Time Travel has always been a core sci fi trope for the Star Trek Universe. Whether it’s going back to the 1980’s to save the whales, or jumping ahead to see the Enterprise-J to avert a time war, it seems the heroes of Starfleet can’t fly into space without wandering into a temporal investigations nightmare.
Recently we’ve seen time travel play a key part in the star Trek Universe once again from Discovery changing era’s from the 23rd to 32nd century, both Picard and Strange New Worlds dropping in to pivotal moments in the early 21st and the Prodigy crew caught in a time travel nightmare trying to find Captain Chakotay and the mixed history and fate of the USS Protostar.
So this September, why not look back at former time travelling adventures in Trek’s past?
All Good Things, TNG, Season 7 episode 25/26
Starting the list on a high is The Next Generations final episode, closing the series in style in an era-jumping episode that questioned the possibilities of humanities exploration through the stars and breaking limitations our thinking.
Jumping through three era’s, Captain Picard finds himself being drawn to both his future and his past while trying to balance those lifetimes in the present. In the future he’s an old man, living alone on his family vineyard as he suffers the effects of a degenerative disease that makes everyone doubt him when he tries to explain whats happening. In the past, he’s just taken command of the Enterprise before the Farpoint mission and trying not to expose all he knows about his shipmates future.
In all era’s there’s a mystery; a phenomenon that’s moving backwards in time and to perfectly round off the series, it all ends exactly where it began; with Q. In Encounter at Farpoint, the shows first episode, he puts humanity on trial for their arrogance, disbelieving they’re as ready for exploring strange new worlds. In All Good Things we learn that trial never ended and he’s thrown them a mystery to test them and how their minds can expand to the infinite possibilities of the universe.
Struggling through all era’s at first, the phenomenon in the present (2370) is smaller than it is in the past (2364) where in the future, there’s initially no sign of it. But thanks to Q taking him back to Earth before humanity existed, Picard knows that it will grow in reverse of linear time and disrupt evolution; meaning humans won’t exist. Investigating through the three era’s they discover that their future selves create the anti-time disruption in 2395. Using the skill of the crew in three time zones, they have to find a way to eliminate the anomaly and stop it wiping out humanity’s chance of ever existing.
Initially the episode was devised as one in which Q had gone mad, with his senility causing the universe to undo itself. Pitched by Ron Moore, the episode was pushed in another direction with Michael Pillar suggesting the multiple-timeline events leading to Moore co-writing the finale with Brannon Braga whilst the duo also co-wrote the planned movie debut.
While they spent a year agonising over the film script, battling the need of every studio demand, the duo hammered out the first draft of All Good Things in a matter of days with only a few tweaks needed to finalise the piece.
Going back to the first episode allowed the crew to show their starting point alongside the finish line for the series, and threw in some nostalgic elements such as Chief O’Brien and Tasha Yar returning, alongside Counsellor Troi’s “Cheerleader and go-go boots” uniform. In the future, we see a world beyond the Enterprise where Riker, now an Admiral, commands the Enterprise as his flagship; Crusher is Captain of a medical aid ship and Picards ex wife; Geordie’s happily retired while Worf is working with the Klingon Empire. And Data’s a professor in England surrounded by cats because why not.
There’s quite a lot of layers going on on the episode., In the present the crew have bonded and merged and have become he embodiment of seven seasons of TV viewing. Those present in the pre-Farpoint mission however, don’t know nor trust their new Captain who is currently chasing Q’s appearance and acting – to their eyes – irrationally. While in the future no one trusts Picard because of his illness, but bend over backwards to indulge their old Captain; even if just to humour him.
Overall the episode is a bit of a hybrid of time travel, alternate realities and outright illusion. But it highlights the journey and bonding the crew have faced over the years and what could happen to them if they let their kinship become ruptured through pettiness.
It might have some dodgy science and one of the biggest plot holes in TNG history (how can future Picard return to see the anomaly forming if it’s growth reversed in time?) but it offers both a thoughtful and nostalgic ending to the Next Generation era and lets Q show his strengths as a guide more than an antagonist, hinting that all this time he’s been pushing for humanity to realise it’s potential.
