Star Trek: The Animated Series S1E12 – The Time Trap
The Animated Series leans into Star Trek’s love of both spatial anomalies and temporal trickery with The Time Trap, an episode that pits the USS Enterprise against the IKS. Klothos, stranding them both in the heart of a mysterious cosmic graveyard known as the Delta Triangle. It’s Trek’s take on the mythology of the Bermuda Triangle, offering a classic adventure filled with intrigue, uneasy alliances and some surprisingly anti-utopian subtext.
Sent to investigate the disappearance of several ships within the Delta Triangle, a region notorious for its vanishing vessels, the Enterprise is ambushed by a Klingon warship commanded by the antagonistic Kor and pulled into the trap. Inside, they find themselves in a timeless void littered with the wrecks of countless ships from across the galaxy, many crewed by species long presumed lost, including the Bonaventure, which Scotty describes as the first ship fitted with warp drive—a detail that would later be contradicted by both Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Enterprise.
As in the Original Series episode Day Of The Dove, the heart of the episode lies in the uneasy alliance between the Enterprise crew and the Klingons, who must work together to escape the Delta Triangle. The wrinkle this time is that instead of uniting to defeat an energy being that fed on aggression, the crews must unite in defiance of the Elysian Council, a peaceful alliance made up of the descendants of the many races who have found themselves stranded and unable to escape. A diverse and pacifist alliance incorporating one hundred and twenty-three different species, Elysia epitomises the ideals the Federation is striving for and yet without any hesitation, all Kirk and co want to do is leave. Of course, their strict pacifist hypocrisy (enforced by the threat of severe penalties, presents a paradox of peace through potential punishment) leaves Kirk with something of a diplomatic and tactical challenge as he tries to outmanoeuvre both the Elysian’ bureaucracy and the Klingons’ aggression.
Visually, The Time Trap makes a decent fist of depicting the ship graveyard and the strange, timeless expanse. The animation captures the eerie vastness of the Delta Triangle, and the designs of the wrecked ships are a fun mix of the familiar and foreign even if the shots are perhaps used once too often to retain their novelty.
It’s a nice touch that the episode sees the return of Kor – last seen in Errand Of Mercy – although the reduced purse strings of animation mean James Doohan has to step in to voice the character instead of John Colicos and Kor’s animated appearance lacks some of the presence that made him such an iconic antagonist in The Original Series.
Ultimately, The Time Trap is another decent entry in The Animated Series, combining adventure, mystery, and some classic Klingon-Federation tension. While the resolution—a clever trick involving simultaneous warp jumps—is satisfyingly on-brand for Kirk and his crew, it also serves as a reminder of how resourcefulness and collaboration are essential Trek values. It’s just a shame that another intriguing idea was compressed into a brief 22-minute timeslot meaning that most of its bigger ideas – such as the existence of the Elysian council’s successful multispecies existence – are barely explored at all.
