Nitpicking the science – and, while we’re at it, the inconsistencies – of the sci-fi that we love is the fanboy’s great joy. And because there’s so much of it, it’s the work of a lifetime. While Trek may be on our top shelf, when it comes to respect and veneration, it gets no exemption.
From warp drive to the Transporter to red matter, Trek is rife with the same pseudoscience we find in most SF franchises; Trek’s is simply more intelligently and believably rendered. We can argue them all day and night, have tons of fun doing it, and have the same debates next week with someone else.
But of all Trek’s quirky science and inconsistencies, the biggest loom in its handling of… time travel.
To be fair, the handling of time travel is quirky and inconsistent across all of SF, not just Trek. There’s the rigid, deterministic straight jacket of time travel’s intrinsic Butterfly Effect – one leetle change in the past changes everything!!! – as exemplified by Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”; there’s the time-will-heal-itself philosophy of Isaac Asimov’s “The End of Eternity”; and the anything-goes meet-yourself-coming-and-going of Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”.
In the movies, it gets way worse. Oh, sure, there’s the perfectly-reasonable time dilation of the first Planet of the Apes, and, better still, Interstellar; but it goes wonky from there, to films like the original Terminator, with its variation on the Kill Grandpa theme; Groundhog Day and Palm Springs, with their maddening time loops; and, of course, the save-us-from-ourselves desperation of 12 Monkeys and Looper (which are great, great movies, but wacky-doodle science).
And the Back to the Future franchise hits just about every box, from the one-little-thing-was-different of I, to the goofy you-broke-it, you-fix-it and branching timeline spaghetti of II, to the message-to-the-future trope of III (how many DeLoreans were there in Hill Valley at the same time in 1955, on the day of the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance?). It’s silly, confusing – but it’s also fun.
Well, Trek provides just that sort of fun. The franchise has bounced all over time, breaking the future, fixing the past, creating new timelines, having consequential oopsies – you name it, Trek went there. In every incarnation.
You’d think there would be rules, given all this time-hopping; but in fact, no, Trek’s time travel is all over the place, inconsistent and philosophically implausible.
In Trek’s nearly 1,000 episodes, there are more than 50 time travel stories – entire seasons have occurred in a misplaced time (Picard S2), and Discovery relocates permanently to the 32nd century.
Well, that’s a whole book; we certainly can’t cover all of that here. So for now, we’ll stick with TOS, which gave us five trips through time (and two additional original-cast trips – one in the animated series, one at the movies).
Let’s have some fun with this. We’ll revisit the episodes, then talk about them.
“The Naked Time”
Trek’s very first foray into time travel occurred very early on – in this Season One episode, the fourth to be broadcast, in the month of the show’s debut. In the story, the Enterprise is orbiting Psi 2000 as a strange disease sweeps through the crew, causing each to experience completely disinhibited emotions. Lt. Riley, the ship’s navigator, develops delusions of grandeur and locks himself in Engineering – where he can control everything, including the ship’s engines, which he idly deactivates.
The ship’s orbit begins to decay, thanks to the collapse of the planet and its shifting gravity – and the Enterprise is destined to burn up in the atmosphere. The engines can’t just be restarted cold – and they have only minutes left. Kirk and Spock fight through the effects of the disease, realizing that there’s a theoretical process – “implosion” – that might restart the engines, but it’s risky. With Scotty’s help, they execute the implosion – and the ship surges out of orbit and into warp, in such a whacked-out manner that the clocks are running backward.
They get it under control, and Spock gets their bearings.
“Spock… the time warp. What did it do to us?”
“We’ve regressed in time seventy-one hours. It is now three days ago, Captain. We have three days to live over again.”
“Not those last three days.”
“Tomorrow is Yesterday”
On its second trip through time, the Enterprise finds itself unexpectedly in a very low Earth orbit, the crew struggling back to consciousness after a near-disaster. As they regain their senses, they learn where they are – and that they have regressed into the 20th century, in the late 1960s. With some brief research, Spock realizes they unexpectedly encountered a black hole, and were thrown back in time.
Before they can boost their orbit and hide from the radar systems of the era, a US fighter plane spots them and films them. Realizing they are in danger of altering history, Kirk orders the fighter confined by a tractor beam – but the comparatively fragile fighter can’t take it, and comes apart. They quickly beam the pilot, Captain John Christopher, out of the craft and onto the Enterprise. Now Kirk has two problems: figuring out how to get the ship back to its own century, and how to erase all traces of evidence that they were ever there.
He hands off the first problem to Spock, who along with Scotty presents the Slingshot Effect as the only solution: diving into the sun’s gravity well at warp will shoot them back into the future.
