“Future’s End, Part II”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by Cliff Bole
Season 3, Episode 9
Production episode 151
Original air date: November 13, 1996
Stardate: 50312.5
Captain’s log. After getting a summary of Part 1, we look in on Paris, Tuvok, and Rain Robinson. They can’t get through to Voyager, so Paris is cannibalizing Robinson’s VW microbus’ stereo system to try to boost the signal, to little effect. Robinson can tell that there’s more going on than they’re saying, and not just because they’re allegedly spies on a classified mission.
They head to Griffith Observatory in the hopes of using the equipment there to contact the ship. Robinson also tells Paris why she became an astronomer (from looking at Saturn’s rings through her brother’s telescope).
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The Relentless Moon
Torres gives Janeway a report on what Starling stole from Voyager’s computer: about 20% of their database, which he also removed from the ship. (Whether the data is missing because Starling is a dick and erased it or because the writers don’t understand how downloading works is left as an exercise for the viewer.) She’s able to reconstruct some of it, but not all of it. For one thing, he’s got the EMH. The regular transporter’s still down, and the emergency transporter requires going into the atmosphere again, which Neelix cautions against. While legitimate news isn’t taking the sighting of their last jaunt into the atmosphere seriously, the U.S. military is, and they’re better off staying in high orbit.
Tuvok manages to get through with help from Griffith’s satellite dish. They fill each other in on what they know, with Tuvok and Paris now being informed of Starling’s mendacity.
Starling queries the EMH about the Voyager crew. He’s convinced that Janeway wants to steal Aeon for herself because it’s more advanced than her own tech, and thinks the story that he’s going to destroy the solar system in the 29th century is nonsense. The EMH refuses to cooperate and diagnoses him with paranoia, but then Starling shows he can make the doctor feel pain.
Before the torture can continue, Robinson calls Starling, saying someone tried to kill her (professing ignorance that it was Starling), and asking for his help. He agrees to meet with her at a pizza place.
Torres modifies a shuttlecraft so it can remain undetected, and she and Chakotay head down. Starling arrives at the pizza place with the EMH, now equipped with a 29th-century mobile emitter.
Starling offers to take Robinson back to his office, and threatens the EMH’s life if she doesn’t comply. She panics when she sees that his goon, Dunbar, is driving—he’s the one who tried to kill her. Tuvok gives Chakotay the coordinates of Starling’s car and he beams him up to the shuttle—however, Starling is carrying a doodad that interferes with the transport. Chakotay can’t rematerialize him, and the interference is messing with the shuttle’s systems. Kim manages to transfer Starling’s pattern to Voyager, but the damage has been done, and the shuttle crashes.
Meanwhile, the EMH being a hologram means Dunbar can’t knock him out—but he can knock Dunbar around pretty well. He and Robinson escape from Starling’s car. Robinson is completely freaking out over Starling’s disappearance and the EMH’s inability to be harmed.
Starling is unconscious in Voyager’s sickbay. Janeway contacts Tuvok and tell him that Chakotay and Torres have crashed in Arizona. Tuvok and the EMH head there, while Robinson takes Paris to Chronowerx to try to figure out how to retrieve Aeon.
Starling wakes up and is disappointed that his doodad didn’t work. Janeway said it does work, he just doesn’t know how to operate it. She asks him to lower the force field around Aeon, but he refuses, and says if they try to tamper with it, it’ll explode, destroying Los Angeles.
Chakotay and Torres regain consciousness to find themselves tied up in a shack. They’ve been captured by a couple of militia goons, who are confused by Torres’s cranial ridges, but do identify Chakotay as an Indian. They assume the shuttle is some kind of government stealth craft, and they babble about their moronic manifesto. Chakotay’s attempt to talk sense to them, including mentioning his past as a Maquis leader, falls on uninterested ears. Then “a black man and some bald guy!” show up and take care of the militia guys, and free Chakotay and Torres. Tuvok repairs the shuttle, and they head back to L.A.
Dunbar boards Aeon and beams Starling off Voyager by piggybacking the transporter off one of Chronowerx’s satellites. Robinson and Paris are sitting outside Chronowerx when a truck that is emitting a tachyon signature leaves Chronowerx’s garage. Paris and Robinson follow, assuming that they’re moving Aeon in the truck. The shuttle rendezvouses with them on a deserted desert road, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s a ruse, as there’s nothing in the truck but a small device emitting the tachyon signature.
Back at Chronowerx, Starling launches Aeon and heads into orbit. Weapons systems are still down, so Janeway heads to engineering to manually launch a torpedo. The shuttle returns to Voyager and the EMH gets to be on the bridge for the first time in reality.
Janeway reconfigures the torpedo, Tuvok fires it, and Aeon is destroyed—as is the rift the ship opened. They seem to have saved the 29th century, since he didn’t go through. But then another rift opens, and it’s Braxton again, with no memory of anything that happened in the previous two episodes—he’s been sent to retrieve Voyager from 1996 because they’re not supposed to be there. Janeway agrees to be towed back to the Delta Quadrant—after requesting that they be brought back to 2373 but on Earth. Braxton says he can’t, as it would violate the Temporal Prime Directive.
