Tomorrow Is Yesterday
“Tomorrow Is Yesterday” exists as something quite unlike anything the show has attempted up to this point. It resides in a strange liminal space between past and future, adjacent to but not actually equivalent to the present.
This is true of all TOS at this point, of course, a view to the future approaching sixty years old. To paraphrase the episode itself, though, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” got there ahead of all of them.
The Roddenberry Resumé
As one might expect with an episode in which our protagonists are flung back in time, references to the past abound here. What’s more surprising is what those references relate to. There’s essentially nothing here that ties into the more general history of the United States. The USAF presented here might as well be GI Joe for all the accuracy offered, beyond some stock footage and decent costume work. That isn’t to say the service isn’t granted importance within the narrative. This is only the second episode of the show so far to not open on an establishing shot of the Enterprise, (the other being “The Conscience Of The King”), and the first for which neither Shatner nor Nimoy are heard within the opening two lines. That’s not about drowning us in military versimilitude, though, so much as a general flourish aimed at framing our heroes as interlopers in our own world.
Not that it even is our own world. Again, this isn’t unusual. This isn’t reality, this is fantasy, as Uhura herself once said. Specifically, this is Gene Roddenberry’s fantasy, and while Fontana wrote the episode, it was Roddenberry who passed her the story beats, as well as (obviously) literally running the show.
As such, the references deployed here relate to Roddenberry’s own past, and that of his show. Thanks to “The Menagerie”, any sufficiently clued-in Trek fan would already be primed to respond to the name “Captain Christopher” with the name “Pike” (Rodenberry liked to recycle names, “Pike” originally being a character from his first attempt at a TV pilot). Majel Barrett returns to the show for the third time as the ship’s computer, in the process nodding to a future staple for the franchise which will last until 2009, a year after her own death.
There’s also something autobiographical in having the Enterprise’s accidental visitor be a pilot. Roddenberry was never technically in the Air Force, but he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and piloted Flying Fortresses in the Pacific Theatre. If that doesn’t quite make Second Lieutenant Roddenberry directly equivalent to Captain John Christopher, it at least puts him on a scale with Christopher at one end, and Hikaru Sulu at the other. Given these links to Roddenberry’s past, it’s probably for the best that we don’t end up diving too deeply into the minutiae of American aviation, military or otherwise. The episode is already in visual range of a line it could cross to become overly self-indulgent even by my standards [1].
That isn’t the only reason to steer clear of too many details, though. While it was common practice for a sci-fi show to spend an episode on Earth to save money (or even a whole season; I’m looking at you, Lexx), “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” is very much not set in the same year it was filmed. Instead we’re in the near future, the Enterprise’s arrival coinciding with a manned moon-shot that was still over two and a half years away when this episode was shot. This is still a show set in the future, just a future far closer to those who were watching it on broadcast.
Choosing not to give any details about the USAF that might quickly go out of date is a savvy choice, then. But this just highlights how big a risk the script is taking in tying down the first attempt to put a man on the moon as something that would take place before 1970. Rather than spreading their bets by referring to a moon-shot happening in, say, the latter half of the twentieth century, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” puts a mere three years on the timer. It was entirely conceivable that the show itself might outlive the decade with which it debuted (in the end its final episode was broadcast in June 1969, just six weeks before the launch of Apollo 11).
So why take the chance?
There are, I think, two potential answers to this question. Both stem from the likelihood that, before the world had even heard of the Apollo programme, the script was counting on President Kennedy’s promise that there would be footprints on the moon by the end of the decade. Not just any footprints, either, but honest, hard-working American footprints, leading to a star-spangled banner held rigid beneath a star-spangled spiral arm. The fact the Enterprise picks up the transmission about the planned mission to the moon from Cape Kennedy itself lends weight to this idea.
How one responds to this framing likely comes down to whether you see this as an expression of optimism, or of jingoism. It’s true that the race for space itself was a massively costly PR campaign, one in which the actual people risking themselves for their country’s pride could find their status as propaganda pieces mattered rather more than their actual lives. It is the grimmest irony that “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” aired just one day before a fire broke out inside the Apollo 1 module during a pre-launch test, killing all three astronauts aboard. The deaths were blamed on a number of factors, one of which was inadequate safety precautions.
