“Yesteryear”
Written by D.C. Fontana
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 22003
Original air date: September 15, 1973
Stardate: 5373.4
Captain’s log. The Enterprise has taken a team of historians to the planet with the Guardians of Forever. Kirk, Spock, and Erickson, a historian, have gone through the Guardian to observe the early days of the Orions. When they return, no one recognizes Spock, and when they beam back to the Enterprise, Commander Thelin, an Andorian, is Kirk’s first officer of five years’ standing. A computer search reveals that Ambassador Sarek did have a son named Spock by Amanda Grayson, but he died at the age of seven, after which the couple separated. Amanda was later killed in a shuttle accident.
Spock is recorded as having died during his kahs-wan, a maturity ritual, but according to Spock’s memory, he survived the kahs-wan (obviously) and his life was saved by his cousin Selek. But he’d never met that cousin before or since, and he realizes now that it was Spock himself going back in time. So he obtains a contemporary Vulcan wardrobe and goes through the Guardian.
He encounters himself being tormented by children, who make fun of him for his halfbreed status, then “meets” Sarek, to whom he introduces himself as Selek, and says he’s en route to the family shrine. Sarek offers him hospitality, which “Selek” accepts.
While Sarek lectures young Spock about how he must choose between his Vulcan and human heritage, old Spock speaks with Amanda about how Spock will find his way, even if Sarek is so demanding.
Young Spock sneaks out at night to undergo the kahs-wan before the appointed time, though his pet sehlat, I-Chaya, insists on going along. Young Spock is attacked by a le-matya, but between them, I-Chaya and old Spock save the boy.
As they traverse the desert, young Spock complains about the expectations of his father and the emotionalism of his mother. Old Spock tells him that having human blood isn’t fatal, and to remember that Vulcans aren’t unemotional, they simply repress their emotions.
I-Chaya falls ill, and both Spocks realize that he was poisoned by the le-matya—which old Spock has no memory of, in fact, I-Chaya lived beyond this date. Old Spock offers to fetch a healer, but young Spock insists on going himself, leaving old Spock to care for the animal. He uses a mind-meld to comfort the sehlat.
Young Spock fetches the healer, but by the time they arrive, it’s too late—the poison has gone too far in I-Chaya’s system, and he’s beyond the healer’s ability to cure. Young Spock makes the decision to euthanize the animal without tears, then when he returns home he tells Sarek and Amanda that he has chosen a Vulcan way of life for himself. He then goes off to find the kids who made fun of him, as old Spock taught him how to do a neck pinch properly, because that’s totally in keeping with Vulcan philosophy…
“Selek” says his goodbyes to Sarek and Amanda, asking the former to try to understand his son. He returns through the Guardian to find that all is normal again, except for I-Chaya’s premature death.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Where the Guardian of Forever was previously only able to show history at ludicrous speed and you had to jump and hope for the best, now you can request a particular time and date and get there. Go fig’.
Fascinating. Vulcan children have to undergo a maturity ritual that—like the koon-ut-kalifee from “Amok Time“—is a relic of their pre-logic days that they hang onto for no compellingly good reason. Letting a kid go out in a brutal desert for days without food and water strikes me as more than a little crazy.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. When the timeline is restored, McCoy is in full-on crotchety mode, bitching about having to recalibrate his medical instruments for Vulcans every time he does a physical.
I cannot change the laws of physics! It isn’t until Scotty doesn’t recognize Spock that Kirk realizes that something’s up, since he assumes that McCoy not recognizing him is just McCoy being a dick.
Channel open. “In the family, all is silence. No more will be said of it.”
Old Spock talking to Sarek and proving that Vulcans have embarrassing family stories they won’t tell, too.
Welcome aboard. Mark Lenard reprises his role as Sarek from “Journey to Babel,” while future radio personality Billy Simpson provided the voice of young Spock, a rare case of actual guest casting on the animated series. Simpson was the first person other than Leonard Nimoy to play Spock (well, you could argue for Majel Barrett in “Return to Tomorrow“…..).
Other voices are provided by Barrett (as Amanda, the character also returning from “Journey to Babel,” and the historian), James Doohan (who does Scotty as usual, and many of the other male voices, including the Guardian of Forever), and various Filmation regulars, among them Hal Sutherland’s son Keith.
Trivial matters: This episode serves as a sequel to both “Journey to Babel” (which introduced Spock’s parents, as well as Spock’s pet sehlat) and “The City on the Edge of Forever” (which introduced the Guardian of Forever).
Amanda’s last name of Grayson is established in this episode.
The history of the alternate timeline in which Spock died as a boy was chronicled in The Chimes at Midnight by Geoff Trowbridge, a short novel that was published in Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions, and which retold the TOS movies with Thelin in Spock’s place.
Although she served as associate producer and story editor for the animated series, this is D.C. Fontana’s only script for it.
This episode introduces Vulcan’s Forge and the city of ShiKahr, which will continue to be referenced in the tie-in fiction and, in the case of the former, on Enterprise in the three-parter “The Forge”/”Awakening”/”Kir’Shara.”
Despite “The Man Trap” establishing that Vulcan has no moon—and despite notes on the cels by both Fontana and Gene Roddenberry saying “NO MOON!”—the animators put a moon in Vulcan’s sky. The original release of The Motion Picture did the same thing—tie-in fiction has established it as T’Khut (or T’Rukh), based on an article by Gordon Carleton in the 1975 fanzine Warp Speed 8), which stated that Vulcan had a sister planet.
For many years, Roddenberry declared the animated series not to be part of the overall Trek canon. The one exception was this episode, only because Sarek made explicit reference to the events of the episode in “Unification I” on TNG. Other animated series references would creep in here and there, though up until 1991, the tie-in fiction was explicitly forbidden from referencing anything from the series. (In the monthly DC comic, they were forced to change Arex and M’Ress to Ensign Fouton and Ensign My’ra.) At this point, 25 years after Roddenberry’s death, most people accept that it’s part of the overall storyline.
Spock being taunted as a boy by full-blooded Vulcan children will be seen again in the 2009 Star Trek.
Thelin’s skin was supposed to come out more blue, like other Andorians. Enterprise would later establish the albino Aenar as other natives of Andoria, and The Chimes at Midnight would establish that Thelin was half-Aenar, thus explaining his pale skin.
The historian was given the name of Grey in the script, with Alan Dean Foster giving her the first name of Jan in the adaptation of this episode in Log 1. Christopher L. Bennett made her a major player in the founding of the Department of Temporal Investigations in the novel Forgotten History, which established her full first name as Meijan.
At no point in the episode as aired is the redshirt who accompanied Kirk and Spock to Orion’s past identified. In the script, he’s established as ship’s historian Erickson. I honestly thought he was a security guard (although the last historian we saw, McIvers in “Space Seed,” also wore red for whatever reason).
NBC expressed concern over the death of I-Chaya, which was heavy subject matter for a Saturday morning kids show in 1973, but Filmation retained complete creative control and they insisted on keeping it. After the episode aired, neither NBC nor Filmation nor Roddenberry nor Fontana ever received a single complaint about the portrayal of a pet’s death.
To boldly go. “Times change, Doctor—times change.” This is generally regarded as the best of the animated episodes, and watching it again, I find myself being disappointed.
Oh, let’s be clear here, it’s a very good episode, but there are a few things that knock it down off the pedestal a bit, mostly in the early going.
For starters, the Guardian of Forever is nothing like it was in “The City on the Edge of Forever“—it speaks in a direct manner, and James Doohan eschews Bart LaRue’s stentorian tones, instead sounding like an old man with asthma who gives irritatingly straightforward answers.
In addition, Spock’s elimination from history makes no sense. How does the team of historians looking at Vulcan’s past change the timeline? Yes, Spock was busy staring at early Orion, but if he hadn’t, he’d have been on the planet or on the Enterprise or some such. Why would just the act of looking at it cause that change in history?
Having said all that, once the story sends Spock to Vulcan’s past, it gets interesting. It’s a little thing, but just the fact that Spock was taunted for being a halfbreed puts so much of his character into focus: his insistence on identifying himself as Vulcan even though he’s a Vulcan/human hybrid, his disdain for human emotionalism, his complete embrace of Vulcan logic even when it costs him. And it makes sense that Vulcan children would be bullies—every Vulcan we’ve met so far (Sarek, Spock, T’Pring, T’Pau) has been arrogant and high-handed, and the behavior of the children is pretty much the same thing without the veneer of emotionalism.
Seeing I-Chaya, the “teddy bear” mentioned in “Journey to Babel,” is a delight, and watching him die is awful, but this is the good kind of awful. It’s supposed to be painful, and an important moment for Spock. You have to wonder if another influence on his embracing Vulcan logic and emotion suppression was to avoid having to feel the hurt of I-Chaya’s loss so keenly.
It helps immensely that Mark Lenard returns to voice Sarek. His conversations with Spock would have had much less impact with James Doohan (who had actually recorded Sarek’s lines before Lenard became available, and so the latter was looped in) doing the voice. Jane Wyatt was unavailable, but at least Majel Barrett does a decent job of getting Wyatt’s tone and tenor right as Amanda.
Overall, this is a strong character study of Spock, and that’s enough to ameliorate the plot’s general lack of sense.
Warp factor rating: 8
Next week: “One of Our Planets is Missing”
Keith R.A. DeCandido has three new eBook novellas in the Super City Cops series available for preorder from Bastei Entertainment. These stories about police struggling to do their job in a city filled with costumed heroes and villains will be released over the next three months and include Avenging Amethys, Undercover Blues, and Secret Identities. Covers, promo copy, and preorder links can be found on Keith’s blog.
