TNG Flashback: Yesterday's Enterprise

Many fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation consider "Yesterday's Enterprise" to be the best episode the series ever produced. But perhaps what makes it truly exceptional is that it was successful in spite of having the odds stacked hugely against it at the time it was made.

A temporal rift appears, and from it emerges the U.S.S. Enterprise-C, the predecessor to our heroes' ship. Instantly, all of reality is altered by the C's disappearance from two decades in the past, because it was not there to help defend a Klingon outpost from a Romulan attack. Our Enterprise is now a battleship, fighting a hopeless war against a Klingon Empire that never made peace with the Federation. And serving at tactical aboard this ship is Tasha Yar, very much alive in this timeline. Guinan alone is able to sense that something is amiss with this version of reality, and urges Picard to send the C back through the rift to the past, where this war can be averted. But as the ship will be impossibly outmatched by the Romulans, this will be a suicide mission.

There are no less than six writers credited for "Yesterday's Enterprise," two for the story concept and four for the screenplay. What's more, show runner Michael Piller also worked on the script, but agreed to take his name off the credits to satisfy the rules of the Writers Guild, which limited the number of writers that could be credited. When you see this many writers on a film, it's usually a sign of a long and troubled creative process marked (and marred) by endless rewrites.

In this case, it was more a sign of desperation. Midway through season three of the show, the writers had run out of scripts to put before the cameras. They were so desperate for something they could film, they turned to a slush pile of rejected ideas, full of cliches that they'd resolved to avoid -- time travel chiefly among them.

One writer had pitched a somewhat dramatically inert story where a previous Enterprise came forward through time (causing no alterations in the present), putting Picard in a dilemma over how much to tell the crew about where and when they were before forcing them to go back. Another writer had pitched an overcooked bit of Trek fanboy service in which a Vulcan science team went back in time through the original series' Guardian of Forever, accidentally killing Surak, the founder of Vulcan logical philosophy. The result was a warlike Vulcan race in the present, who had united with the Romulans to threaten the entire quadrant. The timeline would be restored by Sarek, father of Spock, traveling back in time to take Surak's place.

A decision was made to try and fuse these two ideas -- along with a perceived opportunity to bring back Denise Crosby to play Tasha Yar one more time. The writing process began normally, but then the decision was made that the character of Guinan needed to be fit into the episode too. That's when things got complicated. There was only a narrow window where both Whoopi Goldberg and Denise Crosby's schedules lined up, and that meant a finished script needed to be ready in just a matter of days. And so the entire writing staff worked over Thanksgiving weekend, each taking a different chunk of the script, and racing to finish something. Anything. According to writers Ira Steven Behr and Ronald Moore, the only reason any of them had any real enthusiasm for this story at the time was that it gave them the opportunity to kill off all the main characters in the final act.

So you can see, there was no reason to think they had anything special here. But they did. I remember watching this episode back in 1990 -- back when you generally watched TV live -- and getting a phone call from a friend the moment the Act 1 commercial break came on. "What is going on?" she asked, confused but thrilled by an alternate reality that included war with the Klingons, a female captain of an Enterprise, and Wesley in a red Starfleet uniform.

Honestly, these are the reasons why fans responded so much to this episode -- the changes (subtle and not-so-subtle) to the world they knew and loved. But to be fair, it's a reaction that was earned. Every department of the production did amazing things with the TV budget they had to make the alternate Enterprise-D feel like a truly different place. The costume department changed cuffs and added belts to evoke a militaristic feel. The sound effects department created a louder ambient background, including new sounds for ship-wide announcements, and doors opening and closing. The lighting department created a stark and dim world, accented with harsh blues and yellows. And the set department made startling transformations to the traditional locations, including a number of strategic alterations to the bridge.

But if this kind of fanboy service was all this episode offered, it wouldn't deserve to be thought of as one of the series' great episodes. The fact is, it was also about something. In a tight 40 minutes, the episode is a surprisingly deep examination of what it means to die a "meaningful" death. The crew of the Enterprise-C is being asked to die, with no chance of survival; there's no wiggle room for a typical Star Trek resolution in which the ship saves the day and lives to fight again. Similarly, the D crew must give their lives at the end of the episode to ensure the C can travel back to the past. It all shows how much one small event, one sacrifice, can change the course of history.

