"Future's End" is a two-part episode from the third season of Star Trek: Voyager. The first segment has an average fan rating of 4.5/5 on the official Star Trek website as of September, 2009. The second maintains a rating of 3.9/5.
A ship with a Federation signature emerges from a temporal rift in front of Voyager, and its pilot identifies himself as Captain Braxton from the twenty-ninth century. He says he must destroy them to prevent a cataclysm he believes they're the cause of that will wipe out most of the Earth's solar system in his time. Voyager fights off Braxton's attack, resulting in the future captain being sent back through the rift to the year 1967. Voyager and its crew are also pulled into the rift and find themselves in the year 1996. The starship is identified on Earth as a UFO and videotaped as such, placing the U.S. military on alert.
A young hiker, Henry Starling, finds the timeship in 1967, and steals its technology to found his own company, Chronowerx, which leads to the computer revolution of the nineties. Starling, now a rich man, manages to hack into the computer on Voyager, using his superior 29th century technology, and steal many of their files, including the Doctor. Meanwhile, a young astronomer named Rain Robinson has discovered Voyager in high orbit, and assumes it to be extraterrestrial life. She successfully attempts to contact Voyager, which forces the crew to do some damage control. Captain Janeway, Commander Chakotay, Tuvok, and Tom Paris, all go to Earth's surface. Tuvok and Paris go to find Rain, while Janeway and Chakotay investigate the ex-hippie, Henry Starling.
Ultimately the crew figures out that Starling's attempt to travel to the future in Braxton's timeship is the true cause of that time's explosive catastrophy. After a failed attempt to convince him to stop before it's too late, Janeway destroys the timeship by manually firing a photon torpedo into it, destroying it just as it enters a temporal rift, and saving the future. An alternate Captain Braxton arrives, having detected their presence in the past, and returns them to their own time at the place they left it. He is unwilling to bring them to their Earth as that would violate the Temporal Prime Directive.
- This episode contains two allusions to incidents in time travel episodes of the original Star Trek series: The first is when Voyager is observed and reported as a UFO. This happened when the Kirk's Enterprise traveled to 1969 in "Tomorrow is Yesterday." The second was when Janeway attempted to access Henry Starling's computer files. She equated using a keyboard and primitive computer with using "stone knives and bearskins," the same line used by Spock in "The City on the Edge of Forever."
[edit] Aftermath
- The main consequence of the episode was that the Doctor gained his 29th century technology mobile emitter from Starling and thus becomes able to leave Voyager’s sickbay with its stationary holo-emitters to go wherever he likes, whether inside or outside of the ship.
- The later episode "11:59" reveals that the events of this episode, particularly the existence of Chronowerx, continued to be part of the timeline, as a web browser made by Chronowerx was seen to be in use.
- Captain Braxton returns in the episode "Relativity," possessing memories of both versions of himself seen in this episode. He says that after spending decades on Earth, he was subject to rehabilitation but allowed to return to duty.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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