Once they’re back in the Delta Quadrant in the 24th century, Janeway gathers the senior staff for a toast in the mess hall, with the EMH nearly salivating over the possibilities of being mobile and Paris telling funny stories about Tuvok trying to talk a cop out of a parking ticket using logic.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently, Voyager altered the timeline by destroying Aeon before it went through the rift. Since Braxton said he found a piece of Voyager’s hull in the explosion when he first arrived in Part 1, it’s likely that Chakotay’s backup plan of ramming Aeon is what happened, and it didn’t work. The 29th century timeline is reset, but Voyager’s isn’t—and the EMH somehow keeps the mobile emitter, too. SCIENCE!
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway modifies the torpedo to launch manually. Because she’s just that awesome.
Half and half. Torres and Chakotay discuss what options they have if they’re stuck in 1996. While Chakotay waxes rhapsodic about the possibilities of being an archeologist or lecturer, Torres reminds him that her Klingon heritage complicates things immensely in the 20th century.
Mr. Vulcan. Tuvok’s plan to get Starling to come to them didn’t take the possibility of him kidnapping Robinson into his car into account, which shows a spectacular lack of planning on the part of the security chief. Maybe his do-rag was too tight…
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Starling gives the EMH a mobile emitter that allows him to function anywhere, so he’s now, as he himself puts it, footloose and fancy free.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Robinson and Paris flirt like whoa, not just bonding over B-movies, but also over their interest in space (though Paris’s is more just a natural interest as the pilot of a starship). Robinson asks him out on a date, and you can tell it seriously pains Paris to not only say no but not be able to tell her why.
Do it.
“Doctor, how—?”
“It’s a long story, Commander. Suffice it to say, I’m making a house call.”
–Chakotay shocked at the EMH walking around on a planet, and the EMH putting off an answer until a more appropriate time.
Welcome aboard. Back from Part 1 are Ed Begley Jr. as Starling, Sarah Silverman as Robinson, Susan Patterson as Kaplan, and Allan G. Royal as Braxton. The character of Braxton will return in “Relativity,” played by Bruce McGill, while Kaplan will show up next in “Unity.”
In addition, Brent Hinkley and Clayton Murray play the militia morons.
Trivial matters: Braxton will also be seen again in the New Frontier comic book Double Time by Peter David & Mike Collins and in the Last Generation comic book miniseries by Andrew Steven Harris & Gordon Purcell.
The EMH references the fact that his memories of the past two-and-a-half years were wiped in “The Swarm,” and he hasn’t had all the memories restored. This is the first indication that his memories are being restored, so the tragedy of the end of that episode is now officially pointless.
The mobile emitter will remain for the rest of the series (and beyond in the tie-in fiction), officially freeing the EMH from being limited to sickbay and the holodeck (and the occasional simulation).
According to writers Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky, this was originally conceived as a four-parter, and then a three-parter, before finally reducing it to two parts. As a result, the militia bits were reduced to a vignette. In addition, they had wanted to have Robinson possibly come to the future with them, à la Gillian Taylor in The Voyage Home, but Rick Berman vetoed the notion because he’s a big stinky.
Robinson, the militia dudes, and Starling’s chief goon all appear in Book 2 of Greg Cox’s The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh.
The ponytail that Janeway wears in this two-parter to blend in with 1996 L.A. will become her new regular hairstyle this season, with the bun a thing of the past (er, so to speak).
Set a course for home. “Tuvok, has anyone ever told you you’re a real freakasaurus?” The more ambitious three- or four-parter that Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky wanted to do is evident in this second installment, and it suffers from a lack of storytelling space. There’s a bit too much going on here, and not all of it is as compelling.
For starters, the entire militia subplot falls totally flat. Braga and Menosky should have cut it completely once they were limited to two parts, as it doesn’t get enough screen time to breathe, and just feels horribly tacked-on and lame. The two guys giving their manifesto in five seconds and Chakotay’s half-assed attempt to bond with them over his own experience as a Maquis is just awkward.
On top of that, Starling’s a completely nonsensical villain. Not enough that he sends someone to kill Robinson in Part 1, now he kidnaps Robinson and later flies the stolen timeship through a big window, all in public in broad daylight. Does he think no one will notice this? He’s supposedly doing it to get more tech to make money off of in the waning days of the 20th century, but he’s doing it in a way that will just draw the wrong kind of attention to himself. It also oversimplifies the story, making him so unredeemable that it makes it easy for our heroes to go after him. But what if he’d been a genuine philanthropist who really was in it to improve humanity’s lot in life with technology? That would’ve made for a much more interesting story.
The ending doesn’t even try to make sense—somehow Braxton’s timeline is changed, but nobody else’s is? Even though Chronowerx only happened because Braxton showed up in the Delta Quadrant in the first place? Has Chronowerx been eliminated from the timeline too? Why is the mobile emitter still there?
With all that, the episode is still fun, particularly the EMH’s dry wit both in his banter with Starling and while enjoying his newfound mobility (not to mention his invincibility to things like punches and bullets). Tuvok and Paris remain a fine double act, and Rain Robinson is the first female character on this show whose interactions with Paris don’t either piss me off or skeeve me out (or both). And even the one-dimensionality of Starling is leavened by Ed Begley Jr.’s charisma.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s next Star Trek project was announced last week: he’s one of the contributors to the Star Trek Adventures Klingon Empire Core Rulebook, now available for preorder (print) and download (PDF) from Modiphius. Keith has done a couple of group interviews about the new rulebook, including one as part of the “Day of Honor” event (alongside fellow scribes Derek Tyler Attico and Kelli Fitzpatrick, Jim Johnson, Chris Birch, Nathan Dowdell, and Sam Webb from Modiphius, and special guest, award-winning Trek illustrator Rick Sternbach), and another with Michael Dismuke on the “Continuing Mission” web series (alongside Attico, Fitzpatrick, Johnson, and Aaron Pollyea).
