Trek Thursdays: Trekking Towards Sixty #7 — “Yesterday’s Enterprise” And “Timeless”

On September 8th, 1966, an intrepid crew of explorers boldly went where no one had ever gone before on television. At that moment, Star Trek was born. A series that launched a franchise that has kept a firm grip on audiences for decades.

As the sixtieth anniversary approaches, we here at Comicon are ready to celebrate one of the greatest science fiction franchises. While Star Trek has graced the silver screen, most of its life has been on our television screens. So, that’s where our focus shall remain.

Every week through September 8th, we’ll be spotlighting two Star Trek episodes, from any and every iteration, that we feel are some of the greatest. At this point there are over 950 episodes of Trek, so it goes without saying some favorites won’t make the cut for this list of 60.

One event.

What if changing one event could radically change not just the present, but the past and future as well? This is the crux of most stories centered around time travel. Someone or something trying to make a change to a moment, whether for good or ill, in order to enact meaningful (to someone) change.

Star Trek is no stranger to jumping onto this science fiction trope. In fact, there are quite a number of episodes that could have been chosen to showcase this genre feature. Some of those might still show up in this feature at some point. For this particular entry we’re focusing on one of the most iconic altered moment episodes as well as one that signified a milestone for a series.

-RED ALERT: SPOILERS FOLLOW-

“Yesterday’s Enterprise”
Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 3, Episode 15 (02/19/1990)

Season three of The Next Generation was where the series really began to find it’s stride. Which was great, since the first two seasons, especially the first, had a lot of rough edges and sometimes centers. It’s this season forward where we begin to get the episodes that people will rattle off as favorites or memorable.

They don’t get that much more memorable (there are a few to come) than “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”

Synopsis: While investigating a temporal rift, the Enterprise-D finds itself face to face with a ghost from its past in the form of the Enterprise-C. Lost with all hands twenty-two years before, the ship’s time travel has irrevocably change the course of history, leaving the Federation at war with the Klingon Empire, and close to all out defeat. A not so dead Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) holds the key to saving the Federation and all of time itself.

A beautiful thing about these types of episodes is getting to see our favorite characters in an altered state. Most of the things we know about the Enterprise-D remain the same, but the atmosphere and tenseness are strong. There are no families on this ship, no Worf (Michael Dorn) or Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), and this is not a flagship for exploration but instead for war.

Crosby’s exit as Tasha Yar in the first season was a messy affair, on and off the screen. Getting to see her back was really something at this point. It’s bittersweet in so many ways because we lose Yar once more, to an even worse fate, but it did birth one of the more intriguing recurring villains for the series. More on that in another entry.

Basically, the Enterprise-C captained by Rachel Garrett (Tricia O’Neil) is heavily damaged from trying to protect a Klingon Outpost on Narendra III from Romulan attack. Without their assistance there the Federation and Klingons slip into a brutal war. Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) is the only one that knows that this timeline, and Tasha’s presence, are all wrong.

What we get is a very character rich episode, with the altered timeline trappings framing it. Yar wrestles with her place here and the death that happened in the regular timeline. Picard (Patrick Stewart) wrestles with making a tough choice about sending the other Enterprise back or not. Really this was one of the strongest episodes we got speaking to the oft-mentioned long relationship between Picard and Guinan. Here it’s the very central focus on what has to happen, because the captain must fight his instincts and his belief in what Guinan is stating.

In the end it’s a tragic story of loss, sacrifice, missed potential, and found affection. Yar finds affection for Enterprise-C officer Richard Castillo (Christopher McDonald) but ultimately goes back because she wants a chance to control her fate — to have a more meaningful and purposeful death rather than the senseless way she went in the regular timeline.

We also gone a memorable line from this episode as the Enterprise-D lays out it’s live to let the Enterprise-C return home. Who can forget the determination on Picard’s face as he proclaims, “Let’s make sure that history never forgets… the name… Enterprise.”

It’s also the episode that birthed prune juice as both Worf’s favorite drink and as a warrior’s drink. Trek is the best.

“Timeless”
Star Trek: Voyager – Season 5, Episode 6 (11/18/1998)

As noted above, these episode types mean getting to see the characters and things we love in radically different positions.

It doesn’t get more radical than opening on a frigid looking stretch of land, two figures clad in fully covering snow gear beaming down. Following the readings of a tricorder, they are climbing and heading across this lifeless tundra. They reach a spot, brush some snow away to see metal beneath, signaling on their commbadges that they have arrived.

The camera pans back to show that the metal belongs to a starship, trapped beneath the ice. That starship is the U.S.S. Voyager. Cue the shock.

Synopsis: A brand-new technological upgrade presents an opportunity for Voyager to make it home much faster. Disaster strikes though, sending the ship and crew to an icy crash-landing death. Fifteen years later, only survivors Chakotay (Robert Beltran) and Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) will risk everything to alter history and save their friends and crew from their untimely demise.

How do you celebrate 100 episodes of a series? By killing off most of your main crew and dispatching the ship they travel upon, of course.

All jokes aside, this is one of those ways that a series can make milestone episodes memorable and meaningful, not just a checkbox to reach for syndication (as it once used to be) or just as a milestone.

Chakotay and especially Kim are given some meatier beats than they usually tend to get. Wracked with guilt, Kim struggles to deal with emotions and everything that has happened in the time since the crash. Wang gets to play a wearied and broken version of the usually so resistant character. It’s not the first nor the last time though as Kim definitely got the Miles O’Brien (Colm Meany) curse (being the trope that Deep Space Nine was rife with “Let’s torture O’Brien” episodes as fandom tends to refer to them).

The two timelines, that of the flashbacks of Voyager and the dark future, are intertwined perfectly. Everyone involved in both pulls off playing the different versions of themselves perfectly.

Starfleet seems like the bad guys here, as they send Captain Geordi LaForge, played once more by LeVar Burton (who also directed the episode), to stop the duo from altering time. Except, it’s never painted that way fully. Yes, we the audience want our crew of characters back, but LaForge is right that this type of altering history wipes out people and lives that have existed for the past fifteen years.

Everything comes to an explosive end for the future characters, but time is restored as Voyager never gets to finish the trip with their new technology. Instead, they get just a bit closer to finishing their Delta Quadrant journey. That’s something at least.

Poor Kim has to deal with the headache of time travel when he gets to watch a message from his now never existing future self. This is a highly memorable episode for a lot of reasons, and again, perfectly celebrates 100 episodes of Voyager.

One of the easiest entries, alongside the first one here, to add to this list.

Come back next week as we dive into two more of Star Trek’s greatest episodes.