Tomorrow Is Yesterday

I’ve gotta say this at the outset: in general, I think time travel stories suck. It’s not that they have to. The Time Machine is a perfectly good tale, at least in part because the hero journeys to the future thus handily side-stepping the usual time travel conundrums. And though I’ve never seen this done on TV or in a movie, I’ve read a short story or two about time travelers who head to the past just to watch events unfold.

However, the vast majority of these things immediately mire themselves in the lose-lose time travel plot conundrum. If you travel backward in time but don’t change anything, your story becomes tautological (things happened this way because this is the way things happened) and dull (at the beginning everyone already knows what the end is going to be). Writers can avoid this pitfall by allowing their characters to change the past, but then it becomes an exercise in rug-yanking (you thought you knew how this would turn out but now it isn’t going to because this is an alternate reality) that’s even worse than option one.

Amazingly enough, as bad as these things usually are, this one’s even worse. For starters, we don’t even get the usual obsession with time travel mechanism. The beginning of the episode finds the Enterprise already plunked down in the 1960s with only the most meager of explanations. Then they beam up an Air Force pilot (Roger Perry). Then they decide they can’t return him because he’ll know about the future and that could affect history. Then they decide they have to return him because his as-yet-un-fathered child will eventually play an important role in the space program.

In the meantime, attempts to recover photos of the Enterprise from a Strategic Air Command base have failed to net the negatives and instead have resulted in a security guard being beamed aboard. After additional time-wasting, our heroes figure out how to slingshot themselves back to their proper time (and don’t bother to wonder why if it’s so easy to do that Star Fleet doesn’t pop back and forth in time all the time). And if they beam back the pilot and the guard at exactly the right moments as they’re flying backward into the future, it’ll be like the whole episode never happened (at least from the perspective of the guys from the 20th century).

If you’re sitting there wondering “how would beaming a guy back on top of himself work at all, let alone cause him to forget the last day or two of his life?” join the club. This episode is full of don’t-think-about-it-too-hard moments. One of the biggest ones is “if everything’s going to be put back where it was, then why bother trying to steal photos from SAC when those photos will end up never existing to begin with?” Or how about “why bother with all this subterfuge, when the government at the time had a solid reputation for covering up anything having to do with a UFO, minimizing the chances that the incident would have any lasting effect at all?” Or perhaps a simple, catch-all “dude, WTF?”

I was especially bothered by how much of the situation was initially caused by the crew’s incompetence. The pilot has to be beamed aboard because turning a tractor beam on his plane puts too much stress on the “primitive” craft. And once he’s on the Enterprise, they give him a guided tour of the place before anyone bothers to think “oh, he really isn’t supposed to know about the future.” Dumb.

That’s symptomatic of the most galling thing about the whole mess: almost all the problems are the result of bad writing. Every implausible moment could easily have been written around with a little more care and attention. It’s as if D.C. Fontana decided “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the guys had to creep around an Air Force base?” and then cooked up a script around the concept without bothering with small details like logic.

Considering the plot holes huge enough to drive a starship through, I’m astounded that Star Trek Compendium author Allan Asherman liked it as much as he did.

Episode rating:

Stardate: 3113.2

Episode type: Time travel

Written by: D.C. Fontana

Original air date: January 26, 1967

Arena / Court-Martial

Back to the Star Trek index