"Tomorrow Is Yesterday"

Yes, I hadn't seen that episode in years. I just knew that he would kill her in the end and that marred the suspense. However, with the "Outer Limits" it often ends very badly.

 

we are watching Just shoot me with breakfast, and my wife calls him "Papa Hollis" because of Carmilla, an exceptional youtube series about a lesbian Vampire.

She doesn't like Veronica Mars or Person of interest, seminal viewing with strong Enrico Colantoni involvement, but I still stick around.

 

The time travel aspects of "Tomorrow is Yesterday" do not make a lot of sense.

The Enterprise didn't do anything which would make it disappear from in front of Christopher. If they didn't return to their exact own time, but to a time at least a little bit before then, they could have sent a message to their other selves, preventing the time travel accident, and then they and their crew, and Christopher and the Guard, would disappear from existence. That is not what the epsiode showed, and so they didn't do antnything to make the Enterprise disappear from in front of tCaptain Christopher.

As for beaming a human body into that same human body at a different time, the two copies of the body would not have the exact same posture - nor, for that master, the exact same structure, since thousands and millions of body cells would have died and been born during a single day..

Because the two bodies would not have the exact same posture, their positions would almost competely but not totally overlap, Almost totally, but not totally. Some parts of the old body would be outside of the area of overlap of the two bodies, and some parts of the new body would be outside of the area of overlap of the bodies.

The parts of the bodies which were outside of the area of overlap would become detached. Wisps of cothing, hair and skin would be left, separated from the overlapping areas, and would fall to the deck or floor.

Since the structures and postures of the two bodies were not totally identical, the tiny air passages in the lungs would now overlap with tiny blood bessels in the lungs, spilling air into blood bessesl and blood into airways. Bodly wastes would get inside arties and veins. That should be quickly fatal.

Except that there probably would not be enough time for that to happen. The diferent molecues within a cell are held in posiiton by electromagnetic forces between them. With the number of molecues instantly doubling,new lines of force woult instandly appear and cut across the old lines of force, thus causing a lot of confusion in the very fin structure of the body.

So it is quite possible that Capt. Christopher and the guard instantly dissolved into countless separate molecules of many different solid elements and compounds, liquid elements and compounds, and gaseous elements and compunds.

That has been suggested over forty years ago, which seems like plenty of time of time for someone to refute it and come up with a more scientifically accurate description of what would happen when one body was beamed into the space occupied by an (almost totally) identical body. So have any of your ever heard of a more accurate scientific description of what would happen if onebody was beamed into another?

So that leaves open the possibility that, as suggested, Kirk and Spock deliberately beamed Christoper and the guard into nothingness. That does not explain what cept the other Chrsitpher and guard from seing things and getting involved with the Enterprise crew.

Thus it has been suggested that something else "really" happened and the story has been changed.

Maybe the creators of TOS changed the scientifically accurate story of what "really" happened for various storytelling and tv production reasons.

Maybe Kirk, Spock, Scott, and the others changed their logs to keep what "really" happened a secret for some reason, and the script is based on those official and misleading logs.

Maybe a larger or smaller part of the episode is not what "really" happpened in the fictional universe of TOS, but an illusion which Kirk, Spock, and the others thought that they were experiencing.

And possibly all of those happened at diferent stages, making the story more and more different at each stage from what "actually" happened.

So who or what would give the Enterprise crew illusions of events happening differently from how they actually happened?

Today, Sept. 20, 2021, I thought that possibly the Talosians aboard the Enterprise might have done it for some Talosian reason.

What Talosians aboard the Enterprise? What evidence is there that any Talosians ever left Talos IV or that any are aboard the Enterprise?

If any Talosians ever left Talos IV to use illusions on Starfleet personnel in order to, for example, send ships full of supplies to an imaginary colony on Talos IV, and if any Talosians were aboard the Enterprise , what evidence would there be? Are you so naive as to assume that it is certain that anything shown in "The Cage" and in "The Menagerie" "actually" happpened, or that theTalosians "actually" resigned themselves to eventual extinction? If so, I have a nice bridge that goes from Brooklyn to Rigel VII that you might want to buy.

But possibly a larger or smaller part of "The Enemy Within" was also an illusion created by someone (possilby a Talosian) for some purpose, an illusion where what seemed to happen was much less scienficially plausible than what "really" happened.

So what actually happened to Capt. Christphere and the guard? Assumig that the illusions concerning their fate were created by Talosians and not by someone else, maybe the Talosians used illusions to make someone beam them into space to die. Maybe the Talosians eventually sent them on the next ship to Talos IV, where they worked as slave laborers for the Talosians,or maybe they were given illusions of happy lives to entertain the Talosians. Who knows?

 

Yes, I remember "Just Shoot Me" from some time ago. He played a photographer who had a room for his berets.

And he slept with most of the models that he photographed.

 

Eh, the whole return trip makes zero logical sense. You just have to roll with it.

 

I don't think the two men were killed, destroyed or anything else to be honest! The show wanted a clean and family positive end to it's story and it got one! The essence of the men was beamed back into their bodies just before they noticed the Enterprise and Kirk & Sulu in the Records Department! Now when they beamed the Lieutenant in first, his actual hearing of the clank in the room was erased because the Enterprise crew never actually beamed into the room in that timeline and once they delivered Captain Christopher after then he would never have heard the noise in the first place. So the timeline was changed twice! Then if they altered the moment they first appeared in the sky then Christopher was never sent in the first place to investigate!
JB

 

They were already there! Why beam anything at all?

