10 Times Star Trek Foretold The Apocalypse
Star Trek has reckoned its future's end, and we're all not fine.
In Star Trek, you can get A Taste of Armageddon ahead of The Doomsday Machine or see Apocalypse Rising after an Armageddon Game. Beyond the titles, the show that gave us a utopia to hope for has never shied away from showing how it might end. In Trek's first pilot, The Cage, the first planet was a post-apocalyptic wasteland with the odd plant. In the second, a would-be god nearly brought everything crashing down around him before anyone had gone before.
Prior to post-scarcity and interstellar travel, Star Trek tells us that Earth itself will have to face any number of catastrophic events — from Eugenics to World War III. If after it was easy to be a saint in paradise, the devil wasn't hard to find elsewhere, sometimes literally in the case of the Pah-wraith. For every species that had blown itself up, there was another trying to set the galaxy on fire.
As a rule, Star Trek makes its doomsday predictions in order to shed light on the present moment. Unlike the divine revelations of prophecy, however, Trek's foretelling can be direct demonstration — of an apocalypse reversed by the next episode or end of the season. It's not quite the end of the world as we know it, and I'll be on Risa anyway.
10. Books of Daniels
When it comes to the apocalypse, there was one fake crewman on the first warp five who wore his name well. An almost spiritual figure in his observatory, Daniels had a few divine revelations for Captain Archer about all things temporal*. There was a war being fought over the very future, past, and present of space and time.
In his role as doomsday prophet from around the 31st century, Daniels did more than predict the end of days, he also enacted it. When he plucked Archer from the timeline in Shockwave, Part I, Daniels condemned a whole bunch of skyscrapers and the rest of Earth to oblivion. No Captain of the NX-01, no Federation, one cataclysm to end it all but the books. A little light reading and some delicate electronics, however, and the apocalypse didn't last.
After that, Daniels failed to foresee the Xindi threat, but he made up for it by providing hindsight of a possible plague in Detroit, and foresight of the fate the Sphere Builders were looking to avoid. Then, before the Temporal Wars could conclude when they started, Daniels had to die in orbit of the altered Armageddon on Earth. Back alive by the 32nd century, the soothsayer had another pseudonym, and one book in a Red Directive nearly led to the end of everything in the place where everything (humanoid) began.
*in both senses of the word.