Voyager 6x12 "Blink of an Eye"

**

A lot of Star Trek fans like to complain that any Star Trek series repeats the same general format as a predecessor.  By that I mean that four out of the five live action shows took the exploration format and ran with it.  It was fine when Next Generation did it.  Deep Space Nine sat in one place.  Then Voyager went back to exploration, and so did Enterprise, even if they had other layers to the narrative.  What's the point?  Genre fans perhaps don't watch Law & Order.  The point is there's always another cool way to do the same basic story.  (If there weren't, many millennia of storytellers wouldn't exist.)

"Blink of an Eye" is one of the more awesome visits to a random alien world in the whole of the franchise.  There's a key difference in this world, in that it spins far quicker than the average, and so civilization rapidly progresses in the time it takes our crew to dislodge their ship from its orbit, so that the episode is really about progress and impact, a more ambitious story than is typical.

You don't need to love Voyager to love "Blink of an Eye," and so it's essential viewing regardless of whether or not you like any of the characters (The Doctor has an understated subplot that may be worth noting), just so long as you love Star Trek.

franchise * series * essential * character

Notable guest-stars:
Daniel Dae Kim

Memory Alpha summary.