Star Trek TOS Re-Watch

[Ssosmcin]

I this due to the acting performances/Charlie's borderline misogyny/Kirk switching shirts in the turbolift/or other factors?

I don't care about any of that. I hated the rec room scene, which ground the episode to a dead halt. Uhura loses her voice and Spock's lyre stops working and not a single person reacts. Almost as if, just like me at home, they're saying "thank god that's over" and getting out while they can. The first half of the episode is cringe inducing and the story doesn't really interest me until the second half, when it becomes a nightmare scenario. But watching an adolescent hurt young yeoman's feelings, say the wrong thing to Janice and make an idiot out of himself is not the most entertaining or comfortable viewing experience for me.

 

[Commander Troi]

Tomorrow Is Yesterday by D.C. Fontana

What an odd episode.

So little felt familiar, so I have to wonder if I've seen this one at all, or maybe not since the early 70s.

We open on a USAF plane, which probably made a few people wonder if they had the right show. We find out the Enterprise has been flung back in time following an encounter with a "black star". I found it interesting that we the episode aired in 67 but refers to the "first manned moon shot," so the episode is set in what was then the near future.

Air Force Captain John Christopher is sent to investigate the UFO that showed up out of nowhere. Kirk orders the tractor beam used, but it crushes Christopher's jet and they beam him aboard. As they show him around, you can see that meeting Spock gives him pause, but I like that he's stays composed and doesn't say anything. Uhura has a nice amused look on her face.

Supposedly, Christopher does nothing of note historically (imagine being told that!), so he can't go home because he could disrupt the timeline if he reports on the Enterprise and the future. Then Spock admits he was wrong (!) and Christopher's not-yet-existing son will be important. He already has kids, but glows at the idea of having a boy. Whatev.

Which brings up the interesting sexism/not-sexism that plagues TOS. Christopher sees a woman on the Enterprise and asks about it.

CHRISTOPHER: A woman?
KIRK: Crewman.

Kirk's reply is cool, but then later, in Kirk's quarters, we get an overly affectionate computer (was that sexy voice Majel or someone else?). It calls Kirk "dear" and giggles (per Spock).

CHRISTOPHER: I take it that a lady computer is not routine.
SPOCK: We put in at Cygnet Fourteen for general repair and maintenance. Cygnet Fourteen is a planet dominated by women. They seemed to feel the ship's computer system lacked a personality. They gave it one. Female, of course.

Oy.

Anyway, Christopher tries and fails to escape, Spock finds out they have to send him home, and they decide to pull all the audio and video so he'll be "simply be one of the thousands who thought he saw a UFO." Christopher is okay with this and even sketches out the base for them. Kirk and Sulu go to get the evidence and get stopped by an armed guard. The guard takes their stuff and accidentally sets off an emergency signal, getting himself beamed to the Enterprise. I got quite a kick out of watching him frozen on the transporter pad, scared to move!

Kirk and Sulu get the audio recordings and go for the film from the plane. Kirk gets captured by security (giving a lovely "I'm so innocent" look), but Sulu escapes back to the ship with the evidence. Christopher forces them to take him to get Kirk back and tries to get left on Earth. Spock downs him with a nerve pinch.

Back on the ship, Scotty and Spock have figured out the slingshot maneuver (used many times after this). They start moving backwards in time and beam Christopher back into his jet at the moment he first saw Enterprise, erasing everything that happened after (and giving me a headache). Enterprise goes back to the future.

I'm not sure about the solution, but it's no worse than the technobabble we got in other episodes.

SPOCK: Logically, as we move faster and faster toward the sun, we'll begin to move backward in time. We'll actually go back beyond yesterday, beyond the point when we first appeared in the sky. Then, breaking free will shoot us forward in time, and we'll transport you back before any of this happened.

How is that logical?

There's a lot of humor in the episode and there are a lot of mishaps, so I wonder if this was supposed to be a comedy or maybe the actors just played it that way. Shatner especially seems to have fun with the Air Force security people.

My favorite line:
KIRK: All right, Colonel. The truth is, I'm a little green man from Alpha Centauri. A beautiful place. You ought to see it.

By the way, per Wikipedia, "It was the first Star Trek episode to be written solely by a woman (Dorothy Fontana had previously written the teleplay for the episode “Charlie X” but the story was credited to Gene Roddenberry)."

