Zefram Cochrane

Zefram Cochrane is a fictional character in the television show Star Trek. He was introduced in the episode Metamorphosis.

When Captain Kirk, Spock, and Bones take a female diplomat named Nancy to get medical help, their Space Shuttle crashes onto a planet where they meet a man who calls himself Cochrane and notices that Spock is from Vulcan. Cochrane tells them the energy being won’t let them leave the planet but that it’s been keeping him alive ever since he crashed there.

Spock later asks Cochrane his first name and he says it’s Zefram. Kirk realizes that Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri invented the Warp drive and Bones says Cochrane disappeared 150 years ago. Cochrane says the energy being is keeping him young and alive and that it kidnapped them because it realized that he was lonely.

Kirk and Spock try to fight it but lose. Kirk wonders how he can destroy it and Bones tells him “maybe you have to be a soldier so often, you sometimes forget you’re also supposed to be a diplomat.”

Kirk gets Spock to use his Universal Translator to talk to the energy and then realizes it’s female and in love with Cochrane. Cochrane thinks that’s disgusting because she’s not his species. Nancy thinks it doesn’t make sense for Cochrane to react that way so the energy possesses Nancy and they become the same person. Cochrane is willing to live with her ever since but asks Kirk, Spock, and Bones not to tell anyone so that they won’t be disturbed by people who think he’s dead.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the characters measure Warp Speed Energy in Cochranes.

Dr. Zefram Cochrane is a major character in the movie Star Trek: First Contact. After World War 3, Cochrane turns a Nuclear missile into Earth’s first Warp drive, in Montana. He uses it for a spaceship called the Phoenix. The Vulcans notice, so they go to Earth and meet with him. That becomes the first time humans meet aliens and makes it possible for the Federation of Planets to exist.

The Borg then go back in time to stop Cochrane but Captain Picard manages to stop them.

In Star Trek: Enterprise, Cochrane helps create Starfleet, works with Dr. Henry Archer on building a better Warp drive and disappears. It also turns out there’s a Parallel Universe, where Cochrane killed the first Vulcan he met and humans conquered the Universe.