Besides how did just monitoring the time line change it how did Spock originaly save himself? Was there origiinally another cousin who saved him? I guess we have to accept a clunky set up to get to the story of Spock’s youth.
In addition to the wonky temporal mechanics, I have to seriously question the morality/wisdom of going back. There was a very real risk that instead of restoring the original timeline Spock would create a third one that was materially worse. Much like in Voyager’s Endgame, the current timeline is fine and the main characters want to change it for mostly selfish reasons. The Federation is fine, the Enterprise is fine, the galaxy as far as we know is fine. It’s tragic that Amanda died young (alternate timelines being her kryptonite, apparently), but any small changes are almost inevitably going to cause some people to die younger and others to live longer. As far as we know, Spock could have simply continued to exist as some sort of temporal fragment and even rejoined this new version of Starfleet with Kirk to vouch for him. Playing with the fates of billions of lives to micromanage the ripples is morally questionable at best.
But of course the show has no time for this concept, because the entire point is an excuse to tell a story about Spock as a small child. Which makes me wish they had just been able to tell a story about Spock as a small child and leave time travel out of it, maybe just have Spock remember or have the Guardian play it back for him (granted, it may not have been feasible to create an episode without a ‘jeopardy’ angle of some kind).
Interesting to look at this through the lens of biracial and bicultural children. “Hafu” children, who are half-Japanese and half-another culture, typically experience discrimination in Japan because they are not fully Japanese. It’s a very similar parallel to Spock’s experiences throughout the series.
Definitely the best TAS episode, but the time-travel logic is incredibly wonky. I tried to explain a lot of it in Forgotten History, like reconciling the different behavior of the Guardian and explaining how Kirk ended up back in the right timeline without actually going through the Guardian himself. But one thing I can’t make sense of is how I-Chaya could die “this time” when he didn’t “before.” I mean, if Spock only exists because his older self saved his younger self, then his worldline includes a self-consistent causal loop. His older self going into the past was “always” part of his history, therefore it didn’t change anything when he did go back. So there’s no sense to treating it as a second iteration that happens differently. All I can figure is that maybe Spock didn’t remember when I-Chaya actually died — that it always happened this way, but his memories of his childhood got confused, like how he forgot that it wasn’t the real kahs-wan.
I also drew heavily on the visuals of ShiKahr and Sarek’s home to depict the same location in my third Enterprise: Rise of the Federation novel, Uncertain Logic, which features Sarek’s parents as major guest characters. In the process, I noticed that the set design of T’Pol’s family home in ENT’s fourth season was evidently inspired by the design of Sarek and Amanda’s home in “Yesteryear,” with a heavily windowed house surrounded by a walled courtyard with sculptures and a fountain.
Filmation did a similar story about a hero helping a child deal with the death of a pet in The Secrets of Isis a few years after this. Depictions of death were quite rare in most Filmation shows in the ’70s, so I remember being quite powerfully affected by it when it did happen. Although I think I’m more affected by I-Chaya’s death and young Spock’s decision now than I used to be, because I had to make the same choice with my cat Tasha some years back.
Among the voices listed as “Unknown” in the original Star Trek Concordance and credited to Doohan (perhaps erroneously) in the revised edition are Bates (the officer giving the exposition about Sarek and Amanda in this timeline) and the historians Erickson and Aleek-Om. I used to be pretty sure they weren’t Doohan, and maybe were Lane Scheimer, but now I’m not entirely sure.
Speaking of voices, the role of the le-matya’s voice was played by Godzilla. I’m not sure how Filmation’s sound-editing company Horta-Mahana ended up with the actual, authentic Godzilla roar in their library; the Hanna-Barbera Godzilla series didn’t come along until 1978. But there it is. (Godzilla’s roar, by the way, is a slowed-down recording of the strings of a double bass being stroked by a resin-coated leather glove.)
By the way, La La Land’s Star Trek soundtrack set featuring the first-ever release of TAS’s musical score (among many other things) went on sale about an hour ago as of this writing:
http://lalalandrecords.com/Site/StarTrek50TH.html
I’ve ordered mine!
This probably is the best of the animated episodes. It was written by an experienced Trek writer and fits the shorter time frame very well, certainly better than last week’s did.
When I saw the first NuTrek movie, I immediately recognized so much from this episode, even though I hadn’t seen it in nearly 40 years. I think the writers must have borrowed heavily from it, and I had the feeling that some of the scenes of Spock being taunted were blocked out in the same way.
The gray Andorian may be another byproduct of the color-blind director. The major problem there was the prevalence of the color pink, which we’ll get to eventually, but I have to wonder if it’s a factor here, too.
I’ve always put the differences in the behavior of the Guardian down to Starfleet having had time to work with it and learn to control it to some degree.
Where the Guardian of Forever was previously only able to show history at ludicrous speed and you had to jump and hope for the best, now you can request a particular time and date and get there. Go fig’. – Well, clearly, the manufacturer finally issued the long-awaited patch. ;)
The kahs-wan is a pretty dumb idea for an ostensibly “logical” and civilized society, as you point out. And Spock/Selek’s comment, “In the family, all is silence” is horrific and abusive in too many real-world circumstances. I am sure that wasn’t the script’s intent but, wow, it floors me every time.
Still, I like this best of all the animated episodes, as do many others. Too much Vulcan goodness to resist!
@1 & 2: I’ve always taken the intent to be that what we saw here was the way it “always” happened: Spock went back in time to save himself because he experienced a timeline where he died due to not going back in time to save himself. So it’s sort of a causal Moebius strip where the events of the main timeline only happen because a time traveler saw what would happen if they didn’t go back in time to create the main timeline.
What’s interesting is the part where Thelin wishes Spock long life and prosperity in his reality — and Spock wishes Thelin the same in his. That implies that he expects Thelin’s timeline to continue rather than being erased when Spock restores his own timeline. Which fits nicely with the later idea of the Kelvin Timeline (Bad Robot movie universe) coexisting in parallel with the Prime timeline. A lot of fans assume that the “normal” outcome should be the altered timeline erasing the previous one, because a lot of episodes and movies assume the same, but it’s actually far more physically realistic and logically consistent for the original and altered timelines to coexist side-by-side. And Spock’s line to Thelin implies that was always a possibility despite what fans tend to assume.
@@.-@. One explanation for I-Chaya’s death could be that adult-Spock assumed he was dealing with a self-consistent time loop, meaning that their victory against the le-matya was assured, and didn’t fight as effectively as he could have. I-Chaya’s death could have been a wakeup call for him that the timeline is not set, and that he and young-Spock were in very real danger despite his own memories.
@8/Cybersnark: Yeah, but the thing is, it should be a self-consistent loop, regardless of anyone’s assumptions. There’s no sensible model in which it isn’t. If Spock was always “Cousin Selek” to begin with, that means this time travel was the event that brought that about. That means it was always part of the sequence of events, and it’s logically inconsistent to say there were two different versions of it. People often make this mistake when dealing with time travel (and clearly D.C. Fontana did so as well) — we assume that cause always comes before effect, so we assume that any time travel into the past must be “changing” some earlier version of events. But the very existence of time travel disproves the assumption that cause must precede effect. It’s entirely allowable for an event to be caused by something in the future. So the time travel isn’t changing what happened before, it’s causing what happened before, and it always did and always will. The event only happens once, but from some of the participants’ perspective, it happens in a different order.
In short, there are two kinds of time travel story: The kind where you go back to events you weren’t part of before and change them (e.g. McCoy saving Edith Keeler), and the kind where you go back to events you were always part of and play the role you were always destined to play (e.g. the movie 12 Monkeys or Hermione Granger with the Time-Turner). They’re mutually incompatible. It’s possible to have separate examples of both in the same universe (e.g. “Past Tense” vs. “Assignment: Earth”), but the same time travel cannot work both of those ways at once, because that’s self-contradictory. But that’s what’s being proposed here — that it’s both a self-consistent causal loop and a temporal alteration. It’s trying to have it both ways, impossibly.
@@@@@7/9: My thinking was that there’s three timelines.
Timeline 1: We never see it in this episode, but most of TOS occurs in it. Spock, for whatever reason, goes back in time and is Cousin Selek. The exact circumstances and why he does so are not revealed to the viewer.
Timeline 2: Spock doesn’t go back, resulting in the timeline we see at the start of this episode.
Timeline 3: The “close enough” timeline that Spock creates where his pet dies prematurely. To the extent this is “canon,” this essentially overwrites Timeline 1 (hence my comment @@@@@ 2 above about the morality of even trying to make changes).
Timeline 1 is contains a self-consistent causal loop, Timeline 2 is the result of a temporal alteration, Timeline 3 is another temporal alteration. The “temporal alteration” that causes the divergence from Timeline 1 to Timeline 2 is never revealed, but given they’re playing with fire by traveling back in time, my best guess is that they somehow screwed up their own personal history. That’s hardly outside the realm of possibility given that they’re messing with the Guardian without having any real idea what they’re doing.
To the extent Timeline 2 continues on, by the way, the story looks bizarre from their perspective. They briefly had a version of Kirk that didn’t remember the “real” first officer and some stranger Vulcan, who then took off. I hope they ended up getting their own Kirk back, somehow.
To borrow from O’Brien twenty real years ago and one hundred fictional future years from now: I hate temporal mechanics.
One more thing: Although this was the first time we saw little Spock bullied onscreen, the idea that the other Vulcan children gave Spock a hard time because he was a half-human was established as far back as “Journey to Babel.” Amanda mentions it to adult Spock at one point . ….
@11/Greg: Yes, it’s interesting that this is as much a sequel (prequel?) to “Journey to Babel” as to “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Several TAS episodes are sequels to TOS episodes — e.g. “More Tribbles, More Troubles,” “Mudd’s Passion,” “Once Upon a Planet” — but this is the only one that’s a significant continuation of two at once.