 

[Ssosmcin]

Tomorrow Is Yesterday by D.C. Fontana

We open on a USAF plane, which probably made a few people wonder if they had the right show.

As a kid, I thought it was I Dream of Jeannie...

(was that sexy voice Majel or someone else?).

100% Majel. Sounds exactly like her.

There's a lot of humor in the episode and there are a lot of mishaps, so I wonder if this was supposed to be a comedy or maybe the actors just played it that way. Shatner especially seems to have fun with the Air Force security people.

Oh it was a light one intentionally. The music leaned heavily on the cutesy pieces by Mullendore and Fried.

This episode is fun, but it doesn't give me the same joy it did when I was a young pup. The "science" behind the resolution is worthy of Irwin Allen.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

We open on a USAF plane, which probably made a few people wonder if they had the right show.

Slowly raises hand.

 

[Tallguy]

Even for Star Trek the end of this does not make one lick of sense. But it's a great episode. Serious enough but lots of tap dancing. Gene Coon before there was Gene Coon. (I think?)

For the longest time there was the rumor that this was actually supposed to be part II of The Naked Time. Rather than time warping back three days at the end of TNT they would have ended up here. But that hasn't ever been totally confirmed.

This is one of the episodes that I have to say that the Remastereds actually knocked out of the park.

 

[Ssosmcin]

Even for Star Trek the end of this does not make one lick of sense. But it's a great episode. Serious enough but lots of tap dancing. Gene Coon before there was Gene Coon. (I think?)

This is one of the episodes that I have to say that the Remastereds actually knocked out of the park.

This one falls in his regime, so yeah, this was a Gene Coon episode

And agreed, this is the only episode where I actually PREFER the TOS-R version. The ending at least visually makes sense now and the shots of the Enterprise in the sky was sublime.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Even for Star Trek the end of this does not make one lick of sense.

Agreed; it involves a unique application of the transporter, to say the least!

 

[Mytran]

The resolution requires at minimum wiping the memories of Captain Christopher and the guard - at worst erasing some variants of them from existence! Although if I lose a portion of my memory, can I truly be said to be the same person anyway?

And where did that version of Enterprise in the sky go???

 

[ZapBrannigan]

The resolution requires at minimum wiping the memories of Captain Christopher and the guard - at worst erasing some variants of them from existence! Although if I lose a portion of my memory, can I truly be said to be the same person anyway?

And where did that version of Enterprise in the sky go???

That version of the Enterprise never happened, because they went back (around the sun) and undid it. So from the TV viewer's point of view the ship seemed to disappear, but (now) in fact it was never really there. [The Enterprise which went back 300 years hasn't arrived yet, and now it won't because upon arrival back in the 23rd century, Kirk will prevent the accident.]

The onboard versions of Christopher and the Air Force MP didn't vanish at that point because they went around the sun with the ship. But taking them back in time, to a time when those two guys already existed, meant that now there were two of each guy.

And I think the ending makes total sense, once you accept the solution in which Kirk and Spock are dry-eyed and unsentimental about their need to correct the timeline. They went with your "wiped out" option.

They didn't exactly beam Christopher and the MP into their own bodies, which is ridiculous. They beamed the two now-redundant guys at their original selves. This caused the Transporter software to scan the destination and discover that the person was already there. The "excess" matter stream was therefore dispersed into space, steam-valve style. The proper version of each one was still alive, and the redundant versions are space dust.

The whole thing seems pretty airtight. I'm not sure the episode's writer had it figured out, but it seems to work.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

And I think the ending makes total sense, once you accept the solution in which Kirk and Spock are dry-eyed and unsentimental about their need to correct the timeline. They went with your "wiped out" option.

They didn't exactly beam Christopher and the MP into their own bodies, which is ridiculous. They beamed the two now-redundant guys at their original selves. This caused the Transporter software to scan the destination and discover that the person was already there. The "excess" matter stream was therefore dispersed into space, steam-valve style. The proper version of each one was still alive, and the redundant versions are space dust.

The whole thing seems pretty airtight. I'm not sure the episode's writer had it figured out, but it seems to work.

Oh, yeah?

 

[Ssosmcin]

That version of the Enterprise never happened, because they went back (around the sun) and undid it. So from the TV viewer's point of view the ship seemed to disappear, but (now) in fact it was never really there. [The Enterprise which went back 300 years hasn't arrived yet, and now it won't because upon arrival back in the 23rd century, Kirk will prevent the accident.]