 

First, it shows both men getting "something" beamed into/out of them, so, this disclaims that Christopher and the Sergeant were beamed into nothing/space and killed. The transporter is capable of combining two individuals into one person and removing the excess mass (The Enemy Within and Tuvix). Second, at the point in time for each beaming, each man just saw or heard something, but after beaming, they were seeing the altered timeline were the Enterprise never came to the planet. Both "thought" they experienced something that wasn't there, so, after a reality check, both men shook it off and thought it is was just their imaginations. Third, neither have any memory of their interaction with the Enterprise and crew, so, the beaming of them into themselves did not preserve their memories (I guess because it never happened per Kirk). Forth, merging their future bodies with their former bodies gets rid of the men on the ship. Fifth, both men were technically "returned".

Comment: one could argue that the past Christopher and Sergeant (with a belly full of chicken soup) were fully replaced by their future selves with no combining of their bodies. Then we assume that the two past people were removed and killed by the transporter and replaced by their future bodies. Once immersed into the new timeline, they "won't have anything to remember, because it never would have happened."

 

It was a cool visual. The finale never made sense, so I just went with that.

 

For me the funniest part of the finale was that Spock had everything timed to the split second, yet when he said the Kirk "Braking should begin now...", when Kirk gives the order, they spend an extra 10 seconds or so with Scotty telling him the strain weakened the engines and they may come apart if they reverse...yet somehow they end up right back in the year they need to be...

 

Omg right? To this day, that bothers me. It's as if Spock anticipated Kirk and Scotty were gonna waste time.

 

Starfleet Control was never going to dock their wages even if they were out of communication for a few days! Starfleet Command on the other hand...
JB

 

Given that Starfleet had actually noticed one of its ships was missing, the Enterprise could have overshot the arrival time by weeks or months.

 

These things should be timed by computers. A human being can't be precise at a fraction of a second, especially if he, they waste time arguing...

It always amuses me that they say "take us out of warp" which in and of itself takes a lot of time to say and then manage to de-warp exactly where they should be, even in the middle of debris!!

 

I have discussed this whole time travel mess a number of times over the years but unfortunately I have yet to find an explanation that doesn't end up getting horribly convoluted!
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/tomorrow-is-yesterday.277930/
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/episode-of-the-week-tomorrow-is-yesterday.252382/
However, some events have an easier explanation than others:

• Beaming Capt Christopher and the sergeant into their own bodies is easily enough explained, either via death-by-transporter (as per the @ZapBrannigan theory, which I favour) or by integration (ala the time cops in Voyager). However it doesn't really matter which was used; since neither Captain Christopher nor the sergeant recall anything about their time on board the Enterprise, those versions of themselves are effectively dead either way.
  I agree that the Transporter machinery can just "phase out" any unnecessary matter, thanks to the examples listed upthread.
• Returning Capt Christopher to just before he observes the Enterprise in the sky means that there WAS an Enterprise present, otherwise he wouldn't have flown up there in the first place.
  His intercom announces "you should be close enough now for visual contact" and 20 seconds later the Enterprise is gone from the pilot's POV. This differs from the first sequence of events where the Enterprise was still visible 20 seconds later (albeit in the distance).
  Perhaps the sparkles of the Transporter beam could have distracted Christopher's attention at the crucial moment, allowing that Enterprise to veer off into the clouds as planned; Christopher (having missed this) would have had no reason to follow a pursuit course.
  However, that naturally leads to the question of what happened to that second Enterprise?
• Returning the sergeant to just before he opened up the door to the photography room forces us to wonder why he was doing that in the first place - he acts like he expected to see something inside the room, yet it is empty. Where did Kirk and Sulu go? Maybe the sparklies transferred an echo of his alternate self's memories about that room, or maybe it just gave an odd feeling which he interpreted as as need to check out the nearest lab for activity.
  But regardless, at this point it is clear that events are proceeding along a new timeline, completely separate from the original.
• The Enterprise that got away from Capt Christopher in the revised timeline would presumably have repaired its damaged systems (without distraction), then slingshotted round the sun and returned to it's own time. So, where is it?
  Did it fail to make the slingshot manoeuvre correctly and get destroyed? Possibly, but Spock's essential calculations were not influences by the events of the episode so this seems unlikely.
  It is clear however that by the end of the episode there are TWO timelines involved, be they divergent branches from an original point or simply a pair of pre-existing parallel universes. Since we don't see both Enterprises arrive together at the end of the episode, the likeliest explanation IMO is that the second Enterprise ended up in the timeline where Capt Christopher's son never helmed the Saturn mission.
  If it was a divergent timeline that no longer had any means of being created (since neither Capt Christopher or the sergeant got abducted) then perhaps it phased out of existence...along with the 2nd Enterprise!

But enough with the death and destruction - what did D.C. Fontana 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:

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!

Sorry D.C. but it really does appear that you killed everyone, although at least it was only in someone else's timeline and not ours

 

One thing that always makes me laugh is the "chronometer runs backward" thing as the chronometer obeys the exact same laws of physics as the rest of the Enterprise (including the crew) so even if it "runs backward" so will they and they won't notice anything different but you have to overlook such nonsense if you want to enjoy Star Trek because it's everywhere.

 

Either that or the chronometer is updating itself every second by constantly checking itself against some sort of central Starfleet mainframe - which is a lot of effort for a simple clock!

 

Yes, they designed their chronometers with in mind that sooner or later their ships would be subject to a time distortion or one kind or another.

 

Having an accurate clock is often necessary for navigation. One explanation could be that the E's clock references pulsars as a backup to a Starfleet timing signal. Since many pulsars slow down over time, the backward running chronometer may be reflecting this.

 

Nothing Kirk did in the climax should prevented the Enterprise from appearing in the skies over Omaha. Returning Christopher and the guard really does nothing. What they needed to do was go back to their own time prior to the initial time warp and prevent it from happening in the first place. Once done, the Enterprise which made the trip, Christopher and the guard would have vanished because then none of it would have happened.