KRAD, I always believed that was a neck pinch that Spock did to I-Chaya, because he told his old pet “Sleep, now. “
My theory on how I-Chaya died when he didn’t originally die was that it was caused by old Spock’s imperfect memory of the past. We hear him making a personal log entry saying that he was sure that the critical day was the day of the Kahs-wan, and somehow history has apparently been changed again but he can’t figure out what he could have done to change it. Only later does he remember that it was his own personal test, not the actual Kahs-wan. (This brings up the problem of why Spock was recorded in history as dying during “the maturity test” when that was not accurate. Perhaps Amanda wanted Spock’s death recorded that way and Sarek disagreed because it was illogical to record a falsehood in history, but conceded the point to Amanda rather than argue further.)
When young Spock went out, he left the door open and I-Chaya followed him. In the original history old Spock was on the ball and followed young Spock immediately, closing the door so that I-Chaya couldn’t get out. Since I-Chaya wasn’t there, he was never poisoned. Old Spock even says to I-Chaya something like “My life decision was made without the sacrifice of yours, old friend.” Whether he was never there, or was there but avoided the poison is not clear.
Of course this has one problem in that we see I-Chaya defending young Spock from the le-matya and my theory means that he wasn’t there to do so in the original history. But on the other hand, old Spock would have been closer by, expecting the le-matya and possibly having the element of surprise.
Spock’s mere presence as “Selek” of course raises the question of whether the timeline is polluted by Spock’s survival and whether it’s even right for Spock and Amanda to be alive given that they die in unaltered history, and there have been lots of comments already on this subject. David George even wrote in “The Fire and the Rose” that Spock willfully changed history to benefit himself (referring to this incident).
This episode is probably my least favorite use of the “bootstrap” paradox. My two favorite uses both happen in Star Trek IV: Kirk pawning his glasses, which were a gift from McCoy, and will be again; and Scott giving Dr. Nichols the formula for transparent aluminum, justifying the change of history by saying, “How do we know he didn’t invent it?” (In the novelization he actually did invent it.) I’m with the people who wish that Spock’s childhood had been shown with no changes in history.
My take is the same as Leander’s: Spock put his pet to sleep with a neck pinch; he didn’t mindmeld with it.
The best episode of the animated series, even though it hardly features Kirk at all; another of the best is “The Slaver Weapon,” which has zero Kirk (or ENTERPRISE).
@13 & 15: Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the episode (which would’ve been based on the script, so he would’ve known the intent of the scene as written) confirms that Spock did neck-pinch I-Chaya unconscious, although Foster said he somehow did it more gently than he had with the le-matya.
Wow. it never even occurred to me that Spock might have used the neck pinch — which has always been portrayed as an offensive weapon, as an assault — on a beloved pet and I’m, frankly, revolted by the very notion. it’s like saying Spock hit him on the head with a croquet mallet…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
KRAD are you sure Fouton was a changed version of Arex? I mean, they don’t look at all alike (to the point of being different species and missing Arex’s trademark third arm), Fouton was in Security rather than bridge crew, etc. I can believe PAD meant him as a replacement if told he couldn’t use Arex, but it’d seem that he then went on and created a completely new character to do so rather than the much closer M’ya to M’ress.
@17/krad: That must be why Foster said it was something like the nerve pinch but gentler.
When they introduced Vulcan neuropressure therapy on Enterprise, I realized that it was probably meant to be a more therapeutic application of the same principle behind the nerve pinch (because “neuropressure” and “nerve pinch” are basically synonyms) — or, more likely, that the nerve pinch is a defensive application of neuropressure techniques. So that’s consistent with the idea that there’s a gentler way of doing the same thing. Indeed, since Vulcans are pacifists, one could argue that the nerve pinch is meant to be a gentler alternative to inflicting pain or injury in order to incapacitate someone. Although VGR: “Cathexis” established that it could cause nerve damage, and STID showed it causing pain. Maybe it depends on how it’s used.
Tom: Pretty sure, especially since Peter did put Arex in security when he brought the character to New Frontier. And Fouton was a tall, skinny alien, so easy enough to redraw (certainly easier than when they substituted Connors for Arex in The Crier in Emptiness…..).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
and don’t forget, M’Ress and Arex show up in Peterborough David’s New Frontier novels
@17/ I had always interpreted that moment in Star Trek Into Darkness to be Khan resisting the nerve pinch rather than Spock inflicting extra pain himself. After all, immediately afterwards, Khan takes multiple stun blasts with minimal effect, just like in the ENT Augment trilogy. “If that what it takes to stun them, what does it take to kill them?” as Malcolm Reed said. It seems to me like that moment showed off Khan’s enhanced abilities as an Augment, rather than saying that nerve pinches can sometimes be more painful.
My favourite part of the episode is actually the beginning. It’s true that the Guardian acts very different here and that Doohan’s voice for it is somewhat unflattering, but I just love the team of historians on the planet. It’s great to get a glimpse of the larger workings of the Federation – in this respect, too, this episode is like Journey to Babel, only with scientists instead of diplomats. I like that the time travel device the Enterprise stumbled upon is used for historical research. It’s also great that the research isn’t Earth- or even US-centric, but something else entirely: “Orion, at the dawn of its civilisation”. And hey, so many scientists, and none of them dies! Did that ever happen in TOS?
Concerning the time travel plot, IMO it has to be a causal loop. Why would Spock travel into his own past in the first place if it wasn’t for the reasons seen in this episode?
Another thing I like is how accustomed Kirk and Spock have become to the idea of time travel. They both realise quickly that Spock’s “cousin” is Spock himself, and they both realise it at the same time. I like this kind of low-level continuity, where you can see that the characters’ past experiences have influenced the way they think. I missed something like that in TOS episodes like Return to Tomorrow, when they were astounded at Sargon being “pure energy” although they had met energy beings before on more than one occasion.
Sarek and Amanda both look and behave like they did in Journey to Babel. That was done well too.
It seems that it’s possible to walk into a Vulcan home and claim to be a relative, and everyone will just accept it without asking questions. It must be because Vulcans usually are honest and have no crime. It also shows that Sarek has a large family he isn’t particularly interested in.
So Sarek promises to “Selek” to try to understand his son. If you look at their relationship in Journey to Babel, he didn’t exactly succeed.
I found it interesting that this episode establishes the Andorians to be a “warrior race”. One of the things I like about Enterprise is the way they fleshed out the Andorians, and I wasn’t aware of the fact that this trait of theirs had already been established here. And, of course, having an Andorian in the story at all is another reference to Journey to Babel. I wonder what became of Thelin in the original/restored timeline. He probably serves on a different ship.
Actually, it was “Journey to Babel” that established the Andorians’ warrior tendencies.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@24/krad: I don’t remember that. In which scene?
(Edited) Okay, I looked it up, and there’s a scene where Shras says: “My people are a violent race”. Is that what you meant?
I’m not sure Spock traveling back in time has to be a causal loop. It is possible there was a real cousin Selek and that he got killed during the historical investigation. That means there was a cousin Selek who saved Spock, but oopsie, woopsie they meesed that up. So Spock goes back to recreate what his actual cousin did, but makes a mistake and gets his pet killed. It’s about the only way this makes sense to me.
@26/percysowner: No, Kirk and Spock deduce that “Selek” was Spock from the future all along. Spock remembers that he looked the way Spock looks now. The whole reason the timeline shift happened was that Spock was supposed to be there in the past but wasn’t. That was explicitly stated. There’s no way to reconcile that with the idea that there was a “real” Selek who was somehow randomly “killed” by the fact of the historians scanning the Guardian. It was unambiguous that it was a time loop — Spock himself had “always” gone back to pose as Cousin Selek and save his younger self, and that’s why he had to do it now. If it had been to replace a real Selek, they would’ve said so.
And that’s what I said about a temporal Moebius loop: The only way Spock would know he had to go back to save himself is if he experienced the altered timeline where he didn’t. So the alteration of the timeline was necessary to bring about the preservation of the timeline. Two opposite sides of the “strip” blending into each other in a continuous loop.
And no, that doesn’t “make sense” by our conventional notions of linear causality, but it shouldn’t, because those notions are based on the assumption that time and causality only move in one direction. When dealing with physical circumstances that are radically different from conventional experience, like time travel or relativistic travel or subatomic quantum interactions, everyday common-sense expectations are usually completely wrong, because they’re meant to apply to a very different set of conditions. It’s like expecting to be able to breathe normally underwater. That expectation “makes sense” in normal, everyday conditions, but it’s completely absurd in the different conditions of being underwater. And it’s the same with time travel. It’s not a normal set of conditions, so any idea that seems to “make sense” by conventional expectations is probably wrong.
Seeing this as a kid, I somehow came away with the idea that the kahs-wan was an old ritual they didn’t really do these days (and the people who did it might be older and better trained) but that Spock snuck out to do this to prove himself a “real” Vulcan.
Skipping over Spock’s memory of Selek looking like him, my guess would be that timeline one was where Spock died, timeline two was where Sarek (possibly when dealing with Amanda’s death was added to the guilt he already felt over his son) went back in time to save Spock. Timeline three has Spock and a Kirk who remembers timeline two temporarily existing in what’s basically timeline one, with Spock deciding he must have been Selek instead of someone else. He goes back and creates timeline four.
The main problem with this is the theory (is it in the Foster story or did I just pick it up somewhere?) that Spock comes back to an altered timeline because he went back to the time period where he died (even if he was in a different part of space) and didn’t stop his death from happening–failing in his part of the time loop.
