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Episode
019
Tomorrow is Yesterday
A twentieth-century man is trapped on a twenty-third-century ship that is trapped in the twentieth-century. Can everybody get back to their own time without wrecking time for everybody? Find out as we put “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” in the Mission Log.
The opening to this episode was/ and still is one of my all time favorite teasers ever. BTW FYI- the night after this episode 1st aired, is when NASA and the US suffered the lose of our test pilot’s in the fire of Apollo 1. http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo1info.html
The guys say the NASA explosion was Apollo 3 but it was actually Apollo 1. In terms of manned flights, Apollo 1 would have been first. After the accident, they ran several unmanned tests and the first successful flight was Apollo 7.
“I’m about to RETCON YOUR MIND” Ahahaha
OK -Did you know that “Bluejay 4” was an Lockheed F104 supersonic interceptor aircraft
& was called a “Starfighter”?
Trivia – IF the pilot was sitting down when he was beamed out of his aircraft – why then did he materialize on the transporter pad standing up? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a0f9e245ab3d2173a6bbaede11dd9e7e62120e6e5abcf7ead5a524d25647e9fa.jpg
Blooper
How exactly did they beam Christopher and the guard back into their bodies before they originally beamed then away? Did the men’s mass suddenly double? It makes me feel like secretly Spock beamed out the earlier versions of the men… and let them disintegrate, replacing them with the captured versions. But then they’ll still have their memories – ENOUGH TIME TRAVEL HEADACHES ALREADY!
I didn’t have a problem with the ending, for this reason: the men at the air force base were being merged with earlier versions of themselves, while the Enterprise crew weren’t. Presumably you could only pull off the merge trick for times in which there is an original “you” running around. The Enterprise therefore wouldn’t crash when it showed up in the 1960s because none of the crew had earlier versions of themselves to merge with. On the other hand, if they had gone back in time only as far their childhoods, then they might have had a problem. (Though a certain amount of physical proximity might be needed for the merge to happen as well.) It’s close enough for fiction.
Maybe that’s the real test of whether you can take this episode at face value–are you treating it as a fun bit of reasonably internally consistent fiction, or do you want it to be a completely plausible demonstration of how time travel would “really” work?
Totally random aside, but Ken’s praise of Looper’s time travel logic bugs me. It was actually very illogical, particularly when one of the character’s body parts are cut off in the past and they start disappearing in the present. Sounds OK until you realize he’s driving a car in the present. If his legs are suddenly gone, how did he start driving the car in the first place?… I felt you had to turn your brain off to enjoy that one.
Again, I’m listening to this years later… but I think you’re confusing the term “butterfly effect” a bit. The butterfly effect is the idea that a butterfly flapping her wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another; it’s another term for ripple effect. It is something that happens over time, but in a normal way. What you seem to be thinking of is Ray Bradbury’s “Delicate Sound of Thunder” story, in which the death of a butterfly in prehistoric times causes a change in the characters’ present time politics. That’s the effect that time travelers have to think of.
LLaP
Two cute observations I had from this episode (one of my faves):
When Spock says he may have made an error in his computations, McCoy retorts: “OH? This could be an historic occasion.”
And then Christopher misremembers what Spock said: “You said I made no relative contribution.” ROTFL!!! Spock said “relevant” but this is priceless, since it is indeed his RELATIVE that makes the contribution. I found this incredibly clever, both then and now.
Am I reading too much into this?
Lou