“Tomorrow is Yesterday”
Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 1, Episode 19
Directed by: Michael O’Herlihy
Written by: D.C. Fontana
Original air date: 26th January 1967
Tomorrow is Yesterday is Star Trek’s first real time travel episode. It was originally going to be Part Two of The Naked Time before both stories were worked into standalone episodes.
For a time travel story, this is among the most straightforward I’ve seen. I know that Star Trek was stretching its time travel muscles at this point. However, you could argue that it’s too simple and not a lot really happens.
The Enterprise is thrown back in time to late-1960s Earth after trying to escape a black star. The ship gets spotted by a US Air Force plane and Kirk has to beam aboard the pilot, Captain John Christopher. Kirk and co are then faced with the dilemma of what to do with Captain Christopher now that he has knowledge of the future.
I rather enjoyed the excitement of the opening scenes. They were a bit similar to the Future’s End two-parter on Voyager, in which Janeway and co realised where they were before they realised when they were. Captain Christopher’s plane approaches the Enterprise with orders to disable it. Spock warns that the craft could be armed with nuclear warheads so the Enterprise locks on a tractor beam. When the plane begins to break up under the stresses of the tractor beam, Kirk has to beam Captain Christopher aboard.
All this makes sense and plays out well. But now we come to the first of the episode’s problems. When Captain Christopher arrives in the transporter room, Kirk says to him, “We’ll tell you what we decide to tell you in a few moments.” I thought, yes, be very careful what you tell and show him since he’s from three hundred years in your past. However, Kirk’s next line is, “In the meantime, relax, you’re our guest—I have a feeling you’ll find it interesting.” Now I’m worried. What’s Kirk going to do that he’ll find interesting?
Oh, give him a lovely tour of the bridge, apparently. Introduce him to his first alien, Spock. Let him have a look around at all this future tech that’s not been invented yet. And spill all the beans along the way about being from Earth’s future and travelling back in time accidentally.
Spock has to explain to Kirk that they cannot send Captain Christopher back to Earth because he’s already learned too much about them and is learning more (yes, because Kirk has just let him wander round the Enterprise’s command centre and talk to the crew). He explains that if Captain Christopher returns to Earth with knowledge of the future, he could cause the timeline to change and everything Kirk and Spock know to stop existing.
And Kirk’s reaction is basically, oh, whoops, didn’t think of that. He thought it would be perfectly okay to tell him he’s aboard a starship from the future and give him a tour of it.
I get that there is probably no Temporal Prime Directive at this point, particularly as The Naked Time made it appear that the Enterprise’s time travel at the end was the Federation’s first experience of it. But come on, Kirk. It’s not rocket science that someone from the past with knowledge of the future might use that knowledge to change it. That’s common sense.
So, one of the things I learned from this episode is: Kirk is dumb.
Kirk decides that they’re going to have to keep Captain Christopher aboard to protect the timeline. Christopher himself argues that his disappearance might also disrupt the timeline, but Spock says that his research shows no evidence of any important historical “contribution” by Christopher. However, Spock later discovers that Christopher’s son, Colonel Shaun Geoffrey Christopher, will have an impact by heading up the first Earth-to-Saturn mission. A son Christopher hasn’t had yet.
That means they do have to return him to Earth. However, they still have the problem of his future knowledge. Kirk points out that if they destroy all tangible evidence of the Enterprise’s visit to Earth, in particular the recordings Christopher made while on board his aircraft, then Christopher will have nothing to support his claims. He’ll just be another UFO nut.
So Kirk and Sulu beam down to the Air Force base to search for the tapes. They’re caught by a guard and when the Enterprise realises they’ve been gone too long, they attempt to beam them back. Instead they beam aboard the guard. Now they’ve got the same problem all over again.
Meanwhile Kirk and Sulu get accosted by more officers. Sulu escapes with the tapes and Kirk has one of TOS’s trademark silly fistfights with the officers. I laughed out loud when Kirk launched himself horizontally at them. But I know that most of TOS’s fight scenes are camp and awkwardly choreographed. For most people it’s part of its charm. I can’t count myself among them. For me, bad fights, dated sets, silly props and fake-looking monsters detract from the story and with TOS I really have to try and ignore them. (On that subject, at least the exterior ship and space scenes are beautiful, since the episodes I’m watching are the remastered versions with all-new CGI effects.)