In the meantime, an Air Force sentry catches Kirk and Sulu stealing the camera footage of the Enterprise from the wreckage of Christopher’s aircraft, and is beamed aboard. Now they have yet another problem.
Initially, Kirk had decided Christopher couldn’t be returned, because he would report what he’d seen, and that could change history. A records check by Spock indicated Christopher hadn’t done anything noteworthy in his career, so his absence wouldn’t be a problem. A deeper check, however, revealed that his son would one day command an interplanetary exploration mission – a son not yet born.
Kirk realizes that Christopher has to be returned – and Spock theorizes that as the starship dives into the sun, it will briefly regress in time before the Slingshot Effect takes hold. As they pass the points at which both Christopher and the sentry were beamed aboard, they’ll beam them right back – and they won’t remember what happened, because it won’t have happened yet.
This they do, and the Enterprise slingshots back to 2266 – leaving Christopher and his plane intact, and neither him nor the sentry any the wiser.
“The City on the Edge of Forever”
This time it’s not the Enterprise that finds itself in the past, but a crazed Dr. McCoy.
The Enterprise has located a planet where “ripples in time” are occurring, and they are trying to study the phenomenon as the ship is frequently shaken. McCoy is accidentally injected with a drug that leaves him delusional, and he flees to the Transporter Room, beaming himself down to the planet. There’s a time portal there – the Guardian of Forever – an intelligent entity/machine that can access all points in time. Journeys to any planet, any era, are possible. Kirk and Spock learn all this as the landing party they beamed down with searches for McCoy – who leaps into the portal.
In the blink of an eye, the Enterprise above them in orbit ceases to exist. As does the Federation itself. Leaping into the past, McCoy has somehow changed history; “Your vessel, your beginning – all that you knew is gone,” the Guardian informs them. “Earth’s not there – at least, not the Earth we know. We’re totally alone,” Kirk realizes.
There’s nothing to do but follow McCoy back and somehow set things right. Kirk and Spock leave the rest of the landing party behind, and find themselves in Depression era New York City, circa 1930. They blend in, working in a street mission to raise money for Spock to build a peripheral for his tricorder, so he can isolate the event that McCoy changes; they can then try to prevent it from happening. In the course of things, Kirk falls in love with the mission’s administrator, Edith Keeler.
Unknown to them, McCoy is nearby, recovering from his overdose. Spock isolates the change in the timeline: Edith Keeler herself. She either died in a traffic accident, or she led a national peace movement as World War II broke out. The latter turns out to be McCoy’s change: he somehow kept her from dying, as she was meant to, delaying America’s entry into the war. Hitler took the world, and everything went to hell. To set things right, Edith Keeler has to die.
And die she does: crossing the street in front of a truck she doesn’t see, McCoy moves to save her and is blocked by Kirk, in what has to be the most difficult thing he’s ever done.
Time is set right, and the three are returned to the corrected future by the Guardian.
“Assignment: Earth”
The three previous episodes represented three separate ways of moving through time, none of them connected with any of the others. This next Enterprise adventure represents the first instance of continuity, as the ship makes use of the Slingshot Effect for a second time. The idea is “historical research,” according to the captain’s log: “…to find out how our planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968.”
And as they orbit the Earth, monitoring global communications, they intercept a transporter beam – from another star system. A contemporary human, Gary Seven, materializes in the Transporter chamber, holding a black cat.
Seven makes clear that he is what he says he is, a 20th century man of Earth, but that he has been living on a faraway planet, undergoing training as an agent to keep Earth on a progressive course. He insists that he must be allowed to beam down and get on with his work. Kirk and Spock aren’t sure if they can believe him: if he’s telling the truth, holding him back is a bad thing; if he’s deceiving them, and his intentions aren’t good, letting him go is a bad thing.
Seven escapes, heading to a New York office where he has otherworldly tech available to him, including a powerful, all-knowing computer. He learns that two other agents of his extraterrestrial bosses have died in an accident, leaving him to complete a mission – destroying an orbital missile platform that the US is about to launch, which could destabilize international relations and even lead to world war. Kirk and Spock pursue him incognito, and there’s a showdown in which Kirk has to decide whether or not to trust Seven – if given a chance, will he destroy the platform? Or let it fall to Earth and detonate, triggering war? It’s the former, and all is well.
Wrapping things up, it turns out that Spock’s historical research confirms that “on this date, a malfunctioning suborbital warhead was exploded exactly one hundred and four miles above the Earth.”
“So everything happened the way it was supposed to,” Seven observes.
This version of Trek time travel, then, introduced the predestination paradox – “a phenomenon in which an event of time travel could become part of events which had already occurred, and could even lead to the initial event of time travel in the first place,” according to the Memory Alpha fan wiki.
