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Synopsis

Part 1

Our episode begins with a spaceship crashing off-screen in 1967 Los Angeles. A hippie bearing a red tattoo on his left wrist goes to investigate.

Back on Voyager, present day, Tuvok presents a report to Janeway, but Chakotay calls them immediately for a red alert on the bridge. A spatial rift has opened, and a small ship with 1 human occupant and a Federation signature emerges. The ship attacks Voyager, and when they use a deflector pulse to stop the attack, they are hailed by the occupant, a Captain Braxton of the 29th century Federation Timeship Aeon. He’s come to destroy Voyager in an attempt to stop a catastrophic event in the 29th century which destroys earth’s solar system.

The attacks continue, but when Voyager further deflects them, both ships are sucked into the rift and end up back at earth. However, they are in 1996, and the other ship is nowhere to be found! There’s a subspace signal somewhere on the surface, and Janeway leads a team of Chakotay, Tuvok, and Paris to find it. Kim is left in charge of the bridge.

They split off into pairs; Chakotay and Janeway, and Tuvok and Paris. Janeway and Chakotay locate the signal coming from a bearded man.

We are then introduced to Rain Robinson, a scientist working at the Observatory and who just detected Voyager in orbit. She contacts the man funding her research, Henry Starling, and we get a great shot of his tattoo. It’s the hippie from earlier! Against Henry’s wishes, Rain sends a message to Voyager.

Meanwhile, back on Voyager, we learn the ship is so damaged that they will have to come within 10 km of the surface in order to beam the away team back to the ship. Voyager receives Rain’s message and notifies Janeway. The away team reunites and Janeway orders Paris and Tuvok to find the person who sent Voyager the message and find out what they know. Also, if possible, to destroy the evidence.

Janeway and Chakotay engage the bearded man when they find his home in an alley. It turns out he’s Braxton, and he was sent to the surface 30 years before Voyager got there. Braxton’s ship crashed and he emergency beamed onto the surface, and Starling the hippie, found the ship first and stole all the technology. Braxton explains that over the last 30 years, he realizes Voyager wasn’t the cause of the catastrophe, but Starling travelling to the future with Braxton’s ship. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – the only reason why there was an explosion was because Braxton tried to stop the explosion in the first place. After the explanation, Braxton runs away from the cops.

Starling finds out Rain didn’t keep the discovery of Voyager a secret, so he orders her killed.

Paris and Tuvok get to the observatory and run into Rain, who Paris strikes a friendship with. Tuvok manages to delete all her data and they leave, but Rain chases them out of the building. Starling’s assassin shoots Rain with a phaser, but misses, and Tuvok, Paris, and Rain escape in her car.

Kes and Neelix are watching earth TV programs as instructed by Kim, just in case anyone reports on Voyager. They muse about how nice non-interactive stories are.

At CHRONOWERX, Starling’s company, Janeway and Chakotay manage to break in without any alarms. They hack into his computer and discover that the computer age was a result of their time travel. They also find the ship behind a forcefield in Starling’s office. Coordinating with Kim on Voyager to download Starling’s database, they are caught by Starling, but are beamed out right on time.

Unfortunately, that meant Voyager came close to the surface, and was spotted by earth. Additionally, Starling counter-hacked Voyager, stealing much of their data, too.

Part 2

Rightly suspicious Rain questions Paris and Tuvok, thinking they don’t seem like secret agents, that something is off about them. They lost their ability to communicate with Voyager in the previous episode, and must return to the Observatory to contact them.

Back on Voyager, we re-learn the stakes, such that Braxton was right about everything: the solar system is at risk. Starling took an enormous amount of data, including the Doctor. Additionally, Neelix says that the US military is onto Voyager.

Tuvok hacks a cell phone at the Observatory to contact Voyager. Janeway recruits Rain for a job, but we don’t know what yet.

Starling boots up the Doctor and programs him to feel pain, hoping to get him to comply and cooperate. While they discuss that, Rain calls Starling, and asks him to help her out because she’s scared someone’s trying to kill her.

We then learn this was Janeway’s plan all along.

Chakotay and Torres are in a shuttle, another part of Janeway’s plan. They are going to beam Starling to Voyager, and it’s safe this time since the shuttle is “cloaked” to look like a plane.