Anyway, the Enterprise rescues Kirk and then they have to work out how to get back to their own time. They propose to recreate the incident that led them there, which Spock refers to as a “slingshot effect”. It involves flying too close to a star, getting caught in its gravity, and using maximum warp to break away, the “whiplash” propelling them back to the future. (This method of time travel is one that turns up again in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. It’s how the Enterprise crew—aboard a Klingon bird-of-prey at the time—goes back to 1986 to snatch a whale.)
It also means that as they get too close to the star and get caught in its gravity they’ll initially start moving backwards in time. This is how they propose to send back Christopher and the guard. They’ll go back in time before yesterday, before the two men were beamed aboard, and as they go forwards again, they’ll beam them back to their respective positions—Christopher to his cockpit, the guard to the airbase. Kirk says that neither of them will remember what happened aboard the Enterprise because it never happened.
That doesn’t work. Characters in Star Trek who go back in time don’t lose all their memories because those events haven’t happened yet. That’s like Admiral Janeway in Endgame losing all her memories of the future the moment she came back in time to bring Voyager home.
I appreciate that the writers are just working out their own time travel rules at this point, but it doesn’t work in the context of this episode either. Why do Christopher and the guard lose all their memories of what happened but the Enterprise crew remember everything? Nothing different happens to Christopher and the guard. They’re simply beamed back to Earth. If Kirk and co remember, so should they.
Also, when the Enterprise beams the men back, they beam them back to the exact coordinates of their past selves, before they were beamed aboard the Enterprise. In effect, they overwrite the men’s past selves with their day-older selves. I’ve never seen this happen before in Trek. Using a transporter beam to replace someone. I wouldn’t actually expect it to be possible. Surely there are two separate patterns. Would beaming the men into the bodies of their past selves not cause them to, I dunno, explode in a bloody mess? Yeah, okay, it’s a family-friendly show. That can’t happen. But remember when Tuvok and Neelix merged in Voyager and we got Tuvix?
Basically it seems an easy and unrealistic deus ex machina to return them to Earth like this (and that’s without mentioning the nonsensical memory loss).
There are more problems with this scene. Why, after they beam Christopher back, does the Enterprise just disappear? The one he’s pursuing should still be there. Technically there are two Enterprises in this moment. The one from a day ago that Christopher is pursuing in the skies, and the day-older ship that’s currently flying forwards in time. When the Enterprise goes back in time, it doesn’t actually do anything to undo its first visit, so the tractor beam locking on and Christopher getting beamed aboard should all still happen.
Can open. Worms everywhere.
What the writers should’ve done was send Christopher back sometime shortly after he gets beamed to the Enterprise, with all his memories intact. The most logical thing to do would’ve been to beam him into the wreckage of his aircraft after he disappeared so that he could be rescued. Meanwhile his past self has gone aboard the Enterprise and the cycle is playing out as before.
Overall, although Tomorrow is Yesterday is not a horrible episode, I can’t call it a good one. I mildly enjoyed it but the time travel plot is too simple, the pacing is slow, the ending makes no sense and Kirk is dumb. And what on earth is up with that in-your-face music? Every time there’s a moment of humour it has to be punctuated by some whimsical little number. When Spock raises his eyebrows or backchats McCoy, we get a bouncy little theme. And when Christopher expresses his surprise at seeing a woman on a spaceship, we get some sexy sax. (Because, you know, women = sex.)
That actually brings me on nicely to those horrible ‘sexy computer’ scenes. I’m not necessarily looking for feminism in old Trek but seriously. This episode was even written by a woman! Basically, the computer keeps talking seductively and calling Kirk “dear” and according to Spock has a tendency to giggle. We find out it’s because they sent the Enterprise for general repair and maintenance to a planet dominated by women, women who decided to give the computer a “female” personality (much to Spock’s chagrin). Because, you know, a female personality means you’re overly affectionate and you giggle. I just don’t know where to start. This is all kinds of stupid.
I do like that Tomorrow is Yesterday is about the impact that one random and seemingly unimportant individual can have on the world and the future. However, this idea is explored much more effectively in a later episode, The City on the Edge of Forever, which happens to be the one I’m reviewing next.
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