Star Trek: 10 MORE Greatest Time Travel Episodes
9. Future's End, Future's End Part II
Tom Paris isn't the only time traveller who can quote the 20th century classics, it seems. Hanging a lantern on things, "the question isn't where we are, it's when we are," notes Captain Janeway as Tuvok turns off the din of narrowband E.M. signals. That line is almost word-for-word from 1968's Planet of the Apes ("The question, Landon, is not so much where we are as when we are"). Of course, the crew of Voyager didn't have to wait for the Statue of Liberty. "Right place, wrong time."
After that, what looks like '90s nostalgia is, in fact, just the 1990s — a fun way off the studio lot and onto the Venice Beach boardwalk of contemporary L.A. Thirty or some years later, the two-parter hasn't aged a day. Only now, Tom's kitsch fascinations match our own — "stone knives and bearskins" computing, camcorders, soap opera, and all.
As for social commentary, mad multi-billionaire Henry Starling might have been a little moustache-twirling for the turn of the millennium. These days, he feels practically underplayed. Irony being, actor Ed Begley Jr. wouldn't harm a fly, let alone endanger the future of the solar system. Shock, horror for Southern California, Begley even takes public transport to the Oscars! "What's next? Basket-weaving?" to quote that atemporal being from another episode.
Future's End is also, quite simply, a lot of fun. The Doctor is set "footloose and fancy free" for his first house call via mobile emitter — and car — narrowly avoiding a bootstrap paradox, if not a few punches from Mr. Dunbar. The two-parter would then be followed up by Relativity, setting in motion a design legacy for the 'time travel police' that would last until at least Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.