Tomorrow is Yesterday
Tomorrow is Yesterday (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is incredibly promising, but suffers by putting the crew into such a bad position that the way they get out of it has to be contrived and dumb.
This, as you can tell, is a time travel episode. The Enterprise accidentally slingshots around a “black star” and ends up in the 60s. There, they are spotted by Captain Christopher of the US Air Force, and they are forced to take him aboard.
Now they have two problems: how to get home, and how to get Captain Christopher back to Earth.
Begin Spoilers
The crux of the matter is that Christopher knows too much to go back to Earth, because his knowledge could change his future and the Enterprise’s past. Spock lays out the Temporal Prime Directive to back this up: you’ve got to keep the flow of time as it was.
But wait! Captain Christopher’s son will be a major figure! So Captain Christopher must go back. But before he does, the evidence of the Enterprise that he recorded on his plane must be destroyed. And the crew kind of botches that job. Badly. Now the whole security detail on base knows something is up.
But wait! Now Spock has figured out how to slingshot around the sun and return to Enterprise time. And as a bonus, you jump back before you jump forward, and if you transport people back into the spots where they were at the time they made important decisions the first time around, their situations will mysteriously be different this time around and they won’t have to make the decisions, because otherwise the plot falls apart.
This could have been a nice little episode where the crew is bad-ass and destroys the tapes (beam into the room, grab, beam out; stun anyone and everyone who gets anywhere near you) and transports Captain Christopher back after befriending him and convincing him not to talk. But instead it’s 75% of an awesome episode and some crap.
End Spoilers
With a lot of stock footage of air force planes taking off and flying about.
Starfleet or United Earth?
Starfleet is very definitely the people-in-charge of the Enterprise (we learn that the fleet has only twelve ships like her), but Starfleet is a part of (or maybe has a part called) the United Earth Space Probe Agency:
Captain Christopher: “Did the navy-“
Kirk: “We’re a combined agency. Our authority is the United Earth Space Probe Agency”
Captain Christopher:“United Earth?”
So now that the “Starfleet” term has begun to seek in, let’s start tracking when the “Federation” appears.
Grade
C+