“the entire militia subplot falls totally flat. Braga and Menosky should have cut it completely “
There was a Tom Clancy doorstopper (the one where he nuked Denver) that came out at the same time that had the exact same problem. Reaction to Waco, I guess.
Thanks for the shout-out to my EW books.
I remember my editor, John Ordover, and I having a long debate about how much of this episode actually “happened” after the timeline got reset. I can’t remember our actual arguments, but I remember it was a headache to sort out, which is why I kinda steered clear of Starling in the books.
And, yes, I still wish Sarah Silverman had joined the show as a regular.
Clancy had a militia subplot in “Executive Orders” – the story cuts to the militia guys periodically, only for their plot to fizzle completely with no impact on the main storyline.
I hate time travel. Leave it to the experts, like the Doctor, (and I don’t mean the EMH).
Time didn’t reset for Voyager because they never experienced a different timeline. Braxton did and therefore was changed.
So did homeless, stranded on Earth Braxon just go ‘poof’?
The EMH’s house call line is a clever and funny one, but my favorite line in this two parter has to be the following one:
JANEWAY: Chronowerx stock is about to crash.
One of my favorite Voyager lines. The way Mulgrew speaks it, with such inflection and over the top theatrics makes me laugh every time. It feels in place with the loose tone set by this two parter.
As it is, Future’s End Part 2 falls into the old TNG pattern of part 2 not living up to the first part, which is nothing new for Trek at this point. But I had no idea this was meant to be a four-parter. There was certainly a lot going on during this second half.
Regardless, I don’t think the militia subplot really deserves any more screentime than what we already get. Those characters would be right at home in the middle of a Trump rally. I for one felt uncomfortable enough with their scenes with Chakotay as it is. They are what they are. Stupid morons.
But the rest still works well for me. In a way, Starling’s actions remind me of the fairly recent Venom movie, where we also have a corporation willing to engage and chase its subject through crowded city streets regardless of the property damage caused. When a corporation acts like this, you know the story is willing to be ridiculous. Starling was already this type on part 1. I had no reason to expect anything more nuanced or with good intentions. The message is simple: a greedy capitalist tycoon is as threatening as the Borg Queen. Future’s End is broad enough to get away with it.
Robinson continues to be a delight, and the EMH getting his mobile emitter is a bold step. It’s the rare case of this show actually introducing something and sticking with it. Very smart idea from Braga and Menosky, which opened up tons of storytelling opportunities for the remainder of the show’s run.
Oh, there were lots of stories — both in the news and in fiction — about militias. In fact, I edited a Captain American novel around that time, called Liberty’s Torch, written by Tony Isabella & Bob Ingersoll, that had Cap going up against a militia.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I found John Ordover’s argument convincing that this entire episode was set in an alternate past that was erased at the end. It’s one of the only things Mr. Ordover and I have ever agreed on.
Of course, “Relativity” will contradict this episode by establishing that Braxton remembers the events of “Future’s End.” The only reason time travel gave Janeway a headache, I think, was because Voyager‘s time travel episodes were consistently the dumbest and most illogical in the franchise.
There’s nothing strange about the mobile emitter remaining after the timeline was wiped out, though, because that’s what usually happens in Trek. In “Yesteryear,” Spock continued to exist in the timeline that had been changed so that he died as a child. The alternate Tasha Yar from “Yesterday’s Enterprise” lived on in the past after her timeline was erased. The slightly-from-the-future O’Brien in DS9: “Visionary” remained after his timeline was prevented. And so on. The only exception I can think of is TNG: “Time Squared” where the duplicate Picard vanished after his future was prevented (and I rationalized that in DTI: Watching the Clock as the result of there being two Picards at the same time so that their quantum wavefunctions merged into one). If something is removed from its home timeline, then it continues to exist no matter what happens to that timeline in its absence, as long as there’s no duplicate for it to merge with in the current timeline.
No, the real problem with the mobile emitter is why Braxton didn’t demand they give it back. If their job was to prevent changes to the timeline, surely leaving 29th-century tech in the 24th is a no-no. Obviously this was glossed over so that Picardo wouldn’t be stuck on the sickbay set for four more years, but it’s annoying that they left it unexplained. I tend to assume that mobile emitter tech was only a few years away from being developed anyway, so it would already exist by the time Voyager got home. I mean, just because it’s used in the 29th century doesn’t mean it’s brand-new; it could’ve existed for centuries already.
As for Sarah Silverman, on the one hand, I would’ve loved to see her as a regular, since she was fun and really hot. But would it really have been fair to Rain Robinson to drag her along, not only into a future that’s alien to her, but to a ship that’s stranded and lost and struggling to survive? That would seem like a pretty rotten thing to do to her. If it had happened by accident, that would’ve been one thing, but the scenario as presented wouldn’t really have allowed for that.
Did anyone else find Robinson completely unconvincing when she was talking Starling into coming to get her? Which seemed like a decent job of an actor playing someone being a bad actor.
