Monday, July 29, 2013

Tomorrow is Yesterday: TOS Season 1 Episode 19


Sorry for missing a week, and being late this week. I don't have time this week to take screenshots, which is a shame because I find that part of it fun, but I watched an episode last night so I figured I'd write a quick post today.

Plot Synopsis

We start in "present day" Earth, the air force sees a UFO that of course winds up being the Enterprise. It turns out that the Enterprise had gotten caught in a gravity well of some particularly powerful star and had to use full power to get away. There was a slingshot effect that wound up sending them back in time. They are a little disoriented at first, but once they get their bearings they realize the air force has scrambled a jet to intercept them. They try to catch it in a tractor beam but it destroys the plane and they have to beam the pilot aboard. (I was distracted at this point, so I may have missed some finer points, but this seems to be the gist of it)

They now have a conundrum, they can't send the pilot back because he knows too much about them and it will alter the past. Nevertheless, they seem to have no qualms about telling him all kinds of stuff, for example, Spock tells him that he will have a son and the son will be important to history. They also spend a lot of time beaming down to the military base and trying to destroy records of their ship in the sky. Ultimately they accomplish this, but wind up with a second person from the base on the ship.

Now they just need to get home, and they need to find a way to return these 2 guys to the surface without screwing up the timeline (further). They can slingshot around the sun and head back to their own time, but before they go forward in time, they will go backward a little as they approach the sun and they can beam those guys down at the moment when they were picked up. Done and done!

Back and Forth

I didn't understand exactly why they would go backward in time a little bit before they went forward. Spock said something about them going backward when they approach the sun. I guess since the slingshot will fling them into the future as they are exiting the gravity of the sun, they were saying that approaching the sun will send them back in time. I'm pretty sure this made no sense at all.

Memory

Let's assume the back in time thing makes sense. Wouldn't the guys they beam down still have the memory of what had happened to them. It seemed that they were put right back where they were and their memory of the intermediate events was erased. That didn't really make sense either.

Rating

5/10

I love time travel stories, but this one didn't really have much going for it. They talked of not changing the past, but then they did a bunch of stuff that would change the past. Plus a lot of time seemed to just be wasted running around on the military base.

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