THE MOST INSANE TIME TRAVEL PREMISE EVER

 

Episode Title:  All Our Yesterdays

Air Date: 3/14/1969

Written by Jean Lisette Aroeste

Directed by Marvin J. Chomsky

Cast: William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk    Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock             DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones”              James Doohan  as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”        Mariette Hartley as Zarabeth          Ian Wolfe as Mr. Atoz               Kermit Murdock as The Prosecutor        Ed Bakey as The First Fop              Albert Cavens as Second Fop                  Anna Karen as unnamed Woman   Stan Barrett as The Jailor       Johnny Haymer as The Constable

Ships: USS Enterprise NCC-1701

Planets: Sarpeidon

My Spoiler filled summary and review: The Enterprise arrives at the planet Sarpeidon, whose sun is about to go nova in three hours.  To their surprise the entire planet’s population seems to have disappeared.  Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to investigate and arrive in some type of record storage facility.  There the three men run into the librarian; an older gentleman named Mr. Atoz who seems surprised to see them.  He insists they don’t have much time but is very glad that they are here.  They can look at the tapes and choose a time period, he says, but when Kirk points out that he wants to know what happened recently, Mr. Atoz is a little slow to respond saying there was not much demand.

Meeting Mr. Atoz

  

The three begin to explore this library and quickly run into Mr. Atoz again.  After having a similar conversation with him they turn away only to have that 180 degree turn result in a third encounter with the same man.  The third encounter seems to have turned Mr. Atoz into a grouch.  We do learn from this Mr. Atoz that the nicer two are duplicates who are there to assist him with his task.  He appears to have had something to do with the disappearance of population and he keeps pointing the three in directions of the disks.  For the moment they choose to amuse him glancing at some of the disks.  McCoy looks at one with images from an artic region while the Captain begins to look at one from a pre-industrial period.

Spock and McCoy going through the portal

Kirk suddenly hears a woman scream.  He runs through a door, ignoring the panic screaming of Atoz’s saying he is not ready, vanishing into thin air.  To Mr. Atoz’s horror, Spock and McCoy run after him and vanish as well.  Kirk ends up in a pre-industrial setting while Spock and McCoy find themselves stuck in some sort of ice age.  The equipment and weapons are inoperable. For a brief moment they can hear each other’s voices but Kirk gets distracted by the screaming woman.

The greatest fighter in the galaxy vs. a caviler dandy!

The woman is being attacked by a couple of cavalier-looking men.  Kirk rushes to her defense, and as the greatest fighter in the known universe, Kirk makes quick work of them.  Kirk, after he is sure the woman is okay, walks back to find the entrance to the library.  He talks Spock and McCoy some more and this makes the woman believe that he is some sort of witch.  The fact that he saved her life doesn’t enter into her decision at all.  The cavalier-looking men return with more of their number.  They too hear the voices and come to the same conclusion.  Kirk is arrested and charged with witchcraft.

Spock and McCoy desperately seek shelter.  They are not having any luck finding it.  McCoy is about to be finished when they are found by woman who takes them to her shelter.  And what a shelter it is complete with heat from natural hot springs to keep them nice and toasty!  This allows the woman, who we learn is Zarabeth, to walk around in a sexy outfit.  Zarabeth tells Spock she was marooned in this time period by Zor Kahn, a tyrannical ruler of her planet as punishment when members of her family failed to assassinate him.  As Spock nurses McCoy to health, he finds himself strangely drawn to their rescuer and is starting to have other strange thoughts pop up in his mind.

In prison Kirk denies he is a witch but he quickly figures something out about his jailer.  Like him he is from the future, Kirk calls him out on it and the man tries to play stupid.  However, they quickly begin talking about time travel.  Kirk expresses his desire to get back to his own time.  His jailer explains that he can’t go back as once you are prepared your molecules must live in the time you are sent.  Kirk explains that he wasn’t prepared.  To which the man explains that not only can he leave but he must.

For Kirk no good dead goes unpunished!

Back in the ice age, Spock is going through some changes.  Zarabeth has prepared some cooked meat for them but Spock is a vegetarian.  Now there is a survival factor here that does make some sense but it goes beyond that.  Spock likes eating the meat and he also seems to enjoy getting nice and close to Zarabeth.  He starts to lose all sense of where he is when he tells Zarabeth the Vulcan is a planet millions of light-years from Sarpeidon.  Which if true would put Vulcan several galaxies away from its actual location.  This is probably the biggest confirmation that Spock is losing it.   When McCoy points this out to Mr. Spock, Spock almost attacks him.  McCoy can still appeal to his reason.  He reminds Spock what Vulcan was going through in this time period.  Spock realizes that he is reverting to the ways of his ancestors as a consequence of returning to the past.  However, when talking to Zarabeth she informs him that they can’t go back to the present because of the process unaware that McCoy and Spock did not complete it.

Spock and McCoy before Zarabeth rescue!

Not trusting the judge from the future to be honest and fair, Kirk arranges his own escape. He forces his adversary to bring him to the library door so he can return to the present. When he returns to the library Kirk confronts Atoz but the time librarian is determined to prepare Kirk and send him back.  Kirk is having the hardest time convincing the old man that he is not even from this planet.  At one point Atoz knocks Kirk out and tries to push him back in a cart before Kirk wakes up.  This scene is kind of funny.  

