point, they went from toothless bureaucrats to full-fledged Time Police .
• Totally Radical : Tom gets a funny look from both Tuvok and Rain when he uses the word "groovy".
• Trapped in the Past : Chakotay and B'Elanna speculate on what might happen if they can't get back. Chakotay thinks he might become an archaeologist, as many great discoveries have yet to happen. B'Elanna pointedly doesn't discuss how she'd fit into a pre- First Contact society with Klingon forehead ridges .
• Unskilled, but Strong : Starling jump-started the computer age with access to Braxton's time ship but he didn't really understand how it works and that was just what he could replicate; so he was becoming desperate to find something else that could push past the current plateau. His personal equipment taken directly from the ship is also still 500 years more advanced than Voyager's technology and that allows him to hack their systems like firewalls were a myth.
• Unusual Ears : Tuvok's bandanna gets knocked off when he pulls an Unnecessary Combat Roll during his phaser battle with Dunbar, exposing him as a Pointy-Earred freakasaurus . He passes it off as "a family trait" akin to a genetic deformity.
• Vague Age : Since Janeway's date of birth hadn't yet been codified, this episode gives us a ballpark: she mentions playing tennis "in high school" and that this was "nineteen years ago". If twenty-fourth century high school follows the twenty-first centuries age range of 14-18, this puts her age here from 33-37 (Kate Mulgrew was 40 when this season was filmed).
• Viewer-Friendly Interface : On Rain's computer.
• Villain with Good Publicity : Starling. A philanthropist whose computer revolutions benefit all humanity, but really a Small Name, Big Ego playing with technology he doesn't truly understand.
• Watch the Paint Job : In the first half of the "Future's End" two-parter, Tom and Tuvok need some transportation and so take a truck out on a test-drive, leading to Tuvok arguing about the ethics of hanging onto the truck for longer than they told the dealer they would. The discussion ends up being rendered somewhat irrelevant when Dunbar shows up and vaporizes the truck with a 29th century disruptor.
• Weapon of Mass Destruction : The time ship requires a trained pilot to properly Time Travel . A jump that is calibrated wrong, such as by the inexperienced Starling, was apparently destructive enough to destroy most of the Sol System in the 29th Century. The Stable Time Loop came from Braxton discovering a piece of Voyager's hull in the explosion, assuming they were responsible and attempted to destroy them to prevent those events from happening, which only lead to the Time Ship being stolen in the 20th Century.
• You Are in Command Now : Before beaming down, Janeway leaves Harry in command.
• You Can't Fight Fate : Starling is opening a temporal rift, but has made a miscalculation that means he'll destroy the solar system when he arrives in the future. He won't listen to reason and Voyager ' s weapons are off-line. Tuvok says the future disaster may be inevitable. Chakotay says Screw Destiny and they'll ram Starling if they have to . The Captain comes up with another option.
• Averted with Tom Paris. When Rain Robinson demands an explanation, and points out the flaws in his "secret agent" story, he just says that he can't explain but when Dunbar tried to kill her, he and Tuvok protected her, so she's just going to have to accept that they're the good guys and what they're doing is Classified Information .
• You Know Too Much : When Rain emails a professor (who told someone else, who told someone else, etc) regarding the UFO she's detected, Starling sends Dunbar to kill her. Tom and Tuvok try a non-lethal version by simply wiping her hard drive.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me : Starling thinks Voyager can't do this, because he knows from the files he's hacked that their weapon system is disabled. So Captain Janeway crawls into a launch tube and activates a photon torpedo manually .
• Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 7 "Sacred Ground"
• Recap/Star Trek: Voyager
• Star Trek Voyager S 3 E 9 "Warlord"

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Future's End Stardate: Unknown Original Airdates: 6 + 13 November 1996

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Star Trek: Voyager – Future’s End, Part I (Review)

In a very real way, the third season of  Star Trek: Voyager begins with  Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II .

After all, the episode airs directly after  Sacred Ground . Although mixed into the broadcast order with a bunch of episodes that had been produced during the third season,  Sacred Ground was the last episode of the second season production block to be broadcast. ( Basics, Part II had been the last episode to be produced.)  Sacred Ground  was the last episode of Voyager  to be tied to producer Michael Piller, who had been working on the franchise since the start of the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation . There is some sense of symmetry there.

Tuvok and roll.

Sacred Ground feels like an appropriate place to draw a line under the first two seasons of Voyager , to suggest that the earlier incarnation of the show is finished and that a new era is beginning. After all, Sacred Ground was really the last gasp of the New Age mysticism that Michael Piller had tried to infuse into Voyager through episodes like The Cloud or Tattoo . (Piller would return to that New Age fascination with Star Trek: Insurrection .)  Sacred Ground even featured something of a rebirth of Captain Kathryn Janeway.

However, if Sacred Ground represents the end of the second season, what about the start of the third season? What makes Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II such an effective new beginning?

Feels like going home.

Part of it is purely timing. The second season had been a difficult time for the staff working on Voyager . Michael Piller had departed the show around halfway through the first season to work on his own UPN series, Legend . However, the series did not fare particularly well in the ratings and did not survive past its first half-season. As such, Piller returned to Voyager at the start of the show’s second season. Despite the fact that Jeri Taylor had been running the writers’ room in his absence, Piller was eager to impose his own vision on the show.

It seems fair to suggest that Piller’s vision of Voyager was an unmitigated disaster. Piller sought to turn the Kazon into a recurring adversary and to stoke the fires of Maquis conflict on board the ship. However, Piller was hindered by a number of factors. The most obvious was that the Kazon were simply not interesting enough to justify such an intense focus. However, there was also a sense that the writing staff had little interest in following those particular threads. The result was a second season that felt like a tug of war.

It’s amazing how much you can learn about Voyager ‘s troubled production history on the internet.

When Michael Piller left at the end of the second season, things settled down somewhat. With the broadcast of Sacred Ground , the producer’s influence over the series had been completely excised. The result was that a lot of the conflict that defined the writers’ room in the second season was lifted. Interviewed by Cinefantastique , Jeri Taylor and Brannon Braga talked about Future’s End, Part I as something of a new beginning for the series:

With the airing of holdovers from second season, it wasn’t until the November sweeps two-parter Future’s End that season three began in earnest.  “It was very high concept. It was the show that kind of really began to swing us back to a more adventure-oriented sense of fun,” said Taylor. Supervising producer Brannon Braga liked the show’s new direction. “I’m happier now than I’ve been since my last year on Next Generation. Future’s End, although it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, was a critical success, and a rating’s success in a big way.”

Indeed, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II represent a fairly sizable shift in the creative balance of power on Voyager . With Michael Piller gone, Jeri Taylor is very much in charge of production. However, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II confirm Brannon Braga as heir apparent on the writer staff. A veteran of The Next Generation , Braga would go on to succeed Taylor on  Voyager and oversee the creation of Star Trek: Enterprise .

Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II could be argued to be the point at which Voyager finally and truly crystalised. It was the point at which Voyager seemed to reach the end of its creative evolution. To be sure, there would be any number of changes in the show’s remaining four-and-a-half years on the air; the addition of a cast member in Scorpion, Part II , the departure of Jeri Taylor with Hope and Fear , the recruiting of new writers like Michael Taylor and Bryan Fuller. However, this epic two-part adventure sets the tone for what follows.

In many ways, every evolution in popular culture exists as either an extension or a reaction, building upon or rebelling against what came before. After all, a lot of what makes Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so intriguing and so effective is an exploration (and subversion) of many of the assumptions underpinning The Next Generation . In that respect, the version of Voyager that arrives in Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II is very much a reaction against the troubled storytelling of that second year.

“This is no time to argue about time. We don’t have the time.”

This bold new vision of Voyager moves away from the clumsy experiments with continuity and long-form storytelling that haunted the second year. After the spectacular misfire that was Investigations , it seems like the creative team are not interested in serialisation. Similarly, any hint of tension or disharmony among the crew is downplayed from this point onward, barring episodes like Worst Case Scenario or Thirty Days or Repression . In many ways, Voyager becomes a much more generic and episodic show from this point onwards.

Similarly, the third season rather consciously avoid introducing recurring antagonists like the Kazon or the Vidiians. The Borg are seeded in episodes like Blood Fever and Unity , but the Borg Collective only appears  en masse in Scorpion, Part I . The Borg will becoming a recurring adversary, but never at the centre of an arc similar to the Kazon arc of the second season. Later seasons will feature recurring foes like Species 8472, the Hirogen or the Malon, but never to the extent that the first and second seasons focused on the Kazon and Vidiians.

