“Yesterday’s Enterprise” (3×15)
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This is episode is one of my all-time favorites. I love how:
- it fills in some of the gap in the timeline between the Enterprise-A and the Enterprise-D;
- the Enterprise-C looks like it fits in between the Enterprise-A and the Enterprise-D in terms of technology and design;
- the way that it understands how the sacrifices of a handful of individuals can change the course of history
With the explosion of new Trek content in the Paramount+ era, the show I want most is an Enterprise-C miniseries with a young Captain Garrett. I feel like that era, when the Wrath of Khan red uniforms were still in use but the undershirts with the ribbed collars had been retired, is one of the most unexplored eras in the canon.
This episode is especially unusual because our point of view character is the normally enigmatic and mysterious Guinan. Even though she has relatively little screen time in the episode, putting Whoopi at the center of the episode in the same year she’d give an Oscar-winning performance in Ghost instantly elevates the episode. And whereas usually Guinan shares only a tiny fraction of what she knows, here she’s butting up against the limits of her El-Aurian extrasensory perception; her memories have been overwritten by the new timeline just like everybody else’s, but she has a vague instinct that points her to what has changed. It says volumes about the Picard/Guinan relationship that this Picard trusts her with so much on the basis of so little.
It’s one of the few examples of time travel in Trek where time is explicitly rewritten rather than branching off. Star Trek: First Contact was similarly timey-wimey, but the Enterprise-E followed the Borg into the past so quickly that there wasn’t time to consider whether they were in an alternate universe or a rewritten timeline. This episode makes sense if you accept the “Loki” model of time travel, in which changes to the past spiral off into alternate timelines unless intervention steers things back on course; by pruning these alternate timelines like a gardener, you can preserve a single, authoritative timeline. The events of the episode are a closed loop, self-correcting. The alternate timeline of this episode only exists for the several hours required for the Enterprise-C to complete its brief visit to the future.
It’s also a unique episode in that it shows an alternate timeline that diverged fairly recently, such that some of the older characters had already reached adulthood by the time it happened. This Picard is a wartime captain with very different responsibilities and experiences than “our” Picard. But the two Picards were one and the same for nearly the first four decades of their lives. At the point of divergence, Picard had been a Starfleet officer for 17 years, and had been the captain of the Stargazer for over a decade. So he remembers what Starfleet was before the war with the Klingons, what it was supposed to be.
It also gives the writers a do-over when it comes to the end of Tasha Yar’s story, after the shocking but empty way she died in the first season after Denise Crosby asked to be released from her contract. The Prime Tasha Yar died by errant energy blast. This Tasha Yar sacrifices herself to save billions.
It’s also satisfying to see more than just cosmetic changes. Shows can rarely afford to bring back past cast members or bench current series regulars, but in this case it made sense: Crosby was willing and able to come back, and the more militarized Starfleet evidently didn’t have counselors in their senior staff, so no Troi and thus no emergency over Vagra II. Likewise, it makes sense that Worf would not be an officer in Starfleet in a timeline where the Federation had been at war with the Klingons for so long. It’s one of the things that bugs me about the Mirror Universe, that two timelines that diverged thousands if not millions of years prior would produce near identical ships with the same senior officers.
And there’s something powerful and heroic about the crew of the Enterprise-C, confronted with a no-win scenario, choosing to do their duty and sacrifice themselves for billions of people they’ve never met. By losing the battle, they win the war before it even starts.
One observation that stood out to me this time around: The militarized version of the Enterprise-D bridge in the alternate timeline has a lot in common with the design of early 25th century Starfleet bridges: The dim lighting, with the glowing LCARS as the primary source of illumination; the captain’s chair on a raised platform, with a handful of steps down to the conn and operations station; and the dark flooring. Given the rough few decades in the Prime continuity — battles with the Borg, the Dominion War, the destruction of the Utopia Planitia Fleetyards on the surface of and in orbit around Mars, the aborted evacuation of the Romulan Star Empire and its subsequent collapse following the Romulus’s star going supernova — it makes a certain amount of sense that the Prime Starfleet would feel a bit more like the alternate Starfleet of this episode. I’m hoping that after a period of peace and regrouping, Starfleet will get back to a more optimistic place, with a design aesthetic to match.
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