Can we just say that this is timey-wimey stuff, and leave it at that?
As for the Gaurdian, I’m assuming they found a copy of “The Guardian for Dummies” (Chapter One: How to Adjust the Personality and Voice Settings).
So, they created an altered timeline by obeying the rules and not altering the timeline. Because the Guardian likes messing with people and also realized it would be left alone and bored if it didn’t make it clear now and then that abandoning it could be more dangerous than mucking around in time (I still think getting the Guardian a good book club or online discussion group would be safer, but Trek scientists never seem to think of these things).
Definitely the best animated episode. It works because it focuses on character far more than any other entry. It even surpasses a lot of plot-oriented TOS entries.
It’s no secret Fontana always preferred Spock over the other characters (to the point of rewriting This Side of Paradise, which was originally supposed to be a Sulu story).
As usual, original Trek is at its best when it tackles Spock’s ever present conflict between his human and vulcan sides. I like it that it introduced a lot of relevant vulcan elements, as well as establishing the fact that vulcan children can be vicious bullies (something I previously thought to be an element introduced in the 2009 film). Despite it being a story about a child’s path of growth, it never dumbs down the concept to embrace wider audiences (or assume that young viewers won’t understand the drama). Other than the poorly thought temporal mechanics in the first act, the story works beautifully. Part of the reason is because the story never shies away from giving young Spock the chance to make the decision.
So Sarek promises to “Selek” to try to understand his son. If you look at their relationship in Journey to Babel, he didn’t exactly succeed.
@23/JanaJansen: I’d argue that even Spock’s death couldn’t fully mend the bridges between him and his father. TNG’s Unification-Part I makes it clear that they kept on fighting and arguing all the way until Sarek fell ill and Spock left for Romulus. They stopped talking to each other when Spock attacked Sarek’s position regarding the Cardassian conflict and Perrin pushed him away. In a way, it’s both realistic and tragic.
Okay, about the Guardian, here’s my thinking from Forgotten History:
One: In “City on the Edge of Forever,” The Guardian begins showing the entire span of Earth history without being asked. Kirk asks the Guardian “Can you change the speed at which yesterday passes?” and the Guardian replies, “I was made to offer the past in this manner. I cannot change.”
Two: In “Yesteryear,” Spock asks the Guardian to send him to a specific date and place, and the display in the Guardian is still a cycle of images rather than a single fixed one.
What I realized is that there’s no direct contradiction there. In “City,” nobody actually tried requesting a specific destination, and the only thing the Guardian actually said was that it couldn’t change the playback speed. So that doesn’t actually rule out the possibility that the Guardian could focus more tightly on a single period — still fast-forwarding through a range of history around it, at the same speed as before but over a narrower span of place and time. That doesn’t actually contradict the letter of what was stated in “City.” So I figured Kirk and Spock just didn’t think of the right questions to ask to get the Guardian to narrow its focus. Kirk only asked about the speed of the playback. If he’d instead asked “Can you narrow your focus to a specific time period,” he might’ve gotten an affirmative answer.
For decades, I had the same problem most of you had, assuming that it was incompatible, because Alan Dean Foster’s version had the portal eventually lock onto a single fixed moment and place. Growing up, I was far more familiar with Foster’s novelizations than with the actual epsiodes. But eventually I realized that the episode itself shows the Guardian continuing to cycle through a series of images, with Spock timing his jump for the right moment. So it still basically works the way it did in “City,” just over a narrower range of time. And the dialogue in “City” doesn’t specifically rule that out. I’m lucky I figured that out before I wrote Forgotten History — I’m not sure what cockamamie excuse I would’ve thought up otherwise.
One quick question to which I’m assuming I know the answer: Did they not use the theme from TOS due to not having the rights?
Also, I had to laugh pretty hard at hearing the Godzilla roar. Truly one of the most unmistakeable sound effects ever, and hearing it in Star Trek was funny in the best possible way.
I also thought this was a really good episode. I can only remember one TAS episode (the very last one, I believe) from back when Nickelodeon showed them in the mid-late ’80’s, so I find animated Star Trek to be, dare I say, fascinating.
@31/Pat D: Yeah, it seems likely that Filmation didn’t want to spend money on licensing the Alexander Courage theme. I don’t think any of Filmation’s adaptations of prior TV or film series reused their original themes; instead they used similar-sounding pastiches. The one exception being The New Adventures of the Lone Ranger, since the William Tell Overture is public domain.
No, hold on, I was wrong — The Brady Kids‘ theme was the same tune as the theme to The Brady Bunch, but with new lyrics. Although Filmation’s other Sherwood Schwartz sequel, The New Adventures of Gilligan, used a pastiche of the original Gilligan’s Island theme.
Still, I quite like the TAS theme in its own right. Sure, it’s a pastiche of the TOS theme, but it’s a good one. And the TOS theme was itself pretty much a pastiche of “Beyond the Blue Horizon” with a bossa nova beat added.
Regarding Vulcan’s (non-existent) moon – JJ Abrams ALSO gave Vulcan a moon! Or at least, that’s the only logical explanation for how Kirk and Scotty could have watched a gigantic, sky-filling destruction of Vulcan from that icy body.
They just won’t stop giving Vulcan a moon!
@33/Jacob H: Kirk and Scotty didn’t see Vulcan’s destruction from Delta Vega. Kirk was aboard the Enterprise at that moment. There was a shot of Spock Prime seeing Vulcan’s destruction in the sky, but it was during his mind-meld montage, so I’ve always taken it as a figurative representation of his telepathic experience of his species’ demise, like when he experienced the Intrepid‘s death in “The Immunity Syndrome.” (Although the planetary-destruction sequence in The Force Awakens makes it seem likely that Abrams intended it to be literal rather than figurative.)
Ah, thank you – I suspected I misremembered who was on that moon. But no, I’m pretty sure that he was really seeing it in the sky. Netflix doesn’t have it streaming anymore so I can’t go back and check easily, but it seemed like a pretty straightforward witnessing from what I recall. Redlettermedia talks about it in their review of the movie, and if you aren’t familiar with those guys, you really should be. They do very insightful and funny analyses of all the Trek and SW movies (well, the prequel SWs)
There’s nothing insightful or funny about those reviews. On the contrary, they come across as juvenile. A perfect embodiment of the worst trends seen on YouTube.
1) Anybody else ever find it hilarious that Spock continued to wear his uniform under his Vulcan robes? And that nobody ever noticed, even when his sleeve is falling away when he tells Sarek goodbye?
2) Another possible trivial matter – Didn’t Spock refer to himself as Selek in Crossover? (the novel). I happened to be reading the one while watching this episode for this week’s rewatch, but I don’t have it in front of me right now.
@36
Well, I agree that it’s juvenile (on purpose), and something can be both juvenile and funny. As for insightful, well, you have your own opinion, but I will just point out that since the like/dislike ratio on their videos is generally better than 11-1, I think it’s a fair recommendation to a Trek fan.
@35/Jacob H: Yes, it was depicted as Spock seeing it in the sky, and the fact that Abrams reused the trope in The Force Awakens makes it pretty clear he meant it literally, as I just said. But my point is that, since it was presented in the context of a mind meld rather than a real-time, real-world event, that gives us room to disregard the absurd intention and rationalize it as merely a figurative image.
@37/Jeff: Yes, Spock does use the Selek alias in Crossover, at least briefly.
Ok, I see your point; that’s a way to preserve canon as well as possible. However, I was able to find a clip of the scene on youtube, and Spock’s V/O during the scene specifically says (regarding Nero) “He beamed me here so I could observe his vengeance. As he was helpless to save his planet, I would be helpless to save mine.”
That doesn’t seem to leave a lot of wiggle room!
@32 CLB
It isn’t just a “pastiche” of the TOS theme. It is the exact same theme inverted (high notes become low and vica versa).
As a classical musician I love that gimmick, and also think it is a very appropriate for TAS.
On the one hand it almost sounds like a parody of the original (inverted music usually gives this feeling). But on the other hand, both the music and the opening sequence are played completely straight, which renders the notion of it being an actual “parody” unthinkable.
Love it.
@41
That’s very interesting about the inverted music! I didn’t know that was a thing – are there any other well-known pairs you can think of?
@40/Jacob H: To a telepathic species, the word “observe” wouldn’t necessarily refer to the sense of sight. Indeed, although it’s generally used that way, there’s nothing in the etymology of the word “observe” that limits it to visual perception. It means to be aware of something, to pay attention to it, to hold or follow it (e.g. to observe a holiday or a religious orthodoxy). In this specific case, it meant to be a witness, to register and be aware of the event of Vulcan’s destruction. And that could work for telepathic perception as much as for visual.
@41/OThDPh: Hmm… the thing is, the Courage theme has two parts, the “fanfare” (under the Shatner narration) and the “song” (under the cast credits). I’ll agree that the “song” part of the TAS theme is an inversion of the TOS “song,” but the “fanfare” part is not an inversion. Where the Courage fanfare has three rising notes, a pause, a five-note phrase that falls and rises, another pause, and then two rising notes, the Ellis fanfare has four mostly rising notes, a pause, another four notes that go back and forth, another pause, and then two different rising notes. So only half of it is an inversion.
Now, Fred Steiner’s Enterprise motif from his TOS scores is basically an inversion of the Courage fanfare. An instance begins at 1:05 on this soundtrack sample.
@43 Yes, I thought of that – but then it still doesn’t make sense, because then why beam him anywhere? Why not have him “observe” the destruction of Vulcan from the brig of Nero’s ship? Then you get the added bonus of seeing him suffer
@44/Jacob H: Ultimately it doesn’t make sense. I’m just trying to minimize the lack of sense as best I can. But I can’t rewrite the actual events of the movie, so there are some things I’m stuck with.