If we’re going to down the historical route in analysing this episode, though – and really, what option do we have with a fifty-seven year old story pretending to be a fifty-four year old one – I’m not sure how reasonable it is to criticise this script for wanting to take the president who was assassinated just three years previously at his word. Whether it was reasonable or not to see the US space program as being an expression of optimism, I think Trek’s own optimism is on full display here, and we should engage with that on its own terms.
Outdated Reference
The most obvious reason to dismiss the idea that the episode is intended as putting all its chips on continued American dominance of space is that our heroes have just come from there, and they did it while under the flag of a United Earth.
It’s true that this isn’t the first time such a planetary body has been mentioned this season (that would be “The Corbomite Maneuver”). There’s an added edge to the idea here, though, with Kirk being not at all sure someone from nineteen-sixty-whatever America being able to even grasp the concept of an Earth that has completely united.
His decision to not even attempt to explain the geopolitical situation three hundred years hence leads us into the key observation about the episode. Often what’s most interesting here is what’s being left unspoken. Ironically, there’s quite a lot to say about this, mainly with respect to Captain Christopher. At first, he’s surprised to see women serving on (what he interprets as) a warship – or perhaps he’s just surprised to see an officer showing that much leg. Either way, it takes him all of a single turbolift trip to internalise the situation. By the time he’s introduced to a black woman as a bridge officer, he doesn’t so much as twitch. Spock knocks him sideways, yes, but Uhura? He quietly accepts a tour from her, and then gets embarrassed when she catches him continuing to freak out over the first alien he’s ever met.
(It’s worth noting here that, in truth, the first black woman to reach the rank of lieutenant in the US Navy did so in 1944. That was also the same year in which the US Navy got its first female captain, (by rank; the first woman to captain a Navy ship came decades later). Christopher shouldn’t have been surprised to see a woman serving at all, then. I suspect Fontana – the only woman to receive a writing credit in the show’s first season – is playing loose with history in order to make a point.)
It’s an understated moment, yes. Really, though, how could it be otherwise? The whole point is to show that Christopher has no issue with what he’s seeing – that at worst he’s surprised, and he never comes close to disapproving.
There’s a form of character that blogger and all-round sharp cookie Jack Graham refers to as “Tim Nice-But-Then”. This is any character in a historical setting who expresses modern socially-liberal views in contexts where such views wouldn’t have been comprehensible. Doing this serves two purposes. Firstly, it allows the audience to feel better about choosing to enjoy stories in which minorities are either badly treated or entirely absent, and more particularly to forgive themselves for laughing along with all the “political incorrectness gone mad” such stories often trade in. Secondly, and paradoxically, the inclusion of such characters allows the audience to engage in smug back-slapping about how enlightened we are now compared to how they were then.
This allows a rewriting of history as a place where nobody knew better, and therefore no-one can be judged. On the surface, this seems like a way of taking pride in how far we’ve come as a society. In practice, though, it’s deployed as a way of crudely tearing the present away from the context of the past, arguing that because the bad things happened then, they can’t possibly be happening now. This is a line of thought expressed recently a slew of arguments saying it’s unreasonable to take down statues venerating literal slave traders, because no-one back then was enlightened enough to realise claiming to own people and torturing them for not working hard enough for you was actually a bad way to behave. [2]
Captain Christopher is positioned here as the exact opposite character, Tim Nicer-And-Soon. According to “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”, there wasn’t even thirty-six months left on the clock before your average American white guy could see a black woman a few bad days away from commanding a warship, and barely blink. The real bet here isn’t that America can reach the moon in the next three years. It’s that it can reach the glaringly obvious conclusion that the Civil Rights Movement was absolutely right on all points. The very ridiculousness of the comparison lends it an extra weight. We’re working on going to the literal moon, lads. Do you think you could find it in your hearts to maybe share a water fountain?
Like I said, optimistic.
Past Tensions
Nor is Christopher’s brief interaction with Uhura the only example we can reach for. Barrett’s role as a retooled ship’s computer isn’t just a reference to the show’s past. It’s a springboard to the idea there exist female-dominated cultures out among the stars, ones that the Federation don’t just interact with, but are happy to employ when they need some repair work.
