Voyage to the Stars
is a partly improvised comedy series. "The year is 2263. A group of bumblers mistakenly board an alien spacecraft and find themselves transported through a wormhole to the far side of the universe. These are their stories as they try and find their way home."
Stars:
- Colton Dunn as Captain Tucker
- Felicia Day as Science Officer Elsa Rankfort
- Steve Berg as Stew
- Janet Varney as Sorry, the ship's AI
- Kirsten Vangsness as Nico, an alien who joined the crew in season 2
IDW published a four issue Voyage To The Stars Comic Book series set after the second season.
Tropes:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Sorry's databanks were badly corrupted passing through the wormhole, with the section on early 2000s pop culture the closest to intact. In "So Far Beyond Good and Evil" she discovers a directive allowing her to kill the crew as a threat to the universe, changing her mind at the last minute.
- Artifact Title: About halfway through season 2 the crew return to Earth.
- The Empath: In "Once More With Feeling" the crew pick up an empathic alien who offers his services as a therapist, unfortunately he's also an Emotion Eater.
- Fictional Political Party: Dorians support mandatory labeling for androids and building a wall around the radioactive wasteland that used to be the Midwest, Ionians believe in equal rights for robots, mutants, and dolphins. (Corinthians are just weird.)
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Chronos in "Worst Contact" is subject to a planet-wide time loop that allows the population to live lives of utter hedonism with no consequences, until the crew take the source of the time loop for fuel after Tucker drunkenly blows up half the planet, oops.
- Human Alien Discovery: In "Stewtopia", Elsa learns of the existence of a highly-advanced Human Alien species called "rankarts" and latches on to the idea that she is one of them, though it's left uncertain at the end of the episode. In the season 1 finale they get hold of a sample of rankart DNA which suggests she's a rankart/human hybrid.
- Humongous Mecha: Nico has a giant combat mech that has some connection to The Ship.
- Hybrid All Along: Elsa is confirmed as half-rankart in the season 1 finale.
- In Love with Your Carnage: The Grand Judge and the Supremes know all about the crew's multiple genocides— and want to recruit them as villains, rather than convict them like the crew assumes. They don't take rejection well, but after Nico blows up their ship, the Grand Judge leaves Tucker a voicemail hoping they can still work something out.
- Intelligent Gerbil: Nico, the alien mech pilot who joins the crew in the second season, looks shockingly like a red panda.
- Last of Their Kind:
- Sorry mentions that the macabra was the last of its species right after Elsa airlocks it, but it ate at least one of the redshirts so nobody was particularly torn up about that genocide.
- Nico off-handedly claims to be the last of her kind, and her secret revenge diary implies the Nothing was involved.
- Love Triangle: Tucker and Nico are both openly trying to date Elsa, though it seems unclear whether the latter is bisexual or If It's You, It's Okay. Elsa is initially interested in both, but tilts strongly toward Nico before long.
- Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Pretty much the whole cast by the end of the first season, with accidental or not-so-accidental planetary destruction happening almost Once per Episode.
- Miles Gloriosus: Tucker flunked out of flight academy and was an insurance salesman until he lied to the ASHA's captain about being a qualified space captain and got roped into leading the boarding team to The Ship.
- Missing Mom: Tucker's parents were on the Destiny that went through the wormhole, never to be seen again.
- Multi-Part Episode: Aside from the pilot, every episode is split into two parts.
- Non-Idle Rich: Elsa, sort of. Her family owns pretty much all of Earth, yet she went out and got a dozen or three half-degreesnote - repeatedly insisting that once she knows stuff, she doesn't need to bother with official validation - and generally wants to make something of her life.
- Our Wormholes Are Different: A wormhole opened between the Earth and Moon 25 years previous, research station ASHA was built orbiting it and the Destiny went through but never returned. In the pilot the station has been reduced to a tourist trap and is about to be shut down when an empty alien ship comes out and a bunch of station staff and tourists bumble their way on board before it goes back through and the wormhole closes.
- Perfect Pacifist People: The disciples of the Word, know nothing of conflict before Elsa and Tucker get them involved in their political debating. Then they "solve" that problem by setting one of them up as a repressive dictator, which soon touches off a nuclear war.
- Proud Scholar Race: The rankarts were a highly advanced species who dedicated their lives to the sciences, which leads to some awkward moments between the academically unfocused half-rankart Elsa and a rankart elder.
- Red Shirt: Aside from the four or five main characters (the "inner circle") the ship has about fifty other crew members, but if one of them has a speaking role they tend to get killed off by the end of the episode.
- Robo Sexual: Stew previously dated a robot, and currently has Will They or Won't They? going with Sorry. (Shortly after getting her robot body in season 2, he sang about "like-liking" her, while she riffed on their podcast title "Sorry, Not Sorry" as "Girlfriend, Not Boyfriend".) Gets more complicated when Stew is revealed to be an artificially created "organic robot" with fake implanted memories.
- Scrapbook Story: Formatted as a collection of Tucker's "captain's logs," Elsa's "science logs," and Stew's podcasts that nobody else listens to. Plus Nico's "secret revenge diary" acting as The Stinger to season 2's first story.
- Shiny New Australia: Elsa's dad bought Australia and made her grand duchess of Tasmania.
- Shout-Out: In "It All Returns to Nothing", Tucker compares the Nothing to Unicron after Zell explains to him what it is.
- Spacetime Eater: The Nothing introduced in the first season finale, which ate the rankart homeworld and is now headed for Earth.
- The Unfavorite: Elsa's parents made it pretty clear she couldn't hold a candle to her brother.
- Viva Las Vegas!: First season has an episode where the crew land on a casino planet, and Stew accidentally gambles away the ship while Elsa runs up the room service bill. And in season 2 they go to Mutant Vegas, find a hotel owned by the Rankforts, Stew and Sorry get drunk and then married.
- Who's on First?: The Ship's computer accidentally registered Stew's reflexive apology on rebooting her as her name.
