If you are at all familiar with glove box—meaning that sort of device that allows one of a scientific bent to manipulate tools and substances without subjecting oneself to whatever dangers might be latent in said substances, be they radiological or corrosive or poisonous or perhaps, I don’t know, magical—you’ll have at least an inkling of the fact that this is not an interface you would want standing between you and, say, urination. Especially if you’d just finished consuming a heroic amount of beer at a ballpark and were waiting for your friend to score the autograph of some forgettable relief pitcher. Relief, in such a scenario, can be an urgent need, conjuring up within the body the unmistakable symptoms of imminent death—abdominal pains, sweating, fever. Under such duress the last thing you would want between you and the numinous nirvana of the urinal is a set of heavy rubber gloves stitched into the side of a plexiglass box. I speak from hard-earned experience.1
At its best Star Trek is like a competent if threadbare college theater production—a little overly dramatic, the props and costumes a bit grubby, but crackling with the energy of fresh-faced youths who believe that they’re pioneers of some universal truth, even if—maybe especially if—they aren’t.
At its worst it handles its subject through the mediation of a glove box.
“Tomorrow is Yesterday” falls pretty firmly in the latter camp, though it has a few reedeeming characteristics. It is curiously the first major work of science fiction to correctly predict the decade of the first moon landing, although it’s off by a year. It debuted the day before three Apollo astronauts burned to death on the launch pad, which is not a meaningful correlation so much as an interesting bit of trivia. It’s worth bearing in mind the milieu in which the original Star Trek operated, if only to observe the push and pull between the show and the larger culture. Mostly pull at this stage.
To wit: the highlight of this episode—which begins in media res as the Enterprise recovers from being thrown back to Earth in the 1960s as the result of tangling with something called a “dark star”2—is undoubtedly the interspersed stock footage of F-104 Starfighters taxiing and taking off somewhere somewhen, resplendent in their mirror-like aluminum skins. I’ve always had a preference for propeller aircraft over jets but these sons of bitches look like diamond solitaires and I could watch this episode a hundred times just for the 20 seconds they’re on screen.
So one of these F-104s, piloted by a fellow by the name of Captain John Christopher—a fictional name if ever I’ve heard one—spots the Enterprise floundering through the clouds like, well, like a plastic model hanging on a string if we’re being honest. Kirk and the gang freak out, thinking this guy might fire on them, so they grab the plane with their tractor beam. They quickly discover that Lockheed did not design their fighter-bombers to be snatched out of flight by 23rd century tractor beams, and as the jet breaks up they are forced to beam the pilot onboard.
Most of the story plays out in a series of sneaks and confrontations at Captain Christopher’s airbase as Kirk and Spock and Sulu attempt to retrieve the plane’s photographs, which apparently were transmitted to a series of old reel to reel tape machines. Spock seems to know exactly which tape to steal, but they’re interrupted by a group of hapless guards. There are a few absurd fights, including one in which Kirk leaps over a lunging attacker by pulling himself up from the top of a door frame like a gymnast doing a routine on the rings. Kirk always had a way of moving about in the most complicated possible manner when simple and direct would suffice.
The real core of the story comes when Kirk and Spock wrestle with the grandfather paradox—that old chestnut in which you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, in the process erasing your own existence. This is not the first time Star Trek dealt with time travel (“The Naked Time” featured some incidental time traveling—it was in fact originally meant to be part and parcel of this very episode), but it’s the show’s first attempt to deal with the consequences. Unfortunately it’s the Duplo version of the thesis: “I have run a computer check on all historical tapes,” says Spock, “They show no record of any relevant contribution by John Christopher.” Unfortunately they discover that although Christopher is not destined to make even the faintest impression upon the historical record, his son will have an important role in the future of space travel and so they’d better make sure he ends up where he belongs.
Of course, “relevant contribution” suggests that Kirk and Spock possess absolute knowledge of what is actually historically consequential, which, despite the all-knowing smugness of the ship’s computer, is of course a kettle of fish all its own. History, as any historian born in the last hundred years will tell you, is not the same thing as the past. Chaos theory was active in the lab in 1967 but it would be more than thirty years before Jeff Goldblum brought the idea to popular awareness by way of trying to seduce Laura Dern on an island full of dinosaurs. For Gene Roddenberry, the whole notion of “contribution” was still very much redolent of the Great Man theory, and the brain trust on the Enterprise behave very much like Enlightenment philosophers confidently picking up discreet paradoxes like they were dirty diapers and not explosions of shit covering all the walls plus the floor and ceiling.
The actual physical mechanism for time travel is equally clunky: speed toward the sun real fast, go back in time; slingshot around the sun and head back out at high speed, go forward in time. This makes absolutely no sense, and the ship’s chronometers indicating the year as though it were a fixed property of the universe through which they were traveling is the fuzzbrained icing atop this cake of improbability. Still, the plot needed a mechanism to let the crew know exactly when to beam Christopher back into himself at the exact moment he originally had been beamed up,3 so we get little mechanical chronometers running forward and backward like odometers at a crooked auto shop. What can I say? You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.
Props to the writers for at least taking a stab at these things though, I guess. Star Trek would plumb these depths many times over its life, from the original series to the countless, ever more anemic spinoffs. It’s a favorite of sci-fi fans I suppose—it tickles the part of the brain that thinks there’s actual science in the fi. I get it. I like a good circle of causality as much as the next fella, though eventually I’d stumble across Douglas Hofstadter. After that, the proximity between this baloney and the domain of Fisher-Price toys narrowed, draining the show, in my mind, of any significance, leaving but a whiff of nostalgia and those sizzling Starfighters.
The pee pee part, not the glove box.
The term “black hole” had been around for a while but wouldn’t impinge upon the popular imagination until the physicist John Archibald Wheeler used it in a talk at the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies later this same year.
How did they even know you could do this?