Not the first clue that Starling is a bad guy, but a pretty big one.

However, Voyager would find its own stylistic sensibilities. Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II serve as a great example of this new Voyager aesthetic. In Uncharted Territory , Brannon Braga argued that he was really taken with the idea of doing gigantic two-parter episodes:

One of the things that I knew I wanted to do was… I got this crazy idea in my head that we would make it a tradition to do great epic two-part episodes. I think after the first two-parter we did together, which was a time travel show called Future’s End, it was just so much fun, to paint on a bigger canvas. … Another thing that I set out to do was to tell more plot-driven stories and tell bigger stories. You know, get these characters on big, grand, epic sci-fi adventures. And just kinda push our production team to their limits and see what we can accomplish.

Indeed, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II set up a template for big sweeping mid-season two-parters. Voyager would return to that model a number of times; Year of Hell, Part I , Year of Hell, Part II , The Killing Game, Part I , The Killing Game, Part II , Dark Frontier, Part I , Dark Frontier , Part II .

“And we still can’t get UPN out here!”

Of course, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II are not the first two-parter of Voyager’s run. The show had bridged its second and third seasons with Basics, Part I and Basics, Part II , although both episodes had been produced at the end of the second season production block. However, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II represent an entirely different beast. Basics, Part I and Basics, Part II were intended by Michael Piller to serve as a climax to his time on Voyager , a culmination of two years of storytelling involving Seska and Chakotay, Voyager and the Kazon.

Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II represent something very different. They are not the culmination of anything. They are not resolving any dangling storythreads. To be fair, there are some  very minor references to character back story, particularly in Future’s End, Part II ; the EMH has a throwaway line about the events of The Swarm while Chakotay reflects on his time as a rebel. However, the two-parter is drawn rather broadly. There is very little in the episode that is specific to Voyager .

Earth-shattering.

After all, the episode should represent a major milestone for the characters. Future’s End, Part I represents the first time that the entire ship has returned to Earth, despite teasing glimpses of the planet in episodes like Non Sequitur or Death Wish . For a show based around the premise of a lost starship returning home, this should be a bigger deal. Even returning to Earth in 1996 represents a significant victory for the characters. One imagines Janeway should have stellar cartography planning a slingshot maneouvre around the Earth’s sun as a way to get them home.

Instead, only the faintest lip service is paid to the idea that this might seriously represent a journey home. When Captain Braxton reappears at the end of Future’s End, Part II , Janeway gingerly broaches the idea that Braxton could return the ship to Earth in the twenty-fourth century. He shrugs it off, “I’m sorry. Temporal Prime Directive. I’m afraid you’re on your own.” Janeway seems to accept that. It is in many ways a reminder of how inconstant Janeway is as a character; other versions of Janeway would not tolerate such shenanigans.

“Computer. Late-twentieth century civilian clothing.”

The lack of fanfare around the return to Earth would seem to be a point of the exercise. There is none of the angst and soul-searching that one might expect, which informed episodes like Eye of the Needle or The Cloud . Indeed, Brannon Braga cited this lack of angst or trauma as part of the episode’s appeal in The Star Trek: Voyager Companion :

Voyager started its turnaround for us, personally and creatively, when we did the very first two-parter because we said to ourselves let’s start having fun. What’s fun to write is fun to watch and we’ve been toiling with the Maquis storyline and we’ve been having these angst-ridden characters deal with being lost and it’s not much fun to write anymore and we felt that it couldn’t possibly be all that fun to watch. Let’s let it all hang out and do something insane… What seemed more insane back then – but if you hear about it now it sounds ridiculously antiquated – Voyager in 1996! And we conceived of big action sequences and big concepts with an epic villain. Henry Starling was our first geat Voyager villain. It sounds like a pat on the back, but I think we created great single individual villains and that was the first one, played by Ed Begley Jr. And we crafted big action set pieces like the chase between a Mack truck, a shuttlecraft, and a Volkswagon van. Things that we never would have thought of even attempting on The Next Generation or in the early days of Voyager. It’s crazy, but we did it and we pulled it off and it was a charming, fun episode.

Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II consciously avoids being too specific or too particular to Voyager . The two-parter does not feel like a story specifically tailored to the basic premise of Voyager . It is not a story that requires the crew to be stranded far away from home. It is not a story that relies upon the divide between the Starfleet and the Maquis crews. It is very much a story that could be told using any crew in the franchise.

“Yes. This will do nicely.”

This very much set the tone going forward. Voyager had struggled with its own identity over the course of its first two seasons, trying to determine whether it wanted to be unique or generic. Would it stand apart from the other shows in the franchise? Or would it follow the path of least resistance? With Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II , it seems like the decision has been made. Voyager knows what it wants to be, and has committed to that vision. Voyager wants to become the most generic version of Star Trek imaginable.

This is very much a value neutral statement. The very best and the very worst thing that can be said about Voyager is that it aspires towards (and succeeds at) being “generic Star Trek.” It is packed full of familiar archetypes and images, concepts and plot beats, themes and motifs. Voyager is in many ways the most “Star-Trek-y” of the franchise series, the television show that is most likely to offer the casual viewer a sense of the franchise. While Star Trek , The Next Generation , Deep Space Nine and Enterprise all have their own flavours, Voyager is the franchise vanilla.

Man out of time.

Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II abandon any sense of long-form storytelling or continuity, and hint of Voyager as a show driven by a unique premise beyond “being a Star Trek show.” There is a sense that the writing staff have decided that Voyager should be a show about the core ideas and themes of Star Trek , more than a series with its own central premise driving the action or motivating the crew. Getting home is at best a secondary objective, beyond the storytelling expected of Star Trek .

With this commitment to being a generic iteration of Star Trek comes a rather casual attitude to the specifics of the franchise. Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II only pays the most glancing attention to the core premise of the show, but it also stoked controversy by explicitly contradicting established Star Trek continuity. Early in the run of the original  Star Trek , the episode Space Seed suggested that the nineties had been dominated by “the Eugenics Wars.” It was a safe prediction for a show airing in 1967, but it posed a challenge for the franchise.

Does not compute.

Later in this same production year, the writers on Deep Space Nine would fudge the details of that fictional conflict in Doctor Bashir, I Presume . However, in taking the cast back to 1996, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II completely ignored that piece of continuity. Ronald D. Moore confessed to Cinefantastique that he was a little confused by the decision:

“I was a little surprised when they didn’t mention them in the Voyager episode. But on Deep Space Nine it was just a mistake.” Added Moore, “What looked like the distant future in 1967 is not so distant any more. I don’t blame them for not having the foresight to see that in 30 years this would become important in the series. That’s the way it is. The continuity of the series, of all the series, is to me a really pleasant and cool thing. I like the fact that the Star Trek universe hangs together as well as it does. But it’s not perfect. There are some internal contradictions. And OK, so what?”

When Janeway is sent back to Earth in 1996, she finds no sign of the global devastation wrought by Khan Noonien Singh and his rivals. There is no indication that Voyager has arrived in what Spock described as “the era of [our] last so-called World War.” Everything looks pretty normal. This is very much the world as it appeared to viewers watching at home; the real world rather than the Star Trek universe.

A pizza the action.

That is, of course, the point of Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II . After all “Janeway travels back in time to the present day” is a markedly different story than “Janeway travels back in time to the heart of a brutal conflict that was mentioned in a few lines of dialogue in the late sixties.” One of those stories is an accessible premise aimed at a broad audience, while the other relies heavily on the inner workings and minutiae of the Star Trek universe. One is big and broad, the other is narrow and specific.

While the writing staff could perhaps have made a winking nod towards the continuity issues generated by thirty-year-old production decisions, much like Worf’s “it is a long story” when asked about Klingon foreheads in Trials and Tribble-ations , it seems perfectly reasonable for the production team to avoid getting so tangled in continuity. There is a sense that this storytelling decision speaks to the priorities of the writing staff working on Voyager . Slipping in a sly reference to a late first season episode of a thirty-year-old show is not anywhere near the top of the list.

