1.19 — “Tomorrow is Yesterday”
I know I was a bit negative about “Arena” and “The Galileo Seven,” but now I believe we’ve hit a pocket of really fun episodes (knock wood) that, if you’re a person who likes original Star Trek, just have to make you smile. Here is Star Trek’s first time travel episode, excluding the short jaunt at the end of “The Naked Time” (which was originally envisioned as the lead-in to this story), and its first visit to planet Earth, not counting the mysterious Earth copy planet in “Miri.” Wow, I’ve watched 20 shows and now I’m tossing around episode titles like I have a Ph.D. in advanced nerdery.
I love that the teaser is told solely from the point of view of the 1960s USAF officers, with no cast members appearing. The use of stock footage makes it look like an entirely different show. WHAT is the Enterprise doing in the 1960s? It’s a mystery! When the first act starts you see the crew picking themselves up off the floor, and they let the audience catch up to what happened, cutting out all the boring parts. This is great storytelling. I also love the camera work and the performances when Capt. Christopher is led onto the bridge. By staying grounded in character, “Tomorrow is Yesterday” manages to be much funnier than “Shore Leave,” the supposed comedy episode.
Interestingly, Kirk references the gravity well of a “black star,” because, according to Memory Alpha, the term “black hole” would not be coined by physicist John Archibald Wheeler until later in 1967. Kirk also correctly pinpoints the date of the first moon landing as occurring in “the late 1960s,” although this had not yet occurred on July 20, 1969 (a Wednesday, as stated in the script), and NASA’s public estimates at the time were well into the 1970s.
I thought it strange that the crew dldn’t take more precautions to isolate Capt. Christopher and employ greater security, but I guess they hadn’t run any drills on this subject. Although Spock is the first to point out how foolish this is, in other ways, he seems too pessimistic. He says they must prevent Christopher from changing what “must be”–um, who says? Why assume that the future they remember is the best possible future? Especially since, realistically, the Enterprise has no chance of returning. It does return, of course–using some hocus pocus pseudo-scientific cheating–but this episode has a “What if?” quality and I like to think of it as one of many alternate timelines in the multiverse. We do happen to live in a present in which the course of scientific development was forever changed by our encounters with the Enterprise (on television, not real life), and as far as I know this hasn’t done any harm, no matter how many drabber alternate universes died off when NBC decided to give Gene Roddenberry a second shot at filming a pilot.
I’m navel gazing. The episode descends swiftly from high-concept sci fi (SCOTTY: We’ve got no place to go. CHRISTOPHER: You’re just as much a prisoner in time as I am!) into silliness (the ship’s new computer voice, Kirk and Sulu’s infiltrations of the air force base), but I think this episode is a hoot and I love it.
We learn there are 12 starships. United Earth Planetary Probe? If they only had an operations section worth a damn, they wouldn’t have to beam down the Captain and the Navigator to steal the plans. More screen time for Sulu is fine with me, however.
The humor of Spock’s character really comes into bloom with his “I am” response when Bones criticizes him for not working on the warp calculations. Future script editor D.C. (Dorothy) Fontana is the writer (her second script after “Charlie X”), and she has a great feel for character.
I did wonder why the visitors to the Enterprise had their memories erased when they went back in time, yet the Enterprise crew can remember everything back in the 23rd century. Beaming someone on top of himself doesn’t seems like a such a bright idea to me, but I guess they had to reset everything to normal or discontinue the show.
The remastered effects shots of the Enterprise circling the Earth and slingshotting the Sun are gorgeous.
Leave a Reply