“Future’s End” is episode eight of season three of Star Trek: Voyager.
The episode opens on Earth, in the High Sierras in 1967. A man, who appears to be a hippie, is listening to a radio by his campfire when the signal starts breaking up. There’s a sonic boom and a light passes overhead to land with a crash nearby. The man goes to see what it is.
Captain Janeway is in her ready room, practicing her tennis serve, when Tuvok enters. She’s decided to take tennis up again after 19 years and is a little rusty. Tuvok gives her some advice and starts his monthly security evaluation when a red alert sounds and Chakotay asks the captain to come to the bridge.
A spatial rift has formed in front of the ship; according to Harry, it’s a distortion in the space-time continuum, and it’s been artificially generated. A small ship, only 6m long with a single human occupant comes out. The subspace signature shows that it is Federation. The ship doesn’t respond to hails and is charging weapons. It packs a powerful punch for its size, taking the shields down and sending the helm offline. Phasers have no effect and Voyager is being shaken apart. A high energy polaron pulse disrupts its weapon.
Now the ship wants to hail them. The commander is Captain Braxton of the Federation Timeship Aeon. He’s from the 29th century and wants them to stop blocking his weapon. Voyager is responsible for a disaster in his century; a temporal disaster that destroys all of Earth’s solar system. His mission is their destruction. Debris from Voyager‘s secondary hull was found at the explosion. Braxton fires again. Janeway wants rather more proof before she sacrifices her crew. Responding to the attack causes the rift to destabilise and both ships are pulled in.
The temporal rift closes and, when asked where they are, Tom says ‘Home’ because they are in orbit around Earth. There’s no response from Starfleet Command and Tuvok is picking up multiple narrow band EM signals. Radio. The captain then asks when are they. 1996. Tom warns that there are surveillance satellites in this time so Voyager moves into a higher orbit and the shields are modified to scatter the radar. There’s no sign of the Aeon in orbit. A scan of the surface reveals a subspace signature from the northern hemisphere. Los Angeles. The timeship must be there, as subspace technology was unknown. It’s the only way to get home. The captain, Tuvok, Tom and Chakotay are going to beam down, leaving Harry in charge. Tom’s interest in the 20th century is known, so Janeway asks him what they need. Nice clothes, a fast car and lots of money.
Observing the people on the surface, Tuvok comments they could have worn their uniforms and he doubts anyone would have noticed. They are close to the subspace signature. Perhaps the ship is cloaked. They split up into two teams, and Janeway and Chakotay discover that the subspace readings are coming from a homeless man. At Griffin Observatory, meanwhile, a young woman gets a blip on her computer screen. The emission source is plotted to be in orbit.
A man is chewing someone out about the quality of a computer chip when the meeting is interrupted. His assistant tells him that it’s from a Rain Robinson at Griffin Observatory. The man, Henry Starling, funds her astronomy lab and he was to be notified if a gamma emission was spotted of a certain frequency and profile. It was, so she is. The source showed up 90 minutes ago. Rain wants to send a message to NASA and others, but Starling tells her to hold off on that. As he hangs up the phone, it can be seen he has the same tattoo as the hippie who saw something crash in 1967.
Rain decides to send the standard SETI greeting anyway. On Voyager, B’Elanna and Harry are going through the problems, one being the main transporter pattern buffer has crashed. They still have emergency ones, but they only have a 10km range. Then the ship picks up a signal directed at them, a greeting from the people of earth. When asked if they should send a response, Harry says absolutely not.
All four on the surface are following the homeless man who is putting up signs about the end of the world when Harry contacts them about the signal coming from Griffin Observatory. They can’t beam there either, so Tuvok and Tom will have to use conventional means. Tom tells Tuvok that nobody walks in LA. Chakotay and Janeway follow the man, who thinks they are homeless people. Then looks more closely, and realise they are from Voyager. It’s Captain Braxton. Covering someone in lots of hair makes it easier to age them more realistically.
Neelix and Kes, whilst scanning local transmissions for information, get hooked on soap operas. Tuvok gets asked about his ears, which he says are a family trait. Which is totally accurate. Somehow, the destruction of the solar system needs to be stopped, but causality is a problem, as the attempt to stop the destruction caused it. Time travel is always a problem. And all these problems need to be solved without wrecking the timeline.
The story continues in “Future’s End, Part II”.