Snow big deal…

After all, Brannon Braga was an executive producer who took a great deal of pride in not having watched the original Star Trek . Indeed, Gene Roddenberry had valued that about the young writer, famously asking Braga not to watch the classic show so that he might bring something fresh. On the audio commentary for Star Trek: First Contact , writer Brannon Braga outlined why the production team decided to ignore this particular continuity minefield:

You know, the continuity thing you were mentioning is… interesting. Because it’s a tightrope. Because you want to utilise the continuity and exploit it to come up with stories. You don’t want to violate it. But there are times when you either must ignore or contradict certain continuity elements, if they’re fairly obscure. Like, you know… the whole… the Eugenics Wars. Well, the Eugenics Wars were in 1996. It’s a reference in the original… it’s a line. In Voyager, we did an episode that took place in 1996. “Are we going to do the Eugenics Wars?” Well, no. Because it would just be kinda strange. But then, later, in the show that’s on the air now, we’re doing the Eugenics Wars. So there’s this flip-flopping of continuity that you just have to kinda say… “Look, we’re playing around with it a little. Don’t take it too seriously.”

It should also be noted that Braga’s script for Flashback honoured the thirtieth anniversary by by jumping back to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country , the most recent of the Star Trek films to feature the original cast. (Released only half a decade earlier, in real time.) This is an entirely defensible choice. It also speaks to the ways in which the generic nature of Voyager could play to the show’s strengths.

The hippie-dippie shakedown.

Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II essentially demonstrates the type of Star Trek towards which Voyager aspires. It is not the fine-print continuity of individual episodes like Space Seed . Instead, it is the broad and sweeping populist version of Star Trek embodied by Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . Indeed, there are points at which the episode feels like a tenth anniversary celebration of that time travel caper film, and is arguably as much a part of the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary celebrations as Flashback or Trials and Tribble-ations .

The episode’s plot owes a lot to The Voyage Home . The characters are thrown back in time in response to a disaster threatening Earth in the future; the whale probe in The Voyage Home and the explosion in Future’s End, Part I . In both stories, the characters are drawn to modern-day California, befriending a nerdy young woman who falls in love with one of the leads. Tuvok even gets to ask Paris “what does it mean, groovy?” , in a nod to Spock asking Kirk “what does it mean, exact change?”

“You’d be surprised how thirty years trapped in the twentieth century can really focus the mind.”

It is worth pausing to reflect on why Voyager should choose to build its first big sweeping mid-season two-parter around The Voyage Home . After all, fandom would generally argue that the best Star Trek film was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan . Indeed, Enterprise would dedicate an entire three-part episode ( Borderland , Cold Station 12 and The Augments ) to riffing on that particular episode and Star Trek Into Darkness would borrow rather liberally from the sophomoric film effort. There is a tendency to gloss over how beloved The Voyage Home actually was.

After all, The Voyage Home was the most financially successful film in the franchise before the release of Star Trek in 2009; it is still the third highest grossing film in the franchise adjusted for inflation . Indeed, the movie was responsible for spurring the creation of The Next Generation and the return of Star Trek to prime-time live-action television . Although fandom seems relatively fond of The Voyage Home , there is a sense that it is underappreciated by certain sections of the base. After all, it is much sillier (and more embarrassing) than The Wrath of Khan .

The time traveler who fell to Earth.

However,  The Voyage Home is arguably the Star Trek film with the largest pop cultural footprint among the wider public. It represents the Star Trek franchise at its most accessible rather than its most esoteric. It is a film with a very simple high concept, which showcases many of the best aspects of the franchise; a social conscience, iconic and archetypal characters, a sense of humour that might fairly be described as “cheesy.” While it is quite easy to mock the film’s “save the whales” earnestness or its admittedly loose plotting, it is hard to overstate its impact.

In fact, it is quite easy to forget that part of the appeal of First Contact as the theatrical release for the franchise’s thirtieth anniversary was the way in which it blended together elements of The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home . Retrospectives and discussions tend to focus on the former more than the latter, and understandably so. In the years following the release of First Contact , the Star Trek franchise became increasingly fixated upon The Wrath of Khan as the be-all and end-all of the franchise. (This period also coincided with the franchise slipping from the mainstream.)

Crack your own joke.

There is certainly something to be said for a version of Star Trek that picks The Voyage Home as its point of reference. Indeed, Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II make a fairly convincing case for Voyager ‘s new storytelling model. Light and poppy high-concepts that play almost as blockbuster movies on a television budget.  Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II lays out a vision of  Star Trek that is not too far removed from the JJ Abrams reboot, broadly drawn and accessible stories with an impressive sense of scale couched in familiar iconography.

The structure of Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II is very much that of a blockbuster film. The concept is broad, yet intriguing. There is a singular bold science-fiction idea underpinning the two-parter, the idea of bringing the crew back to modern-day Earth; Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II would put Voyager through the eponymous annus horribilis while The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II find the crew forced to play war games for the amusement of their Hirogen captors.

Starling is shorting futures.

Similarly, the two-parter is built around a singular antagonist, with the plot contorting in such a way as to allow the characters a chance to square off. Henry Starling is a fantastic creation, particularly as brought to life by Ed Begley, Jr.  Future’s End, Part II seems almost ahead of its time, running through a version of the now-familiar “capture and escape” plot beat favoured by modern blockbusters blockbusters like  The Dark Knight and  Skyfall ; all so Janeway and Starling can have a head-to-head confrontation in Sickbay.

Henry Starling is something of an anomaly as Star Trek villains go. Up to this point, Star Trek has largely steered clear of pitting its characters against individual antagonists. Khan Noonien Singh is perhaps the most notable exception, squaring off against Kirk in Space Seed and even staking a claim in the title of The Wrath of Khan . However, Star Trek has typically approached its antagonists as representatives of alien empires rather than individuals. Kor, Koloth and Kang all represent the Klingon Empire. Even Gul Dukat spent several seasons representing Cardassia.

“Yep, she’s definitely been posting negative comments about Star Trek.”

Starling is something very different. In terms of how the two-parter is written, Starling is presented as something equivalent to a Bond villain. He feels very much like he was lifted from a mid-nineties blockbuster, the kind of murder-happy authority figure that populates films like Chain Reaction or Enemy of the State . Casting Ed Begley Jr. only solidifies the sense that Starling is meant to be a “big bad.” He feels more like a supervillain than a Star Trek antagonist. The character loves to monologue; at the climax of Future’s End, Part I , Janeway has to cut him off mid-sentence.

Unlike characters like Kor or Koloth (or Tomalak), Starling is very much acting in service of his own agenda. Unlike Dukat or Madred, he does not attempt to hide that fact behind a veneer of patriotism. Even the trappings surrounding Starling suggest that the character wandered out of an action film. He keeps his time ship and future tech hidden in a secret hangar hidden behind a map of the world etched in glass. Dunbar is very much a stock action movie henchman, with his distinctive business suit and his willingness to get his hands dirty in service of his employer.

“You know, I did suggest a gimmick for completeness’ sake, but Dunbar just wasn’t into it.”

Ed Begley Jr. does great work in the role, his mannerisms helping to turn Starling into a particularly memorable antagonist. Indeed, the actor recalls his guest appearance on the show rather fondly :

That was just great. It was a good show, it was a really good part, and to be part of the Star Trek franchise, even years on from the original show, which I was a huge fan of. Back when the original show was on, I was in my mid-teens. I was the perfect Trekkie candidate. I loved the show. Not so much that I actually went to conventions or anything, but I sure did love it. So to be on Star Trek: Voyager, I felt really blessed.

Voyager had a knack for casting these sorts of guest roles, as the second season had demonstrated with performers like Brad Dourif in  Meld and Joel Grey in Resistance . The fourth season would get just as lucky in casting Kurtwood Smith as Annorax for Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II .

Putting the “execute” in “executive.”

Starling is very much a prototype for how Voyager will approach the antagonists in these stories. Whereas other Star Trek shows tended to build up cultures and characters through repeat appearances, Voyager develops a fondness for memorable one-shot baddies. This is particularly true in the various two-parters across the run of the show; Annorax in Year of Hell, Part I and Year of Hell, Part II , Turanj in The Killing Game, Part I and The Killing Game, Part II , Iden in Flesh and Blood, Part I and Flesh and Blood, Part II .

(Although the Borg Queen is introduced in First Contact , she is perhaps the best example of this tendency within Voyager . Although Scorpion, Part I and Scorpion, Part II feature the Borg Collective on its own terms, the Borg Queen becomes the focal point of the later Borg stories. The Borg Queen provides a single opponent who can butt heads with Janeway and Seven of Nine in episodes like Dark Frontier, Part I , Dark Frontier, Part II , Unimatrix Zero, Part I , Unimatrix Zero, Part II and  Endgame . Voyager ‘s fixation with singular antagonists consumes even the Borg.)

“Like the glass plate? I picked it up from Hippocrates Noah.”

