Star Trek: 10 Characters Permanently Displaced In Time
Star Trek characters have dealt with "timey-wimey" stuff almost as often as a certain alien Doctor.
So what's with Star Trek's writers and time anyway? Since its debut in 1966, Star Trek's writers have sent characters through time almost as often as they've sent them to strange new worlds. Characters have been to Great Depression-era New York City, Los Angeles in the 1990s, San Francisco in the 1980s, San Francisco in the 1880s, Los Angeles in 2024, and the Federation in the 32nd century.
Typically Star Trek's time travel stories have featured the protagonists correcting the timeline, protecting the future by changing the past, and generally setting right what once went wrong. These stories end with the heroes completing their objective and finding their way back to their own time.
However, there's been more than one occasion when characters have had one-way journeys through time. Sometimes they simply spend centuries drifting through space in sleeper ships, sometimes they've been abducted by aliens and left in suspended animation, sometimes they've unknowingly bought a one way ticket through a rip in spacetime, sometimes they've joined with alien travelers to help maintain the timeline, and sometimes they've actively decided to live in another time. With that in mind here are 10 characters who've been permanently displaced in time.
10. Morgan Bateson
Captain Morgan Bateson was introduced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Cause and Effect. In 2278, he was commanding the USS Bozeman when it encountered a temporal distortion and collided with the USS Enterprise-D in 2368.
The resulting explosion of the Enterprise-D ruptured the spacetime continuum and locked both ships in an endless loop of the Bozeman colliding with the Enterprise-D followed by the Enterprise-D exploding and triggering a new loop.
Although the crew of the Enterprise-D eventually broke the loop, the Bozeman and her crew were now trapped in the 24th Century.
Bateson eventually continued his career in Starfleet. In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode Grounded, Bateson was instrumental in proving that Captain Carol Freeman of the USS Cerritos had been framed for the destruction of the Pakled homeworld.
Bateson's career was fleshed out in several Star Trek novels, short stories, and comics. Ship of the Line, for example, depicted the events leading to the temporal causality loop, the crew adapting to life in the 24th century, and their eventual assignment to a new USS Bozeman that participated in the Battle of Sector 001 in Star Trek: First Contact.