Captain's Blog pt. 85: Tomorrow Is Yesterday

On January 26, 1967, while Chicagoans endured the worst snowstorm in the city's history and Operation Cedar Falls officially ended in the 'Nam, NBC aired:

TITLE: (2) Self-evident enough. Personally, I think this title should be swapped with "All Our Yesterdays." A better fit for this story and "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" is a better fit for the situation on Sarpeidon.

SCRIPT: (8) In Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Robert Justman relays how he submitted a story proposal to Gene Roddenberry for possible consideration long before this episode was written. "Almost beat for beat, Justman's proposed story is the same as this episode."

Fontana got the credit as well as the cash, a source of some understandable consternation for Bob Justman.

This was one of my favorites growing up. I think there was a stretch in the 1980s where I watched it once every weekend. I associate it with cutting lawns, walk-mans, swimming pools, iced tea and bologna sandwiches, baseball, and Empty Nest. (Tomorrow is Yesterday, indeed.)

 

I always crack up when the colonel  tosses Kirk's communicator to the guy standing in the background, who immediately starts examining it like he has a clue what he's doing.

I still love it, maybe a tad less than I did as a teen, but it's an entertaining episode, well-filmed, well-scored, well-performed, and just fun to watch unfold. Some great lines (and great moments between Kirk and the re-vamped computer) and although there are some things I'll discuss when we get to Internal Logistics, it holds up pretty well even in 2013.

THEME: (8.5) Looking at the past imagining its future is part of the fun of TOS, and I love when future Trek plays around with it (a la Captain Proton in Voyager.) Of course, this was the future time-traveling to the present when it aired, so there's still a real Tomorrowland flavor to contemporary viewers. (Add in flashing back to watching it so much on VHS in the 80s, and I'm in temporal flux.)

It also deserves all the chapeaus in the world for serving as a beta test for the time travel story Trek would return to so many times over the years. Others may have done it better, including within TOS itself, but, like Kirk says to Captain Christopher, this one made it before anyone else.

VISUAL DESIGN: (4) Good mix of soundstage and stock footage.

Without googling, can you recall Captain Christopher's ship's call sign? Answer beneath points total.

Always reminded me of one of the X-wing Rebel Star Wars action figures.

I have to roll my eyes at how much internet chatter is devoted to the addition of the damn food synthesizer in the transporter room. I have the same reaction when people start niggling over costume ranks and what not. I understand the impulse, but these are not real problems: the reality of tv production is always the answer. Here it is no different: (from Memory-Alpha) "This episode is the first of two episodes to have a food synthesizer in the transporter room. According to D.C. Fontana, budgetary restrictions precluded taking the Security Police sergeant to a dining facility or having another actor in the scene bring him food, so Kyle was employed to provide the sergeant's chicken soup from the dispenser."

Several episodes later, in "This Side of Paradise," Spock smashed it good.

Hey, what do you know - I have something nice to say about the remastered version edits:

This one from inside Christopher's jet is particularly cool.

KIRK AND THE GANG: (30) 

Shatner's somnambulant delivery towards the episode's beginning is a rare contrast to his more over-the-top moments.

Uhura appears to have one of Chekov's wigs on for this episode.

GUEST: (3) I like Captain Christopher. He's fairly one-note but easy to sympathize with.

Played by Roger Perry.

INTERNAL LOGISTICS: (2) As this is the Ur-episode of Trek Time Travel, I won't dwell on some of the stranger elements, mainly the timing/ logic of transporting the Enterprise's "guests" into their bodies at the moments indicated.

But it's at least consistent with the end of "The Naked Time," for which this episode was intended to be a sequel. (That one ends with a temporal displacement, and this one begins with one.) Would've been great as a two-parter, actually, even if I don't think all that much of "The Naked Time."

Speaking of the time-travel wonkiness, Byrne devotes an issue of his Assignment: Earth mini-series to squaring the two approaches:

Says Byrne: "(In issue 2) you will catch me in my most anal fanboy mode, as I did a crossover with 'Tomorrow Is Yesterday,' just to explain away, at least to my own satisfaction, the inconsistencies in the way time travel was handled."

From Memory-Alpha: "Kirk tells Captain Christopher that the Enterprise operates under the authority of the "United Earth Space Probe Agency," which Kirk describes as a "combined service" when Christopher presumes that the Enterprise is operated by the navy. Author Bjo Trimble suggests that it is a fictional name, designed to keep Capt. Christopher in the dark about the true nature of the Federation."

