“All Our Yesterdays”
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 23
Directed by: Marvin J. Chomsky
Written by: Jean Lisette Aroeste
Original air date: 14th March 1969
All Our Yesterdays is the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Original Series and its final time travel story. Does it end TOS’s exploration of time travel on a high?
Yes and no, I’d say. In equal parts. This is about 50% great ideas and 50% terrible ones.
The concept itself is neat. The setup is similar to Wink of an Eye, with the Enterprise visiting a planet whose entire population has mysteriously vanished. The reason the Enterprise turns up is because the planet’s sun is about to go supernova and they’ve gone to warn the inhabitants. We learn over the course of the episode that the inhabitants have used time travel to evacuate to various eras of the planet’s past.
Using time travel to evacuate a planet into its own past is definitely one of the episode’s great ideas. (This gets reused in the ill-fated TV series Terra Nova many years later, although I didn’t see that and heard it wasn’t very good.) Another great idea is that the writers chose not to set this story on Earth. So here we’re getting to see the history of an alien world called Sarpeidon.
Of course, therein lies one of the episode’s terrible ideas: making Sarpeidon’s historical eras identical to Earth’s own past. I absolutely do not buy that this planet, far from Earth, would’ve had people dressing in the exact same clothes as those worn in Britain in the 17th century, or using exactly the same types of swords. All the talk of witches demonstrates that the writers have looked through UK history books and decided to copy the Stuart era. And copy it so closely that for about 15 minutes I actually thought Kirk had travelled to Earth.
It already doesn’t help that this is yet another race of aliens that looks identical to humans (no doubt because of limited budgets). But it’s utter nonsense that their history would’ve played out just like ours. It demonstrates a woeful lack of imagination, removes all sense of believability from the story and wastes the great idea of time travel on an alien world.
Rewinding a bit, Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrive in a library on Sarpeidon and encounter mysterious librarian Mr Atoz. The cold open is strong, particularly when several Mr Atozs start appearing (turns out they’re his replicas, helping to run the library). In short order Kirk and co discover the library is not as it seems. Its discs, which archive the planet’s past, are actually used to select time periods to travel to. Then a machine called an atavachron (fantastic name, I thought) opens a portal in an archway to whichever time period is selected. Mr Atoz assumes that his guests know how all this works (I guess because he assumes they’re Sarpeidons) and Kirk ends up inadvertently travelling through the portal to the planet’s, er, Stuart era. Meanwhile Spock and McCoy travel back to its ice age.
So, yes, Sarpeidon had an ice age too. Again drawn straight from our own history. It’s apparently pre the Sarpeidons’ evolution but no real attempt is made to explore the time period apart from: it’s cold and snows a lot. Spock and McCoy are rescued from freezing to death by a woman called Zarabeth. Zarabeth was banished to the ice age by a tyrant called Zor Kahn, who one of her ‘kinsman’ tried to assassinate. This means the Sarpeidons have been using the atavachron for some time. Initially I figured it had been built for the purposes of evacuation; evidently it had other uses before that, one being punishment.
Zarabeth’s story might’ve been interesting had she not been so thinly written and vapidly acted. Instead of exploring her loneliness and desperation with some depth and nuance, the writers resort to another cheap romance subplot (which seems to happen every time there’s a prominent female character), this time with Spock. Why does she need to fall in love with Spock to be desperate for him not to leave her? Surely if you’re the only person in the world, this wouldn’t matter one jot. You’d treasure the company whatever it is (which means she would’ve been equally keen to keep McCoy around, too). Of the female protagonists that have featured in TOS’s time travel episodes (see The City on the Edge of Forever and Wink of an Eye for the best examples), Zarabeth is by far the weakest.
And I’m sorry, but I wanted to throw a cup of vomit at the screen when Zarabeth—in an ice age—took off her full-length fur robe to reveal a skimpy top and tiny loin cloth—in an ice age. Did I mention it was an ice age? Not a tropical jungle? Apparently Gene Roddenberry wanted her naval on show, too, but the network wouldn’t allow it. I mean, I know this was made in the 60s, so I should at least try to forgive it, but the obvious female exploitation on display here is not just gross, it’s stupid. It’s an ice age.
Meanwhile, Kirk has been captured and imprisoned after trying to save some woman with an incomprehensibly awful accent (what is that? Irish?) from being attacked, and proceeding to talk to ‘spirits’ (i.e. Spock and McCoy) through the time portal. He meets the Prosecutor, who he discovers is another Sarpeidon from the future, sent by the atavachron. Kirk eventually escapes and finds the portal and returns to the library, but Mr Atoz tries to send him back for his own good, believing Kirk to be suicidal. Kirk forces Atoz to help him recover Spock and McCoy from the ice age.
Atoz is an interesting character. He’s there to make sure everyone’s processed and evacuated before he can travel back in time himself. As Kirk says to him at one point, he’s actually just trying to save people. But he’s eager to save himself, too.
Oh yes, it’s worth mentioning at this point that an original aspect to the time travel in All Our Yesterdays is that people have to be ‘prepared’ to go back to the time period they choose. Once they are prepared, they can never come back to the future because their cell structures are adjusted to the time they enter. But Kirk, Spock and McCoy haven’t been prepared, hence why they’re able to get back.
It would’ve been interesting if the writers had injected a bit more science into this concept (this is where future Trek’s technobabble would’ve come in handy), if only to provide some more understanding. What are their bodies being adjusted to? The temperature? Gases in the atmosphere? Gravity? In any case, even without the explanation, it’s a fun idea.
Meanwhile, Spock and Zarabeth are doing blah, blah, blah, romantic things, blah. The only interesting thing to come out of these scenes are some tense, fairly well written exchanges between Spock and McCoy. And this is as a result of another of the episode’s great ideas—that time travel to the distant past (in this case 5,000 years) could have a physiological effect. Spock is starting to demonstrate emotion. He’s smiling, getting angry at McCoy, enjoying eating meat and worrying about it afterwards (are Vulcans vegan or something?), hurling cheesy compliments at Zarabeth, and kissing her with passion. McCoy realises that travelling this far back has caused Spock to start “reverting into his ancestors”.
Now, I absolutely hate McCoy’s ‘explanation’ of what’s happening to Spock. Here’s—again—where some technobabble and some pseudoscience would have given the idea some credibility. Still, it’s a neat idea. And I guess it’s the only thing that makes the stupid romance plot worthwhile. From Spock’s perspective, anyway.
In the library, Kirk manages to locate Spock and McCoy just as they’re heading back to the portal themselves. Would they have heard Kirk shouting to them if they weren’t standing next to the portal? Unclear. The ‘shouting through the portal’ to each other thing is pretty hokey to be honest.
Anyway, Spock and McCoy come back through the portal, Atoz goes through in time, and the planet is, in the final moments, destroyed. The end.
We unfortunately don’t get to find out what the impact of the Sarpeidons’ time travelling might be on their own history. It’s a brilliant idea to have them populating the past, but what effect could that have on the future? Or did they have rules about not interfering/changing anything? And how long have they been using the atavachron for non-evacuation-related activities? These are just a few of the things that go unexplored in this middling final time travel episode for TOS.
Next month I move on to Star Trek: The Animated Series. I’ve never seen any of the animated episodes, so this is going to be interesting 😊.
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