In keeping with the sense that the two-parter is establishing “blockbuster Star Trek, but for television” , the episode makes a point to touch on the grand sweeping themes of the franchise. It seems unlikely that any viewer would single out the adventure as the perfect expression of the franchise’s optimism or humanism, but writers Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky make several nods towards these core values. There is not a lot of depth, but there is a sense that the writers are making a point to keep the episode “Star-Trek-y” , even amid the action movie trappings.

After all, Starling is presented very much as the avatar of capitalism. He is a man who stumbles upon something beautiful and wonderful, but whose first impulse is to exploit it for his own gain. When Janeway tries to convince him that his unchecked greed runs the risk of literally destroying the planet , Starling falls back on the refrain of the industrialist, “Without me there would be no laptops, no internet, no barcode readers. What’s good for Chronowerx is good for everybody. “ (Which nicely sets up a fantastic Janeway zinger, “Chronowerx’s stock… is about to crash.” )

The man of tomorrow… today!

It is worth pointing out that Starling is very much defined as a child of failed sixties utopianism. The character is introduced in the teaser to Future’s End, Part I camping in the High Sierras in 1967, just in time for the end of sixties utopianism. He may have arrived straight from the “Death of the Hippie” ceremony in October 1967 . The summer of love is over . With his long hair and his bright clothes (and his “far out” ), Starling is immediately presented as a hippie. The crash of the Aeon perhaps serves as an end of that sixties dream.

Starling sells out, using the technology from the ship to transform for hippie to yuppie. In someways, the High Sierras is an ideal setting for this transformation; the region serves as an effective metaphor for the commercialisation of hippie culture, with the region once known to house private marijuana farms for personal use now home to industrial-scale cultivation for financial gain . Starling is so effectively transformed by his greed that the rose tattoo on his inner arm is the only clue as to who he once was.

“Robinson’s not going to play ball.”

As such, even though Starling is very clearly positioned as a contemporary action movie antagonist (a hugely influential industrialist with advanced technology and a homicidal manservant), he is still contextualised within the history of the franchise. Starling is a character who might once have believed in utopian idealism and the greater good, the optimism that seemed to be taking root in the sixties. However, he cynically turned his back on that in pursuit of fortune and power. Starling represents a betrayal of the franchise’s roots.

Indeed, Starling fits very much within the larger framework of nineties popular culture, and its anxiety about emerging tech companies. Starling is very much presented as an evil version of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, a slightly less psychotic twist on the villain that Christopher Walken played in A View to a Kill . He represents a lot of the nineties (and contemporary) uncertainties about the executives that drive Silicon Valley, the kinds of people that Greg Ferenstein described as “hippies who dig capitalism and science.”

Groovy, baby.

The Voyager crew are very much positioned in opposition to Starling’s selfish materialism. That is what draws Rain Robinson to Paris. “All this running around you do, your mission,” she reflects. “You’re so dedicated, you know? Like you care about something more than just your own little life.” Paris seems almost surprised that Rain would comment upon it. “Is that so unusual?” he wonders. Rain responds, “Yeah.” It might not be as overt as the environmental subtext of The Voyage Home , but it does suggest that the franchise’s utopian is alive and well.

(Indeed, this theme even bubbles through the truncated subplot that finds Chakotay and Torres trapped in a militia compound. As with Starling, there is a recurring sense that twentieth century mankind has a long way to go before it reaches this utopian future. Again, it is framed in overtly political terms. “There are two forces at work in the world,” Porter boasts. “The drive toward collectivity and the drive toward individuality. You are the former, and I am the latter.” Given that the Federation is all but explicitly socialist, he is more right than he knows.)

“What’s the racket?”

Much like Starling, Rain Robinson is an interesting character. Much like Starling, the production team got very lucky with their casting. Sarah Silverman is obviously a lot more famous now than when she was cast, in what the comedian acknowledges as her first major dramatic role :

Actually, I was in a two-part Star Trek: Voyager, and I was a scientist in a study lab with a half-shirt and a push-up bra. And I was like, what the—this isn’t how scientists dress! And they’re going, “Uh, yeah. It’s Star Trek: Voyager.” But I went to an acting coach for it and everything. This fancy acting coach. And I remember him looking at the material and just going, “Look, sometimes when you’re running from lasers, you just gotta pretend you’re running from lasers.” And I thought, yeah, okay, right. Like, you gave me license to just pretend. Acting is pretending. You can’t draw from your childhood for running from lasers on Star Trek.

Silverman is immensely likeable as Robinson, bouncing well off McNeill and Russ, adding a slightly more grounded perspective to events. Unlike Starling, Robinson is not particularly well-defined beyond “wide-eyed wonder” and “deflating observations” , but Silverman elevates the material like a pro.

“If you don’t come down from there, I’m turning this van around and taking us right back to the twenty-fourth century.”

Robinson is very much positioned as a counterpoint to Starling. If Starling is the sixties idealist who sold out at the first opportunity, then Robinson is the idealist who refused to give up hope. Although Robinson is much too young to have lived through the sixties, she drives a Volkswagen van, one of the most iconic representations of the era. She also still looks to the stars in hope, recalling the wonder and excitement of the sixties space program that informed so much of  Star Trek in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, Brannon Braga half-considered adding Rain Robinson to the show’s regular cast. According to Bryan Fuller, “It was Brannon’s desire to bring Rain on board because he enjoyed writing for Sarah and the freshness she brought to the show.” It is certainly a valid point, although it’s interesting to wonder how things might have turned out had Braga followed through on that idea. After all, Voyager would look at adding a new regular cast member at the end of the third season. Ultimately, that character would be developed as Seven of Nine.

“What does it mean, flirting?”

Given that the addition of Seven of Nine to the Voyager cast at the start of the fourth season represents the biggest transition in the show’s future, it is interesting to wonder how things might have been different had that new character been Rain Robinson instead. Of course, it is impossible to accurately predict how things might have been different. After all, there are an infinite number of variables. It is impossible to know whether Sarah Silverman would have accepted the offer, had it been made. Still, it is fun to wonder.

Would a twentieth-century human seemed any less cynical an addition than a former Borg drone? Would Robinson have come to dominate the show’s dynamic in the same way that Seven did? Would Mulgrew have reacted as strongly to another female character if that character weren’t as heavily sexualised as Seven was? How would Silverman have affected the precarious workplace environment on the show? How would being a regular on Voyager have affected her long-term career prospects?

Growing the beard.

Still, even if Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II did not change the opening credits, they still had a sizable impact on the show going forward. The two-parter seems to outline a new vision for Voyager . The future has only just arrived.

You might be interested in our other reviews from the third season of Star Trek: Voyager :

• Basics, Part II
• False Profits
• Sacred Ground
• Future’s End, Part I
• Future’s End, Part II
• The Q and the Grey
• Blood Fever
• Favourite Son
• Before and After
• Distant Origin
• Worst Case Scenario
• Scorpion, Part I

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Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: Brannon Braga , continuity , ed begley jr , Eugenics Wars , henry starling , Joe Menosky , Sarah Silverman , star trek , time travel , voyager |

23 Responses

Sarah Silverman in Trek!

Oh, and I like this two parter, even if its not one of my favorite episodes, I do love how its actually not very corny and makes fun of the whole time paradox issue and even makes a jab at television, which Trek strangely did from the time to time, strange since you know, its a tv show…

I like how our technology we take advantage of is in Trek due to some bizarre time travel scenario, kind of like Amelia Earheart being on an alien planet. Eh, actually I don’t like that episode…

Yep. Although the paradox aspect of the plot makes me wonder if any of the plot actually happened. If Braxton could travel back in time to take Voyager home, surely he wasn’t stranded in the twentieth century, and so Starling couldn’t have the timeship and invent the moder world, so surely that all happened naturally?

Oh no. I’ve gone cross-eyed.

Yeah, how did this paradox even get started? When everything is fixed at the climax, Braxton shows up completely unaware of any problem and behaving like a rational, reasonable human being. If he can’t remember what happened, wouldn’t he still be a raging loon screaming “no time!” and starting the loop again?

Voyager is where time travel in Trek goes completely fiddle-faddle.

It’s best not to think about time travel in Voyager. Or in Star Trek.

Yet somehow Braxton remembers being trapped in the past in Relativity. Oy.

For me, seeing the Voyager crew in normal clothes and not in their goofy futuristic jumpsuits is more jarring…

Sarah Silverman being a regular on Voyager sounds awesome, but Seven of Nine is my favorite Voyager character, so Im happy with how that turned out

Yep, a lot of Sarah Silverman as a regular would depend on execution. Although I imagine it’d be great fodder for interviews or memoirs.