That's pretty cool. Ah, but wait:

"The name would be established canonically as being the agency under whose authority the Earth Starfleet operated under in Star Trek: Enterprise."

Well, there goes that; I like it much better as the official "No Such Agency" of Starfleet.

MEMORABILITY: (3.5)

Total Points Awarded: 61

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Captain's Blog pt. 84: A Piece of the Action

On January 12, 1968, Faye Dunaway graced the cover of Life magazine and posed for a gangster moll pictorial. Bonnie and Clyde chic. That same night, NBC aired:

The flip side of Bonnie and Clyde chic. i.e. the kind with Starfleet uniforms.

Script and Theme: (9 / 9) The script was allegedly ordered up as another humor episode to capitalize (no pun intended) on the popularity of "The Trouble with Tribbles," but it built from an idea Roddenberry scribbled down as a one-sentence synopsis ("President Capone") on the very first page of his very first Star Trek series proposal in 1964. On a more enlightened level of the Tower, this page is on display in the Smithsonian.

So much more, though, than a gag episode. Cultural contamination, communication confusion, and on-point message ("A society based on a moral inversion") combine to make this one of my favorites. The gags are still fun (Fizzbin, I would advises ya to keep dialing, Oxmyx, Scotty's endless confusion, etc.) but the whole thing is a send-up of everything it touches: gang war as country conflict, imperialism, and, most especially, one-world-government. It blurs the line between it - or at least the United Nations model - and organized crime.

Perhaps League of Nations would be the better analogy. Either way, there's always a percentage to be paid.

When Kirk explains how the Federation's "cut" of the planet's reorganized economic and political structure (40%!) can be re-invested in the culture's self-growth and enlightenment, the look on Spock's face says it all. I'm reading a book on Asia's IMF Crisis in the 1990s lately, and this episode has come to mind more than a few times. I wish its author would reference it directly, actually, as the parallels are pretty wild.

I also rather enjoy seeing Kirk and Spock, as they do in "Patterns of Force" and so many other places, go native, meeting the culture where it lives so they can wrestle it to the ground.

Similarly, watching the Iotians try and "negotiate" to get what they want is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek.

As such satire goes, it's no Starship Troopers, but it's a damn fine little episode. Especially in context. (i.e. 1960s television/ culture. Context is my best friend.)

Title: (2.5) What exactly is "the action?" How are these laudable goals going about being accomplished? What does it means for the Federation to be the source of both contamination and salvation? If this was a Soviet-era propaganda film about the global capitalist conspiracy, its cultural imperialism, and arms trade, it wouldn't play out much differently. (Though it would undoubtedly be less funny.)

Now let's break out your drinking stuff... and celebrate the Syndicate.

Visual Design: (2) The ever-popular Paramount backlot and rooms built for other television shows provide most of the setting. The costumes are memorable. (Kirk's get-up in particular.)

I do not like the remastered changes to this episode and won't screencap them for that reason.

Kirk and the Gang: (35) Kirk's badgering of Oxmyx and Krako at the end ("I want to talk to this creep" while pushing him back against the wall with his Tommy gun) has been cracking me up for years.

The general channeling of James Cagney all around is great fun.

"Check the language banks and find out what a "heater" is..."

Guest: (4) First off, the street urchin who helps Kirk and Spock gain entrance to the building and says the episode's title aloud is Sheldon Collins, yet another Andy Griffith Show cross-over.

He's a dentist in Colorado Springs these days.

The gangsters are all great. If there was a museum exhibit of the garden variety TV gangster, at least for this era, these would be the performances I'd nominate.

Additionally John Harmon (the bum with whom McCoy tries to bond in "City on the Edge of Forever") plays one of the mob bosses.)

Internal Logistics: (1.75) The Icotians seem to know things about the transporter ("they can't do anything 'til they finish sparkling") that are a little odd. There's a certain contrived-circumstances factor to the script that I could be a bit harsher on if I felt like it. But: I do not.

Memorability: (4)

Nice callback in Enterprise's "Horizon." (That's The Book back there on Travis' shelf. No I didn't catch this myself. I sometimes wonder if there is a lot more stuff like this waiting to be discovered, but I imagine everything post-TNG's been picked clean by now.)

Total Points Awarded: 67.5