All Our Yesterdays
I am nearly finished with my survey of the original Star Trek. There is only one episode left to go, now. Tonight I watched the penultimate offering, "All Our Yesterdays." In this episode, the Enterprise learns that the inhabited planet Sarpeidon will soon be destroyed when its star goes nova. They arrive just hours ahead of the disaster and beam down to the planet, where they find everyone is gone except for a librarian, Mr. Atoz.
(Get it? A librarian named "Atoz"? A-to-Z. Hee hee! This episode was one of a handful in the original series that was written by a hardcore fan who was able to sell her script to the studio. She was a librarian herself.)
It turns out that the planet's inhabitants, lacking space travel to escape the cataclysm, had all fled to different periods in the planet's own history. Kirk accidentally goes back to a witch-burning period, while McCoy and Spock go back to an ice age. They have their adventures, Spock gets a kiss, Kirk has a sword fight, and they all get back just in time to beam up to the ship before the whole solar system is destroyed.
I was very glad to see this episode, and all because of a special effects shot in the last couple of seconds. When I first began my survey of the series several weeks ago, I hadn't seen many of these episodes since I was a kid, and I had many vague memories about the series that I was looking forward to revisiting. One of the most important of these was this special effects shot of a planet being vaporized in a ball of light as brilliantly white as the dying star it circled. That image was powerful to my young mind; it made an impression that helped to shape the way I think. But I remembered no details about the actual episode. All I had was an impression of this being a very "wide" episode in terms of ideas and settings and visual scapes...sort of like the vast open space of a dream. Well outside Star Trek's feeble third-season budget, to be sure.
My uneasy feeling of vastness just beyond the fringes of conscious memory helped to elevate the emotional mystique of this mystery episode. I had forgotten that it involved time travel, and the images I had in my head of what was going on on the planet were mixed with other memories that had nothing to do with Star Trek. Possibly they had nothing to do with anything, coming from my own imagination. Most of the "correct" images were only correct in part: If you look out the window of Mr. Atoz's library, you'll see a background that may have figured into my memories. Also, in Kirk's time period, the gloaming quality of the light in the swordfight scene apparently made its way into the recesses of my mind. What I actually remembered was completely different: A ranch amid a vast, lightly forested plain, at night. Many people. A few ghosts. None of that was in the episode (although there were "spirits" thanks to Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy.)
Since I hadn't remembered any of the details of this episode other than the nova at the end, I didn't know which episode it was, and, as the series played itself out in my survey, I began to wonder if I had been mistakenly remembering the nova image as being from Star Trek. Memory, after all, is a tricky creature. About halfway through the third season, my hopes had been dashed when I saw another episode with a star that was about to go nova. The special effects in this episode didn't look anything like what I remembered, and I felt practically betrayed, like a long-lost source of memory had turned out not to be real. Then, along came this episode--at the last possible moment, since the remaining episode is the one where Kirk switches bodies with Janice Lester. (No novae there.) Indeed, I had forgotten about this urge to see the nova when I sat down to watch this episode tonight. When the captain's log came on, I knew at once that I had been vindicated.
This is the planet Sarpeidon, seen behind the Enterprise, being vaporized as its star, Beta Niobe, goes nova:
Considering Star Trek's obscenely low budget in the third season, it's impressive that they bothered to do this shot at all. I am grateful they did, however. To me, it is one of the most poignant images in the entire original series: An entire world blinking out of existence, all its histories and tomorrows come to a close. Everything...all the trees and animals. All the people, alive but without a future. Here is a story that ends.
And there's the Enterprise, sailing away, out into the unknown. It would have been a good note for the series to go out on.
This was the only episode of the series with no scenes aboard the Enterprise, and only Kirk, Spock, and McCoy out of the main cast appeared on screen. This removal from the Enterprise and its crew, plus the travel into two distinct periods in Sarpeidon's history, plus the nova visual at the end, all came together to give this episode an ethereal quality...almost un-Star-Trek-like, despite it being obviously, idiomatically Star Trek down to the core. But it was different. It got closer to that greatness that science fiction aspired to touch in those days.
Having just about completed my survey, now I understand why this show inspired such enthusiasm and commitment. It's campy as all hell, the special effects are ridiculously cheap, and the plots are filled with half-bungled ideas, but the breadth of the creativity, and the depth of the (main) characters, was genius. Sci-fi did no better on television, until Star Trek: The Next Generation. And, in a way, even that show was not as teeming with potential as the original series, so that, even though TNG fulfilled a much larger percentage of its potential, the original series could have been one of the watersheds in human history.
If only the studio been more supportive, the censors less puritanical, and the dollars more plentiful...if only. Somebody should remind those empty suits that our sun will bequeath a not-so-different fate unto this planet someday. Do we really want our memories of Earth to be so timid?
Curiosity: The effects shot is wrong. A nova is a phenomenon of binary star systems. Let the record show that here is one of the few times when I said, "Facts be damned." Here's to memories of things that will never be the same again! The adventures that shaped us as children are as far beyond our reach as childhood itself, but we can embrace the shapes they gave us. Here's to that! Sarpeidon may be no more--indeed, it never existed at all--but I will not soon forget the awesome power of that simple, cheap image they put up on the screen for a few seconds.