IMO, they should have cut the whole thing down to one episode. I’m admittedly biased because I almost always hate time travel episodes (it part because it is even more obvious than usual that the reset button is going to be slammed *hard* at the end), but this just seemed drawn out. There is nothing about it that is unique to Voyager or being stuck in the Delta Quadrant (other than Janeway’s brief attempt to get them sent back to Earth crammed in at the end), doesn’t tell us much about our characters that we don’t already know, and just kind of feels like filler to me. On re-watch, it has some fun 90s nostalgia to it, but watching it in the 90s I remember being so bored by it. If I wanted to see Robert Beltran in a polo shirt or Kate Mulgrew in a power blazer I could have just looked at any photo of those two actors. The best thing to come out of it is the EHM getting the mobile emitter, since I am always for anything that is going to get us more Picardo.
But what if he’d been a genuine philanthropist who really was in it to improve humanity’s lot in life with technology? That would’ve made for a much more interesting story.
I don’t know, I think he was a genuine philanthropist who really was in it to improve humanity’s lot, and any sloppiness (such as launching in broad daylight) is on account of Voyager showing up and altering what would have been a more subtle plan. He obviously has plenty of money and fame, and could easily either just retire or slap his name on the inventions of junior engineers, so his stated motivation is really the only one that makes sense. The scene in sickbay where he tries to justify himself helps quite a bit.
What’s more, Janeway’s grandstanding about how nobody in her century would risk the future will turn out to be a lie, given her own selfish time travel plot. But we’ll get there…
Starling clicked on “move” instead of “copy” when he went after Voyager‘s files.
Doesn’t Braxton come back (played by a different actor) in late season 5, I think?
@14
From the welcome aboard section:
“The character of Braxton will return in “Relativity,” played by Bruce McGill”
sandra: genuine philanthropists don’t order the cold blooded murder of other human beings. Or torture sentient beings….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
sandra: genuine philanthropists don’t order the cold blooded murder of other human beings. Or torture sentient beings….
@16/KRAD: I guess I would say the word “genuine” is doing a lot of work there. His motivation really does appear to have been improving the lives of billions of people on Earth, is taking the position that you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and is willing to risk his own life to make the world a better place. From a strict utilitarian perspective, he likely has a point, in that if he actually did manage to travel to the future and come back with 29th century technology/information (such as, say, a medical database) he would have saved far more lives than the one he tried to take. Which is exactly why utilitarians can talk themselves into all sorts of morally questionable positions and great men are rarely good men. As always YMMV, but I liked Starling as a villain, how often does an antagonist die in a failed attempt to make the world a better place?
@16/Krad @17/Sandra: It’s an interesting point of view. I don’t see Starling’s motivation as a selfless one at all. The whole speech about improving the lives of citizens through his work comes across to me as a classic corporate entrepreneur speech, carefully designed to hit the right notes with its target audience. To me, it’s just an thin excuse, and it comes across as a dodgy defense of his ‘right’ to achieve profit by whatever means.
Doesn’t Starling have a wonderfully dopey final line before getting ‘sploded? Something like “Uh-oh!” or “Oh boy!” Yeah, that cracked me up. Well done, Mr. Begley.
@18: Your explanation matches my assumption based on that impression.
I’m with Eduardo — Starling’s talk about helping people was just the sales pitch, the surface justification for his pursuit of power and success.
I mean, “I want to save millions of lives so I will torture and murder a few” is the thinking of a sociopath trying to convince himself he’s good, not the thinking of a genuinely good person. Look at all the medical researchers desperately trying to find a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19. It’s true that they’re giving some people placebos as a control for the drugs they’re testing, and some people have died as a result — but those people surely volunteered for the study, knowing that was a risk, because that’s basic medical ethics. It wasn’t forced on them without their consent. Even knowing that they could save millions of lives, they still treat individuals as ethically and responsibly as they can. Because it is false to say that the good of the individual and the good of the masses are in conflict. The masses are made up of individuals, so they’re the same thing. Sacrificing your own needs for the needs of the many is heroic, but sacrificing an unconsenting victim’s needs is villainous, no matter the excuse.
Of course “We’re going to kill some people for the benefit of a greater number of people,” is the basic operating premise of any military service or guerrilla outfit, Starfleet and the Maquis included, but one expects them at least to have some sort of regulations governing when and whom they’re allowed to kill, rather than just allowing a self-elected tech entrepreneur to wing-it.
“Tuvok, has anyone ever told you you’re a real freakosaurus?” Yet again, I’ve tried to use a quote to open this and found that great minds have thought alike. And mine too.
There’s an attempt at making this a true ensemble piece and giving everyone a decent role, although it doesn’t quite succeed with Neelix and Kes somewhat short changed. (Kes at least gets to do a bit more medic stuff in the Doctor’s absence. Neelix is barely in Part II and his main contribution is to repeat what he said at the end of Part I.) Chakotay and Torres’ subplot is a bit of a failure as well. They get some good scenes in the shuttle but things fall apart when they get taken hostage by the weird cult of rednecks, who are too stupid to recognise a crash. The budget doesn’t run to covering it properly, so both the local law enforcement (supposedly consisting of two cars and a helicopter) and most of the rednecks get taken out by the Doctor and Tuvok off screen. At least we get the Doctor’s badass moment standing in the middle of a hail of bullets. (“God in heaven help us.”/“Divine intervention is unlikely.”)
After the Doctor was only in Part I for a few seconds, this more than makes up for it. 24 years on, it’s hard to really replicate the shock of the Doctor appearing out in the open for the first time. And then the double shock when there’s no reset button at the end and he gets to keep the mobile emitter. It’s probably an important moment in his development and he’s clearly revelling being in on the action, from his glee at punching out Dunbar to his leaning in on Tuvok and Paris’ planning conference. He’ll get his own quarters about the same time he gets a name that isn’t Mr. Leisure Suit though.
