Friendship One finds Star Trek: Voyager trapped between its own past and the future of the larger Star Trek franchise.
Of course, there’s no small irony that that future would take the form of Star Trek: Enterprise, a prequel set almost a century before the original series and (to date) the television series set at the earliest point in the larger continuity. This gets at something very strange about the seventh season of Voyager, where it seems to be looking both back at and forwards to the past. In some ways, it is the ultimately literalisation of the “end of history” ambiance that pervades the series, articulated in stories like Future’s End, Part I and Future’s End, Part II. There is no future. There is just the past.
What ship can cause antimatter annihilation and has room for two people?
A friendship?
So Friendship One seems caught between two different versions of the past. In its most obvious sense, it is trapped in Voyager‘s own idea of the past. It is an atomic-era creature feature about the horrors of radiation, a pulpy fifties schlock-fest that feels of a piece with everything from Jetrel to The 37’s to Cathexis to Macrocosm to In the Flesh to Bride of Chaotica! This is the future as it looked in the fifties, the atomic (rather than “post-atomic”) horror. However, it also gestures very strongly towards Enterprise, even accidentally encapsulating some of the core anxieties of the fourth Star Trek spin-off in an eerily prescient manner.
The result is an episode that feels like it is suffocating in its own past, with no idea of how to chart a course forward.
Does anything really (anti)matter?
Filed under: Voyager | Tagged: Bryan Fuller, joe carey, michael taylor, Mutants, retirony, star trek, star trek: enterprise, star trek: voyager, voyager | 13 Comments »
