"World Enough and Time"
Star Trek: New Voyages
reviewed by Diane Doyle

The Star Trek: New Voyages episode, "World Enough and Time" had originally been intended to be an episode of planned Star Trek series Star Trek—Phase II that was aborted in favor of making the movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The episode’s title, "World Enough and Time," keeps in the Star Trek tradition of deriving titles from medieval works, this time from words in the Andrew Marvell poem, "To His Coy Mistress." The story for this episode is primarily centered on Hikaru Sulu. It opens with a scene on the bridge of Captain Sulu’s ship, U.S.S. Excelsior. First Officer Janice Rand has cleared his schedule for him so there is "all the time in the world". The episode then flashes back to his days on the U.S.S Enterprise as Lieutenant Commander Sulu.

In an attempt to rescue a stranded ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise encounters Romulans. The Enterprise was able to disable the Romulans; however, the Romulans were able to get off a partial shot which resulted in the Enterprise getting trapped in a trans-dimensional field. The shields are holding but the Enterprise is unable to use warp drive to escape because that field prevents determining the exact coordinates. Hence, Sulu and computer specialist, Dr. Lisa Chandra, took a shuttlecraft to a partially intact Romulan ship to extract as much information about the new weapon as they can. They retrieve the data but the Romulan ship begins to explode. Scotty attempts an emergency beam out. After some initial problems, Scott is able to retrieve Sulu but not Dr. Chandra.

However, an older, almost barbaric Sulu, who does not recognize the crew, emerges from the transporter. In the short time it took to transport him back to the Enterprise, Sulu had lived 30 years on another world in another dimension. He and Lisa had given birth to a daughter, and Lisa was now dead. Scotty notices another signal in the transporter buffer which turns out to be Sulu’s daughter, Alana. However, Scotty can not fully materialize her since she still retains a subspace connection to her home world. Hence, she must remain in a stasis field. She has interactions with both Spock and Kirk that give insight into all of their characters.

Meanwhile, the shields protecting the Enterprise from the trans-dimensional field keep decaying as time passes. They desperately need information about the Romulan weapon in order to escape, and Sulu is the only one who can provide it. Unfortunately, he cannot remember anything about the weapon, being as he’s aged 30 years. McCoy attempts drugs in attempts to revive Sulu’s memory, and Spock attempts a mind-meld, both without success. As the story unfolds, the final solution shows Sulu caught in a dilemma: to save the ship at the expense of his daughter’s life. It’s as if Sulu is facing his own version of Kobayashi Maru. There is also a surprise at the end of the episode.

The episode, written by Michael Reaves and Mark Allen Zicree, is an excellent addition to the Star Trek universe. There is plenty of conflict, from both an action-adventure and a character driven point of view. The acting by John Kim as young Sulu and George Takei as the older Sulu was in character. Takei contributed a good fight scene when unable to recognize his crewmates upon his return to the Enterprise. It appears that the actors playing Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Kirk are improving over previous efforts. It well deserves its TV Guide Online Video Award which is a major accomplishment, considering it was competing against professional efforts.

Free counters provided by Andale.

Click here to return to the Star Trek Fan Films page.
Click here to return to the Orion Press website.