Star Trek Next Generation: "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Cause & Effect"

Season 3: "Yesterday's Enterprise"

Time Travel Device: Wormhole

Time Travel Outcome: Changes the current state of the Federation.

Coolness Factor: Seeing the Enterprise as a war ship. Also, Tasha Yar makes the greatest "return of a dead person" to television EVER. And Captain Picard gets to do his Winston Churchill impression.

Flaws: That's an awful lot of consequences resting on Guinan's say-so!

Paradox:Messing directly with the grandfather paradox here!

Season 5: "Cause & Effect"

Time Travel Device: Loop

Time Travel Outcome: Live the same few days over and over and over . . .

Coolness Factor: Seeing the Enterprise blow up several different ways. The clues Data sends himself. The idea of one choice leading in a completely different direction than another choice. Kelsey Grammar.

Flaws: People make thousands of minor choices every day. Eventually those minor choices would stop the collision from happening LONG before the actual moment.

Paradox: Although the episode resolves due to a single choice, the episode behaves as if some things are predestined.

Kate says so I love Star Trek, which means I rarely care how silly it is. Okay, "Spock's Brain" was pretty silly, not to mention early Troi. But generally, I just love Star Trek.

Of the two episodes, I think "Yesterday's Enterprise" is better, having more content to explore. One interesting idea of "Yesterday's Enterprise" is whether we really WANT to relive the past.

I recently thought to myself, "If I could go back to a year and a half ago and stop my Ford Focus from being pulverized when I hit a patch of ice, many of my current money troubles wouldn't exist. But I would have to live that year and a half over again." And I realized I wouldn't want to do that unless I remembered it (so I could tweak things here and there) and even then . . . well, gosh, there's just an awful lot of things that I just don't want to have to do again. It isn't that the past year and a half were bad; it's just . . . things happened; they are over. It took a lot of work for me to get to 2011. I'd rather take a breather, thanks.

Of course, that's not exactly the same as someone suddenly fast-forwarding me to 2015 and saying, "Hey, do you still want to live the last four years over again?" Still, if I liked 2015, I might say, "No."

And it isn't like I'm in the middle of a Klingon War; I've just never seen the appeal of, for example, going back to high school. I know people who live their lives in parallel--the life they have and the life they could have had. I don't see the point of this. This is the life I have. End of story.

Enough of the tangent! This issue of "what future or past do I choose for myself" is Tasha Yar's conundrum--in the "real" past, she's dead. But if she goes back into the WAY past, she'll likely be killed. If she stays in the new present, she'll continue to have a life.

Of course, she makes the noble choice (and lives to make another few guest appearances!). In any case, I like the idea of people struggling with where they belong time-wise. It gives the episode more ballast than just "oh, yeah, the Enterprise D shouldn't be here."

"Cause Effect" is fun, mostly because of how it is filmed--every day uses different angles or starts from different points of view. The idea is clever and the episode--like most Next Generation episodes--is well-plotted, but the idea doesn't really make internal sense, and there isn't enough other stuff to give it weight.

Mike says man, I love watching Trek. One nice thing, for our purposes, is that we can pick an episode, put it in for review, and usually not have to worry about what's happening in the season.

"Yesterday's Enterprise" is one of those episodes that changed all the rules. Altering the timeline, bringing back old cast members, and making everyone dark was all kind of a shock to us watching this for the first time years ago.

The idea is very cool, and I love the execution. When the Enterprise C leaves its timeline, time is changed, only returning to normal once they return. This is a big change to most time travel rules, as many keep the timeline, just assuming that history would be fixed later. I think it's the immediacy of the effect that I love so much.

Given all that, I do agree with Kate, the entire plot hangs on the very thin thread that Guinan "feels weird." While it's awesome that everyone has so much faith in her, it's a bit of a stretch (and by a bit, I mean "holy crap!").

"Cause and Effect" is fun, if very light compared to the heaviness of "Yesterday" (even watching it now, the opening teaser really throws off the viewer--Wait, everyone is dead? But there's another hour left!). One of the great things about TNG is that every cast member got a few episodes centered around them (though Worf, Data, and Picard really got the most screen time), and this Crusher-based episodes really fits the character, as the plot is simple, fairly mellow, with an explosive outcome.

The thing that really makes me laugh about these episodes, though, is how rampant time travel is in the Trek Universe. The timeline seems to be under threat every day, if not several times a day. If similar events are happening to every crew of every fleet of every race all over: yikes. The Trek universe is being rewritten everyday! Which really puts the validity of the Trek reboot into perspective.

Despite flaws, gimmicks, and gross overuse of a plot device, nobody does time travel like Trek.