Future's End

"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.

Plot

Captain Braxton from the twenty-ninth century appears before Voyager and says he must destroy them to prevent a cataclysm that will wipe out most of the Earth's solar system. Voyager fights back, resulting in a time rip that sends the future captain to the year 1967, while Voyager and its crew are sent to the year 1996, where the starship is mistaken for a UFO and videotaped as a UFO, placing the US military on alert. This is the second time this happened. The first time this happened was when the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 time traveled to 1969 (Original series episode: "Tomorrow is Yesterday"). That ship was also mistaken as a UFO by the US military, specifically by the USAF.

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 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.

When attempting to access Henry Starling's computer files, Captain Janeway equates using a keyboard and primitive computer with using "stone knives and bearskins", which alludes to a line Spock uses in "The City on the Edge of Forever", an episode of the original Star Trek series.

Ultimately the crew figures out that Starling's attempt to travel to the future in Braxton's timeship is what caused the explosion in the future. 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 he returns them to their own time at the place they left it. Unfortunately, he is unwilling to bring them to Earth in the future, as that would violate the Temporal Prime Directive.

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. Because Voyager destroyed Starling's ship, the causality paradox is prevented and all returns to normal for Voyager and its crew.

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.

External links

• Future's End, Part I at the Internet Movie Database
• Future's End, Part II at the Internet Movie Database
• "Future's End, Part I" at TV.com
• "Future's End, Part II" at TV.com
• Future's End, Part I at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• Future's End, Part II at Memory Alpha (a Star Trek wiki)
• Future's End at Memory Beta (a Star Trek wiki)
• Future's End, Part I at StarTrek.com
• Future's End, Part II at StarTrek.com