YEAR OF HELL, Voyager Season 4, Episodes 8/9
Once upon a time, a man learned how to change the past to create a better future. That future eliminated the one thing dearest to him. His wife.
This two parter is a bit of a cheat. The show doesn’t deal directly with time travel, but instead on Krenim scientist Annorax changing the timeline to try and restore his world to it’s former glory by erasing people, places and whole worlds from the timeline to try and find that one butterfly effect moment that could undo his past mistakes.
Annorax was an intriguing character to focus on. A man who had an idea and created an incredible invention, but couldn’t live with the consequences of his early mistakes in using it. In his first trial he neglected to see every piece of the puzzle he was eliminating, which included a species finding a cure for a plague on his own world.
Though none of those mistakes were as devastating to him as accidentally causing the erasure of the colony his wife was from; turning his mission to restore the Krenim back to being a huge military power, to a personal fight against the winds of time to bring back his wife. As Chakotay and Paris are stuck on board his ship, protected from the changes they wee making, they allowed us to see both sides of him. Paris seeing the villain, Chakotay empathising with his pain and wanting to help Annorax as much as he wanted to restore his own timeline and get back home.
As the timelines shifted, Voyager was right in the middle of it all. Each change causing more damage to the ship. At first they met a small, underpowered scout. One timeline shift later they were against a warship. That rising threat would only escalate, seeing Voyager battered and bruised, torn apart as they got caught in the middle of the ever changing warring factions.
Following this ship for a year, the two-parter became one of the best “What If?” stories in Star Trek. One of Voyagers biggest, and most justified, criticism was that aside from a few thrown in phrases, the threat of being stranded and cut off from Starfleet seemed irrelevant. The ship was always fixed from any damage in the next episode. Replicators kept giving them food. Fuel was always found when needed. And no matter how many times a shuttle was destroyed, a new one would pop up. And just how many torpedoes did Voyager have anyway?
A lot of dramatic options within the shows premise were binned for familiarity. The word “ration” was the only tie to the base concept with replicator and holodeck time rationed between crewmembers despite food never running out and the holodeck probably needing some kind of rota’d booking system anyway. In a logical world Voyager would be suffering constant low morale, supply issues…. without a starbase or a chance for routine maintenance they’d probably have to put duct tape on the hull to keep it together.
But no matter what happened tot he ship in the series, it was always shiny and chrome in the next episode. And thats true of Year of Hell, admittedly, as in the end Voyager resets the timeline by doing a kamikaze run into Annorax’s ship and everything’s back to normal in the last few minutes.
But until then the episode focuses on what the show could have been at it’s most extreme, with Voyager taking attack after attack. Crew abandoning ship for their own safety. Slowly we see some incredibly CGI work where the ships taken apart piece by piece, permanent fires and tears in the hull making most of it uninhabitable. And the remaining senior staff were torn apart with it between Tuvok losing his sight with Neelix putting on a uniform to be his assistant, and Janeway going all John McClane as she feels the pressure of the ever worsening situation, suffering stress and running into fires to help fix the breaking down ship.
For those who felt Voyager could be more than just another Next Generation or run of the mill series, Year of Hell is both a delight in seeing how things could have worked out, and an eternal frustration that they never had a chance to go down that route. Even if just for one season, which would have been a foregone conclusion in the modern storytelling world.
Even with that frustration of “reset button” writing in the last few minutes, that glimpse into their mission turning into a living hell made it a magnificent peek at what could have been, bolstered by the empathetic performance of guest actor Kuretwood Smith as Annorax and the slow descent into losing her grip on her professionalism from Kate Mulgrew as a tortured Janeway.
Though the best moment was a simple one. Once realising that they can destroy Annorax’s ship with a suicide run, Janeway stays behind to pilot Voyager to it’s end; and as the crew leaves, Tuvok refuses to let his old friend sacrifice herself. “As illogical as this might sound, I feel as close to Voyager as I do to any other member of my crew.” Janeway tells him, “It’s carried us, Tuvok – even nurtured us. And right now, it needs one of us.”
In a perfect world, he would have stayed by her side. But that wouldn’t have worked for the dramatic angle or Janeway sitting in the chair alone piloting her ship to it’s death. But for an episode that saw the crew suffer, that raised many questions on altering time and the personal effects it had on Annorax and Chakotay – it was one of those moments that took Voyager to another level and transcended it’s need to be just another continuing mission.