Everyone is surprised to see the Doctor sporting a “mobile emitter” which allows him to travel where he pleases – he arrives at the square with Starling. When Starling takes Rain into his car, rather than enter Rain’s car, they still manage to beam him out of there and Rain and the Doctor run for Paris and Tuvok and succeed. That seemed to have been Janeway’s plan.

Chakotay and Tuvok beam Starling to Voyager despite his interference device, but they crash into the Arizona desert. They wake up in a basement and are questioned by their captors if they’re from the government, aka, the Beast. Torres isn’t pleased at all.

Janeway orders Tuvok and the Doctor to go and find Torres, Chakotay, and their shuttle. Meanwhile, Paris and Rain go to Chronowerx industries and acquire the timeship.

Starling’s personal guard Dunbar transports Starling from Voyager back to his office, using the timeship.

Paris decides to not involve Rain in the mission and drops her off at the observatory. On the drive to Chronowerx, Rain hypothesizes who they are, and Paris essentially lets it be known when they find the timeship leaving the observatory by truck. After sharing feelings, Paris asks Rain if she’d want to help him one last time and they give chase to the truck.

The Doctor and Tuvok save Torres and Chakotay. It’s kind of funny when the captors shoot the Doctor and no bullets hit him. Funnier still are Torres and Chakotay’s reactions to seeing the Doctor at all.

There’s a fun chase scene between Rain, Paris, and the timeship truck. With a phaser, Tom shoots out one of the tires of the truck, but the truck was a decoy. The real timeship was at the office the whole time!

Starling launches from his timeship and it’s up to Voyager to stop him. Janeway decides to manually shoot torpedos at the timeship.

Rain and Paris say goodbye and kiss in a poignant moment. “Say hi to Saturn for me!”

Now, everyone is on the bridge, including the Doctor, who is so happy to be there. Starling is given a choice before they fire, stop or be destroyed, but, he refuses, and is destroyed. Janeway is knocked out, but the day is saved. Unfortunately, the rift is broken.

No worries, though, since a new rift appears and a different Braxton informs them he will return them to the Delta Quadrant. Janeway begs to be brought back to Earth instead, but Braxton refuses on account of the temporal Prime Directive.

The crew have a party where we learn a little bit more about the holo-emitter: it’s kind of like shoes, but more complicated than that. The episode ends with Paris calling Tuvok a freakosaurus.

Thoughts

I’ve had fond memories of this episode, especially as a Sarah Silverman fan. Young Sarah was so cool! I’ve also just loved the episodes which more or less set in the time period filming, for all the Trek series, and Voyager’s episode is campy and fun as hell.

These episodes are a bit unfamiliar as a Trek two-parter, such that each episode in “Future’s End” follows the same format and minor plots; in essence, this was a movie, very much in the style of the series opener “Caretaker.” In my opinion, most Trek two-parters feel like two distinct episodes with a familiar thread (such as Year of Hell). Playing out in longform, like in “Future’s End,” certainly kept the stakes high and energy flowing strongly.

Each member of the crew had a distinct role, some larger than others, but it had that Trek-film vibe, where all of our favourite characters are doing something cool. Neelix and Kes, getting the short end of duties, were hilarious watching the TV. Additionally, this may have been the first time Voyager relies on Kes for her medical expertise, something we’ll see again in a proto-“Year of Hell,” actually, when Kes travels back in time.

I liked Paris as the love interest here, since this might have been the first time seeing him grow and mature from the ladies man to someone with a soul. He is the only one of the “secret agents” working with Rain who feels bad for patronizing her, and becomes most embarrassed about it when the Doctor infers she was hallucinating. Paris’ reputation in the show was poor when it came to relationships, so this was a pleasant change.

Was it an idiot plot? Did Starling have to travel to the future, even though Janeway said it would surely lead to destruction? I felt like the writers left out a line where Janeway makes it clear to him that his intention of coming back with technology to sell will be moot if he dies in the explosion. If such a line were expressed, his motivations would seem far more unhinged. I guess they wanted to make it seem like he was making good decisions for himself, at least, but maybe it would have been cooler to juxtapose Starling’s obsessions with Braxton’s. We don’t see Braxton after the cops chase him until the very end of the second episode, and the comparison of those two characters may have been something interesting to explore.

It was a real pleasure watching these episodes again and writing about it. “Future’s End” is such a fun, family friendly early 90s movie.

This was originally posted on March 21, 2020. Transported to neocities on April 25, 2025.