Customer Reviews

Star Trek - The Original Series, Episode 21: Tomorrow Is Yesterday [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I first saw this episode so many years ago, I was afraid they had replaced Star Trek with some show about the air force. What a classic teaser! What a relief to see the Enterprise make it's surprise appearance!

We don't get to see the Enterprise at its best in this episode, which is what makes it so fun. Kirk makes one blunder after another. The computer has had a recent unfortunate personality transplant. Even Spock overlooks a very important facet in his calculations. As the episode progresses, the situation just gets worse for our heroes. It's very enjoyable watching Kirk squirm under interrogation.

The resolution didn't come across as very believable, but I'm no time travel expert, so what do I know? I just accept it and applaud.

And, of course, the "chicken soup" scene is a classic Star Trek instant.

For the first time the Enterprise goes back in time in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," thrown back while trying to break free of the gravitational pull of a black hole. The Enterprise ends up in the late 1960's (neat coincidence, huh?) over the United States, where a jet fighter is scrambled to check out the giant blip on the radar. Worried about nuclear missiles, Kirk uses the tractor beam to stop the aircraft, which then falls apart. The Enterprise rescues the pilot, Captain John Christopher, who finds everything (including Spock) a little hard to believe. Then Kirk discovers he is between a rock and a hard place: they cannot let Christopher return with his knowledge of the future but the officer has to return because his son, who is not yet been conceived, is going to be a famous space explorer. If this does not give Kirk a headache, then just think about the old kill a butterfly and cause monsoons in China theory of causality. There are some nice moments in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," having to do with the sudden confrontation of the past and the future, the best of which (Kirk being interrogated by the Military Police and noting wryly that the lengthy prison sentence he is being threatened with would be "just about right" for getting him back to his own time) will pop up again in the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." I have to admit, I like a time travel episode where the entire fate of the universe does not hang in the balance, as in "The City on the Edge of Forever."

In "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," the Enterprise finds itself in the 20th century, not far above the surface of the earth. It is spotted by a pilot of the United States Air Force and is believed to be a U.F.O. Scared of being shot down and possibly destroyed, Captain Kirk decides to beam the pilot onboard. If Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew don't watch out, they might change the course of history.

I thought "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" was a pretty good episode about time travel. At times in the episode, the Enterprise will travel back in time, making the clock onboard the Enterprise counts backward. I thought that was one of the best things about the episode. "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" isn't one of the best episodes of Star Trek The Original Series, but it isn't a bad one either. If you like The Original Series of Star Trek, I recommend getting "Tomorrow Is Yesterday."

This episode is so bad. The first 20 minutes is bad television. Then Kirk and Sulu beam down to the planet to retrieve the evidence. This is stupid because later in the episode the crew said that once they return to the future, none of it would have happened. And then the biggest turd is the ending. It offends all logic. So, the first 20 minutes suck, the second 20 minutes was filler because it was not necessary, and the last 10 minutes make no sense. Tomorrow Is Yesterday is the second worst episode, coming right behind The Alternative Factor.

When the U.S.S. Enterprise is thrown into a time warp by a black star, it ends up orbiting Earth in the 20th century. Omaha Air Base detects a peculiar UFO and sends a fighter plane, manned by Captain John Christopher, to investigate. The starship accidentally destroys the plane, caught in their tractor beam, so the pilot is beamed aboard. The problem now, of course, is to prevent Captain Christopher from returning to tell others on Earth. In order not to change history, in which Christopher's son will prove important, Kirk must return the captain to Earth without knowledge of the ship. In an attempt to remove all records of the U.S.S. Enterprise sighting, Kirk and Sulu beam down to the air base. Kirk is almost immediately captured by the Air Police, though Sulu manages to escape and gets the stolen records to the U.S.S. Enterprise. Spock and Captain Christopher beam down to help get Kirk away from the Air Police. At the same time, an Air Police sergeant has been accidentally caught in the U.S.S. Enterprise's transporter beam and is reeling as he finds himself on a 23rd century starship. Spock and Scotty manage to recreate the conditions of the time warp that brought them to this time, with a slingshot effect around the Sun. The confused Air Police sergeant is returned to Earth a second before he was transported to the U.S.S. Enterprise, so he will remember nothing of his astounding experience, and the starship returns to the 23rd century. This time, the pilot sees nothing and the Air Force concludes that the sighting was a mistake... a UFO. In effect, everything that had happened, never happened.

