Voyager Flashback: Future's End

Ask someone who knows very little about Star Trek to tell you what they do know about it, and chances are pretty good they'll mention something about a movie where they saved the whales. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home turned out to have some crossover appeal beyond Trekker circles. So it's not surprising that one of the Star Trek series would at some point be inspired to try a similarly lighthearted time-traveling romp to "present day." Voyager did just that with the two-part episode "Future's End."

A Federation timeship appears from the future and attempts to destroy Voyager to prevent a catastrophe... but in the process, both ships are thrown pack in time to the 20th century. The timeship falls into the hands of a schemer who raids its technology to build a business empire, while Voyager lands in 1996 and the crew must find a way to break the cyclical loop of events they're now trapped in.

Just as Star Trek IV just hand-waved time travel as something you can just do when it's good for the plot, so "Future's End" has a really rough and non-sensical opening to get you into the story. You have to overlook a time traveler shrieking about how he has "no time" to explain a problem (that's not going to happen for centuries). You have to buy that Voyager would have any means at all to resist an attack by technology 500 years more advanced. You have to believe that a future Federation officer's standard procedure would be "shoot first, ask questions never." (And accept that no apology will be requested or offered for him turning out to be dead wrong about his reasons for wanting to destroy Voyager.)

Get past all that, and this episode really is a lot of fun. Watching the Voyager crew try to navigate 1996 is great (particularly with Tom Paris, who's working at a level of knowledge where he doesn't know how much he doesn't know). The crew gets hooked on soap operas, the ship is caught on film as a UFO, we get callbacks to past Star Trek time traveling ("stone knives and bear skins"), and it's all contained in the fun premise that our own real-world technological boom was the result of a visitor from the future.

It all must have been a lot of fun to make too. It feels like there's more location shooting for this two-parter than in all preceding Voyager episodes combined. (Plus: for once, they get to film at Griffith Observatory and tell you it's Griffith Observatory.) The production team has fun serving up wild fashion, Photoshopped fakery (of a famous "Nixon meets Elvis" photo), and well-decorated sets (the offices of Henry Starling and Rain Robinson).

The best part of the episode is the casting of two big guest stars. Ed Begley Jr. is playing wonderfully against type here; though in real life he's an active environmentalist, his role here as sociopathic "tech bro" Henry Starling (before we had the nomenclature for such a thing) turns out to be Voyager's most effective villain to date. Then there's Sarah Silverman as Rain Robinson. Though she's certainly more well-known today, her reputation as a stand-up was well-established at the time, and she was crossing over into acting. She was reportedly thrilled to do something that wasn't a dopey sitcom role, and she actually demonstrates more acting chops than a lot of Star Trek guest stars of the era showed.

Other observations:

• If the episode weren't clearly intended to be fun, you could seriously dig into the question of what would be worse: to be trapped an impossible distance from your home, or to be at your home but in the wrong time period?

• How and why has tennis changed in the future to use a weirdo ball with suckers? And why is Janeway just practicing in her ready room as opposed to a holodeck or something?

• This episode came a year after the movie 12 Monkeys, which clearly put the idea in the writers' heads that knowledge of the future turns you into a raving maniac.
  

• It's great to see Harry Kim put in command (and for him to be good at it). But still... why? There are higher-ranking people who could have taken the captain's chair (including B'Elanna). After this, the fact that Kim never gets a promotion for the entire run of the show looks egregious. He doesn't even get the dignity of an "acting captain's log" in this episode; he delivers the "Operations Officer's log."
  

• Why risk taking Voyager close to the planet's surface when you could send a shuttle? (There's nothing wrong with the shuttles, because we see exactly that in the second half of the two-parter.)
  

Man are there a lot of plot holes in getting this episode up and running. But once it's there, the great guest stars and the overall fun tone make for a nice ride. I give "Future's End" a B.