Star Trek: The Voyager Home on the Edge of Forever. To say that this episode contains references to previous Trek would be a bit of an understatement, but at the same time it is hard to not enjoy getting to see 1996 LA through the eyes of Star Trek so while I may have some issues with some of the originality, I don't have any problem with the entertainment value. Of course all Neelix wants to do is rot his brain on soap operas, what else could he be useful for? Of course Paris is there to seduce the scientist lady (played by an already way over the top (and not always in a good way) Sarah Silverman). As much as I was just complaining about too much being lifted from other Trek, I did enjoy the line about stone knives and bearskins from City.
The episode opens in the year 1967 where a hippy is interrupted at his camp fire by the apparent crash landing of some sort of spaceship. Back on Voyager the captain is interrupted from her tennis practice by a red alert, a rift in spacetime has opened in front of the ship. Inside the rift is a small ship with a Federation signature that opens fire on them. They manage to disrupt the weapon and are hailed. The ship is from the 29th century and is there to stop them from destroying solar system at that time, but Janeway isn't going to take the guys word for it and allow her ship to be destroyed so they fire back and both ships and drawn into the portal. After some camera shaking they find themselves in orbit around Earth in the year 1996.
They detect some sort of subspace signature and beam down to the LA boardwalk and find it coming from a homeless guy. Cut to the Griffith Observatory where a SETI scientist has detected the ship in orbit and after a phone call to the obvious villain CEO Starling she can't resist sending a reply signal to Voyager. Janeway and Chakotay follow the homeless guy while Tuvok and Paris steal a car and head to the observatory. Janeway figures out that the homeless guy is the timeship captain from the 29th century and he tells her about Starling stealing his ship after he beamed out before it crashed. He then has to run from the cops though leaving Janeway and Chakotay to track down Starling. Paris and Tuvok find the lab where they were detected from and after stealing all the data they wipe the drive, but not before running into Sarah Silverman who is the scientist who found them. She chases after when she realizes they destroyed her computer but one of Starlings goons opens fire with a phaser forcing them to flee in her car.
Janeway manages to break into Starlings office and get into his computer system learning that he has been mining the timeship for tech and slowly releasing it. Also the ship is in a lab adjacent to his office but before they can steal it and get out he arrives knowing all about them. He tries to hack Voyager and gets a bunch of data before Kim and break the link and beam out Janeway and Chakotay, but to do so he has to fly into the atmosphere and right over LA. We close on the bridge of Voyager and the new TV obsessed Neelix shows them a video that just was shown on local news of Voyager flying right over the city.
Review: I really enjoyed this one despite it being maybe a little too similar to some previous famous Trek time travel stories. Still a fun one to watch though and my favorite from this season so far.
7 out of 10
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