One Classic Star Trek Episode Changed the Time-Travel Game Forever
What if the greatest episode of a TV show technically never even happened?
While many science fiction franchises can stake a claim for the best time-travel stories of all time, it’s hard to argue against the huge temporal influence of Star Trek. Yes, various shows and movies are all about exploring the final frontier of space, but more often than not, the best Star Trek episodes are really time treks.
Thirty-five years ago, on February 19, 1990, in the middle of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s pivotal third season, the show dropped one of its best episodes, “Yesterday’s Enterprise.” Not only was this a fantastic character piece that brought back Denise Crosby as Tasha Yar, but it also demonstrated what Patrick Stewart could do as a slightly harder-edged, alternate version of Jean-Luc Picard. But, for all of its classic moments, “Yesterday’s Enterprise” has another enduring legacy: It introduced a new kind of sci-fi episode for sci-fi TV, one that suggested that when it came to paradoxes, you could have it both ways. Spoilers ahead.
The Enterprise-D meets the Enterprise-C in "Yesterday's Enterprise."
When the predecessor of the USS Enterprise-D, the Enterprise-C, emerges from a temporal rift, the present tense of the cozy world of TNG suddenly changes. The bridge is darker, the Enterprise is a warship, and Worf is nowhere in sight because now, the Federation has been warring with the Klingon Empire for 22 years. In this timeline, Enterprise-C was last seen defending the Klingon outpost on Narendra III from a Romulan attack in the year 2344. Now, it’s 2366, the then-present tense of TNG, but the tenuous peace between the Federation and the Klingons had fallen apart at that exact moment. Had the Enterprise-C gone down fighting, the Klingons would have believed the Federation was a worthy ally, but because it appeared that the Enterprise-C ran away from a fight, conflict eventually erupted between the Klingons and Starfleet.
The butterfly effect event that this episode retroactively establishes didn’t come from any previously established Star Trek movie or TV series, and it wasn’t until 1991 that The Undiscovered Country actually established how the Klingon/Federation peace process began. While the canon of Star Trek and the history leading up to TNG might seem complicated now, it’s important to remember that at this point, in 1990, TNG was building this lore, all for the purposes of telling a topsy-turvy alternate universe story. Before “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the Enterprise-C was simply a sculpture on the wall of the briefing room of the Enterprise-D. We had no idea its captain was Rachel Garrett (Tricia O’Neil), nor that it ever traveled in time.
The return of Tasha (Denise Crosby) in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” was an incredible retcon and paradox all in one.
The origins of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” came from two different story pitches that the TNG writers and producers were mulling over at the time. The final writing credits for the episode are lengthy, including writers Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, Hans Beimler, and Richard Manning. But the original story pitch came from Trent Christopher Ganino.
“‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ was a spec script,” Ronald D. Moore explained on the 2013 TNG Blu-ray commentary. “In the original teleplay that I had, the Enterprise-C comes through the rift, its commanded by Richard Garrett, and timeline does not shift.”
So, in the first concept, conflict was more about Picard wrestling with a decision to hide the future from the doomed crew of the other ship. This is relevant, because in a sense, the original pitch implied a predestination paradox; if the timeline didn’t change than the Enterprise-C was always meant to briefly go to the future, only to be sent back. What the final version of the story did was more radical: the story still ends-up being a loop, but the Enterprise-C briefly creates an alternate timeline, from which an alternate Tasha Yar is created. This Tasha Yar later goes back to the past of what is, essentially, the foundation of both timelines.
This detail is crucial to understanding the nimble way “Yesterday’s Enterprise” approached time travel. When Garrett loses her life in the present, Yar volunteers to go back in time to help the Enterprise-C because they’re short-handed. She also does this because Guinan’s perception of the shifting timeline leads her to tell Tasha that if history is restored, Tasha will lose her life earlier, as she did in TNG Season 1’s “Skin of Evil.”
Essentially, even though everything about this alternate present is worse than the TNG status quo, the upside is that Tasha didn’t lose her life during her first year on the Enterprise. This wrinkle works extremely well because it makes the stakes both deeply personal for Picard, but also for the audience. Is there a way for the timeline to be restored and for Tasha to live? Must this be another tragic “City on the Edge of Forever”-style time travel story?
The answer to these questions is yes and no. Much later, in the Season 5 premiere, “Redemption II,” we learn that the alternate Tasha did live, for a time, but was later murdered by her Romulan husband. Presumably, this means that in the backstory of TNG, at some point, there are two Tasha Yar’s alive in the 2240s and 2250s — one who is the original Tasha who grew up on Turkana IV, and the second Tasha, who traveled back in time from the alternate timeline in “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
The darker version of TNG actually allowed the rest of the timeline to exist.
Essentially, TNG created a loophole that allowed the series to use a paradox to its advantage. It would have been impossible for the Enterprise-C to safely get back in time without Tasha, and therefore restore the timeline. So once the timeline was restored, and Tasha was in the past, she didn’t cease to exist because she was so integral to the timeline that she saved, even though she came from an alternate universe.
To this day, Trekkie heads are still spinning trying to work it all out, but since “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” other sci-fi shows like Doctor Who, 12 Monkeys and Loki have presented timey-wimey plotlines that have arguably been more convoluted. What makes the paradoxes of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” so compelling 35 years later is that the performances, writing, and action are so good in this episode that you hardly have time to think about the implications of the ending.
Essentially, “Yesterday’s Enterprise” features the destruction of not just the Enterprise-C, but the alternate Enterprise-D, too. So, it wasn’t just Tasha that gave her life to make sure the timeline was reset, but Picard and the rest of the regular crew, too. The episode ends with the audience knowing that two Enterprise crews sacrificed their lives to make sure the “real” Enterprise crew lived. This episode never happened, technically, and yet if it hadn’t happened, none of the other episodes could exist.
