Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 78 All Our Yesterdays
This episode confused the hell out of me as a kid. First Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are in a high tech facility. Then McCoy and Spock are in an arctic wasteland with a hot girl in a fur bikini and Kirk is in merry Old England. Challenging for my young brain. The entire thing was set up as a device to allow the residents of Sarpeidon to escape the destruction of their world by running back into their worlds past. Kirk gets accused of witchcraft (instead of sleeping with the local witches) and Spock falls in love with a cave woman.
Not the best written episode IMO. I think my main issue has to due with Spock reverting to the the level of the primitive Vulcans. As a plot device this is weak (if we were to travel back in time several billion years would we all revert to primordial ooze?) but the fact is I like Spock as Spock. With the notable exception of the great episode Amok Time I really didn’t like it when they gave Spock emotions. It is not his character and really felt unnatural (in Amok Time his emotions were the result of perfectly logical events, which is why that episode works for me. Plus I love the fight scene). Time travel is a tricky beast and by the end of season 3 they had pretty much milked every time travel story they could. If the entire population of Sarpeidon had traveled back in time isn’t it remotely possible that one of the billions might have done something to change the past? Wasn’t that the point of City on the Edge of Forever? I am going to put this on the danger of accepting fan scripts. This episode was written by fan Jean Lisette Aroeste. Granted she also wrote Is There No Truth in Beauty, a better episode, but even that one was problematic. If you are so out of ideas you need to turn to fan fiction it might be time to hang it up (which they did one episode later).
(History repeats image courtesy of the Cheap T Shirt category)
I’ll probably knock out The Savage Curtain (ugh) tomorrow and then see a new movie tomorrow night. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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