I know this is a minority opinion, but for me season 3 represents the nadir of Voyager. Season 1 was trying to do some interesting things, and Season 2 is easily the most memorable season, albeit because most of it is memorably bad. Still, the Kazon and Viddians are the most memorable Voyager species, not the best just the most memorable, and at least there is an attempt at using Voyager’s premise to tell interesting stories. Season 3, however, is incredibly unmemorable, and adds little to nothing to Voyager’s mythos. The doctor gets his mobile emitter and Kes breaks up with Neelix, which won’t even be relevant after Season 3. Really, the viewer could skip to Scoprion and not miss much. Furthermore, there is no Seven of Nine whose stories along with the Doctor’s managed to elevate the generic season 5-7 from bad to ok. This episode has one of my favorite moments of bad dialogue in which Captain Braxton fires on Voyager, they ask him why he is doing this, and replies “no time!” despite the fact that he is on time traveling ship, so he really has all the time he could ever want. I also have to disagree with you when it comes to Sarah Silverman. I found her incredibly annoying, as many of her line reads come off as overly whiny. She seems to be meant to be very similar to the Catherine Hicks character from Star Trek IV, but that character was actually intelligent and had some good lines. Hicks also had chemistry with William Shatner, while Silverman has very little with Robert Duncan McNeil. All that being said I do enjoy aspects of this episode. I like how Captain Braxton becomes a bum, and I do enjoy some of the out of fish water scenes.

I think we’ve had this conversation before, but I actually have a bit of a strange fondness for the weirdness of the third season. Any season of television that can do something as weird and wacky as Macrocosm and Darkling while finding room for Future’s End and Scorpion cannot be all bad. (Although maybe my fondness for the fifth season of DS9 is rubbing off on it.) And I’d argue that the third season of Voyager has the luxury of not having anything as obviously cringy as Alliances or Tattoo, although Displaced might as a well be Trump commercial.

(Also: Remember! And Distant Origin! And Worst Case Scenario!)

Yeah. I’m not as crazy about Remember as you are, primarily because I have trouble remembering it, pun not intended. Whenever I rewatch it I find it a perfectly serviceable piece of Star Trek, but not a must see. I can’t get over the idea that Dinosaurs apparently built a ship and flew away after the meteor, so that hurts Distant Origin in my eyes though I appreciate the pro-evolution message. Worst Case Scenario is a very well done holodeck gone awry story, but it is still yet another holodeck gone awry story, which gives it a slightly stale air in my opinion. Macrocosm is a love or hate it kind of episode, and the bad CGI makes so many scenes just so silly. It is like something out of the end of the Langoliers. Darkling is somewhat enjoyable in seeing Robert Picardo get to completely ham it up, but other than that is not a good a episode. Furthermore, none of these stories actually add anything to a deeper understanding of the characters. DS9 season 3 peeled back the layers of Dukat, Garak, the Jem-Hadar, as well as Odo by finally showing where he came from and his feelings for Kira. We also got the defiant, along with a new much bolder Sisko. Even TNG season 3 revealed things about the characters: Worf’s love-hate relationship with his people deepened in Sins of a Father, Geordi being hopeless at love was first introduced, and Picard is assimilated by the Borg. All that being said there is nothing as repugnant as Tattoo or Alliances. I completely agree with you here, I just find Season 2’s attempts at long term story telling kind of charming in its awkwardness, and I give it points for trying to actually take advantage of Voyager’s isolation. After all, a few years down the road Voyager will be taking care of Borg cubes like they are run by Pakleds, so I have to take the actual sense of danger whenever I can get it.

Oh yeah. Well, comparing any season of Voyager to any season of DS9 will leave Voyager in the dust. Ditto comparing any season of Voyager to any season of The Next Generation following the second. But, on its own terms, I enjoy the third season much more than either of the first two or the last two. And probably more than the fifth, although it’s likely closer than I recall.

Distant Origins is one of my favorite Voyager episodes, one of the few Voyager episodes I’d be comfortable saying is one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. I agree with Trekspertise that the plotline is untapped and should be revisisted

I’m glad that Sarah Silverman didn’t become a regular because I think she works better in smaller doses, much like Neelix, Wesley Crusher or Naomi Wildman.

I have to admit when I first saw this episode as a teen I was very much smitten with Rain and it makes me sad to hear she might have stayed on. Getting a 20th century view on the Federation might have worn thin after a while true, but I agree Silverman had real likability going for her.

Yep. And I imagine that – like most concepts on Voyager – the show would happily have discarded Rain’s “20th century perspective” the moment that including it began to feel like work.

Jaysus. I sound really cynical this weather.

Well, that’s what fanfiction is for. 🙂

Besides whatever the flaws of the show, sheer on screen charisma and talent pushed certain characters above the material – true the Doctor and Seven had interesting hooks but I think it was mostly thanks too their actors that they worked so well. Silverman’s Rain might have stood a similar chance.

Oh yep. The reason that the show came to focus on Mulgrew, Picardo and Ryan is that those three stand head and shoulders about the rest of the cast in terms of ability. To be fair, Phillips probably comes close, but he’s stuck with an unworkable concept.

That’s true, however Seven of Nine’s premise wasn’t ditched immediately, and was used throughout the series, alongside the EMH, the two best characters, probably the two only characters I actually like from the show, so it wasn’t a given.

Yep. Seven’s premise wasn’t ditched because it worked and the writing staff were comfortable with it.

I suspect it could have gone the way of the Maquis if they struggled with it.

I think Tim Russ is also a talented actor, Darren. If only the series had been willing to do more with him.

Yep. I think he’s certainly far from the weakest member of the ensemble.

BTW, for some odd reason, I thought this was the season two finale and season three opener, and remembered it being very bad, but I got confused with that last Kazon episode where they take Voyager. I’m not even 30 yet and having lapses of memory…yep

Basics, Part I is not so bad, although it relies on some shocking contrivances and gaps in logic to get to its pre-determined cliffhanger. But Basics, Part II is diabolical.

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Future’s End (Part 2)

The crew of the USS Voyager have found themselves in the 24th century, stranded in the Delta Quadrant, far from their original destination of Starfleet Headquarters. In their quest to find a way home, the intrepid Voyager crew have encountered many incredible adventures and faced the challenges of the unknown. Now, they must once again put their courage and knowledge to the test as they confront a bizarre situation that could jeopardize the future of the entire universe.

Captain Janeway and her crew have discovered that a mysterious temporal disturbance has sent them back in time to the year 1996. Upon reaching Los Angeles, they find that a powerful alien group, the Krenim, is attempting to use a powerful temporal weapon known as the Chrono Deflector to rewrite history. With the power to alter time and space, the Krenim are capable of wiping out entire planets, and they have already used the weapon to eliminate entire civilizations from existence.

The Krenim’s chief scientist, Annorax, had originally created the weapon to restore his own species, which had been destroyed by a temporal anomaly. But now, he intends to use it to create a version of history in which the Krenim are the dominant species. To prevent this, Janeway must enlist the aid of the Caretaker, an alien entity with the power to control time who has been trapped in the past since the first Voyager mission.

With the help of the Caretaker, Janeway and her crew must use their knowledge of physics and temporal mechanics to outsmart the Krenim and prevent them from using the Chrono Deflector. In the process, they’ll face temporal paradoxes, time loops, and alternate timelines, all while attempting to find their own way back to the 24th century. It’s an action-packed race against time as Janeway and her crew put their courage and intelligence to the test and risk their very lives to ensure the safety of the future.

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Equinox (part 2), persistence of vision.

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Screen Rant

Star trek: ds9 foreshadowed voyager’s fate a year earlier.

In 1994, Star Trek began laying the groundwork for Voyager's 1995 premiere with a stark warning from Sisko about both the Maquis and the Badlands.

• DS9 set the stage for Voyager's fate, including the introduction of the Maquis and the crucial Badlands location.
• Commander Sisko's pursuit of the Maquis in DS9 foreshadowed Voyager's disappearance in the Badlands.
• The Badlands played a significant role in Voyager's pilot episode, setting the stage for the crew's journey to the Delta Quadrant.

The fate of the USS Voyager was foreshadowed by Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 2. With Star Trek: Voyager slated to premiere in January 1995, DS9 season 2 and Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7 laid some of the groundwork for the new show. The biggest way that DS9 and TNG set up Voyager was the introduction of the Maquis, the terrorist organization that would provide the rogue element in Voyager 's cast of characters. The TNG episode "Journey's End" set up the political situation from which they originated, while DS9 's two-parter "The Maquis" formally introduced them to the Star Trek universe .

