3x08 Future's End (1)

[7.2/10] Very little of 1990s Star Trek feels dated to me. Some of the early seasons of The Next Generation feel like a throwback, from the less-polished presentation to the fifty shades of beige for the set design. But I tend to think of that series as the beginning of modern television. That has more to do with my age than any objective factors, but TNG, alongside The Simpsons, is the dividing line where television feels like what I know and recognize, in style and in substance.

But in an episode like “Future’s End”, it becomes apparent that a good part of that rests on the franchise’s future setting. While the chunky computers and data drives aboard the Enterprise seem a little silly now that we have smartphones and tablets, for the most part, the fantastical setting helps these shows age gracefully. It’s easier to be timeless when your world, your setting, and even your apparel are pretty far removed from the immediate styles and trends.

And yet, you throw the crew of Voyager into the Los Angeles of 1996, replete with rejected Miami Vice apparel, riffs on dot com billionaires, and pointed observations of the culture at the time, and suddenly you’ve tied yourself to a real, particular time and place in a way Star Trek rarely does. The end result is that an episode like “Future’s End”, meant to be a pip with its gimmick and a thrill with its unique threat, mainly plays as hokey, not because of the substance of the story, but because of the trappings of the present day presentation.

All of that said, while I chuckle a little bit at the elements of this one that seem cheesy to modern eyes, it’s nice to see Voyager shoot on location a bit! The production aesthetic will be familiar to anyone who watched other UPN shows at the time (which is part of what dates the episode), but the direction and cinematography gets much looser and more ambitious working in real spaces rather than on controlled sets. It helps sell the sense that this truly is something different than the norm, worthy of attention and intrigue beyond the usual crisis-of-the-week.

Of course, this crisis is a little more convoluted than the usual forty-four minute adventure. It involves one Captain Braxton traveling from the 29th century to destroy Voyager, a spatial phenomenon that strands our heroes in the earth of the mid-1990s (Hey! That's when the show was airing!), a hippie who parlays discovering Braxton’s ship into a tech bro empire, and a plot to travel to the distant future that results in a deadly time explosion and predestination paradox. (Don’t tell the recently-introduced Temporal Investigations division of Starfleet; they’d have a field day.)

Suffice it to say, that's a lot. You can feel the episode slow down in points to try to set this all up and explain it to the audience. But honestly, I like the ambition of it, and even if the plot threads get tangled in places, the stakes and the urgency are clear enough, even if the details are a little opaque in places.

More to the point, while all the narrative scaffolding that has to be established can feel a little tedious in places, there's a solid enough structure to the episode that keeps it accessible. Tom and Tuvok snoop for clues and end up inadvertently team up with aspiring scientist and wunderkind Rain Robinson. Janeway and Chakotay track down Captain Braxton but end up in the crosshairs of the aforementioned tech billionaire, Henry Starling, who’s commandeered the time vessel and is orchestrating the plans.

Most surprisingly, there's a solid little subplot about Harry Kim being given temporary command of the bridge and having to make the tough calls, a rare bit of growth and nice win for the guy. None of these plots is perfect, and both have to leap over the narrative detritus that piles up in setting up this scenario, but for as wide-ranging and epic as this means to be, the division and progression is easy to follow.

The problem is the characterization and performances. Allan Royal is clearly giving it his all, but turning Captain Braxton into a time-displaced, streets-roaming crank who happens to be telling the truth plays as too cheeky, and Royal’s take on the archetype comes off as silly rather than grounded. Likewise, I’m a fan of Sarah Silverman, but her acting isn’t quite up to snuff in one of her first non-sketch roles on television, and the writing of Robinson as an overgrown teenager does her no favors. Corny dialogue about Robinson’s “curves” or Starling’s threats doesn’t help the situation either.

That said, Ed Begley Jr. is a champ, as always, and gives Starling a lived-in edge that helps make the villain of the piece stand out despite challenges in how the character’s written. Make no mistake, the villainous business guy was a tired archetype long before Voyager got its bite at the apple. (Paul Reiser’s character from Aliens comes to mind.) But there is a hacky, dated quality to him as a reflection of the 1990s dot com boom that worsens the problem for “Future’s End”. Thankfully, Begley Jr. more than pulls his weight to help compensate.

What’s left is a balance of cornball elements: like Tom and Tuvok’s odd couple routine with Rain that falls short of Star Trek IV’s similar setup, Janeway and Chakotay’s snarky comments about the beach crowd, and Neelix and Kes’ fascination with soap operas on the one hand. And on the other, you have legitimately compelling teases, like Starling using his 29th century advantage to get the better of Voyager, the Doctor being holo-napped, and Voyager appearing on television. The gimmick here is a thrill, but in terms of quality, the first half of “Future’s End” is all over the place.

Here’s the funny thing, though. I watched most of Voyager when I was a kid, and much of it is a blur. I remember the characters and some key moments and adventures, but a lot of the intricate details have fallen away over time.

And yet, I remember “Future’s End” surprisingly clearly: the excitement of seeing Voyager in the then-present day, the neat mix of what was our current technology at the time with futuristic Starfleet tech (“Use AOL keyword ‘Janeway’!”), and the prospect of devices that were even more advanced than the Federations. However silly it may all seem now, it enraptured me then. The material and approach here may feel unusually dated to my modern eyes, but if it could provoke that kind of response when it aired, and stick in my brain all these years later, they must have been doing something right.