PAST TENSE, DS9 Season 3, Episodes 11/12
As the crew of DS9 take the Defiant to Earth to report to Starfleet Command, Sisko, Bashir and Dax beam planet-side. But Starfleet reports they never arrived. Instead of arriving safe and sound at headquarters, a problem with the transporter sends them back to 2024; leaving them stranded in their troublesome history…
Past Tense is one of those episodes that hits a little too close to home. Now more than ever. While Dax is found by a higher class member of society and able to lie her way into making him believe she is too, Bashir and Sisko end up in a Sanctuary District; a place where the government hides the homeless, poor and generally unwanted elements of society. In the Trek timeline, 2024 was the year that those forced into these districts, hidden away in a their “poor camp” would rebel against the system in a series of mass riots led by Gabriel Bell.
As is the way of things, their presence helps Bell get killed, forcing Sisko to try and correct the timeline by taking on his identity and ensuring that history remains intact and that the key socialist uprising still happens and lays some more seeds for the idealistic future we all still hope for.
When it was produced in 1995 the producers maybe didn’t comprehend how close to reality this show was. In 2020 – four years before the fictional show – the US has seen riots lasting for months due to the unjust killing of minorities which has led to worldwide protests against injustice and police brutality. Thats not the only backlash we’ve seen against society: within the UK alone we’ve seen a rising media backlash against those in need, gained a more corporate-centric vision where economy overrides public health and a societal shift that has caused a tension where even we can see a Gabriel Bell raising the local Job Centre.
More than the parallels with modern society, Ira Behr noted that it was accidentally relevant in 1995 as well. That was the year California had began trying to “hide” the homeless. Not help them, but shuffle them away out of sight to make the city of Los Angeles look nicer. Out of sight, out of mind.
The entire two parter showcases a world where empathy is lost and an image of perfection, or rather perceived perfection, is maintained by shuffling away the undesirables and those down on their luck into private districts they can’t leave. Like the DWP shuffling everyone who lost their jobs into the same block of flats.
More than any other time travel episode, Past Tense is a reminder of the worst part of humanity. It highlights how those below an acceptable standard, a vision, can be treated and how easy it is to hide from the ideal of helping each other when in need.
The entire episode comes down to a hostage situation, with 2024 characters coming round to Sisko – posing as Bell’s – vision of standing their ground and finding a way to reach out to the world. To tell their story. Much like the real world, we have people in dire straights telling their stories, We have people dying of hunger because they were cut off from benefits. We have people who can’t walk cut off from help as there’s intentionally no lift in the building they’re being interviewed at. We have people openly speaking out over the “wrong” coloured people being allowed over the border, and prolific authors comparing transgendered people to sex offenders.
There are many causes this episode can speak to. But at it’s heart, it offers hope that no matter how bad it gets, we can fight for a better future. For the era of Gabriel Bell, that fight started in 2024. For us, it may already have started.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
TAPESTRY, TNG Season 6, Episode 15
I won’t lie, this is another bending of the rules. Tapestry is a time travel story with a caveat in the sense that Q, once again, interferes and offers an illusion that pulls at the threads of Picards life by allowing him the chance to go back in time and relive a defining experience so he can change his future.
In the present world of 2369, the good Captain has an accident. After getting jumped outside a conference, he takes a blast in the chest causing his mechanical heart to malfunction and kill him. As he takes his last breath,, he wakes up in a construct of the Afterlife where he’s met by Q. Posing as God, Q explains that if he didn’t need a heart replacement in his youth, he may still be alive.
Showing him a recreation of how his organic heart was lost, being stabbed through the chest in a bar fight with a Nausican as a freshly minted Ensign, Q offers Picard the chance to go back to his youth and correct his youthfully arrogant mistakes.
Revisiting those early days as an officer waiting for his assignment, Picard was a far cry from the Captain we’d got to know; multiple romantic interests, hanging out with his buddies playing dom-jot and, apparently, getting in the face of Nausicans. Exploring the early life of Picard was an interesting touch from failed romantic interests to long long friends.
