Videos by ComicBook.com
It first aired 57 years ago today, and instantly seized viewers’ imaginations, sparking the kind of discussion and debate that continues to this day. While Star Trek has told many other time travel stories since then, few surpass this time-honored classic.
Star Trek‘s “All Our Yesterdays” Is One of TV’s Best Time Travel Stories
“All Our Yesterdays” finds the crew of the USS Enterprise coming to the planet Sarpeidon, which is about to be destroyed by a supernova. Captain Kirk, Doctor McCoy, and Spock beam down to the planet to evacuate it, only to find a lone inhabitant, Atoz (and his team of android copies), maintaining a library of the planet’s history. They find out that the Sarpeidons have fled the planet using a time travel device called the atavachron, which took them into the planet’s past.
Through an ill-fated mishap, Kirk ends up getting transported into Sarpeidon’s Medieval past, during a dark age of superstition about things like witchcraft. When McCoy and Spock try to pursue Kirk, they instead end up stranded even further in the past, during Sarpeidon’s Ice Age.
The episode got even deeper from that high-concept premise: Kirk’s arc sees him trying to aid a seeming damsel in distress, only to find out she’s a thief and suspected witch, landing him in a medieval jail, facing trial. He finds out the prosecutor is one of the time travelers from the future, and that the stakes are higher than he imagined: without proper “preparation,” the time displacement could be fatal to him and his friends.
Kirk manages to fight his way back to the present, but finds Atoz and his androids opposing him. Meanwhile, Spock and McCoy have an arc where Spock meets a woman named Zarabeth (Mariette Hartley) who was exiled to the Ice Age past because her family tried to assassinate one of Sarpeidon’s despot rulers. Spock and Zarabeth quickly fall in love, but she conceals the true dangers of time travel, including the side-effect that Spock starts to become attuned with the Vulcan species of that time: a volatile and barbaric people who had not yet mastered their signature logic-over-emotion lifestyle.
In the end, Kirk gets his two friends back to the present by the skin of their collective teeth and gets the Enterprise out of orbit just before Sarpeidon explodes.
Star Trek Inspired So Many Other Works With This Episode
Look no further than a cult-hit series like Outlander for an example. That series sees a WWII nurse thrown back in time to 18th-century Scotland, where she falls for a rebel fighter. Netflix’s hit German-language series Dark is “All Our Yesterdays” taken to a much more complex degree of sci-fi theory: A small town of people (and some covert temporal operatives) jump through time, creating mind-bending connections and time displacement ripples that form a causality knot even the most dedicated fans have trouble untangling.
Then there are the numerous Star Trek series that have given their head nod to “All Our Yesterdays”, such as Star Trek: TNG (“A Matter of Time”, “All Good Things…”), Star Trek: Voyager (“Before and After”) Deep Space Nine (“Little Green Men”), Strange New Worlds (“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”) and many other examples. That’s not even mentioning the obvious examples of famous films (Terminator, Back to the Future) that have been inspired by the idea of avoiding present-day calamity by traveling into the past.
“All Our Yesterdays” should be one of those episodes newer Star Trek fans seek out – and definitely a pioneering example of how to do a time travel story that is both high-concept and dramatically personal.