Bottom line, there is no possible way that an ice planet like Delta Vega could be in naked-eye visual range of a really hot planet like Vulcan. They’d have to be sister planets in the same orbit, so they’d get the same illumination from their primary star. True, differences in atmospheric composition, size, internal heat sources, and the like could make a difference in how warm they were relative to each other, but since Vulcan doesn’t have a superdense Venus-like atmosphere, it’s hard to believe the difference could be that great. So I simply cannot accept the scene as shown to be literally true. There’s just no way it could be.
I agree – and even if there was some kind of Earth/Venus type relationship, it would still be just a star-like pinprick of light, like the way Venus looks to us. In the movie it looked Moon-sized, or rather Earth-sized as seen from the Moon. Hence why I joked that nobody told JJ Abrams that Vulcan has no moon. I guess, as an author in the expanded universe, you have to explain it somehow, whereas I can just laugh at how little they seem to know about space.
Maybe, in the time since the Kelvin timeline split, they built themselves an ice moon as a sort of planetary chest freezer.
@34: It’s pretty obvious throughout their space-opera-ish work that Abrams & Co. have no idea how much time and distance are involved in space travel. That’s not so much an issue in the Star Wars ‘verse, where everything runs at plot-speed and it’s not clear (nor does it really matter) how far Tatooine is from (the remains of) Alderaan or how far Hoth, Bespin, and Dagobah are from each other; but Star Trek, though things often move at speed-of-plot in practice, at least has a tradition of nodding to how big space is (and even using it as a plot-crutch in all those episodes where messages are sent and received too late to make a difference).
This irritated me in Star Trek, when Spock watched Vulcan destroyed from what was apparently another planet in possibly another star system (Orci and others now say their Delta Vega was in the Vulcan System, so I guess that’s canon, but my recollection from watching the film is that this isn’t at all clear), and it irritated me in Into Darkness when the Enterprise appears to be in what is seemingly an unpowered fall from the vicinity of the Moon down to Earth, a journey that took the Apollo astronauts around three days each way when they were given a hard push in the right direction and left to float the rest of the way (enough time for Kirk to head down to the cafeteria, get a cup of coffee, maybe take a nap, go down to the ship’s library to see if he can find a technical manual with better instructions than “Try kicking the warp core! Harder!”, and then maybe ask around Engineering to see if anyone else knows how to fix a warp core, and then…).
Sure, Star Trek is full of lousy physics all the time, I know; but again, the franchise has traditionally at least nodded in the direction of science. Especially in the days when they bothered to solicit scripts from science fiction writers and consulted with SF writers and scientists, instead of relying on people whose reading mostly seems to be of the Save The Cat! variety. (::grumble::)
An excellent episode, time travel wonkiness not withstanding. Since the whole bit with the Guardian is just an excuse to go back to Spock’s childhood, I give it a pass. Simply look at it as really being cousin Selek’s interaction with young Spock and ignore the whole time travel nonsense.
It could have worked if the show opened with Kirk and Spock being alone together in a shuttle and telling stories of their past to kill time. Two minutes to set it up and a one minute tag and have the rest of the episode set in the past with no time travel involved. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how The Final Reflection covered it. Preset day bookends of a story set in the past.
That said, it’s a fascination look at the childhood one the most popular Trek character after getting little hints along the way in TOS. DC Fontana knows these characters and it shows. Amanda’s concern for her sons feelings. Sarek being more concerned with how things appear to outsiders and Spock’s improper behavior. Even I-Chaya shows us a side of young Spock that we’ve never seen before.
We even get to see a Vulcan city, ShiKahr. Noticeably different from Eath cities, it was a very well done image. So much so that it later showed up in the background of a shot in the remastered Amok Time. One thing about it showing up in later fiction is that it suddenly turns into the capital of Vulcan and has the Science Academy located in or very near to it. Why can’t it be a fairly remote, even unimportant city on a planet that must have many such settlements? With transporters, it’s not as if Sarek needs live close to the capital. It’s a big planet. Why not explore more of it?
In the end though, it’s a simple story of a young boy learning to say goodbye to a beloved pet and growing up in the process. Well done.
8/10
Star Trek does Old Yeller. We’ve all been there, saying goodbye to a beloved pet. It’s a tough time for any kid, and well told here.
@37/Jeff: “Anybody else ever find it hilarious that Spock continued to wear his uniform under his Vulcan robes? And that nobody ever noticed, even when his sleeve is falling away when he tells Sarek goodbye?”
That uniform design wouldn’t be introduced for about another 25 years, so it’s not as if Sarek would’ve recognized it.
As I mentioned last week, though, this is the only time in all of TAS that any member of the crew changes their wardrobe at all.
@48/eric: With the exception of ST:TMP, the Trek movies have always been far more fanciful than the TV shows generally were. That began with Bennett and Meyer, not Abrams. The Genesis Device in TWOK/TSFS is probably the most ludicrously fanciful, magical technology in the history of the franchise. A five-foot-long torpedo that can somehow transform an entire planet? And that can somehow magically create a planet — and perhaps even a sun — out of nebular gas, even though it was only programmed to restructure the surface of an existing planet? Then there’s the cavalier time-travel logic of TVH, the 20-minute trip to the center of the galaxy in TFF, the illogic of the Nexus in GEN (just for one thing, if it takes only 78 years to orbit the galaxy, a circumference of maybe 150,000 light years, then how does it move slowly enough for its approach to be visible to the naked eye?), the silly fountain-of-youth radiation in INS, and the gibberish thalaron weapon in NEM. The problem isn’t Abrams, the problem is movies. Action-adventure films tend to be less intelligent as a rule.
It’s not time-travel. They just think it is. It’s multi-verse travel with the Guardian giving access to parts of the multi-verse that resonate on a quantum level with the individuals going into the ‘past’.
So when the historians come back from their trip they land in a universe that resonates for their dominate quantum energies but Spock is dead – they missed the best verse.
So Spock goes back in ‘time’ to a verse he resonates with and saves himself.
Then he returns alone to the verse that resonates most closely with his quantum temporal signature.
There, no causality required! Still trying to come up with a theory to reconcile against the original live-action episode though. Perhaps the Guardian has a bubble of space-time that stands independent of the multi-verses.
@43 CLB
Obviously.
I was refering to the “song” when I spoke of an inversion. Somehow I forgot the fanfare even existed, and I think I know why: It’s just a variation on the original, and thus completely unmemorable. The inverted part, though, is a stroke of genius in my opinion.
@42 Jacob H
When inverted music is used seriously (we music guys routinely invert songs and classical pieces for fun, but that doesn’t count) it is usually as a development of the main theme in the same work. So we usually won’t find an inverted theme of show A in show B (I’m sure such examples exist as well, but they’re rare and I personally don’t know any).
It is much more likely to find an inverted version of the main theme of a show as background music in the same show.
ChristopherLBennett gave an example of this in the link he posted at #43, but it’s a pretty subtle one (kudos to Christopher for catching it, as I’ve never noticed it before). But really, once you’re aware that TV composers do this, it isn’t difficult to spot such inversions in your favorite TV show. They do it quite often (and it is done in concert music as well).
BTW, has anybody here noticed that the DS9 theme pretty much begins with the exact same notes of the TNG theme? Different style and different rhythms, but the notes are almost identical.
@45 CLB
Well, I’m not usually the guy to defend Abrams-Trek (and that scene doesn’t make astronomical sense either way) but strangers things have happened in both the real world and the Trek universe.
Maybe Vulcan does have a really strong internal source of heat. Albedo (light reflectivity) could also play a factor. A quick google search tells us that among the moons of jupiter, Europa has a mean temperature of -170 C while Callisto has a mean temperature of -130 C.
So Callisto is 40 degrees C hotter, even though it is further out from Jupiter so it recieves less radiations and is subject to less tidal stress. Something very strange is going on there, and the same thing could have happened to Vulcan and Delta Vega.
That is, if the whole scene (and film) made any sense to begin with…
@48 Eric
Just a minor correction regarding Apollo: They were only “given a hard push” to escape lunar orbit. Since every ounce of fuel was worth more than its weight in gold, they started their actual fall to Earth at a negligible speed. So it really does take 3-4 days to fall down to earth from the vicinity of the moon.
Of-course, none of this changes your point regarding that scene which is 100% valid.
Awsome animated series. The author Keith really knows his stuff.
#52/Steve–
“Perhaps the Guardian has a bubble of space-time that stands independent of the multi-verses.”
Of course it does. In “City on the Edge of Forever”, there would otherwise have been no way for Kirk and Spock to restore the timeline. Once McCoy changed history, the Enterprise vanished, while the landing party did not… because they were within the Guardian’s bubble, which exists in every possible timeline.
That also explains how Spock is able to determine Edith’s two possible futures from a recording made of the Guardian. Not only did it playback Earth’s history, but all possible histories, all of which are observable from within the bubble.
@55/Kevin Parker: The reason Spock had both histories in the tricorder is that he was already recording the original history when McCoy stepped through, then recorded the altered history afterward. There’s no way a single tricorder could have enough memory to contain all possible histories, and no way Spock’s primitive mnemonic memory circuit could isolate just the two specific ones he needed.
There’s no need for a complicated explanation here. It’s a pretty standard rule of Trek time travel (and other fictional time travel) that those individuals within the direct influence of a timeline-changing phenomenon are unaffected by the change. Usually this means the occupants of the time machine itself — for instance, when Marty McFly changed his life in 1985 for the better in Back to the Future, he still remembered the original version of the timeline and was surprised by the changes. But sometimes it includes people within the broader influence of the temporal phenomenon — like the Enterprise-E being protected from the change in First Contact by being in the temporal wake of the Borg sphere. Given that the entire Guardian planet is surrounded by time ripples (another detail of “City on the Edge” that “Yesteryear” ignores), it stands to reason that the Guardian’s temporal influence extends beyond the structure itself — not as far as orbit, since the ship in “City” was wiped from existence, but certainly far enough to protect the people around it.