Several Maquis members, including Commander Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and Lt. B'Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson) would later be forced to join the crew of the USS Voyager. However, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's Maquis two-parter set up the plot of Star Trek: Voyager in other ways, too . Halfway through "The Maquis", Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) is captured by terrorists, forcing Sisko to give pursuit. Tracking the Maquis freighter, Sisko, Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), and Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) enters the Badlands, a region of space that would play a crucial role in Voyager 's pilot episode, "Caretaker".

Star Trek: Voyager & DS9 Crossed Over In The Mirror Universe

Ds9 foreshadowed uss voyager's disappearance in the badlands, the maquis' use of the badlands as a hiding place and strategic location was seeded through ds9 seasons 2 and 3..

Briefing Dr. Julian Bashir, Kira reveals that the Badlands is beset by plasma storms, making it an incredibly dangerous region of space. To which Sisko adds that " a few ships have been lost there over the past year or two ", foreshadowing the loss of the USS Voyager a year later. DS9 would also later establish that the Badlands was a key strategic location for the Maquis in their resistance efforts against Cardassian occupation , further setting up the Star Trek: Voyager pilot. Not only was the Badlands a crucial hiding place for the Maquis, the region was also used as a staging ground for larger military operations.

The Badlands were likened to the Bermuda Triangle in an early outline of Star Trek: Voyager dated 17th August 1993.

In DS9 season 3, episode 9, "Defiant", Thomas Riker (Jonathan Frakes) hijacked the USS Defiant and took it into the Badlands to rendezvous with a fleet of Maquis raiders. "Defiant" aired a few months before Star Trek: Voyager 's pilot, in which Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and the crew of the USS Voyager departed from Deep Space Nine to track down a missing Maquis ship in the Badlands . It was a fateful mission that ultimately resulted in the Intrepid-class Voyager being stranded thousands of lightyears from home, another starship " lost over there " in the Badlands.

While devising Star Trek: Voyager in August 1993, Jeri Taylor wrote that the Badlands were " a turbulent area of space where some ships have been lost (some of them might crop up during the series) "

Other Star Trek Starships Lost In The Badlands

"a few ships have been lost over there..." - commander sisko.

The USS Voyager was initially sent to track down the missing Maquis freighter, the Val Jean, aboard which Lt. Tuvok (Tim Russ) was undercover for Starfleet. The Val Jean was lost in the Badlands after being pursued by Gul Evek (Richard Poe), who was overseer of the Demilitarized Zone in place between the Cardassian and Federation territories. However, rather than being destroyed by the plasma storms that plagued the region, the Val Jean was actually captured by the Caretaker's coherent tetryon beam and brought to the Delta Quadrant . The Caretaker had also taken a Cardassian Galor-class warship, and a Cardassian Dreadnought missile.

In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Voyager Conspiracy" it is suggested that it was Gul Evek's ship that was captured by the Caretaker, however this is later debunked.

The most notable starship taken by the Caretaker was the USS Equinox, which was encountered by Captain Janeway and the crew in Star Trek: Voyager 's season 5 finale . However, given that the Equinox was stranded in a different region of space, it seems that they weren't lost in the Badlands like Voyager was. The Badlands continued to be a key position during the Dominion War in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , until the Maquis were rooted out by the combined forces of the Cardassians and the Jem'Hadar, a devastating loss for Voyager's Maquis crew members.

All episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager are available to stream on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

*Availability in US

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, also known as DS9, is the fourth series in the long-running Sci-Fi franchise, Star Trek. DS9 was created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, and stars Avery Brooks, René Auberjonois, Terry Farrell, and Cirroc Lofton. This particular series follows a group of individuals in a space station near a planet called Bajor.

Star Trek: Voyager

The fifth entry in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Voyager, is a sci-fi series that sees the crew of the USS Voyager on a long journey back to their home after finding themselves stranded at the far ends of the Milky Way Galaxy. Led by Captain Kathryn Janeway, the series follows the crew as they embark through truly uncharted areas of space, with new species, friends, foes, and mysteries to solve as they wrestle with the politics of a crew in a situation they've never faced before. 

8 New Details Star Trek: Discovery Revealed About DS9s Breen

WARNING: Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery, season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors".

• The Breen from Star Trek: DS9 make a proper return in Discovery, revealing their secrets and motivations.
• L'ak is a unique Breen who fell in love with Moll, breaking the standard mold of his species.
• Discovery reveals the Breen have two faces, one translucent and one solid, hinting at a deeper evolution storyline.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors" reveals a raft of new details about the Breen from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . The Breen are the latest DS9 aliens to appear in Discovery , making their proper return in the flashback sequences that fill viewers in on the backstory of Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis). Written by Johanna Lee & Carlos Cisco, and directed by Jen McGowan , "Mirrors" finds Moll and L'ak stranded in interdimensional space with Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Cleveland Booker (David Ajala).

With the four treasure hunters forced to work together, there's a chance to reveal more about Moll and L'ak's motivations in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5 . The bombshell reveal that L'ak is actually Breen is the first of many revelations about the enigmatic Star Trek: Deep Space Nine aliens in the episode. The flashbacks to Moll and L'ak's burgeoning romance shed light on a number of aspects of Breen culture in the 32nd century , including just what sits underneath those helmets.

Star Trek: Discovery Vs. DS9's Breen Is Now Inevitable

L'ak is a breen, but he doesn't fit the mold of a traditional breen..

As Burnham and Book try to reason with Moll and L'ak, the couple reveal that they're trying to outrun an Erigah, a Breen blood bounty. This confirms to Burnham that L'ak is a Breen, albeit without the helmet and refrigeration suit . The flashbacks to how Moll and L'ak met reveal that L'ak was a member of the Breen royal family, but he didn't fit the mold . Demoted from his royal duties, L'ak was assigned to shuttle bay duty, where he met and fell in love with Moll.

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) once stated that nobody had seen a Breen without their helmet and lived to tell the tale. The revelations about L'ak's origins mean that half the cast of Star Trek: Discovery season 5 have managed to do just that. However, as the flashbacks show, the Breen are still incredibly secretive about showing their faces, which makes L'ak a unique member of his species .

Moll Used To Sell Dilithium To The Breen Imperium

It's how she made her living during the burn.

During the time of scarcity following The Burn, Moll supplied the Breen with dilithium for use in their starships. However, Moll was cutting her dilithium supply with " impurities " , meaning that the Breen's supply was considerably watered down. Confronted about this by L'ak, Moll offered to go into business with the mold-breaking Breen to make things go smoothly. L'ak agreed, partly due to his desire to get payback for his demotion, and partly due to his immediate attraction to Moll.

Moll and L'ak became a courier couple like Burnham and Booker, giving Book hope that he could get through to his new "sister".

Moll and L'ak were eventually found out for their scam, for which the punishment was execution. However, as L'ak couldn't bring himself to kill the woman he loved, he turned on his own people, instead. In response, the Breen placed an " Erigah " on L'ak, a blood bounty that could never be cleared . While Burnham and Booker offered Federation protection from the Breen, Moll and L'ak were unconvinced that they could truly help erase the Erigah.

Star Trek: Discovery Stars Eve Harlow & Elias Toufexis Break Down Their Villainous Romance

The breen placed a blood bounty on moll and l'ak, "can they erase an erigah".

Although the Erigah was placed on L'ak, Moll refused to leave his side, meaning that the Breen blood bounty was placed on them both. This explains Booker's assessment that the couple were having fun and engaging in " cliffs-edge kind of stuff ". Moll and L'ak's devil may care attitude so far in Star Trek: Discovery season 5 is likely driven by the fact that they're on the run for their very lives . Moll and L'ak are so committed to each other that the Breen tells Burnham that he'd " rather die " than be separated from Moll in a Federation prison.

An Erigah is an aspect of Breen culture that wasn't previously mentioned in the species' multiple appearances in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . It's therefore unclear how one collects a blood bounty, but Moll, L'ak, Burnham, and Book all seem troubled by the mention of the name. Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 7 is titled "Erigah", so it will presumably shed further light on the blood bounty placed on Moll and L'ak's heads, and who will attempt to collect it.

The Breen Atmosphere Is "Quite Comfortable"

Just as ds9's weyoun said it was..

