3x15 Yesterday's Enterprise

[8.5/10] I never really cared about Tasha when she was a regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show barely developed her. She had few meaningful connections to the other characters. And she died unceremoniously without much reason to miss her. That last part, though, felt like a missed opportunity. It’s not every day that you can remove a main character’s plot armor and show some real consequences. And while there’s merit in the idea of Tasha getting a “normal” death rather than a dramatic one, the dregs of “Skin of Evil” couldn’t make hay from that idea.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” would work without Tasha’s glorious return and poignant departure. It’s dripping with sci-fi coolness in the form of its alternate timeline, glimpse at Enterprise history, and time traveling moral dilemma. But what grabs me about the episode, revisiting it all these years later, is that it uses that thrilling setup not just to entertain, but to right that first season wrong. Tasha’s demise here matters and, shock of all shocks, it made me finally care about the character, a mere two seasons after she left the show.

The impetus for that sacrifice comes when the Enterprise-D, with Worf at the tactical station, witnesses one of the standard spatial anomalies, as a ship begins to emerge from a swirling cloud of particles in the middle of nowhere. All of a sudden, it’s no longer the Enterprise we know. It’s a warship, with a testier Captain Picard in a slightly different uniform on a notably differently-styled bridge and, most notably, Tasha back at tactical. What’s more, this ship’s examining the same phenomenon its more peaceful Prime Timeline counterpart was analyzing, and discovers the ship that passed through is none of than the Enterprise-C, thought to have been destroyed twenty-two years ago.

That’s a hell of a way to kick off an episode! Alternate timeline stories are almost always a blast, because they open up so many storytelling possibilities. One of the few neat things about Tasha’s death in season 1 is that it violated the usual rules of episodic television, which requires the status quo to be restored at the end of the hour. Alternate timeline stories allow for the same kind of freedom, letting the writers disrupt the status quo and introduce major consequences to certain decisions because they won’t affect the show’s ability to be a continuing series.

What’s more, they allow storytellers to explore how simple changes can have wide-ranging consequences, allowing the audience to reexamine familiar characters and scenarios through a different situational lens. It’s fascinating to see the Enterprise-D at war, and how that changes who are heroes are and the kinds of choices they make, something otherwise near-impossible until successor series like Deep Space 9 would go for more explicit serialization.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” takes advantage of both elements. The final battle with the Klingon battlecruisers is the most thrilling space fight in the show so far, and much of that owes to how much further TNG can go when there’s no tomorrow. There’s clear stakes as the Enterprise-D has to fend off the Klingons so that the Enterprise-C can make it back through the portal, and some nifty effects work that emphasizes the dynamism of the battle. But it’s also boosted by the fact we see Geordi frantically evacuating people as the warp core starts to breach; we see Riker killed (pretty gorily) after a particularly rough blast, and there’s genuine questions as to whether this incarnation of the Enterprise is going to be destroyed, in the way only a “What If?” story can do.

More to the point, it’s also fascinating to see not just what the ship would be like when meant to engage in a full blown war rather than a cold one, but how it affects the crew. Some skillfully deployed exposition tells us that when the Enterprise-C’s engaged with a quarter of Romulan warbirds in defense of a Klingon outpost, the flurry of weapons fire created a temporal rift that sent the ship hurtling more than two-decades into the future, But beyond the practical import of that trip, it meant that the ship and its crew avoided being destroyed in battle, an event that, it turns out, was necessary to earn the Federation the respect and admiration of the Klingons. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” strongly suggests that, in the absence of that noble defeat, Federation-Klingon relations frothed to a boil, leading to the war that’s consumed the Enterprise-D in this alternate present.

On a pure nuts and bolts level, there’s a cool factor to just seeing the minor differences. Uniforms are slightly altered. Everyone carries sidearms. There’s belts and straps on everyone (not unlike the maligned-or-forgotten uniforms from Star Trek: The Motion Picture!). At the same time, war’s led to bigger changes as well. The ship’s complement are referred to as troops; there’s no children on the ship, and it’s referred to as a warship rather than an exploratory vessel. Seeing a Starfleet spacecraft built for war is a trip, something that seems antithetical to the ethos of the Federation.

And yet, somehow it’s even more jarring to see how it reflects the crew in ways subtle but meaningful. Picard is outright angrier here, still the measured tactician and thoughtful leader, but one who’s clearly had to make some hard choices and been hardened by them. His relationship with Riker is downright frosty, rather than friendly. And the conference room scene is a self-proclaimed briefing where the captain disdains feedback and input rather than welcoming them as usual. Nobody comments on these changes, but they’re palpable in the atmosphere and every interaction, a testament to the harm that’s been done not just measured in the lives lost due to the war with the Klingons, but to the soul and psyche of the Federation and its flagship.

(As an aside, it’s worth noting that with the literally darker lighting of the ship, a battle against an overpowering enemy, and a conspicuously angry Picard barking at fellow officers rather than maintaining his usual measured calm, “Yesterday’s Enterprise” seems to presage Star Trek: First Contact. At the same time, the strangeness of a Starfleet vessel at war, the unnerving presence of more explicitly military crewmen, and a captain seemingly made harsher by conflict and loss presages season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise, which retained at least a few members of the creative team who worked on this episode.)