Although now that I write that, I realize it’s another inconsistency, because McCoy, Grey, and Aleek-Om do get changed even though they’re standing near the Guardian.
@53
“Well, I’m not usually the guy to defend Abrams-Trek (and that scene doesn’t make astronomical sense either way) but strangers things have happened in both the real world and the Trek universe. Maybe Vulcan does have a really strong internal source of heat. Albedo (light reflectivity) could also play a factor.”
Albedo and evolutionary history can definitely make a difference – e.g. the snowball earth , a phase in which our current Earth might have had Antarctic-like temperatures at the equator. A deeply ice-covered Earth can get locked (by the high albedo of the ice) into a state tens of degrees colder than the current earth, and stay locked until CO2 buildup pushes it into a strong greenhouse effect, followed by the ice melting in a short-by-geological timescales. Even two identically-sized planets at the same insolation could therefore be very different if one was in a snowball phase like that and the other wasn’t. Combined with different masses (and hence different amounts of internal activity and hence different outgassing) which could lead to different amounts of CO2 and hence different greenhouse warming even in their normal state, it’s not that impossible. Axial tilt could also make a substantial difference too.
How certain are we that this Billy Simpson fellow was the voice of young Spock? It sounds, to me, an awful lot like Christopher Shea, the original Linus in the old Peanuts specials. Rewatch the episode while imagining young Spock ranting about the Great Pumpkin, and you might see what I mean.
dwarzel: Pretty sure. Here’s an interview with Simpson about doing the voice work…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@28/Ellen: “my guess would be that […] timeline two was where Sarek […] went back in time to save Spock.”
Sarek wouldn’t have had access to time travel technology. The Federation didn’t have time travel technology before the Enterprise stumbled upon the slingshot effect and the Guardian, and as this episode shows, it still seems to be hazardous and erratic.
@49/kkozoriz: “It could have worked if the show opened with Kirk and Spock being alone together in a shuttle and telling stories of their past to kill time.”
I like the setup of the episode, and I think it contributes to its quality. It makes the galaxy feel larger, and that’s a good complement to the intimate main plot.
Would it take many changes to make the episode work? Drop “it happened differently this time”, and it becomes a true causal loop. Have McCoy and the historians recognise Spock, so that the problem only becomes apparent when they beam up, and the inconsistency mentioned in comment #56 is gone too.
@51/Christopher: “The Genesis Device in TWOK/TSFS is probably the most ludicrously fanciful, magical technology in the history of the franchise. A five-foot-long torpedo that can somehow transform an entire planet?”
I always figured that it used some kind of chain reaction. Molecules becoming different molecules, propagating exponentially. Like prions refolding proteins, only more fanciful. I don’t find that harder to believe than some of the stuff from the TV show, e.g. body swap technology.
“And that can somehow magically create a planet — and perhaps even a sun — out of nebular gas, even though it was only programmed to restructure the surface of an existing planet?”
Yep. That bothers me too. If it’s terraforming technology, how can it create a planet? That’s a completely different task! And it shouldn’t happen so fast – according to Carol Marcus, when they tested Genesis in the cave, “the matrix formed in a day. The lifeforms grew later” (whatever “the matrix” is). It doesn’t get any better in TSFS when they discover that the planet contains “all the varieties of land and weather known to Earth within a few hours’ walk”. Because on a “protomatter” planet, temperature and climate are no longer determined by distance from the sun, axial tilt, and the like? – Oh well. I took it as a metaphor to mean that the planet is somehow special.
I can see Sarek having a Cousin “Selek” that he doesn’t know, but recognizes as being a relative (because he looks so familiar…) if Sarek has a really large family. A friend of mine has about 20 aunts and uncles and close to a hundred first cousins. God knows how many second cousins and other more distant relatives. And they all look like relatives. (This is not too uncommon in small towns in the older parts of the South. And I assume other parts of the country.)
@57/Bruce: That’s a good point about Snowball Earth and such. I guess I was premature there. If both planets are habitable, then the temperature difference between them isn’t really that great in a cosmic sense.
But the Kelvin Timeline is supposed to be just an alternate history with its events changed by Nero’s incursion. There’s no way that would cause a whole planet to exist where it didn’t before. If “Delta Vega” shared Vulcan’s orbit in that timeline, it would do so in the Prime timeline too, and it pretty clearly doesn’t. One more reason why I find it impossible to treat the shot of Spock Prime seeing Vulcan’s destruction as being literally true.
@61/wiredog: I have plenty of relatives that I’d never even heard of until I met them at family gatherings — although, admittedly, I was never close to my larger family until a few years ago. But there are still a number of cousins I’ve never met. And Vulcans do seem to have large extended families.
I thought it interesting that Spock(Selek) told Sarek that he was going to the family shrine to “honor our gods”. This is the first time in all of Star Trek that there was any mention of theology, let alone polytheism, in the Vulcan society. Considering how many arguments many human atheists have made about how illogical the concept of God is (and I’m not either agreeing or disagreeing in this forum), I’m wondering, is it logical for Vulcans to believe in them? Is this opening a can of worms (or maybe Ceti eels)?
@63/richf: Yeah, the “gods” line has been puzzling me for decades. There’s no other mention of Vulcan theological belief anywhere else in the franchise. And it’s not in the Foster adaptation — he changed it to “honor our ancestors,” or maybe that was in the script and it was changed to “gods” in recording — so it really surprised me when I saw the episode on home video after a long time with only the books for reference.
Although there are similar things elsewhere. I remember back when my father saw The Search for Spock on TV with me, he wondered where the logic was in the Vulcans retaining all this ritual and pageantry for the fal tor pan. And there’s not a lot of logic to the “Amok Time” mating rituals and customs either.
I suggested in Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic that these things are atavistic symbols they retain not so much because they actually believe in them as that they find the metaphors useful for focusing the mind in certain ways. Vulcans have powerful emotions that need to be controlled, and logic is the main way of doing that, but ancient beliefs and practices developed the way they did because they were effective at directing and managing Vulcan emotions in certain ways. So there can be value in retaining those practices as useful metaphors, even without a belief in their literal truth.
@clb
An important note from DTI’s Ops Manual:
“don’t mix smearing and non-smearing time servers”
Just finished Time Lock. Good to see you working Romance into the series! And in only 90 minutes! That’s right up there with a t-rex getting borged (which was awesomely funny.)
@65/wiredog: Could you spoiler-code that last sentence or something?
@66
Sorry about that! Done!
@krad:
Well, that’s fair enough, then…
@64/ChristopherLBennett: I think Diane Duane’s novel Spock’s World had Spock claiming that Vulcans constantly perceived the presence of God in their minds. Unfortunately for them, God didn’t actually communicate with them in any way, so this didn’t have any particular effect on their morality.
@69/Diona the Lurker: Yet another Vulcan superpower… But here it’s “gods” in the plural, so I’m not sure if it could be considered the same thing.
I think it’s just one of the set pieces from “primitive exotic cultures” Fontana adorns this story with: Andorians as a “warrior race”, the “family shrine to honour our gods”, the “survival test traditional for young males” which is “an ancient rite of warrior days”. It’s a bit reminiscent of Amok Time.
@69/70: The constant perception of the creative entity behind the universe as described in Spock’s World wasn’t really a “superpower” so much as just a comforting awareness. I had a friend in college who was strongly religious, and she once said to me that she felt the same kind of awareness of God watching over her at all times, and she had a hard time believing that I had never had any such awareness. She thought I was just denying it to myself or something, because it had never occurred to her that that sense could be absent, just as it had never occurred to me that it could exist at all.
Although more recently I’ve learned about a rather interesting theory of consciousness as an “attention schema” — the brain’s simulation of its own activity, essentially a virtual machine running within the brain’s software, so that it can be aware of where its attention is focused and redirect it as needed. So essentially the conscious mind is how the brain monitors itself. And it occurred to me — although my friend wouldn’t like this interpretation — that that duality could explain how we could experience the perception that we were constantly being watched by some other mind, because in a sense our thoughts are constantly being watched by our own brains, and it would be easy to mistake that attention as coming from something outside ourselves. And I realized that I actually had always had a sense of being watched myself; as a child, I liked to daydream that I was the star of a TV show and was narrating my life to my viewing audience. And as a teen and adult, I’ve always had a habit of formulating my thoughts as if I was having a conversation with someone, but I always interpreted it as rehearsing future conversations I might hypothetically have with other people. Now I think maybe my friend and I were both sensing the same thing, that sense of being constantly in the presence of a watcher, but she interpreted it as real and divine while I interpreted it as just a metaphor I invented. (Although if the attention schema theory is true, then it’s the other way around: I am just a metaphor my brain invented.)
I’d like to see a copy of the “Yesteryear” script to find whether the original line was “gods” (as Nimoy said) or “ancestors” (as Foster wrote). Did Foster alter the scripted line, or did Nimoy do it? But would a Jewish actor have chosen to change the line to “our gods” instead of “God”?
@69/70: I seem to recall that in The Romulan Way, Diane Duane also described the Vulcans as unusually polytheistic. That they had thousands (or maybe tens of thousands) of recognized gods in their pantheon. I’ll have to go back and find that passage. But I think she implies that Vulcans didn’t set aside any of their old gods, they just continued to recognize all the gods from their history as valid.
