1x19 Tomorrow Is Yesterday

[7.0/10] “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” is, at least so far, the peak of those goofy sci-fi conceits that people (lovingly) make fun of the show for. Let’s be frank, nothing here makes sense. The time-travel related trek-no-babble is patently ridiculous; the grave concern and then general lax attitude about messing with past is puzzling, and the solution to all of these problems is as much of a nonsense cheat as it is full of people diving out of their chairs on the bridge of the Enterprise.

And yet, there’s such a joie de vivre to the proceedings that it’s hard not to be charmed despite that. As ridiculous as the premise, plot, and resolution of the episode are, the people involved are having such insane, occasionally swashbuckling fun, and the episode coasts off that pretty damn well considering.

Let’s get right down to it – as much sci-fi mumbo jumbo as Star Trek has, it’s pretty silly that they just happen to go back in time to the 1960s where the show was airing. The explanation is fairly weak (jargon about a “black star”) as the cause, but what’s striking his how nonplussed everyone seems about this development. Bones and Scotty make brief comment on the fact that they’re trapped in the past, and maybe working on the federation’s flagship inures you to fantastical happenings taking place on a regular basis, but for the most part, everyone takes being flung two centuries into the past in stride, and it’s really weird.

That extends to the presence of the Air Force Captain whom the crew beams up. Maybe it’s years of stories where characters rail about the risks of changing the past, but tons of people are incredibly cavalier about letting him see and learn about all this stuff from his future. That seems like a pretty bad call. Spock’s aware of this, and admonishes against him, but then spills the beans that the Captain’s son becomes a big famous space hero, totally tainting the timeline! For someone who seemed concerned about what that Captain Christopher does or doesn’t know, he sure doesn’t mind telling him what the future holds.

What kills me is that there’s a cool story there – the prospect of a man who knows too much, and the dilemma of whether to trust him to return to his own time and risk changes to the timeline from his advance knowledge, or to take him away from his wife and kids and risk messing up the timeline through his absence. But Star Trek mostly glosses over that, giving him an interesting character motivation of following his duty the same way the members of Starfleet would and wanting to get back to his family, but compartmentalizing that for most of the way.

Don’t even get me started on the other guy they beam up. The air force major is, I think, supposed to be scared stiff, but the fact that he gets beamed up, causes no fuss, and essentially becomes a living prop in the episode is just bizarre, and makes you wonder why he was included in the episode at all.

At the same time, the resolution to this conundrum just makes absolutely no sense. It is super, super convenient that the method to getting back to the future will takes the Enterprise just far enough into the past to deposit their unexpected passengers back in their own time. What’s worse is that the episode seems to imply that Captain Christopher’s and the USAF Police Sergeant have their memories erased in the process. Why does that happen? How does that happen? Why doesn’t the journey seem to affect the members of the Enterprise crew? “Who knows! The episode’s over! Stop asking questions!”
That climax is also the absolute height of “just reverse the polarity” and “say something complicated and explain it using a simple metaphor” that most notably Futurama has tweaked Star Trek for. Having the enterprise just reverse the process that got them there, and take advantage of an intergalactic (and interchronal) “slingshot effect” to get back to the future is an extraordinarily contrived method to undo something as momentous as being sent two-hundred years into the past.

So why did I still rate this episode as “good,” albeit just barely? Because it’s pretty damn fun in the process. There’s a droll humor on display that just kept me chuckling throughout. Spock looking at the film of the Air Force’s surveillance of the enterprise and offering a dry comment of “Poor photography” is great. Captain Kirk telling Bones that he’s beginning to sound like Spock, and Bones responding “If you're going to get nasty, I'm going to leave” was the line of the episode. And Kirk’s smugness and self-satisfaction, which can often make the character grating, were perfectly deployed when he was being interrogated by the air force. His playing dumb, acting like a wiseass, and saying things like “what, this old thing? I just slipped into it” were all great uses of the character and his personality.

It also produced what I’d venture to call the best hand-to-hand fight of the show so far. I’ll admit, I laughed out loud when Kirk sort of dove into the collection of soldiers in what felt like a ten-year-old’s attempt at a cross-body takedown, and many of the individual moments in the scene were contrived. That notwithstanding, there was a kinetic quality to fight, a certain level of chaos where one skirmish flowed directly into the other, that made this stand out among the typically stolid punch-and-kick fests in the show.

Which is to say that when Star Trek gets goofy, outlandish, and even nonsensical, it should at least be fun. “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” delivers on that. Sure, it handles the issues raised by time travel and unintended consequences with all the deftness of an intoxicated buffalo. Sure, its answer to the plot predicament is to just throw faux-technological terms at the problem and it’ll just go away. And the crew’s attitude about changing the timeline, and the rules employed, make as much sense as the instructions for building a bookshelf translated into Swahili and then translated back again. But by god, it’s all entertaining enough to pass muster, and that gets you a lot of slack.