With all of these “darkest timeline” shenanigans, “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is also a sop to continuity nerds within Star Trek. It’s downright cool to see the Enterprise-C, with a bridge resembling the one from the TOS movies (probably a redress of the same set), uniforms from that era, and a design that splits the difference between Kirk’s Enterprise and Picard’s. (Spoilers for down the line, but we get details on the final piece of the puzzle, the Enterprise-B, in Star Trek: Generations.) What’s more, it’s a thrill to see Captain Garrett in command of a ship that carries the same name, who in a few short scenes seems to clearly have the steel and dedication that makes one worthy to captain the Federation’s premiere vessel, and who operates as the walking antithesis of the sexism displayed in TOS’s “Turnabout Intruder”.

More than the coolness of the temporal hop, or the chance to see a darker version of Picard and company, or the live glimpse at Starfleet history, the episode centers, as many great Star Trek episodes do, on crucial but difficult choices. For Picard, it means deciding whether to send the Enterprise-C back through the portal and to its original time, where the one hundred and twenty-five souls aboard will almost certainly lose their lives, but potentially avert the current bloody war in the process.

That decision is complicated by several important, sometimes contradictory factors. Forty billion lives have already been lost in the fight against the Klingons, impacting the moral calculus, but at the same time, there’s no guarantee that throwing more blood on the fire will prevent that. The questions of whether this is tampering with the timeline or restoring it, and whether it’s right to send these people to a grim fate when you have the power to save them, in the face of likely surrender to an overpowering enemy, loom large.

But ultimately what makes the difference is Guinan. It’s great to see her have so much to do in this one, perceiving that the timeline has changed in ways she can’t articulate, but which she knows is wrong. Her scenes with Picard are extraordinary, as Patrick Stewart goes high volume and intensity in a way we rarely see from the collected captain, and Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan proves every bit his equal, raising the fact that she’s never asked for anything based on the trivial or frivolous. In essence, Picard has to make this call on Guinan’s hunch, and when he does, it not only shows his trust in the wisdom of his unofficial advisor, but once again marks the proprietor of Ten Forward as an unassuming force to be reckoned with within the bulkheads of the Enterprise.

It also comes down to Tasha’s choice though. She picks up on Guinan’s reaction to her, perceiving that she shouldn’t be here, and eventually that she died a senseless death. Tasha wants to transfer to the Enterprise-C to help an undermanned vessel fight the good fight, with the knowledge that if her presence in this timeline is part of its adulteration, if her Prime equivalent died for nothing, then the least she can do is make her end meaningful, by giving her life to protect her fellow Starfleet officers and maybe even save the future.

Her decision is wrapped in a quickfire connection with Lt. Richard “Don’t Call me Shooter McGavin” Castillo of the Enterprise-C. Their concordance is a little rushed, but works on chemistry and the needs of a well-paced but still packed episode. Frankly, it’s the sort of connection between characters that Tasha never really got in tenfold as much screentime when she was a regular castmember, and makes her decision to fight and die beside someone she cares for and believes in all the more poignant.

At the same though, what matters most is what the choice means to Tasha, as an alternative for how she went out in “Skin of Evil”. Her conversation with the captain is tense, but also firm, in her desire to die for something rather than nothing. In some ways, “Yesterday’s Enterprise” feels like it’s slating the previous writing staff and the exit it crafted for Lt. Yar. But more than anything, it feels like a corrective, for the character is not the show, to give her a second chance and make a deliberate sacrifice in keeping with the principles Starfleet seems at risk of losing amid the rigors of war.

The irony and tragedy, of course, is that if she succeeds, no one will know what she did. A successful voyage to twenty-two years ago would erase this timeline and, as the thrilling space battle eventually does, make it seem as though none of this ever happened to the crew of the restored, Prime Timeline Enterprise-C. There’s a sadness in that -- the meaning of Tasha’s decision will remain unknown,

The silver lining, though, comes in the counterpoint to Guinan’s warnings to her crew and captain that something is off. Guinan may not be able to fully remember her sojourn through the altered timeline, but she asks Geordi about Lt. Yar’s, suggesting that Tasha’s act will be remembered in some fashion and, after a fashion, allow her to be remembered too.

To be frank, it felt at times as though The Next Generation had forgotten about Tasha and moved on after “Skin of Evil.” She gets a brief mention in “The Measure of a Man” but otherwise seemed to have left no impact on the series. And I don’t blame the show for that, or at least only blame it insofar as the writers made her an underdeveloped character before she left to where her absence didn’t really merit much notice or attention.

But after “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, Tasha becomes an irrevocable piece of the fabric of The Next Generation. Her departure from this show and this mortal coil are retroactively given more weight and consequence, for her connection to another member of the crew and for the Federation as a whole. Tasha may have returned to the series just to die again, but for the first time on the series, she truly felt alive.