@71/Christopher: That’s an interesting idea. I used to imagine that I was a character in a book when I was a child. For a while, I even added mentally “she said” to everything I said. Could that be similar to the feeling of being watched by God? Hmm.
When I read Spock’s World, the idea that Vulcans could perceive the being who created the universe bothered me because it felt like cheating. It’s an open question in the real world, so it should be an open question in Star Trek too. On the other hand, when I read The Wounded Sky later on, where there is a different “god” behind every universe, that didn’t bother me at all. It was an important part of the story, and I loved the story. Since The Wounded Sky is the older book, perhaps it was an obvious choice to give the telepathic Vulcans an awareness of the being already established there.
@73/Jana: I think it’s more about the underlying spiritual and philosophical themes that are found across most of Diane Duane’s works. They tend to share a certain cosmic worldview that’s influenced by elements of a lot of spiritual traditions, and there are a lot of concepts that cross over among the various franchises she writes in — for instance, Hwiii the alien dolphin in TNG: Dark Mirror comes from a culture identical to the Earth cetacean culture in the second Young Wizards book Deep Wizardry, right down to a specific myth/song/ritual referenced by name, and a lot of Rihannsu theology reflects the cosmology and magic rules of the Young Wizards universe. And Dark Mirror‘s portrayal of the Mirror Universe as a reality intrinsically more prone to cruelty and callousness than ours fits in with the broader exploration of the concept in her later fantasy novel Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, in which different parallel universes have different “ethical constants” that make some more intrinsically just than others (much like the Chinese idea of Tian, which we translate as “Heaven” but which really refers to a sort of moral law of nature that causes justice to prevail).
@74/Christopher: “Dark Mirror‘s portrayal of the Mirror Universe as a reality intrinsically more prone to cruelty and callousness than ours”
That’s sad. Very different from “One man can change the present”.
The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Maybe the “ethical constants” can be changed by a stubborn enough person? Or – if we follow the “many worlds interpertation” of quantum theory: Maybe the so-called “constants” are slowly changing over time anyway, and the branch you end up in is dependent on your choices?
I’m not familiar with the fiction works in question, but I just couldn’t let the depressing notion of “an evil-prone universe and there’s nothing one can do about it” uncommented.
@75/Jana and76/OThDPh: No, the “ethical constant” idea doesn’t mean there can be no justice in a universe with a lower constant, just that you have to work harder to achieve justice. It’s like, say, if you’re on a planet with higher gravity, it’s still possible to build skyscrapers or get into space, but it’s a bigger challenge.
In Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, the main character is from a universe with a high ethical constant that manifests essentially as a sentient goddess of Justice, more or less. Trials consist of defendants essentially being judged by the universe, or rather, compelled by the universe to judge themselves honestly and choose the karmic punishment they feel they deserve. So crime can still happen, but it’s harder to get away with it. But in a universe like ours, it’s up to individuals to achieve justice, or not. People can still try to do good and achieve justice, but they won’t have as much help from the universe itself. And by the same token, in a low-constant universe, individuals could still try to do good, but they’d have the universal tendency toward chaos working against them, making it harder.
#77/Chris- Interesting. What sort of constant does our universe hold, then? Is there less justice in our timeline than the original TOS one, in which WW3 was fought in the 1990s and humanity was warp-capable by the end of the 2010s? Are we “behind the curve”?
Interesting question.
Given that TOS spoke of the 1990s a kind of “dark ages” in which “the records from that era are fragmentary”, I think we did alright.
Then again, human history is still a disaster waiting to happen. I sadly think that the Trek maxim of “it’s going to have to get much worse before humanity learns to grow up” is true. So maybe the fact that there were no Eugenic Wars in the 1990’s just mean that the worst is still ahead of us (I’m a real sunshine beam today, ain’t I?).
BTW Warp Drive wasn’t developed in the 2010’s in the TOS universe, Metamorphosis established that Cochrane was born around 2030. So the 2010’s breakthrough (established in Space Seed without any details as occuring in 2018) must have been some advancement in sublight propulsion. And given what’s currently going on with SpaceX and other private space projects, this “prediction” might turn out to be correct.
@71 – Chris: I always ruminate story ideas or courses of action in my head as if having a conversation. I just thought everybody did this…
#79/Omicron – Yes, you are correct: 2267 minus 150 minus 87 = 2030. I think what I’m remembering is the James Blish adaptation of “Space Seed” in Star Trek 2, in which Kirk replies to MacGyvers, “They didn’t have the warp drive until then…”. My guess is that line was in the original script, and deleted from the filmed version for that very conflict… which hadn’t been established yet onscreen, but likely was in the Writer’s Manual.
@81/Kevin Parker: It’s important to remember that TOS was very inconsistent in its chronology, since they were making things up as they went. The Writers’ Guide didn’t say anything about the time frame except that it was “about two hundred years from now,” but it specifically mentioned that they tried to be vague about the era to avoid “getting into arguments about whether this or that would have developed by then.”
“Space Seed” said that sleeper ships were necessary until 2018, when faster space drives made cryogenic suspension unnecessary. The final episode leaves it ambiguous whether that was warp drive or just a faster interplanetary drive. When “Metamorphosis” came along, it did specify that Cochrane had disappeared 150 years ago at 87, but it still hadn’t been established when the series was taking place; even the 23rd-century time frame was never made explicit onscreen until the movies (although James Blish had mentioned it in his novelization of “Space Seed”). TOS taking place in 2266-69 wasn’t codified until The Star Trek Chronology came out in 1993, though there were fan-made chronologies that made a similar assumption (while others put TOS in the first decade of the 23rd century in an attempt to reconcile the movies’ 23rd-century dating with the “200 years” references from “Space Seed” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday”). And the dating for TOS still wasn’t canonical until Voyager: “Q2” established that the 5-year mission ended in 2270.
Journey to Babel established Sarek was 102 years old
In The Neutral Zone, Data states that the year is 2364.
In Sarek, Sarek is said to be 202 years old, placing it 100 years after Journey to Babel. Also, since TNG established that one season equals one year, this episode is two years after The Neutral Zone. Therefore, Journey to Babel took place in (2364+2-100) = 2266. Much sooner than waiting for Voyager to do it. And you don’t have to watch Voyager either.
Sarek may have pinpointed the exact year, but the 2364 mentioned in The Neutral Zone was already enough to tell us that TOS was set around the 2260’s.
In TNG‘s very first episode, we learn of a 137-year-old Dr. McCoy who’s taking a tour of the Enterprise-D. So right there we know that the dear doctor was born in:
2364-137 = 2227
Even though his exact age was never mentioned onscreen in TOS, this establishes that the original series was probably set after 2250, which is enough to rule out the possibility of Cochrane developing Warp Drive in 2018 (he would have been – at most – 5 years old at the time)
Also, Kahn “sleeping for 200 years” never striked me as an inconsistency. The actual number should have been 2267-1996=271 years which I can see Kirk rounding down. Time dilation might have bought that number down further, had the Botany Bay was capable of relativstic speeds (which – considering where it was found – is a distinct possibility)
@84/OThDPh: I wouldn’t say “right there,” because as you pointed out, the 2364 date wasn’t established until 25 episodes later. “Farpoint” had Data claim he was “Class of ’78,” which doesn’t mesh at all with “The Neutral Zone”‘s 2364 date. Indeed, it’s because of the discrepancy between the two episodes that we ended up with an age for McCoy that’s 7-8 years too low compared to DeForest Kelley’s age in TOS.
Rounding 271 down to 200 would be a mathematical error. By convention, you can only round 201-249 down to 200; 250-299 would be rounded up to 300. Of course, people do sometimes make such errors, but I think most people would round 271 to 300, or maybe 250.
Also, I don’t think time dilation would’ve been taken into account; the clear intent of Khan’s “How long?” was “How far in the future have I been awakened?” rather than “How much subjective time elapsed aboard my ship?”
Khan didn’t even realize that space was three dimensional. I don’t think he’d be aware of time dilation.
The rounding down to two hundred could simply be Kirk doing a quick calculation an coming up with two hundred and some years and just going with that. After all, it was a quick answer and not a detailed examination of the history.
(Kirk uses something metal in his hand to break the glass and open the compartment. The man is slid out on a trolley, gasping and awake. He tries to speak.)
KHAN: How long?
KIRK: How long have you been sleeping? Two centuries we estimate. Landing party to Enterprise. Come in.
UHURA: Go ahead, boarding party. We read you.
KIRK: Lock in on McCoy’s beam. He’s transporting back with a casualty we discovered here.
Khan is hardly in a position to need an exact answer at this moment.
Did we ever get a canon confirmation that that was actually McCoy (despite him being played by Kelley and all the hints) in Encounter At Farpoint?
@87/MaGnUs: He was never identified onscreen as anything but “the Admiral,” so not a canonical confirmation, no. But everyone assumes it was McCoy, including reference works and tie-ins.
Yeah, I know tie-ins and other materials assume its him, I think its him too.
I’m afraid that in this episode happens a typical time paradox. Spock remembers that someone called Sarek saved him when he was a kid and adult Spock will tell to kid Spock that name when “later” in the past they both meet. But then… Who named Sarek for the first time? Is something similar to the argument in Interstelar: the travel to the space becouse someone said to go…and that someone are themselves “later” in the past… How could they know it then?
Anyway, these three first episodes of TAS are really better than a lot of TOS ones.
Not Sarek, Selek.
