19 – Tomorrow is Yesterday

Grade: B

Summary

Through some kind of weird accident, the Enterprise ends up in the 1960s. An Air Force pilot sees the Enterprise and assumes it is a UFO, and matters only get worse when he is transported aboard the ship.

Commentary

I enjoyed this episode, though there are a lot of time-travel episodes throughout this series and the other Star Treks. This one seems to have been written well and keeps me interested. It was also fun to see 1960s technology. This was the first time Star Trek went back into Earth’s past and established a story based on UFOs, but it sure wasn’t the last time they would do this. It seemed to work well here, so they repeated this theme several times throughout the entire franchise.

Of Note

When Kirk is being interrogated on Earth in the 1960s, the Colonel says he’ll be locked up for 200 years. Kirk says that would be about right, meaning he’s about 200 years into the future. When this episode aired, the exact timeline of Star Trek events was not yet established, or else he would have said 300 years instead.

I thought it was also pretty funny to hear Majel Barrett as the voice of the computer in this episode. As you certainly know by now, she was the voice of the computer on future Star Trek series also.