Paris gets the girl: Something that’s rarer than his reputation suggests. He still seems to be somewhat unpopular on here but the bond between him and Rain is believable: Paris might not be a paragon of virtue by 24th century standards, or it seems 21st, but he does have a selfless streak that appeals to her.
It’s true that Starling doesn’t get to show much nuance, but that’s not really what the episode or the story requires. He gets to have another decent confrontation with Janeway and we get two satisfying “Take that!” moments when the shuttle blows up Dunbar as he’s attacking Paris and Rain, and then Starling’s smugness is finally punctured as he realises a torpedo is about to hit him. In a romp like this, there’s probably no point wondering what exactly Voyager did wrong the first time round to get caught in the temporal explosion (although krad makes a decent fist of it!). Slightly more worrying is the lack of follow-up on the elderly Captain Braxton. The appearance of his younger self from the new timeline, with no knowledge of those events, could be interpreted as meaning he disappeared when time changed, although “Relativity” suggests otherwise. After the cliffhanger of Voyager being on the nightly news, there’s virtually no follow-up bar it being used as a reason to send a shuttle into the atmosphere rather than the whole ship: Certainly no-one bothers to beam down and try and destroy the footage a la “Tomorrow is Yesterday”.
Voyager misses out on another opportunity to get home, although it’s basically dealt with in a couple of lines of dialogue. The Doctor experiences pain for the first time for the third time, although we get a reference to his partial amnesia a few lines earlier which could excuse it. (I never really saw the end of “The Swarm” as a tragedy, it’s more akin to the end of The Search for Spock and “Your name is Jim”, but it’s nice to get at least a passing reference to it.) Tuvok becomes the second person in the series to address Chakotay as “Mr Chakotay” rather than “Commander” or simply “Chakotay”.
@7: I agree Janeway’s delivery of that line was so soap opera-ish and hokey that I loved it! Lol.
Never knew that this was originally conceived of as a 4-parter which sounds ambitious but the whole plot kind of dragged along in my opinion so I think it was a good call to just leave it as a 2-parter.
I thought Sarah Silverman did a good of dramatic acting. Everything else I’ve seen of her has been of the comedy variety. I genuinely felt bad for her for having found a decent guy in her life (Tom) but he can’t commit for obvious reasons.
Overall, I found this two-parter disappointing because it didn’t live up to the heights of either the comedy or the dramatic urgency of its Star Trek thematic relative (ST IV: TVH).
18: “To me, it’s just an thin excuse, and it comes across as a dodgy defense of his ‘right’ to achieve profit by whatever means.”
“@21: I’m with Eduardo — Starling’s talk about helping people was just the sales pitch, the surface justification for his pursuit of power and success.
“
But he’s already rich and has plenty of profit. The marginal value of an additional profit, to him, is almost zero. And he already has power and success. Sure, it’s possible he was ‘really’ going to the future to get weapons and become dictator of Earth or something, but as far as we know his plan really was to steal tech and “invent” it in the present. And his stated motivation that he’s doing so to help people is the only plausible one, because he already has everything else his plan could plausibly win him.
To take the Covid example, the future presumably already knows the cure for Covid. If you had to kill one innocent person to go to the future and get it, but doing so would save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives, would you? Philosophers are utterly split on how to handle problems like this. A lot of utilitarians would argue that you should, and in fact doing so is morally praiseworthy, perhaps even morally obligatory. Kant’s categorical imperative would reject this outright, taking essentially the position Christopher did. And still others would say that it’s morally justifiable but not morally obligatory. It’s the trolley problem writ large, and Starling would potentially be bringing back way more than just the cure to COVID.
You can disagree on what the right answer is– I don’t know what I’d do in that situation– but Starling as an antagonist raises them, which by itself makes him an above average Star Trek antagonist. That being said, I do think he would have been a stronger antagonist if they dropped the subplot about killing Rain, which never really goes anywhere and is moot by the time of the second part. After all, Voyager is already on to him, so killing Rain doesn’t really solve anything. And he should have tried to use persuasion on the Doctor too. The whole two-parter needed one more rewrite and one less militia.
@25/sandra: “But he’s already rich and has plenty of profit.”
Have you looked at the world? There is no one greedier than the people who already have the most. The richer people get, the more they define their entire worth by having more money than other people, so they’re desperate to keep getting richer to stay ahead of all the other rich people competing to get richer.
“To take the Covid example, the future presumably already knows the cure for Covid. If you had to kill one innocent person to go to the future and get it, but doing so would save hundreds of thousands or millions of lives, would you? Philosophers are utterly split on how to handle problems like this.”
I’m not talking about the arbitrary brain-teasers philosophers make up to give themselves something to argue about. That’s just sophistry. Like I said, there’s already a well-developed code of medical ethics that addresses questions like these, and there is no circumstance in which it encourages murder or torture.