The Enterprise and crew are thrown back in time to Earth in the late 1960s, but USAF aircraft armed with nuclear missiles are on their way to shoot the Enterprise from the sky as it appears to be a UFO. You know Captain Kirk will get them out of trouble in the end, he always does, but things get worse before they get better! I love the 'chicken soup' scene!

This is a very entertaining episode with one of the best "teasers" in the history of the series --You'll find yourself saying "Hey, what's this! I thought this was a Star Trek episode! "

Also great: "Kirk, I'm gonna lock you up for 200 years"

Kirk (under his breath): "That oughtta be... just about right"

Fun stuff! Rumored to have been part two of "The Naked Time".

This episode re-introduced the time travel plot line into the Star Trek genre. In this case, the time travel was done by accident, the Enterprise was caught in an undiscovered gravitational well and was flung back in time to Earth in the 1960s. Disregarding the laws of physics, the Enterprise is actually flung so low into the atmosphere that it appears on military radars. The U. S. Air Force sends interceptor jets (air fueled) up to investigate and one gets close enough so that it could fire an air-to-air missile. This is absurd, the air friction on the Enterprise when it entered the atmosphere at speeds allowing time travel would have vaporized it with a really big bang. As a self-defense measure, Kirk orders a tractor beam against the jet, which causes it to disintegrate.
To save the pilot, he is beamed to the Enterprise, an act that at first seems to have ended the matter, as the pilot appears to have been of no historical consequence. From this point, the plot really loses touch with reality. Because the Enterprise was captured on the pilot's mission camera, Kirk decides to beam down to the surface in order to eliminate the evidence. This creates some amusing circumstances when Kirk is captured and interrogated. One can see the seeds of the interrogation of Chekov done aboard the aircraft carrier Enterprise in Star Trek IV.
It really makes no sense for Enterprise personnel to beam down to the Earth's surface. Whatever the film revealed would have been of little value without any physical evidence. The saucer section of the Enterprise looks a great deal like some of the "flying saucers" that have actually been caught on tape. Furthermore, the idea that Spock would neglect to check the offspring of the pilot for historical relevance is absurd.
I have always considered this an episode based on a several weak premises. Unlike the time travel in "The Naked Time" or the superb scenario of "City On the Edge of Forever", the time travel here, done by accident, just appears lame. Furthermore, the idea that a gravity well of this magnitude would have remained uncharted by Star Fleet and undetectable by the Enterprise's instruments is unbelievable.

According the The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Star Trek is so much better than other Science Fiction series (like Dr.Who etc) because it was written by real SF authors, such as DC Fontana who wrote this ep. Well, the idea of getting lost in the past is fine and the story is watchable enough, but....BUT....the ending is absolutely absurdly stupid. I mean, never have I seen anything this bad in any show other than maybe Lost In Space at its worst. Two guys lifted from the 20th century are sent back to Earth at the exact moment they were originally taken. That's nice. But how do they now no longer remember anything of the Enterprise? Why does the pilot's plane no longer crash? Why does the guard no longer meet Kirk? The Enterprise merely dropped them off by teleporter as they headed back to their own time. They would have to have gone back to their own time and prevented themselves going back to the 1960s in the first place to change things. Sorry, folks, but for a story written by a real SF writer, this sucked like a Black Hole when it comes to science, logic or even common sense! A fun if trivial episode until the ending...and then it crashed and burned! Sheesh! Give me British SF ANY day!