“All Our Yesterdays”
The Guardian of Forever represented an Enterprise encounter with time travel provided by alien technology. The Atavachron, a time travel portal on the doomed planet Sarpeidon, is the next such encounter.
Sarpeidon’s star, Beta Niobe, is about to go nova. The Enterprise is there to learn what has become of the planet’s humanoid population – they all seem to have vanished.
Vanished they have, into their own past: Kirk, Spock and McCoy trace a power source and beam down, into a building that houses a vast library of records showing moments in the planet’s past. They meet Mr. Atoz, an elderly native, who along with several androids replicas of himself has accommodated the migration of the planet’s inhabitants into their own history, via the Atavachron. Lacking the technology to evacuate their planet by migrating to another star system, they used the tech they did have – time travel tech – to flee through time to safety.
As the explosion of Beta Niobe grows increasingly imminent, the Enterprise men find themselves plunging through the Atavachron into Sarpeiden’s planetary past – Kirk into something approximating its Medieval period, Spock and McCoy all the way back to an ice age.
Each meets someone in the Sarpeidon past who traveled back there through the Atavachron in the planet’s final days, warning them that they must return immediately. In their respective times, the Enterprise officers make their way back to the spots they came through the Atavachron and find themselves in the library again, as an agitated Mr. Atoz makes his own planned escape. They beam up and the ship warps away as Beta Niobe begins to explode.
Whew!
Though there will be more new approaches and wrinkles in time travel as future Treks unfold, these represent a meaningful starting point in studying the aspects of time travel that are most interesting – and philosophical.
We’ve already mentioned a couple of time travel standards – the Butterfly Effect, time-heals-itself, the predestination paradox – and the notion of multiple timelines.
As it happens, the first Trek time travel is also the safest and innocuous. When the warp “implosion” phenomenon propels the Enterprise away from the doomed Psi 2000 and 71 hours back in time, it represents a “doubling”; the ship is simultaneously at the point where/when it got its engines back in control, and also on its way to Psi 2000. Given that distance, and awareness of what has happened, it becomes a simple matter for the ship to just catch up with itself; hang tight for 71 hours, let events unfold as they already did, and then proceed on their journey. No harm, no foul, no complicating issues.
It would never be this clean again.
I’ve got butterflies…
In all of the remaining TOS time travel episodes, we confront the Butterfly Effect: if you travel from the future into the past, won’t even the most incidental, innocuous change lead to a domino-like cascade of changes that will eventually obliterate the future from which you traveled?
Time-heals-itself is the rote response to this one, throughout SF: yes, changes in the past matter, but the general shape of time remains the same. If the timeline is altered, it will “smooth out”. How exactly this smoothing-out happens is seldom articulated.
What we see in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is the typical balance between little-changes-that-don’t-mean-anything (Kirk and Sulu getting collared and interrogated, which disrupted the lives of all the airbase soldiers involved) and big ones that do (a pilot vanishing before he can father an astronaut critical to history). The little changes are rationalized as non-impactful, the idea being that even if the Enterprise guys turned the day upside down for the base security personnel, they still went home to their families at the end of the day and history proceeded to unfold as it should. The big changes – Christopher disappearing, the discovery of films of the Enterprise – have to be set right, or the future collapses.
In “City”, the butterfly is Edith Keeler: if she lives, the Nazis win World War II. That’s about as big as it gets. But when the street bum who finds McCoy’s phaser and vaporizes himself vanishes from history because McCoy went there, doesn’t that likewise change history? Not as much, of course, because we can’t imagine the street bum enabling Hitler – but everything he would have done, every person he would have ever interacted with, had he lived – all of that goes away.
It gets crazier on Sarpeidon, where hundreds of millions or even billions of people have been peppered through the planet’s history – and every single one of them would introduce thousands and thousands of changes to that history. How are Atoz and his library even still there? How could the future that unfolded originally, the one from which all those people traveled into the past, have still happened, if the timeline had been so overwhelmingly revised? Is there any scenario where sending an entire planetary population back into its own past doesn’t make mincemeat out of the timeline they started on?
Now, the handling of Zarabeth – a Sarpeidon woman encountered in the ice age past where Spock and McCoy find themselves – makes sense. Some tyrant banished her to permanent solitude, using the Atavachron, because she belonged to some powerful family and he wanted them out of the way, without killing them. She gets sent so far back in time that there’s no way she can change anything at all. And, being all by her lonesome, she can’t reproduce. On the other hand, given a choice between roasting alive in a nova and being banished alone into a permanent blizzard in the prehistoric past, most Sarpeidans might well choose the former.
This takes us to our next big challenge: alternate timelines.