I mean, come on, Starling sends Dunbar to kill Rain because she’s a “security risk.” If he were this glowing, heroic paragon of goodness you want to rewrite him into, wouldn’t he have tried something else first? He could’ve paid her to stay silent. He could’ve hired her and had her sign a non-disclosure agreement. He could’ve read her in on his work and convinced her it was right to keep it secret. He could’ve wiped her data with a computer virus and left her alone, since there’d be no corroboration for her story. At worst, he could’ve falsified evidence to ruin her reputation so that her claims would be dismissed. There were many options available to him, and his first choice was to send a hitman to murder her. That is not the action of a philanthropist making a hard choice for the greater good. That is the action of a mobster. If he’s so quick to resort to murder in this case, how many other assassinations has he built his success on over the decades? Come on.
And with the Doctor, Starling boasted of how easy it was for him to reprogram him. So it should’ve been easy to reprogram the Doctor to be cooperative and voluntarily tell him what he needed to know — but instead, his first choice was to program the Doctor to experience pain so he could torture him. He didn’t have to do that; he had other options. But he chose torture as his first resort. That is not the action of a noble man bending his morals out of grim necessity. That is the action of a sadist and a bully.
sandra: Starling is the classic case of the greedy corporate tycoon who will do anything, anything, and tell others, and themselves it’s for the “betterment of mankind”, all in the name of profiteering and greed. To quote The Oracle from The Matrix trilogy: What do all men with power want? More power. I would not expect any nuance from a sociopathic corporate tycoon, so Starling as a one-note villain made perfect sense to me.
In addition to the points CLB and Krad made above, Starling didn’t hesitate to order Dunbar to kill Janeway and Chakotay as they were beaming out to prevent their escape.
I just remembered the best thing about the current era of Trek: No Rick Berman.
CLB, you make good points about Rain and whether she should have joined Voyager or not, but even being lost in the Delta Quadrant on an advanced spaceship in the future is still better than living on Earth at the end of the 20th century. Hmm…poverty, war, racism, sexism, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, versus being in space far from Earth in the future with humans and other species from a galactic federation where differences among beings are largely irrelevant; not a difficult choice. But thanks again, Rick Berman. Smh.
Yeah they could have cut the militia stuff altogether. All I kept thinking was, hmm, these morons would fit right in at a Trump rally, as Eduardo points out. But that section of the episode did let the EMH get his Moment of Awesome.
@25/Sandra @26/Christopher: Is a rich businessman like Starling satisfied with his lot in life? I’m going to cite a real-world example, and I’m not even talking about a wealthy person, but an upper middle-class acquaintance of mine. He works hard, has a nice home in a seaside location, has a cabin in the mountains, has a nice car, earns enough money to put his kids through private school and college, and is able to travel to a foreign country at least once a year.
Is he satisfied with his life and his material possessions? Let’s just say he plays the lottery every single week and spends every lunch complaining about the country’s economy, politics, discussing the latest neighborhood crime sprees and making statements about how mankind is sinful, greedy and screwed up. All the while completely oblivious to the billions of decent honest people who don’t make 5% of what he makes in a year.
That acquaintance I’ve mentioned? He also switches cars and iPhones every year. Not because he needs to, but because the newer model hits the market, with all the blitz and prestige surrounding it. We live in a system that enables and rewards people who consume the newest fad. It’s also a system designed to feed on envy. Why stick to your old reliable phone or car when the newer shining expensive model comes around and you just know your friend (rival?) is going to buy it?
If an upper middle class person operates on that level, who’s to say a tycoon with a seven, eight or nine figure bank account is going to settle for less? To them, it’s not even about the money or the possessions. It’s about power and legacy. It’s a completely alien world to the other 99%.
The way I see it, a person with possessions who operates on that materialistic mindset has two worries: making more and also worrying about holding on to what they already have.
Rain could have easily joined Voyager for a variety of reasons, but I think people are upset that Sarah Silverman didn’t join the cast :)
Regarding the philosophical question of killing one person to save millions I quote Captain Jean Luc Picard: “I refuse to let arithmetic decide questions like that.”
@30- Janeway, on the other hand, confronted with the concrete question of whether to execute one person to save two, just last season…
@31/Benjamin: But that’s not a valid analogy here. In “Tuvix,” Janeway literally didn’t have the option of saving all three; as with the Doctor in “Latent Image” later on, it was a triage situation where either choice would cost at least one life. As I said before, it is ridiculous to argue that Starling had no choice but to murder Rain. He had countless other nonviolent options that he didn’t even consider before jumping straight to assassination. So it’s a category error to bring that kind of moral debate into this discussion at all.
@32- I don’t think triage is a valid analogy either- Tuvix wasn’t in any immediate danger of dying- a closer scenario would be killing a healthy person to transplant the organs necessary to save two others, but with the added ethical complication that those organs had arguably belonged to the two people to begin with before accidentally being used to create the third person.
But the larger point is that Janeway did not choose between saving Tuvix and saving Tuvok and Neelix, she chose to end a person’s ongoing, viable life in order to save two others.
None of this is to say that Starling’s actions are justified, or that his motives are pure. I simply don’t find “It’s never acceptable to kill for the greater good,” to be an accurate description of the operating principles of a military ship carrying torpedoes in general, or of Voyager’s crew as we’ve seen them act in particular.
@33/Benjamin: And again, it’s a non sequitur even to bring up such ethical debates when talking about Starling’s blatantly mobster-like tactics.
I didn’t bring them up.
You said “Sacrificing your own needs for the needs of the many is heroic, but sacrificing an unconsenting victim’s needs is villainous, no matter the excuse.”
Michael said “Regarding the philosophical question of killing one person to save millions I quote Captain Jean Luc Picard: ‘ I refuse to let arithmetic decide questions like that.'”