The onboard versions of Christopher and the Air Force MP didn't vanish at that point because they went around the sun with the ship. But taking them back in time, to a time when those two guys already existed, meant that now there were two of each guy.

And I think the ending makes total sense, once you accept the solution in which Kirk and Spock are dry-eyed and unsentimental about their need to correct the timeline. They went with your "wiped out" option.

They didn't exactly beam Christopher and the MP into their own bodies, which is ridiculous. They beamed the two now-redundant guys at their original selves. This caused the Transporter software to scan the destination and discover that the person was already there. The "excess" matter stream was therefore dispersed into space, steam-valve style. The proper version of each one was still alive, and the redundant versions are space dust.

The whole thing seems pretty airtight. I'm not sure the episode's writer had it figured out, but it seems to work.

I love ya, Zap. But you put more thought into that than Fontana did.

 

[Mytran]

...the ending makes total sense, once you accept the solution in which Kirk and Spock are dry-eyed and unsentimental about their need to correct the timeline. They went with your "wiped out" option.

They didn't exactly beam Christopher and the MP into their own bodies, which is ridiculous. They beamed the two now-redundant guys at their original selves. This caused the Transporter software to scan the destination and discover that the person was already there. The "excess" matter stream was therefore dispersed into space, steam-valve style. The proper version of each one was still alive, and the redundant versions are space dust.

The whole thing seems pretty airtight. I'm not sure the episode's writer had it figured out, but it seems to work.

Yes, back in 2014 I had to agree with you that this darker solution of how they were "returned" is probably the correct one, given the facts we have available.
As for the other Enterprise though...

That version of the Enterprise never happened, because they went back (around the sun) and undid it. So from the TV viewer's point of view the ship seemed to disappear, but (now) in fact it was never really there. [The Enterprise which went back 300 years hasn't arrived yet, and now it won't because upon arrival back in the 23rd century, Kirk will prevent the accident.]

I'm not sure how Kirk would prevent the accident - it was caused by the Enterprise struggling to break free of that "black star" and inadvertently catapulting herself into a time warp. Even if he arrives back prior to those events, the act of preventing the accident now means that there are two Enterprises in the same timeframe!

The other issue about having the Enterprise being in the skies of 1969 is that her presence is what caused Captain Christopher to fly up there in the first place. If the Enterprise was never there, neither would the good Captain.

I love ya, Zap. But you put more thought into that than Fontana did.

I wonder what D.C. Fontana did have in mind when she wrote this episode? The subtle implications from the script are that she's going by the model of "only one instance of a person or thing can exist at any one time" which has popped up in sci-fi over the years. It would explain the sudden vanishing of the Enterprise in the sky above Capt Christopher.
It would also explain why suddenly "dropping" a person into the timestream would not complicate the presence of an earlier version of themselves. And naturally, since the events they partook in now "never happened", they wouldn't remember them, right? This last is another old trope in TV shows that can't be bothered to think of a more creative or logical way out of the mess (used also in McGann's Dr Who TV movie). In fact, Kirk more or less expresses this sentiment exactly in his final words to Captain Christopher:

KIRK: You won't have anything to remember, because it never would have happened.

As a one-off I suppose you can take this apparent illogical approach to time travel in isolation and just move on. The difficulty comes in that Trek uses time travel again and again in subsequent decades, with consequences seemingly incompatible with these rules!

 

[Henoch]

Between Finney and Finnegan, Kirk didn't have very good experiences.

Ruth seemed to be a good experience which was sandwiched in there.

 

[BK613]

Spock math...Spock math...zip the two diverging time streams back together...Spock math...

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Ruth seemed to be a good experience which was sandwiched in there.

"Finn" isn't very lucky for him.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

"Finn" isn't very lucky for him.

It's the kind of "naming coincidence" that does happen in real life, but novelists avoid like the plague. Star Trek fell in between, with two different episode writers hitting on similar names.

Kirk has the same situation with Janet Wallace, Janice Rand, and Janice Lester. It could happen, but a novelist would never do it. Kirk's life of coincidences. You can't make this stuff up!

 

[Henoch]

You can't make this stuff up!

 

[Tallguy]

You can't make this stuff up!

But they did!

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

There's just something about "Jan".

 

[Henoch]

There's just something about "Jan".

I thought Marcia got all the attention?