It's long been speculated that the Breen lived in sub-zero temperatures, with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine characters like Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) and Quark (Armin Shimerman) referring to their planet as a frozen wasteland. While Moll doesn't visit the Breen homeworld in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, she is in their territory and doesn't need to wear any protective clothing to cope with the temperatures. This, therefore, confirms something that Weyoun (Jeffrey Combs) said in DS9 season 7, episode 20, "The Changing Face of Evil".

The Breen were also said to wear refrigeration suits to cope with the higher temperatures of other planets, something which is also seemingly contradicted by Star Trek: Discovery .

The Breen were powerful allies of the Dominion in the latter stages of their war with the Federation Alliance in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . After the Breen and the Dominion had signed their alliance, Weyoun reflected that the temperature on Breen was "quite comfortable". It was always possible that this was wry sarcasm on Weyoun's part. However, the atmosphere inside Star Trek: Discovery 's huge Imperium spaceport appears to confirm Weyoun's assessment of the temperature on Breen .

Star Trek: The Dominion War Timeline, Explained

The breen primarch is l'ak's uncle, part of the yod-thot royal caste..

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 1, "Red Directive" revealed that the Breen Confederacy had become the Breen Imperium in the 800 years since the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Not much was known about the inner workings of the Breen Confederacy in DS9 , other than negotiations with the Dominion were led by Thot Gor (Todd Slayton). In the 32nd century, the Breen Imperium is run by the Yod-Thot royal caste, suggesting an ancestral link with DS9 's Breen .

One of the key members of the Breen Imperium is Primarch Ruhn (Tony Nappa), the uncle of L'ak in Star Trek: Discovery season 5. The Primarch is disgusted by L'ak's relationship with Moll and his insistence on denying his heritage . L'ak stopped short of murdering his uncle while escaping with Moll, meaning that Primarch Ruhn may return later in Discovery season 5. Especially if Moll and L'ak open negotiations with the Breen Imperium to provide them with the Progenitors' powerful technology .

The Breen Imperium Destroy The Federation In An Alternate Future

They're the "wrong hands" that the progenitors' technology must not fall into..

Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 4, "Face the Strange" revealed that the Breen took possession of the Progenitors' technology in a timeline where the USS Discovery never defeated the time bug . The Krenim chronophage, left over from the Temporal Wars, was supposed to keep Discovery out of the treasure hunt until Moll and L'ak could secure the Progenitors' technology. The Breen Imperium then used the powers of the Progenitors to destroy the entire Federation in one of the most striking scenes from Discovery season 5, episode 4 .

The Breen previously launched an attack on Federation Headquarters in Star Trek: Discovery season 7, episode 20, "The Changing Face of Evil".

At the opening of Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, "Mirrors", Burnham and Commander Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) reflected on the stakes of their mission. "Mirrors" also revealed that Moll and L'ak are still determined to use the Progenitors' technology to bargain for their lives with the Breen Imperium. As Moll and L'ak escape the ISS Enterprise at the end of "Mirrors", they are more desperate than ever, making Discovery 's bleak future look like a serious possibility.

Star Trek: Discovery Reveals A Voyager Enemy Played A Big Role In The Temporal Wars

The breen do bleed, or leak, at the very least..

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 5, episode 14, "In Purgatory's Shadow", Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) confidently states that the Breen have no liquid circulatory system . Conducting blood screenings to root out Changeling infiltrators in the Dominion prison camp, Bashir says everyone bar the Breen prisoner has been tested because they have " No blood ". Star Trek: Discovery appears to reveal that this isn't the case, as L'ak appears to bleed after falling on his own knife during the fight with Burnham .

Given the revelations about the Breens' physiology in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5, there are some possible explanations for the contradiction. Firstly, the Breen are an incredibly secretive race, who were largely unknown to the Federation in the 24th century. The Breen prisoner in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine could, therefore, have just been lying to Bashir about not having any blood . The other explanation is that L'ak isn't bleeding, rather he's leaking the gelatinous organic material that constitutes a Breen body.

The Breen Have Two Faces

One solid face, one translucent face, both green..

The biggest reveal about the Breen in Star Trek: Discovery is what they keep underneath their helmets. It's stated that a Breen has two faces; one which is translucent and gelatinous, and another which is solid and firmly humanoid. This revelation is delivered as if the viewer was already aware of such a fact, which means that Discovery doesn't dive deeper into the reasons for the Breen having two faces . Primarch Ruhn tells L'ak that the Breen have evolved past their solid forms, and that their translucent form is a sign of strength.

Star Trek: Discovery doesn't reveal what role the Breen's armor plays in maintaining their form, translucent or otherwise. Still, the idea that the Breen's softer, more vulnerable face is stronger than the hard shell is a decent sci-fi concept that will hopefully get further exploration later in Discovery season 5. However, both faces are very clearly humanoid, which heavily implies that they may also originate from the Progenitors. Whether this information will lead to peace between the Breen and the Federation remains to be seen as Star Trek: Discovery season 5 continues.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Streams Thursdays On Paramount+

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is an entry in the legendary Sci-Fi franchise, set ten years before the original Star Trek series events. The show centers around Commander Michael Burnham, assigned to the USS Discovery, where the crew attempts to prevent a Klingon war while traveling through the vast reaches of space.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, also known as DS9, is the fourth series in the long-running Sci-Fi franchise, Star Trek. DS9 was created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, and stars Avery Brooks, Ren Auberjonois, Terry Farrell, and Cirroc Lofton. This particular series follows a group of individuals in a space station near a planet called Bajor.

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Or, they try to. And okay, it turns out the gratuitous beaming was for good reason, story-wise, because in the instant that the pair attempt to beam back to the bridge, Discovery plunges through time, and only their mid-transport timing protects them from the ship’s time-hopping. Everyone else aboard Discovery is experiencing “regular” time travel, as it were, unaware of their movement and remaining “of the time” they jump to.

Everyone, that is, except for Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), who thanks to his tardigrade DNA infusion all the way back in Season 1, the scientist is bouncing through time like the rest of the crew — but he’s mentally aware of the jumping remains “himself” like Burnham and Rayner.

Like “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” this is another episode about time shenanigans centering on Stamets and Burnham (and now also Rayner), but it doesn’t feel like a repeat of the same story so much as a deliberate permutation on a theme. Discovery , the show, is revisiting its past just the same way Burnham revisits her past self here; in both cases, the future versions have grown and changed in ways their past selves could never have imagined.

Who could have guessed, watching the series’ seventh episode, that original showrunner and creator Bryan Fuller would leave after just one season and a majority of the show would end up taking place in 32nd century? Not me, that’s for sure.

(As a side note, I was hoping one of the pasts they visited would be the “Magic” situation, just because come on, who doesn’t want to see what a time loop within a time loop looks like?)

It takes them all a few time jumps to figure out what’s going on, and a few more after that for all three of them to rendezvous. The second jump takes them back to Discovery mid-construction, sitting in dry dock at the San Francisco Fleet Yards, the Golden Gate Bridge framed nicely in a missing bulkhead section. (Both Star Trek and The Room have one rule: If you’re in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge must be visible at all times!)

Next jump is to the Season 2-ending battle with Control, and finally with three jumps there’s enough of a pattern visible for Rayner to identify what’s going on and what, exactly, is causing it. First, each time they jump Burnham and Rayner always return to the ready room – the place where they beamed themselves out of time — and second, that little mechanical spider that’s been crawling around the ship since it first detached itself from Adira’s uniform is a Krenim chronophage (yes, those Krenim ) left over from more lawless times  when paralyzing a ship by having it randomly cycle through time was a thing that apparently people did.

After a few more jumps, including one where a past version of Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) happens to save Rayner’s hide, he and Burnham land on an empty, dusty Discovery , abandoned by everyone except the one person who can’t leave: Zora (Annabelle Wallace). Listening to “Que Sera, Sera” and convinced that she’s dreaming, Zora explains that in this future, Discovery remained stuck in its time paralysis long enough for the Breen to get their hands on the Progenitor’s technology.

It’s a bleak future to visit, but it’s also very fortuitous that they did, because Zora is able to quickly do the math necessary for Stamets — who they finally meet up with in the next time jump –to figure out how to get them out of this. Just build a chroniton stabilizer and squish the bug with it, easy peasy!

And all Burnham has to do is get a component for it from her quarters without being seen. Not so easy as it turns out, as she runs into Book (David Ajala) who is very much in love with Burnham during this time period — and keen to show it. And she, as we all probably suspected, is still very much in love with him and gives herself a brief moment to indulge in that fact.