I merely pointed out that that’s line of thinking is not consistent with Janeway’s actions.
And I’m not interested in whataboutism. This conversation is about Henry Starling’s ethics.
Okay. Henry Starling’s actions are unethical.
But under the framework you’ve established, we’re following a ship whose captain is “villainous, no matter the excuse,” and I think that’s an interesting point to explore.
Amending the above for better context “a captain, some of whose actions ‘are villainous, no matter the excuse,’.”
Concerning Janeway’s ethics what I’ve always found interesting about the show is that as the series progressed Janeway started behaving more like a Maquis and Chakotay started behaving more like a Starfleet officer. Compare their discussion in the 2nd season episode Alliances about an alliance with the Kazon to their discussion in Scorpion about an alliance with the Borg and notice how their positions have flipflopped.
Starling was unethical.
Starfleet and the Federation have, as their prime directive, that entire planets can be wiped free of like due to totally presentable causes.
Starfleet also has a General Order that allows a Starfleet Captain wil choose to destroy all life on an inhabited planet, even if it’s to retaliate for two crew members and an ambassador being held hostage.
Janeway should also take a look at the ethics she’s espousing as a Starfleet Captain.
@40: “Starfleet also has a General Order that allows a Starfleet Captain wil choose to destroy all life on an inhabited planet, even if it’s to retaliate for two crew members and an ambassador being held hostage.”
As ever, you’ve completely misrepresented what happened.
They were ordered to stay away. Once they entered the system, they were subject to Eminian law. Kirk decided that was not the case and ordered Scotty to be ready to kill EVERYONE.
If Kirk was delayed by just a few minutes, Eminiar would be lifeless.
In what sort of reality would such a response be seen as moral and justified? And in such a casual way, simply by shouting out “General Order 24 in two hours”? You need three people to agree to destroy your own ship but only one to eradicate billions.
@42: Well now you’re just changing your argument. And possibly oversimplifying the situation. It’s hard to imagine the order being carried out in “just a few minutes”.
@43 – First off, the Enterprise itself was not in danger.
ANAN: Planetary defence System, open fire on the Enterprise!
SECURITY [OC]: I’m sorry, Councilman. The target has moved out of range.
Second, Kirk gave Scotty the order to implement GO 24 in two hours and Kirk confirms it to Anan. And then Scott confirms that he’s prepared to carry it out.
KIRK: Scotty, General Order Twenty Four. Two hours! In two hours!
—
KIRK: All that it means is that I won’t be around for the destruction. You heard me give General Order Twenty Four. That means in two hours the Enterprise will destroy Eminiar Seven.
—
SCOTT [OC]: All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, identified, and fed into our fire-control system. In one hour and forty five minutes
Third – Kirk escapes and contacts Scott and confirms that his order to destroy Eminiar is still in force. This shows that it’s not a bluff on Kirk’s part.
KIRK: Everything’s secure here. Maintain position. If everything goes according to plan, you can beam us up in ten minutes. If you don’t hear from us, carry out General Order Twenty Four on schedule.
Fourth – The Enterprise was in Eminian space because they chose to ignore the Eminian transmission to stay away. Kirk even states that no contact is to be attempted for any reason. Fox overrules him but, even today, the military is not expected to obey an illegal order.
KIRK: Code seven-ten means under no circumstances are we to approach that planet. No circumstances what so ever.
FOX: You will disregard that signal, Captain.
KIRK: Mister Fox, it is their planet.
Fifth – The reasoning that the Federation needs to contact Eminiar is because they need a Treaty Port in the area.
FOX: Captain, in the past twenty years, thousands of lives have been lost in this quadrant. Lives that could have been saved if the Federation had a treaty port here. We mean to have that port and I’m here to get it.
Background – A Treaty Port is a port established by a powerful nation against a weaker one.
“Treaty ports were the port cities in China and Japan that were opened to foreign trade mainly by the “unequal treaties” with the Western powers, as well as cities in Korea opened up in similar fashion by the Japanese Empire.
—
“Foreigners all lived in prestige sections newly built for them on the edges of existing port cities. They enjoyed legal extraterritoriality, as stipulated in the unequal treaties. Foreign clubs, racecourses, and churches were established in major treaty ports. Some of these port areas were directly leased by foreign powers such as in the concessions in China, effectively removing them from the control of local governments.”
Treaty Ports (Wikipedia)
For More information, see also Unequal Treaty (Wikipedia)
One big difference is that the powers that imposed the Treaty Ports did not have a Prime Directive.
So, as I stated before, The Federation ignored warnings to stay out for reasons that favoured the Federation, refused to submit to the legal authority of a sovereign planet and then came within minutes of killing everyone on said planet.
Not exactly moral behaviour
This article caught my attention today:
Starliiinnnggg!!!
I’ve always liked Future’s End, but I’m late to the party, so I’ll leave it at that.
I always found it amusing that around two weeks later, in the newly-released Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg Queen would tell Picard and Data to “watch your future’s end”. Gives me visions of the TNG cast tuning into UPN for an evening’s entertainment…
krad: True, having Starling be a philantropist would have made for an interesting quandary.
@2 – Greg: Rain Robinson as a series’ regular would have been fun.
@25 – sandra: Immensely rich and powerful people routinely want more power and money, it doesn’t matter that they have more money than they could possibly spend in several lifetimes.
@33 – CuttlefishBenjamin: We’re not talking about “killing never being acceptable even to save lives”. We’re talking about MURDER and TORTURE.
