Awful Time Travel TV: Every Moment of Star Trek: Voyager

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 9/18/07]

Part 2 of 5

When it comes to time travel storytelling, Star Trek nailed it. Kirk has to let Joan Collins die so she won’t help Hitler. Picard gets ripped through time to save the universe from “anti-time” and tie the series together in a nice, neat package (and make me cry on a few occasions). The two best Star Trek movies were all about time travel. Even DS9 managed a good time travel two-parter by re-casting Sisko as the 21st Century’s MLK.

Then came Voyager. No kidding, like the third episode was a time travel story. Lost in Space managed the exact same premise as Voyager without resorting to cheap time travel every week. It got to the point where Janeway and her crew weren’t even impressed with time travel anymore. A traveler would appear from the future, and they were all like, eh, old news.

Then came the season finale. Basically, they ripped off themselves by copying an episode they had done earlier that season. You heard me, not just an episode from several seasons ago that they figured no one would remember, they repeated the exact same premise from just a few months earlier. I guess they figured no one was watching anyway. And they were right.