I was amused!

McCoy calls Zarabeth out for wanting to keep them here.  She confesses that there might be away and takes them there out of guilt.  When they arrive Kirk and Atoz have located the correct disc and Kirk can communicate with them.  They can only return if both do so at the same time.  This means that in order to ensure that McCoy survives Spock can’t choose to stay with Zarabeth.  They say their goodbyes and the two Starfleet officers return to the present.  Atoz flees to the past and the landing party beams back to the Enterprise.  McCoy tires to comfort Spock but Spock doesn’t want to hear it.  Zarabeth he points out has now been dead and buried for thousands of years.  If he wanted to be even more depressing about it, he could point out that the ground she is buried in is about to be destroyed in a fiery supernova.  The Enterprise warps out as Sarpeidon is destroyed.   

Additional thoughts: Not counting that quick trip in “The Naked Time,” the first-time travel episode was “Tomorrow is Yesterday.”  In it the Enterprise accidently picks up Captain Christopher of the U.S. Air Force, at the time it is believed they may have to take him with them to prevent any disruption to the time line.  However, Spock later figures out that the Captain’s descendent Col. Christopher will lead the first trip to Saturn, mandating Captain Christopher’s immediate return.  In “The City on the Edge of Forever” a drugged Dr. McCoy gets trapped in the past.  When he recovers, he saves a random woman, Edith Keeler, from a car accident.  This helpful act caused the Nazis to win World War II and wipes the Federation straight out of existence.  Kirk and Spock were able to fix everything because they had been standing so close to the Guardian of Forever the moment McCoy went in.

Spock about to meet his own "Edith Keeler"

Yet in this episode we encounter Mr. Atoz who has sent his entire planet’s population back to the past.  Your mind will quickly go numb at all the possible butterfly effects flying around.  How the Atavachron time travel device survives all these time alterations I have no clue.  It was amazing not to mention lucky for them to dodge all these potential temporal paradoxes to continue to sending their massive population to the past.  Now the Atavachron did require its subjects to go through a preparation where their cells and brainwaves were to match their intended time period.   This is interesting because we have seen our characters go back in time and have never required such a thing.  It could be that this method is what is used to ensure that the participants conform to their time period and prevents them from interfering with historic events.  The prosecutor that Kirk encounters seems quite scared to talk about his time in the future.  There aren’t listening devices time period so who is yelling to that he believes in witches?  Perhaps if he doesn’t adapt fully, he might drop down dead?  It’s worth thinking about.

Falling in love

So, we have a star about to go nova and a fully populated and developed planet in orbit about to be destroyed.  Starfleet is monitoring this and notices that the planet’s population has seemingly disappeared so they send the Enterprise to investigate.   So, what would have happened if Kirk had found them all hiding in underground structures praying to whatever deity they believed in to come save them?  Would Kirk have been like “Oh, Okay we just wanted to know where you were.  Good-bye enjoy the last three hours of your life.” The Enterprise doesn’t have the resources to evacuate an entire planet.  Maybe Starfleet has a fleet waiting for the Enterprise to report?  But they are cutting it a little close, aren’t they?  There is only three hours here how are we going to evacuate an entire planet. Starfleet shown to either immoral or just stupid.

Kirk and his jailer from the present!

Golly doesn’t Sarpeidon looks just like Earth?  Their people are indistinguishable from humans, and their 17th century England are filled with knights and accused ‘witches!’ If this were an earlier season of Star Trek, they might have called it another Earth instead of giving an actual name.  It is almost they wrote the episode based on what they could find in the prop and costume departments at the studio. 

Spock and Zarabeth looking at their third wheel!

There is so much potential for unseen stories from this planet.  From the tyrant Zor Kahn, who was so evil that even Mr. Spock, who was not from this planet has heard of him; to all modern inhabitants living in their past. 

Going home without her!

The worst part of the episode for myself is the fate of poor Zarabeth.  It bothers me even more than the deaths of Edith Keeler and Miramanee.  Mainly because their deaths were sudden where Zarabeth was condemned to a life of loneliness.  However, an even bigger reason I am so bothered is they don’t attempt to fight for her.  You can say there was no time but there is plenty of time in time travel.   Even if they cannot bring her through the Atavachron they can still try to save her.  McCoy could have taken a sample of her hair and Spock could have grabbed the time disc in the library right before they beamed up.  McCoy could devise a way to undo to her cells what the Atavachron’s process did to them.  Spock can use the disk to locate the exact time period she is in.  They can then use the Enterprise to warp around a star in a nearby system and get to her time period.  (Don’t tell me that is too dangerous they did it “Assignment: Earth” just to answer some local historians’ questions about the late 1960s.) Once there they can fly back to Sarpeidon pick up Zarabeth and McCoy can treat her.  With that done they warp back to and around the nearby star returning to present time.  Since there is only one episode left, we don’t have to worry about how this new addition will impact the series. 

FINAL GRADE 4 of 5