@40 – kkozoriz: I shouldn’t feed the troll, but… PLEASE STOP BRINGING UP THAT EPISODE IN EVERY SINGLE OTHER STAR TREK EPISODE THREAD. WE GET IT, YOU DON’T LIKE THAT EPISODE, YOU DON’T LIKE STARFLEET. Enough.
Interesting reading some of the back story about the evolution of this two parter, I had wondered if they came up with the idea of the mobile emitter (to get their most interesting character involved more) and then worked in a story backwards from that point. I would really have liked to see the militia story given more space as it seems was intended in the initial plans that would have been interesting, they only thing missing from them looking back from 2020 is them not wearing red caps with a stupid slogan on them. All in all a very decent two parter. And Sarah Silverman was gorgeous.
“After getting a summary of Part 1” we get the cast doing the exact same thing in the Observation Lounge. Chakotay tells Janeway that Starling stole 20% of Voyager’s database, not Torres. Janeway launches from Torpedo Tube 1, not Engineering. How can the Doctor drink champagne without it leaking out of him? Autonomous Self-Sustaining HOLo Emitter – nice acronym! Ed Begley, Jr is a genuine philanthropist or environmentalist? How did the microcomputer age get started without Braxton’s technology?
6: If the Aeon never crashed in 1967, Braxton would never have become trapped in Earth’s history. 7: I think they got the idea for the Doctor’s mobile emitter from Rimmer’s light bee in Red Dwarf. 9: I don’t see how the mobile emitter should continue to exist if the Aeon never crashed to Earth but they wanted to free the Doctor from Sickbay and Robert Picardo was too good an actor to remain that way for another four years. But Braxton still should have confiscated the emitter.
10: Was Sarah Silverman an actress or did she come from a background in stand-up? I personally would have loved to see Janeane Garofalo, a proud Luddite, in the role of Rain Robinson. 11: It does suffer from needless padding but I think Future’s End had too much plot just to cram into one episode. 17: In A View to a Kill, Zorin wanted to trigger a massive earthquake to destroy Silicon Valley, in order to corner the market on microchip production. Zorin no doubt thought the same thing Starling did – it’s for the betterment of mankind and lining his own pockets.
21: Starling’s rhetoric about a better human future does sound like a hustle and Janeway knows it. 23: Now that the Doctor’s in the loop, he never wants to be left out of it again. “The Doctor experiences pain for the first time for the third time.” Whatever that means? 24: You can see Kate Mulgrew warming up to play Queen Arachnia in that scene. 39: Good point! I hadn’t twigged that! 46: The Borg Queen told that to Picard, not Data (believing Data was under her total control).
So, just a couple of thoughts since I’m laaate to the party.
I get the whole time loop deal where “we caused the problem ourselves”, but to me it seems crazy weird that a time ship from the future, that apparently has the ability to scan time, and enforces time situations, cannot see that they themselves cause the time scenario, not once but twice! He’s the reason for the explosion AND he’s the reason Voyager is there. He had to do some research to find out where Voyager even was to go after them. You’d think there wouldn’t be any records of Voyager leaving the Delta quadrant, so there should have been questions about how a ship on the other side of the galaxy is involved in an explosion that wiped out the Solar System. (I can hear Christopher Bennett saying “clearly you do NOT get the whole time loop deal”!)
Add to that that the ship with technology from 500 years ahead of a Voyager has no debris remaining after the explosion, whereas Voyager does. The first day of the job, Braxton should’ve seen evidence that his own ship was responsible for the explosion and blew it up! Ok, that was a joke, but on the other hand, considering what a pain Starling was with his limited knowledge of the time ship, it’s amazing to me that the Voyager could survive longer than a few seconds against Braxton and his time ship. If Braxton was any ways competent, Voyager should’ve been destroyed/crippled almost immediately. And speaking more about Braxton’s ship, it seems completely irresponsible to have these colossal dangers to time/space roaming around with apparently no security to stop others from stealing/taking over. It should be next to impossible for anyone to gain access to the controls of the ship, and the ships should auto-destruct whenever anyone tries to tamper with them, or at least permanently shut down.
As for Starling’s motivations discussed at length earlier, one thing that stood out to me was that he felt he was very soon going to become irrelevant now that he had run out of time ship parts to cannibalize, and that was a fairly large part of why he was willing to risk his own life in order to get more technology. He definitely enjoyed being “the guy” when it came to advances in technology, and knowing he wouldn’t be for much longer was likely a giant blow to his ego.
49: It means this is the third time he’s experienced pain and said he’s never experienced it before.
I just watched part 2 last night. I noticed a fun little inconsistency: every time you see the building exterior, the logo is “ChronowerX” with that big ol’ X on the end!
However, in at least one interior shot of the bay housing the Aeon, there is a prominent logo painted on the wall that reads, “ChronowerKS”, with a very distinct KS instead.
My headcanon for this is that there was some sort of trademark dispute between Starling’s company and another that had the same name just with those two different spellings. Either it was settled in court or Starling eventually bought out the other company, and any resources with the KS spelling became his property.
Then again, perhaps it was just the result of a rebranding effort that happened some time before and all the logos had not yet been updated.
Surf Wisely.
@52. Must have been a time travel paradoks.
(we should ask Nelson Mandela. But he died in the 80s.)
Now, Who does the crazy tech genius with a fleet of Starling satellites remind you of ?
His company is named ChronowerX too !