@90/IndyJoserra: There is no “first” time. In a temporal loop, there is no “earlier” version where the event didn’t happen; the event has always caused itself. This seems like a paradox because it defies our assumptions of how causality should work, but a ton of stuff in relativity and quantum physics defies our assumptions, because our assumptions are based on the limited range of conditions we experience in everyday life and thus aren’t equipped to address more exotic situations. Which is where mathematics comes in, because it lets us calculate what would happen when our intuition and common sense don’t apply. And mathematically speaking, a self-causing loop is perfectly consistent and possible. Indeed, some physicists theorize that retrocausality — information coming back from the future — is an integral part of everyday quantum processes, in which case events that retroactively cause themselves are the norm rather than the exception.
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett Wow, that’s a very good point. I’m willing to accept that as a scientific / logical answer to this “plot-hole” that bugged me for months
@86 kkozoriz
I don’t see any reason to think either of those statements are accurate. The only thing “two-dimensional thinking” represents is that Khan is not experienced in maneuvering in space.
I’ve heard it claimed (and I don’t have references either way) that people in general tend not to look up, so things happening above them tend not to be noticed. Now, that is certainly not universal, but I can certainly see it. Humans don’t climb much in everyday life (and when they do it is usually stairs in a confined space so there is no reason to look upwards as if they were climbing a tree.)
So, Khan just isn’t used to it. He certainly knows that there is an “up and down” in space, just as I’m sure he would be completely family with the concept of time dilation. Its just not in the front of his mind most of the time.
Doesn’t make much sense but otherwise executed pretty well.
It feels jarring to not have the Original Series opening anymore. TNG also requires some getting used to now that I’m watching it.
The writer of this article asked “How does the team of historians looking at Vulcan’s past change the timeline? Why would just the act of looking at it cause that change in history?”
The answer is stated by the characters in the episode. They said “you can’t be in two places at the same time”. The idea was that “originally”, Spock had used the Guardian of Forever to go back in time as Selek, but because he “later” used the Guardian of Forever to go back to Orion’s past (not Vulcan’s past, as you stated), the Guardian accidentally erased Spock’s previous time travel by letting him time travel again. But if using the Guardian more than once causes previous trips to be erased, that causes an impossible situation….
If using the Guardian twice causes your previous time travel changes to be erased, and using the Guardian to visit Orion caused the erasure of Spock’s visit to his younger self, that implies he used the Guardian to visit his younger self BEFORE using it to visit Orion. But he doesn’t remember using it for that. That means visiting Orion happened BEFORE visiting his younger self. And visiting Earth (in the City on the Edge of Forever), happened even earlier in his personal timeline, so visiting Orion should have erased Spock’s visit to Earth. That would mean McCoy used the Guardian, and Spock was not there to help Kirk find McCoy, which means McCoy would save Edith Keeler, and there would be no Federation. But there is still a Federation in this episode. So that means Spock’s visit to Earth was NOT erased when he visited Orion. Therefore, using the Guardian more than once does NOT erase your previous trips. And if that’s the case, then visiting Orion would NOT erase Spock’s visit to his younger self.
Some people say that time loops where you go back and save yourself has “no beginning” or “no first time”. But that makes no sense. All time loops MUST have a beginning. It’s like taking a long piece of paper and folding it into a mobius strip, and then saying “see, it had no beginning or end”. Well, yes, NOW it has no beginning or end, but that’s because you took the paper and folded it. BEFORE you folded it, it was not a loop. If time loops or predestination paradoxes are even possible, there MUST have been an original timeline that had no loop. But then someone grabbed the “paper” and looped it back, and then it became mobius strip. After folding it, THEN it’s a permanent loop… but the loop didn’t make itself. A time travelled made it. Obviously, when that happens, the first timeline is erased, and nobody remembers it, so to observers of the time loop, it SEEMS like it was always that way, and there was no beginning, no creation of the loop. But they are wrong. The FIRST timeline had no loop, until someone time travelled.
Here’s an example, using Spock’s visit to his younger self (ignore the idea that using the Guardian erases previous trips)…
Maybe there was originally a timeline where young Spock did NOT get attacked by the creature. Maybe Spock and his one of his enemies are at a time portal. The enemy jumps into the portal and goes back to when Spock was young. Before Spock jumps into the portal, his enemy finds younger Spock in the desert, finds the creature, and aims it in Spock’s direction. Younger Spock gets killed, but older Spock is not erased, because he’s close to the time portal. Then Spock jumps into the portal, meets Sarek, has to think up an excuse for why he’s there, uses the name Selek, then searches for his younger self and saves him, but the older Spock gets killed, and the enemy gets killed too. Younger Spock isn’t killed, so the timeline is restored, but it’s not EXACTLY the same timeline, since younger Spock remembers almost being killed and seeing his cousin killed. This is now timeline 2 and has replaced timeline 1. Spock grows up, and only remembers the timeline this way. When he’s older, he meets his enemy again, and the enemy again goes back in time, and Spock chases him. This 2nd Spock remembers Selek, and then realizes that HE is Selek. So this 3rd timeline is a little different again, and timeline 2 doesn’t exist anymore. Each time Spock and his enemy go back in time, they create a slightly different past, and a new timeline. After several loops, the changes become smaller and smaller, until each loop becomes exactly identical. Once that happens, there are no more new timelines…just the same timeline repeating. In that time loop, older Spock returns to his present instead of dying or being erased. That is when it becomes a permanent time loop. In the permanent time loop, it seems to Spock that he had “always” saved himself, and it seems like there was no beginning. But if someone living outside of time was watching each of those timelines, they would be able to spot the first timeline, and recognize how a loop was formed, and how it became permanent. But that observer would not say “there was no first timeline”. There WAS a first timeline, a timeline where young Spock was not even in danger. But only that outside observer would be able to see how the loop started. The Spock who exists in the permanent stable time loop would not see it.
And then, Spock tries time travelling again, and accidentally breaks his personal time loop, so he has to purposely recreate it. Again, it seems to him that he’s restoring a time loop that had “always” existed, but really he’s restoring a time loop that had a beginning that he just can’t see.
Time travel does NOT mean that effect can happen before cause. Cause still always happens before effect…it’s just that time does not always travel “straight ahead”…sometimes it goes back, and then forward again. To a person living in seemingly-always-forward time, it SEEMS like effect came before time, but from time’s point of view, cause still came before effect. A timeloop’s viewpoint of past and future is different than a normal observers past and future, but cause still always comes “before” effect. You just have to adjust your viewpoint to see that.
@96/Rob: “The answer is stated by the characters in the episode. They said “you can’t be in two places at the same time”. “
Yes, I’m sure Keith is aware that the episode asserts that. The point is that the assertion doesn’t make sense. Why would just watching a past event constitute actually making it reoccur? Sure, you can attribute it to the Guardian’s nigh-magical power over time, but it’s an arbitrary assertion to make the story happen.
Rob: Your post shows more effort put into temporal mechanics than D.C. Fontana made when she wrote the episode. What Christopher said — it still doesn’t make sense, and the fact that you needed a 1000-word post to try to make it make sense just proves the point….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was hoping someone would reply who understood my previous post.
Christopher didn’t understand what I was saying. He still thinks that the episode is saying that the past was changed because they looked at it. It’s not the looking that caused it. It was having Spock in Orion’s past which caused another version of Spock to disappear from Vulcan’s past. I disagree with D.C. Fontana that one trip in the Guardian would erase your other trips, unless you went to the same time and place again.
Krad is correct that I put more thought into temporal mechanics than D.C. Fontana did. But Krad also didn’t understand. He seems to still be thinking what Christopher thinks, that the episode is saying the past was changed by LOOKING. It wasn’t.
Making fun of the fact that I used a lot of words (something autistic people do) doesn’t change the fact that I was right. The episode is not saying what you think it was saying. And my post is not that long because of explaining what really happened in the episode. Only the first 2 paragraphs are about that, not including the last sentence of the 2nd paragraph. That’s where the next topic started. I was explaining why D.C.’s idea that the Guardian only allows one trip to be kept in the timeline doesn’t make sense. So both of you are right that the episode doesn’t make sense…but you are wrong to say that the episode says LOOKING changes the past. It does not say that.
If you actually read my whole post, you’ll see that my 2nd topic was not about the episode itself. It was about the pre-destination paradox idea that writers keep using. I needed a lot of words to explain exactly why THAT idea doesn’t make sense.
So my post was about why certain things DON’T make sense, yet both of you thought I was saying the episode DOES make sense. It doesn’t, and I didn’t say it does. I just said that people are misunderstanding what caused Spock’s childhood to change. It was NOT caused by “looking”.
Rob: The difference is irrelevant. You’re merely restating what the episode asserts. The point is that, either way, the assertion is nonsensical. There’s no reason it should work that way, except that the episode needs it to.
Rob: I wasn’t making fun of how many words you use, and I apologize that it came across that way.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@100 – “There’s no reason it should work that way, except that the episode needs it to.”
Star Trek time travel in a nutshell.
Changing how the Guardian of Forever in each of it’s three episodic appearances. From “I was made to offer the past in this manner. I cannot change.” to being able to call up an exact date to turning it into a doorway and a man with a newspaper.
Or, somehow, changing the dates of the Eugenics Wars results in the same, supposedly, future we see in TOS. Millions of people not dying in 1992-96 and millions more dying decades later has no effect on the future.. Really?
I rather like how Bruce Wayne described time travel in The Flash. The timelines are a big bowl of spaghetti and when you time travel, some of the sauces moves from one strand to the next. Good luck finding the “prime” pasta.
Every time someone travels through time, something, somewhere changes
I think Fontana refers to some of the events of this episode in her novel “Vulcan’s Glory”, which the internet says was published in 1989 (I’m not home to check my copy right now!)
It’s also a fascinating novel because it shows Spock on the Enterprise under Pike, and one of its strands shows Spock’s journey from being more willing to embrace emotion, to essentially rejecting it altogether (at least outwardly).