In their final final jump — this time to early in Lorca’s captaincy — Burnham runs into her much angrier and more jaded younger self; a Michael Burnham who is so barely out of prison that she still doesn’t even have a combadge and who flat-out does not believe this woman in a strange red uniform who claims to be her. Why? Because there’s no way anyone would ever make Michael Burnham a captain .

After a fight in a thankfully empty corridor, our Burnham ends up victorious and heads to the bridge… where she needs to convince everyone that they should listen to her and do something you never really want to do with a warp engine going at maximum speed: intentionally break the warp bubble and slam yourself back into the effects of general relativity.

Flashbacks are a tried and true way for shows to bring back departed characters, so the choice to include Airiam (Hanna Spear) on the bridge makes sense and is nice for audience members who miss her. What doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me is how her presence is used (which is a bit of an unfortunate parallel to her death for me – or at least the impact it was supposed to have).

Burnham knows she needs to convince the crew that she really is herself and that she really is from the future, but instead of, I don’t know, showing them her combadge which is full of 32nd century bells and whistles and exotic alloys that haven’t been invented yet she… convinces Airiam that they know each other because Burnham knows Airiam would sacrifice her life to save the ship? Then someone blurts out a “No she wouldn’t!” like that’s not the first thing any appropriately heroic Starfleet officer would do?

This scene is the one fumble in an otherwise great episode. Two minutes after this weird “I know you and here’s a generic hypothetical that applies to most people in Starfleet to prove it,” Airiam sees Burnham’s fancy holographic combadge and openly gawks at it. See, easily convinced! That would have worked and it wouldn’t have required the show to reexamine the hollowness of Airiam’s death without correcting its mistake.

The fact that Burnham doesn’t have anything better or more personal to say to or about Airiam except “You died, sorry that happened,” underscores just how undeveloped she was as a character. Why bring that up again? But hey, Burnham’s tactic works, and I suppose that’s what really matters here.

Meanwhile, past-Burnham and her era’s Rhys (Patrick Kwok-Choon) show up in engineering, phasers drawn, to try and stop Stamets and this weird guy they’ve never seen before from doing whatever it is that they’re trying to do to the ship. Rayner, solidifying himself as a solid gold example of a favorite character trope of mine — Grumpy Guy who’s a Secret Softie — defuses the situation by being brave as hell (he walks right into Burnham’s drawn phaser) but also emotionally astute.

He doesn’t just tell Burnham personal facts he couldn’t have known if he were really a stranger, he tells her with conviction that she really does deserve to be here on Discovery…  something that sinks to the core of who she is and what she’s battling in this moment in time.

The plan succeeds: the time bug is proverbially squished, and Discovery and her crew are all right back where they belong, minus the six hours they lost during all the jumping. Unfortunately, those six hours were long enough for Moll and L’ak to catch up with them and leave again. Did they find anything, or did they get sick of looking at seemingly empty space and leave? We don’t know yet, so tune in next week.

Which brings us to the beginning of “Face the Strange” — see, I can jump through time too! — when we see Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis) acquiring the bug in the first place. While the Progenitors’ technology is enormous in its power and implications and Moll and L’ak are willing to do just about anything to find it, their motivations seem strictly personal.

Sure, if the way Moll takes revenge on the guy who sells her the chronophage is any indication, they’ll get some personal satisfaction out of seeing the Federation burn, but more than anything they’re in it for their freedom. Freedom from someone or something, certainly – though who or what we still don’t know – but, given the themes in “Face the Strange”, I’d guess freedom from their pasts might be the real goal.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• “Face the Strange” is a reference to the David Bowie classic “Changes.”
• This episode is a spiritual sequel to Star Trek: Voyager’s “Shattered,” a similar final-season tale which saw Chakotay bouncing through different eras of Voyager adventures.
• Discovery’s time jumps include visits to the ship’s transit through the Red Angel wormhole (leading to the ship’s crash-landing in “Far From Home” ), a time when the starship was under construction in the San Francisco Fleet Yards, the battle with Control ( “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2” ), Stardate 865422.4 (during Osyyra’s takover in “There Is A Tide…” ), an unknown date nearly 30 years into the future, a period in early Season 2 (shortly after Jett Reno’s rescue in “Brother” ), a point ahead of the Season 4 premiere after Burnham was promoted to captai), and the encounter with past-Burnham which takes place just ahead of “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry” (denoted by the reference to a still-alive Ellen Landry ).

• Retrofit into corridor after Season 2’s set updates, the passage to the left-rear of Discovery’s command chair returns to its Season 1 “blue blinkies” configuration.
• Captain Pike’s broken wood-and-glass conference table returns to the ready room set during the first time jump, a good touch from the set decoration department.
• We’ve seen the San Francisco bay many times in Star Trek history… so just where in the heck was Discovery’s dry dock located?
• A Krenim chronophage — or “time bug” — snared Discovery in a time bubble, from the species behind Star Trek: Voyager’s “Year of Hell.”
• Season 3-era Reno’s drink of choice is a Vesper martini, served ice cold — and she tells Rayner that he can buy her a drink “at Red’s,” the onboard bar and lounge set added to Discovery during its 32nd century upgrades (though not introduced until Season 4).
• While the ready room set was not built for Discovery until Season 2, the second time jump confirms the room existed as part of the ship’s original construction… but in a continuity goof, the 32nd century version of the Starfleet emblem remains on the Discovery ready room floor in each different time period, instead of the old version seen in Seasons 1 and 2.

• Burnham gives a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nostalgic smile when Stamets hands her a 23rd century Starfleet communicator, retired after the crew upgraded to 32nd tricombadges in Season 3’s “Scavengers.”
• Saurian officer Linus (David Benjamin Tomlinson) appears in the Season 1 time period, indicating he boarded Discovery long before his first actual appearance in Season 2’s “Brothers.”
• Former Discovery cast members Hannah Cheesman and Ronnie Rowe, Jr. return as Airiam and Bryce, Julianne Grossman returns as the original voice of Discovery’s computer. (While Cheesman portrayed Airiam in Season 2, the role was actually portrayed by Sara Mitich in Discovery’s first season.)
• I forgot just how much Airiam moves like C-3PO. Might have toned down that arm placement there in that wide shot if it were me, yikes.
• Discovery’s viewscreen may be an open window to space, but it features blast doors which can be closed as necessary.
• The future time period Burnham and Rayner visit is reminiscent of the alternate future setting in “Calypso,” where Zora and Discovery sat abandoned for nearly 1000 years. Zora even believes she’s having “another dream” when the officers arrive, perhaps hinting that the events of “Calypso” may have been one of Zora’s dreams — as the “Zora-point-of-view” shots mirror moments from that  Short Trek  tale.

• This episode marks the first time we’ve seen Discovery’s original hull and nacelle configuration since its big 32nd century upgrade in “Scavengers.”
• Even living “outside of time,” it’s curious that Stamets can jump back to a time period before his tardigrade DNA injection occurred.
• Stamets’ tactics for clearing engineering get less and less sophisticated as the episode proceeds — going from making up specific problems with the spore drive containment field to just shouting “I’m grumpy!” It works.
• “Hey Paul, let’s show ‘em how a couple of old dogs still know the best tricks!” Whoever gave Rayner a used copy of a dictionary of idioms from 1962, I thank you for your service.
• Rayner’s hand gets the “Timescape” treatment, aging uncomfortably fast while he squashes the time bug — though thankfully avoiding those awful long fingernails.
• Rayner surmises that Burnham must be the first person in Starfleet to captain a ship she first boarded as a prisoner. He’s probably right, but if we allow for a few technicalities I’d put Seven of Nine in that rare club as well: she’s imprisoned very quickly after boarding Voyager , and while she doesn’t hold a Starfleet rank at the time, she does command that vessel for over a month during the events of “One”.

Even with all the time jumping and the temporal-relativity-heavy plot, “Face the Strange” is a straightforward hour of television that confidently knows exactly what it wants to do – both in terms of the story and the characters. There are almost no extraneous moments, but the episode doesn’t feel rushed or overly full. The pacing is great: quick enough that we get to jump through a lot of different time periods, but relaxed enough that there’s room for smaller moments of comedy and character work.

The pacing and placement of the more emotional moments is especially effective, with characters examining and confronting their past and present selves in a way that’s emotionally resonant but also truly moves the story forward both at the episode and season levels.

A frequent frustration I have with Discovery is that the emotional beats and plot beats feel like they’re competing with each other for the same space, but with “Face the Strange” it feels like the show has finally figured out a way to have them work together and compliment one another.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 returns with “Mirrors” on Thursday, April 25.

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