Yesteryear

Don't you just hate time travel stories like "Yesteryear" that have all of these unexplainable contradictions in them? You sit there and try to figure out what happened and end up retconning it?

Let's say, somehow the Romulans (or anybody, really) come across time travel--the Romulans find an Iconian gateway; or Future Guy from Enterprise if he really was a Romulan like some of the writers were thinking about doing at one time, or some other scenario.

The Romulans find out about Ambassador Spock's future attempt to unify Vulcan with Romulus (or some other significant event in Spock's life). They look into history and find that if this cousin Selek was kept from saving Spock from the le-matya, Spock would die as a boy and his future threat of reunification would be gone. (Maybe Selek was a lower profile target than a more direct attack on Spock. You gotta watch those temporal police, like in Deep Space Nine or Enterprise, nosing around.)

The Romulans go back in time (coincidentally, after the moment that Kirk and Spock go back in time through the Guardian to visit Orion's past) and stop/kill Selek. Selek doesn't save young Spock. Spock dies.

Spock's existence is wiped out of the original timeline just like the Enterprise was in "City on the Edge of Forever." The caveat being that the Guardian's influence to protect people from the timeline changes only applies to those in the immediate vicinity of the Guardian on the planet (just like "City"). Let's say that McCoy, Jan Grey, and Aleek-Om were not present when Kirk, Spock, and the red shirted guy jumped into the Guardian and that they came later since we were never shown that exact moment in the actual episode. (I'm ignoring the further complications of the Alan Dean Foster adaptation.) Therefore, McCoy, Jan and Aleek-Om don't remember Spock because they weren't protected by the Guardian when the Romulans altered the timeline.

So, to reiterate, in this new altered timeline, Spock doesn't exist and doesn't come with the Enterprise to the Guardian's planet. Therefore, McCoy, jan, and Aleek-Om don't remember Spock because their memories of Spock were wiped before they entered the Guardian's influence.

Since the full history of the Guardian was never explained, maybe those who are back in time in the Guardian are protected from timeline alterations like those within its immediate presence on the planet. Kirk and the red shirted guy remember Spock when they return from their trip but no one else does because of the altered timeline by the Romulans.

Spock's "faulty" memory could be caused by being young and not being trained in the Vulcan mental abilities at the time; and later by following Vulcan tradition in suppressing all emotional instances out of themselves (like Spock suppressing Kirk's memory of loving Rayna in "Requiem for Methuselah"). Since the Romulans eliminated/killed Selek in this new timeline, Spock has to go back and pose as this "Selek" in order to correct the timeline by preventing his own death as a boy. Not knowing exactly what's going on in the Vulcan past, Spock may not have been in exactly the right place at the right time as the original Selek in order to keep I-Chaya from dying when he (older Spock) saves young Spock. This causes a new little time ripple that the older Spock says never happened the first time around. Young Spock is saved and older Spock returns to the present after completing his mission just as Kirk, Spock, and McCoy did in "City."

Kirk and Spock are unaware of the bigger picture with the Romulans altering the timeline. So Kirk is constantly grasping at straws to explain what's going on. It was never the historians replaying Vulcan history in the Guardian that caused young Spock's death but the Romulan tampering of the timeline. Young Spock's death was because the Romulans killed Selek not because Spock was in Orion's past and couldn't be in two places at the same time.

When Kirk asks if Selek looked like how Spock does now, it's more of a solution to the problem rather than an explanation of it. With his fuzzy memory, Spock goes along with it because it appears to be the only answer in solving the problem. If Spock was protected by the Guardian's influence while back in Orion's past, his memory of the le-matya attack would have been with the original Selek and not an older Spock. Was there ever an instance in the series that actually said Spock, or Vulcans in general, have an eidetic or photographic memory?

 

I once tried really hard to make sense of time travel in Star Trek. It's not possible. I mean, what happened in "Tomorrow is Yesterday"? Beaming Captain Christopher into himself while going backwards in time did what exactly?

I had this project, to draw all the alternate timelines in Trek and show how they interacted with each other. There were early attempts but I have up when I realised it's flat-out impossible to map Voyager's timeline because nothing makes sense. So I photoshopped this:

That's how time travel works in Star Trek.

 

You should read the essays in The Best of Trek that deal with this topic. That's quite a detailed list of all the different ways that the TOS episodes didn't add up. I can't imagine doing another such detailed accounting of all the series.

Your photoshop image is lacking a very important element. You forgot to include a kitten to play with the intertwined cosmic/temporal ball of yarn.

 

Trouble brewing.