And Tasha Yar's appearance in this episode isn't a mere gimmick. Her character is at the very heart of this discussion. In our original timeline, her death was utterly meaningless. (And bravo to the show for being willing to call themselves out on this point and basically say, "we got that wrong, and we're here to make amends now.") Her impassioned speech to Picard, begging to be transferred to the Enterprise-C, carries real emotion in the midst of a dense science fiction gimmick. Next to Tasha's funeral, it's Crosby's finest work on the show.

And it's only one of several good scenes in the episode. The clash between Picard and Guinan -- two characters who have never been at odds before -- is tense and powerful. When Picard confides in Enterprise-C captain Rachel Garrett that Starfleet is at death's door in this war with the Klingons, it's a crushing revelation. When Picard announces his decision to send the Enterprise-C back in time, everyone challenges him, and he shuts them all down in an unusually dictatorial manner. Hell, even before the alternate universe thrills kick in, there's a wonderful scene between Guinan and Worf, full of marvelous character-driven banter between them.

So strong is the episode overall, you can overlook the flaws that easily appear when you take half a moment to think about the episode. Does the romance subplot between Tasha Yar and Enterprise-C officer Castillo really add that much to the episode? Does it even work that well? Why does Guinan have a pseudo-omniscient power to see the falseness of this reality, and how is she able to convince anyone she's right? (As show runner Michael Piller put it, even while acknowledging this was the season's best episode: "Picard sends 500 people back to their death on the word of the bartender. Come on, that's hard.")

Looking back on the episode later, however, the writers would have regrets other than some minor plot holes. Ira Steven Behr and Ronald Moore wished they'd thought to make it a two-parter, to better amortize the production costs and spend more time exploring the characters of the alternate universe. (Wesley, a teenager serving on a warship? Data, an emotionless being forced to rationalize genocide? Troi, maybe an interrogator of some kind in the alternate universe instead of not being present at all?)

Ronald Moore would later also wish (briefly) they'd never done this episode at all; he says that in planning meetings for the first Star Trek movie he worked on, Generations, they wistfully realized that "Yesterday's Enterprise" should have been the plot of the film, with Kirk and the entire classic crew in the "brought forward from the past" roles. You'd think producing one of the fans' favorite episodes would be enough to satisfy him. (Though he is right; that would have been a way better movie than the one we actually got.)

Other observations:

• Worf's love of prune juice, "a warrior's drink," is introduced in this episode (in that great opening scene I mentioned.)

• The Enterprise-C is really a fantastic ship design, a perfect fusion of the Next Generation and original series versions of the Enterprise.

• Originally, some of the writers had the idea to make Worf the captain of one of the attacking Klingon ships at the close of the episode. Producer Rick Berman didn't buy that a mere lieutenant in our timeline would somehow be a captain in the other, while Ira Steven Behr argued that having Worf show up right at the end would feel like a cameo, distractingly kitschy in a moment that was supposed to be starkly serious.

• With the writers being keen on killing off the main characters, the original final act included Data being electrocuted and Wesley getting his head blown off. By the time filming began, time and budget constraints forced everything but Riker's death to be removed.

• This episode is about giving Tasha a meaningful death to "apologize" for the meaningless one in "Skin of Evil." But later, this is undermined by the revelation that Tasha didn't die. She survived and gave birth to the half-Romulan villain Sela. The character of Sela was actually Denise Crosby's own idea, so I suppose she has only herself to blame for compromising her character's "better death."

• One of the writers of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie cited this episode as a key inspiration for their own plot (which itself spawned an alternate reality... but stuck with it).

• There's a blooper in the final scene of this episode. The timeline has been restored, but Geordi is wearing the uniform from the alternate universe. (Look at the cuffs on his sleeves.)

"Yesterday's Enterprise" might not sit at the very top of my list as it does for many fans, but I still agree that it's a grade A episode of the series, truly one of the best.