Plot
A small ship with a Federation signature emerges from a temporal rift in front of the starship Voyager, and its pilot identifies himself as Captain Braxton from the 29th century. He says he must destroy them to prevent a cataclysm he believes that Voyager is the cause of which would wipe out most of the Earth's solar system in his time. Voyager fights off Braxton's attack, resulting in the future captain being sent back through the rift to the year 1967. Voyager and its crew are also pulled into the rift and find themselves in the year 1996. The starship is identified on Earth as a UFO and videotaped as such, placing the U.S. military on alert.
A young hippie hiker, Henry Starling (Ed Begley, Jr.), finds the timeship in 1967 and copies its technology, allowing him to found his own company, Chronowerx, and spark the micro-computer revolution of the 1990s. When Janeway and Chakotay beam up to the ship after confronting Starling, he uses the transporter downlink to hack into the computer on Voyager, stealing many of their files, including the Doctor. Meanwhile, a young astronomer named Rain Robinson (Sarah Silverman) has discovered Voyager in high orbit and assumes it to be extraterrestrial life. She successfully attempts to contact Voyager, which forces the crew to do some damage control. Captain Janeway, Commander Chakotay, Tuvok, and Tom Paris, all go to Earth's surface. Tuvok and Paris go to find Rain, while Janeway and Chakotay investigate the ex-hippie, Henry Starling.
Ultimately, the Voyager crew discover that Starling's planned attempt to travel into the future in the 29th century timeship is the true cause of that time's explosive catastrophe since it ultimately resulted in a temporal rift. The temporal rift unleashed a cataclysm that engulfed Earth's solar system in that time and eliminated most life on Earth. After a failed attempt to convince Starling to stop his time travel before it's too late, Janeway destroys the timeship by manually firing a photon torpedo into it, destroying it just as it enters a temporal rift, and saving the future. An alternative Captain Braxton arrives, having detected their presence in the past, and returns them to their own time at the place they left it. He is unwilling to bring them to their Earth as that would violate the Temporal Prime Directive.
Read more about this topic: Future's End
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)