 

I'm feeling like this should go in the Fan Fiction Forum.

 

I've read them all (except any in BoT 17, the only one I don't have)! I've also read Christopher's Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock which makes an epic attempt to make it seem as if 50 years of Trek time travels all fit into one incredibly complex but cohesive system.

 

Enh . . . I just kinda roll with it

 

Yesteryear is fine, a very good...yarn.

 

I believe this is how it worked in Quantum Leap.

 

Yes, actually, lately time travel stories have been annoying me to the point that I wish Star Trek would stop doing them because there's always something that doesn't make sense.

 

Yes most of the time travel in Trek is inconsistent, doesn't make sense, cause more trouble than it solves and yet they were amongst the most entertaining episodes/movies.

 

Closed time loops are hard for people to grasp.

 

They should destroy that infernal machine. Time travel is just too painful.

 

Yesteryear was probably the best episode of TAS! The story didn't contradict anything in TOS that I can remember and when Mark Lenard 'appears' as well, you've got yourself a great show!
References to the Sehlat, which was very sad when he died and the history was changed by younger Spock's change of decision! That and seeing the city on Vulcan were good and especially since D.C.Fontana wrote it as she also scripted the Journey To Babel made this a winner for me and others I'm sure!
JB

 

The Guardian of Forever works a little differently than how it did in COTEOF. There, it was only able to play back history at one speed and they couldn't pinpoint a specific time. In "Yesteryear," Spock is able to request a particular year and location. But that's OK. D.C. Fontana was obviously just doing what worked best for her story, and she just needed a quick means of time travel to make it work.

 

They learned how to program the portal between the two episodes.

 

It also had a less booming, formidable voice too!
JB

 

I thought Doohan was channeling Boris Karloff in his performance as the Guardian.

 

[QUOTE="Yes, actually, lately time travel stories have been annoying me to the point that I wish Star Trek would stop doing them because there's always something that doesn't make sense.[/QUOTE]

I agree. Time travel and holodeck stories are done to death

 

[QUOTE But that's OK. D.C. Fontana was obviously just doing what worked best for her story, and she just needed a quick means of time travel to make it work.[/QUOTE]

Exactly! We have Spock requesting to visit a specific point and place in time ("I wish to visit Vulcan--30 Vulcan years past--the 20th day of Tasmeen--just outside the city of ShiKahr"). However, in "City on the Edge of Forever," the Guardian specifically states that it cannot change the manner in which it replays the past--which was at breakneck speed. Viewers see this and go "Waitaminute! Changed premise! Changed premise!!"

No, not really if you take a minute to think things through. In "City," the Guardian replays Earth history for Kirk and Spock at breakneck speed. in "Yesteryear," Spock requests that Vulcan history be replayed. After all, the Guardian has to know what kind of history to replay in its portal...right? (As opposed to playing Earth history again...or Andorian..or Klingon, etc.) Everything else Spock says after that about 30 Vulcan years past on the 20th day of Tasmeen outside the city of ShiKahr is just extraneous information that the Guardian doesn't need. It's just Spock being Spock and overanalyzing and volunteering too much information. (Like Spock calculating time or the odds to two places to the right of the decimal point instead of just rounding it off a little sooner.) Or maybe the poor guy was just trying to refresh his hazy memory.

So the Guardian replays Vulcan history that includes what Spock wanted--but still at a fast rate since the pictures in the portal were still changing before Spock jumped in. Spock can still use his tricorder (and maybe have the Guardian replay Vulcan history more than once) in order to calculate when to jump. After figuring out approximately the best time to jump, Spock jumps.

So there doesn't have to be any changed premise involved, the only thing that has changed is that the writer now only has 22 minutes in which to tell the story in this animated form. You bog down the storyline with too many details, if you had to stop and explain all of that. I suppose you could insert a log entry or a voiceover of Spock's thoughts about the whole process but why overcomplicate things when your main audience is kids on a Saturday morning? They cut it down to showing only the bare bones of the process. Spock requests to visit Vulcan past and we have a quick cut to the Guardian saying that everything's ready and Spock jumps. The storyline keeps moving along so they can get to the real heart of the story in Spock's childhood. (If I had to use an analogy, I'm reminded of a scene towards the end of "The Paradise Syndrome." They have only minutes to stop the coming asteroid and Spock starts going into this detailed analysis of the computer board. Kirk gets a little frustrated with this overanalyzing and tells Spock to just press the button already. In this case, the writer didn't bother to go into detail about explaining all of the complexities of how the Guardian presents history in its portal and just cut to Spock jumping into the portal and getting on with the story already.)