“Time’s Arrow” (5×26 & 6×01)
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Tonight’s two-parter closed out season 5 and kicked off season 6. It’s a wonderfully timey-wimey story that takes full advantage of having two characters that don’t age like humans do.
It’s also a different version of time travel than Trek usually employs. Usually, time travel on Trek is cause and effect; either through the creation of an alternate universe, as in the Kelvin trilogy, or through characters going back in time to change the future. In this episode, the events that trigger the time travel are only possible because the time travel has already occurred; Guinan’s entire friendship with Picard is a predestination paradox.
I also loved the idea that Data’s head would make it back to the Enterprise the long way around. When Data believes his decapitated head is proof that his life is finite, and derives comfort rather than dread from that belief, it really sets up his story arc in the first season of “Picard”.
The period stuff in the nineteenth century feels like the kind of story the show would normally do in the holodeck, except this time it’s for real. If Mark Twain wasn’t really like Jerry Handin portrayed him, well, he ought to have been. A wonderfully colorful performance. And while 1890s San Francisco wasn’t a great time or place to be black, it’s a time and place where two characters perceived to be black would at least not be completely out of place. Lots of black people headed west after the Civil War, and a lot of the racist passions in California at the time were more focused on Chinese immigrants.
Whoopi Goldberg is always wonderful as Guinan, and she’s especially wonderful here as two versions of the same person: one who is very early in her life, and another who is fairly ancient. I liked the care taken in the writing with the different power dynamics between Picard and Guinan in the two time periods, with their roles reversed depending on who was at the beginning of the relationship and who was at the end of the relationship. They’re both terrific feature film caliber actors, and they’re both always terrific together.
All in all, time travel is very much overused in Trek, especially in the Berman/Braga era, but this was one of the better examples.
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