Though with Q watching over, when it came down to the time he battled a Nausican, this time Picard made sure that things changed. After his friend Corey lost a game of dom-jot to the Nausicans hanging around the bar, and realised they were cheating, he returned to show them up by rigging the table in his favour. Picard tries to discourage him as thats what started the fight, alas, Corey goes ahead with it anyway.
At the flashpoint of the plan going wrong, Picard ensures the fight is avoided, pushing Corey the ground and telling he and old flame Marta that they have to be the bigger people and walk away. With fisticuffs – and knives – avoided, Picard’s friends storm off never to speak to him again. Meanwhile, the Captains life is restored and we move from a nostalgic trip back in time to the present day: Picard alive and well with his real heart on board the Enterprise.
The problem for Picard was that the bar fight wasn’t just one stupid mistake. But something that helped define him. One act that would likely lead to another, then another, then another. A simple butterfly effect that began with that fight. Instead, mby ensuring that never happened, Picard became someone else. A coward. Those friends walked away from him, his support network and his confidence dented; something which he was inevitably unable to rekindle.
Returned to his life, Picard steps onto the bridge and is greeted by an angry Worf and suddenly the reality of Picards situation becomes clear. That butterfly effect made him play his career safely and by the book. One of the defining moments of his career was taking the risk of jumping into action when the Captain of the Stargazer died, placing him into the centre seat and deep into the command track.
Without those key points, he’s not the Captain of the Enterprise. He’s not even on the command team. Just a lower desks assistant astrophysicist ferrying reports for other people between departments who he later discovers has had such an unspectacular and pointless career that Riker see’s it as ridiculous he’d even ask to be put on the command track.
Of course things don’t stay that way and Picard realises he needs to get Q to take him back and make sure the day happens as it was supposed to; that he learns to take that risk, however badly it turned out.
For years it seemed Picard regretted that moment and his reckless youth as he matured intop a strong leadership character. But he’d failed to realise that mistakes like those help to shape our life experiences and help us to grow stronger. It’s an extreme example. Most of us are able to learn and develop without a key moment in our maturation being a stabbing. But those regrets he had harboured weren’t just stupid moments, not in the biggest picture. And when he pulled at that thread, he began to realise just how important those moments were in making him the Captain he had become.
This is another weird episode where Q plays games with the Captain. Not to antagonise him, but to teach him. Give him a moral lesson and give him strength and self awareness. It can also be considered a hallucination of just a vision. But when we first learned the story about how he gained that heart, told to Wesley Crusher back in Season 2, Picard had said that he began laughing after he saw the knife poking through his chest.
Tapestry explains that he laughs as he’s regained the life he’s just lost; Q was always destined to teach him that lesson while teaching us that sometimes, those things we hate about ourselves or the things we wished we could change – even if it was a harsh experience – only helped to make us stronger; that each bad experience only leads to making us a better person in the end.
CITY ON THE EGDE OF FOREVER, TOS Season 1, Episode 28
Starting off kind of like an episode of Carry on Starfleet, Doctor McCoy is treating an injured Sulu with Cordrazine, but accidentally injects himself with a massive dose, putting himself into a drug fuelled madness. Going a bit bonkers, he raids the transporter room and beams himself down to a nearby planet.
Giving chase, Kirk leads a landing party to find his friend only to discover that, upon arrival, McCoy had jumped through a mysterious and sentient time portal – The Guardian of Forever – and as a result, had changed the course of time. Above the skies the Enterprise vanishes, having never existed, and so the Guardian allows Kirk and Spock to travel through it to find their shipmate and ensure whatever he has done to radically alter the future never happens.
Arriving in a930’s New York, they take refuge with Edith Keeler, who houses and feeds the poor and homeless through her soup kitchen. As Spock reconfigures his tricorder using early 20th century technology to find McCoy, Kirk gets to know Edith, falling in love with her empathy and compassion. Only for Spock to discover that the change McCoy made in the past was saving her life. Unfortunately, if she lives, her kindness has a negative effect on the future. Once McCoy saves her life, she’ll lead a pacifist movement that gains enough support to delay the US’s contributions to the second world war, and as a result,m the bad guys win.