(Get it? A librarian named "Atoz"? A-to-Z. Hee hee! This episode was one of a handful in the original series that was written by a hardcore fan who was able to sell her script to the studio. She was a librarian herself.)
It turns out that the planet's inhabitants, lacking space travel to escape the cataclysm, had all fled to different periods in the planet's own history. Kirk accidentally goes back to a witch-burning period, while McCoy and Spock go back to an ice age. They have their adventures, Spock gets a kiss, Kirk has a sword fight, and they all get back just in time to beam up to the ship before the whole solar system is destroyed.
I was very glad to see this episode, and all because of a special effects shot in the last couple of seconds. When I first began my survey of the series several weeks ago, I hadn't seen many of these episodes since I was a kid, and I had many vague memories about the series that I was looking forward to revisiting. One of the most important of these was this special effects shot of a planet being vaporized in a ball of light as brilliantly white as the dying star it circled. That image was powerful to my young mind; it made an impression that helped to shape the way I think. But I remembered no details about the actual episode. All I had was an impression of this being a very "wide" episode in terms of ideas and settings and visual scapes...sort of like the vast open space of a dream. Well outside Star Trek's feeble third-season budget, to be sure.
My uneasy feeling of vastness just beyond the fringes of conscious memory helped to elevate the emotional mystique of this mystery episode. I had forgotten that it involved time travel, and the images I had in my head of what was going on on the planet were mixed with other memories that had nothing to do with Star Trek. Possibly they had nothing to do with anything, coming from my own imagination. Most of the "correct" images were only correct in part: If you look out the window of Mr. Atoz's library, you'll see a background that may have figured into my memories. Also, in Kirk's time period, the gloaming quality of the light in the swordfight scene apparently made its way into the recesses of my mind. What I actually remembered was completely different: A ranch amid a vast, lightly forested plain, at night. Many people. A few ghosts. None of that was in the episode (although there were "spirits" thanks to Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy.)
Since I hadn't remembered any of the details of this episode other than the nova at the end, I didn't know which episode it was, and, as the series played itself out in my survey, I began to wonder if I had been mistakenly remembering the nova image as being from Star Trek. Memory, after all, is a tricky creature. About halfway through the third season, my hopes had been dashed when I saw another episode with a star that was about to go nova. The special effects in this episode didn't look anything like what I remembered, and I felt practically betrayed, like a long-lost source of memory had turned out not to be real. Then, along came this episode--at the last possible moment, since the remaining episode is the one where Kirk switches bodies with Janice Lester. (No novae there.) Indeed, I had forgotten about this urge to see the nova when I sat down to watch this episode tonight. When the captain's log came on, I knew at once that I had been vindicated.
This is the planet Sarpeidon, seen behind the Enterprise, being vaporized as its star, Beta Niobe, goes nova:
Considering Star Trek's obscenely low budget in the third season, it's impressive that they bothered to do this shot at all. I am grateful they did, however. To me, it is one of the most poignant images in the entire original series: An entire world blinking out of existence, all its histories and tomorrows come to a close. Everything...all the trees and animals. All the people, alive but without a future. Here is a story that ends.
And there's the Enterprise, sailing away, out into the unknown. It would have been a good note for the series to go out on.
This was the only episode of the series with no scenes aboard the Enterprise, and only Kirk, Spock, and McCoy out of the main cast appeared on screen. This removal from the Enterprise and its crew, plus the travel into two distinct periods in Sarpeidon's history, plus the nova visual at the end, all came together to give this episode an ethereal quality...almost un-Star-Trek-like, despite it being obviously, idiomatically Star Trek down to the core. But it was different. It got closer to that greatness that science fiction aspired to touch in those days.
Having just about completed my survey, now I understand why this show inspired such enthusiasm and commitment. It's campy as all hell, the special effects are ridiculously cheap, and the plots are filled with half-bungled ideas, but the breadth of the creativity, and the depth of the (main) characters, was genius. Sci-fi did no better on television, until Star Trek: The Next Generation. And, in a way, even that show was not as teeming with potential as the original series, so that, even though TNG fulfilled a much larger percentage of its potential, the original series could have been one of the watersheds in human history.
If only the studio been more supportive, the censors less puritanical, and the dollars more plentiful...if only. Somebody should remind those empty suits that our sun will bequeath a not-so-different fate unto this planet someday. Do we really want our memories of Earth to be so timid?
Curiosity: The effects shot is wrong. A nova is a phenomenon of binary star systems. Let the record show that here is one of the few times when I said, "Facts be damned." Here's to memories of things that will never be the same again! The adventures that shaped us as children are as far beyond our reach as childhood itself, but we can embrace the shapes they gave us. Here's to that! Sarpeidon may be no more--indeed, it never existed at all--but I will not soon forget the awesome power of that simple, cheap image they put up on the screen for a few seconds.