Another time, another place
In this typical time travel twist, every change to an established timeline creates a new timeline, in which events now will run differently – while everything that preceded the change remains the same in both timelines. In “City”, for instance, if a new timeline was created when McCoy saved Edith Keeler’s life, then there was a timeline where she lives and one where she dies – and both timelines would be identical if you went back before that change.
It's an easy thing to say, “a change in an established timeline generates a new reality,” because it sounds downright poetic – romantic, even! But the idea is ridiculous on its face: a “new reality” is a new universe – a copy of the original, now to be tweaked, as with the saving of a Word doc when we want to do a new draft but keep a backup of the old one. But in the case of a new reality, we’re not talking a second pile of kilobytes; we’re talking about a second pile of a billion billion galaxies. A new reality means a new universe. It makes dramatic sense to say, “a history where Edith died in an accident” and “a history where Edith lived and we lost World War II” – but it makes much less sense when we say, “a universe of a billion billion galaxies where Edith died” and “a universe of a billion billion galaxies where Edith lived.”
It gets even sillier with Sarpeidon, where we’d have trillions of changes in the planet’s history, each generating a “new reality” – leading to trillions and trillions of universes, each with its own billions of billions of galaxies.
There’s much more to say about this one, but it’s led us conveniently to a new problem: the predestination paradox.
What happened, happened
Again, a predestination paradox occurs when an event happened in a timeline as a result of agency from the future, and was integrated into that future’s past – no splitting of realities, no “alternate versions”. Example: the aforementioned “All You Zombies”, Robert Heinlein’s short story in which a young man, a bartender, an unmarried mother, an infant, an older man, and a time traveler are in fact all the same person, a completely closed causality loop.
When Gary Seven enters into his report that the Enterprise crew “interfered with history,” he implies a version of history that is independent of them, and another version where they are present, and meddling; but Kirk corrects this, pointing out that Spock’s research confirms that the “new” version of events matches the old version exactly: “The Enterprise was part of what was supposed to happen on this day in 1968.”
In for a penny, in for a pound: this take asks us to accept that time travel can be a self-sustaining causality – that it’s possible, if traveling to the past was a thing, that “predestined” events could be built into the course of human events with no time-travel-free alternative. Time travel becomes its own kind of destiny. Well, okay, for the sake of dramatic utility, let’s hold onto that. It makes its own internal sense.
But then we have to deal with Edith Keeler – we can’t just say, what happened, happened, where she’s concerned: there is no “Bones was part of what was support to happen on this day in 1930.”
We can see, in “City”, three different versions of the same events:
· Edith dies in a traffic accident, with no Kirk, Spock, or McCoy anywhere to be found
· Edith almost dies in a traffic accident, but McCoy saves her
· Edith dies in a traffic accident because Kirk stops McCoy from saving her
We suppose we can eliminate the first one, and say that because time travel is part of it at all, there is no reality where no Enterprise guys were in 1930. That still leaves us with two: one with Just McCoy, and one with all three of them. The either/or is at odds with “Assignment: Earth”, where they’re “just part of what happened”. It can’t be both ways.
So, how does time travel work in the Trek universe? It has to be one or the other, right? Are some events resulting from the agency of time travelers in the past just “meant to be,” while others represent historical do-overs? If so, what’s the difference between them, other than the writer’s plotting challenges?
Our last two original cast time travel stories – “Yesteryear”, from the animated series, and The Voyage Home, the fourth Trek movie – don’t really add anything to the debate, though they’re fun and interesting to consider. The former is a revisitation of the Guardian of Forever, where Spock is erased in the present – only not really, because he was actually in another time and place within the Guardian at the time of his erasure, requiring him to go back into his childhood and save his own life. In The Voyage Home, the Enterprise crew uses the Slingshot Effect to go back to Earth 1986 in a Klingon Bird of Prey and collect a couple of whales. This time, they do something they declined to do in “Tomorrow is Yesterday”: they bring an Eighties woman back with them. It’s her choice, but of course, the sudden disappearance of marine biologist Gillian Taylor apparently doesn’t count for much in the vicissitudes of history.
Did time heal itself? Did it “smooth over” when Dr. Taylor was plucked out of it? Or was it a predestination paradox? Was her removal simply “part of what happened in 1986?” Does your head hurt? Mine sure does…
It gets better as we move into the other shows: more variations on these themes, plus new themes – a couple of them truly original – and some honest-to-Q philosophical conundrums. We’ll get to at least some of those the next time around…
Oh, and the answer is 4, by the way: the first is behind the billboard at Marty’s family’s under-construction neighborhood; the second is the flying version from 2015, brought back by Old Biff; the third is also the flying version, but this one is in Doc’s workshop on his estate; the fourth is the one sent back to 1885 by the lightning strike, hidden in the mineshaft.
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