What results is a peak moment in the Spock and Kirk relationship. The cold and logical Vulcan insisted Edith Keeler must die, while his Captain struggles with the emotional weight of the situation. Can he let it happen? Not only watch someone die, but someone he’s fallen in love with? It’s a weighty topic, and one that brought a rawness to the series. Without their futuristic toys and fancy starship, it all came down to that one decision, that one moral choice. Is it right to save her, a valuable living person? Or is it right to sacrifice her for the future?
For all the time travel shenanigans and the adjustments for Kirk and Spock having to blend in with stolen clothes and no resources, everything coming down to that moment is key tot he episodes success. Under the weight of the sci fi elements, everything comes down to that romance between Kirk and Keeler, which was excellently played by a young and charming Shatner opposite the magnetic Joan Collins.
The episode doesn’t live on for the time travel, but for the end result. The moment Kirk has to make the decision, seeing Edith in the path of a car and making that choice.
Making the episode wasn’t as easy as it may have seemed on screen. Unlike other shows, the original Star Trek took pride in bringing aboard sci fi writers to pitch ideas and write scripts, giving the show an experienced and imaginative backdrop behind the scenes.
Unfortunately that legitimacy was a double edged sword. The typical sci fi writer, though the calibre the show would hire, didn’t write for television. So when it came to turning their story into a shooting script, considerations they didn’t have in mind needed to be made. Not only would the show need to be tweaked to fit the Star Trek world, such as minor character tweaks, but some ambitions would be too high a cost to film or wouldn’t be able to be done under the demands of network TV.
Some writers can accept this. Andrzej Sapkowski, original author of the Witcher for example, is more than happy for anything to happen to his source material as long as he gets paid. Others such as comic writer Garth Ennis and crime novelist Elmore Leonard are happy to accept their stories being tweaked to serve a new format. Even the writer of the Enemy Within, Richard Matheson was one of the few to step forwarding say, while he had frustrations writing the episode for Star Trek, TV was a different beast.
For The City on the Edge of Forever, Harlan Ellison didn’t take those changes in his stride. After a long, and bitter feud with Gene Roddenberry, and failing to have his name removed from “the script they butchered” he would go on to release his version years later; which was roughly the same in spirit. But also contained a drug dealing officer, which Roddenberry objected to, trans dimensional beings who arrive due to McCoy altering the timeline and some other stuff which in no, way shape or form could Star Trek have afforded to put on the screen.
More importantly in the change, the moment the show all came down to didn’t happen the way it did in his original version.
The moment Kirk has to stop Bones from saving Edith is heartbreaking. It’s a vital moment within and a perfect climax with Kirk fighting back all the tears, all the emotion to ensure history stays intact.
By this point, unknown to Kirk and Spock, McCoy is under the care of Keeler and close by when she’s at risk of getting run over. Just as Kirk and Spock see what’s inevitable, so does McCoy and he does try to save her – that was the moment Kirk was there to prevent. And he makes that call, he hears Spocks words echo in his head and he holds Bones back to ensure history happens the way it was supposed to, that Edith – the woman he’d fallen in love with – meets her end.
It’s not only the role and evolution of a Captain to make these calls, but an extra emotional layer for a shows lead character. That moment was designed for Kirk. Yet in Ellisons, it was Spock who came in with the cold logic and held Kirk back. Which doesn’t quite come with the emotional edge Roddenberry wanted from the script, and makes Spock seem completely heartless.
Mocking Shatner’s overly dramatic “play to the back” style has become a loving pass time for most, though here more than any other episode, he deserves a lot of praise for his performance. He and Nimoy continue to have a wonderful connection as they try and downplay their presence in the past with Shatner bringing a more restrained and powerfully quiet performance as Kirk handles a deeply emotional mission under pressure. Something the retooled script allowed to come to the forefront badly needed to get to the core off the show.
Ellisons script was retooled over ten months under Roddenberry’s watch, with Steven W. Carabatsos the late DC Fontana ensuring it met the standards of Trek. While Ellison himself held a huge grudge against Roddenberry, the input of Fontana, Roddenberry and Carabatsos was invaluable for taking Ellisons story and bringing it’s emotional core to the forefront despite the credit going to Ellison.
Capturing everything Star Trek could be at it’s finest, City on the Edge of Forever won both the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Episodic Drama on Television
A Fistful of Time Travel is adapted from an article written for Comms in October 2020.