Future's End

***** (5 stars out of 5)

Attacked without provocation by time-traveling twenty-ninth century jack-hole Captain Braxton of the Federation Timeship Aeon, our heroes wind up orbiting Earth in the late twentieth century. A benighted, backward era before iPads and Ugg boots, when the very height of cellphone fashion was an archaic flip device the like of which would not be seen again until the 2150s.

Braxton was even less fortunate; in that a filthy hippie jacked his ride in 1967. The hippie became the local Steve Jobs, a corporate sell-out kajillionaire called Henry Starling who caused the computer revolution we know and love. Everything from bar code readers to the Crazy Frog Ringtone can be laid at the feet of the corporate giant known as Chronowerx. (You've seen them: they have a Starfleet chevron on their laptops instead of an apple. Also, hundreds of factory deaths from improperly tuned Chroniton Reactors. Patent Pending!)

Janeway finds Braxton eking out a meager hobo living. He's railing helplessly against the End of the Universe, which will happen rather early if Starling should ever step on the Aeon's gas pedal.

Gangsta Tuvok and Groovy Paris, the original odd couple, chase down a SETI astronomer working in the Griffith Observatory... to destroy her life's work. The stargazer, Rain Robinson, spotted Voyager and e-mailed them those pornographic "Hello, Alien Nudists" greeting cards Earth put on their Voyager probes. So naturally, Starling's phaser-brandishing goon is trying to kill her. She knows too much! And she thinks Jesus Is Magic! To the Mystery Machine, Scoobies!

Oh, also, Starling pirates the EMH (File-Sharing: The Victimless Crime my butt!)

P.P.S: Somebody got a grainy picture of low-flying Voyager on a camcorder. Now that Whack-A-Doo from Squatch My Sasquatch is on their trail!

"Future's End" takes place in 1996, the very year Khan and his genetically engineered supersoldiers were overthrown from the many, many countries they'd conquered and fled into space exile! But, as usual, nobody in Los Angeles noticed anything anyone else in the world was doing.

I kid, I kid. In fact, Rain Robinson DOES have a photograph of the launch of Botany Bay in her office, or at least a DY class ship just like it. So while it's not our dimension (there's no Star Trek TV show there, for example, so Rain's Talosian action figure must be a really similar creature from Battlestar Galactica or possibly Battletoads) it's not just having a silly romp, it's still faithfully following Star Trek's history. Sort of.