I’ll admit that this idea isn’t an unmitigated success. It’s not a great look that the woman who played the ruthlessly logical Number One is now involved in implying even a computer can’t behave logically if it’s given a female personality. Mind you, maybe that’s just an unintended consequence of playing up Kirk’s reputation as an absolute snack [3] – even the lady AIs recognise tasty when their myriad sensor suites detect and process it.
Let’s give DC Fontana – the only woman who received a writing credit in the show’s first season – the benefit of the doubt on this, and move on. What I’d rather think about his how this set-up allows ample opportunity for Christopher to make some crack about female mechanics, or computers needing a man’s dispassion, or something else equally toe-clenching. And there’s nothing at all like that. Instead, he just notes that his hosts’ problems are as difficult for him to relate to as anything else about them, and leaves it at that.
Our final station along this line of thought is Lieutenant Sulu. It was just last episode that the ghost of Pearl Harbor was summoned, via the Gorn sneak attack on Cestus III. I noted in my write-up of “Arena” that this would have carried particular weight for an audience that included so many people who could remember the attack and its aftermath. If we assume John Christopher was the exact same age as the man playing him, that would include Christopher himself. He would have been somewhere around his sixth birthday when the attack happened. That’s the same age I was when the Challenger disaster happened [4], and I still have dim memories of that. And tragic as that was, it was a one-off event. Pearl Harbor resulted in the Americans entering a war it would take almost four more years to bring to an end. John Christopher would have been approaching his tenth birthday by the time Japan surrendered.
As a result, Christopher’s formative years will have been absolutely drenched in anti-Japanese propaganda. Nor did such sentiments disappear from America once peace arrived. The Asiatic villains of the day may have been updated to include the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans and Vietnamese, but there was plenty of distrust left over to point toward the Land of the Rising Sun – something rather underlined by how swiftly Japan returned to the forefront of America’s international concerns the instant the Cold War was over.
It would hardly have been surprising, then, had Christopher looked askance at an American with Japanese heritage, his status as a visitor from the future notwithstanding. And that’s assuming Christopher could even recognise where Sulu’s family had originated from. Maybe it was the country they stopped fighting in 1945. Maybe it was the one they stopped fighting in 1953. Or the one they were still grappling with diplomatically as part of a clash of cultures. Or hell, maybe it was even the one they were still laying waste to with napalm and Agent Orange.
(I hope this goes without saying, but this isn’t me suggesting all Asian men look the same. I’m just suggesting expecting your average white westerner to be particularly good at distinguishing the ethnic differences among those with Southeast Asian heritage is probably a fairly big ask.)
And yet Captain Nicer-And-Soon not only shows no antagonism toward Sulu in general, he raises no objection to the idea of him beaming down into a US military base. Not only that, but Christopher happily gives Sulu the information he needs to gain access to confidential military records.
We can say something about Spock, as well. It takes Christopher a minute or two to adjust to a man from another world, but once he’s done that, he’s no more suspicious of those with a literally alien heritage than he is of those for which it’s true metaphorically. This time around Trek is so totally in the business of refusing to grant credence to the viewpoints of bigots, that it won’t even voice them using the standard sci-fi expression for those concerns. In a film and TV landscape still recovering from the glut of genre pieces based on and reflecting a public in the grip of the Red Terror, Trek suggests a world just years away in which a serving member of the US Air Force is asked to help an Asian American and an actual, honest-to-God alien break into his own base, and says “Sure, as long as I can join in the fun”.
Perhaps this is what Spock means, in fact, when he says he too has never believed in little green men. I mean, Vulcans are pretty damn close to being green men, and the word “little” is so obviously comparative in a galaxy of such wondrous variation that it would be ludicrous to think no Vulcan could ever be considered as less than average height. What he’s dismissing then isn’t the possibility of alien life meeting that description, but that the underlying implications of the idea as humanity expressed it – of the dangerous, malevolent outsider bent on enslavement and destruction. This little green man just wants to do his job, and then get back to finding new lifeforms he can describe as “fascinating”.
Future Imperfect
There are, I admit, limits to what can achieve through a reading like this, in which so much is assumed to be stored in the negative spaces of the story. A response to this essay that argues all I’ve done is note that the guest star’s character doesn’t actually say anything sexist or racist would I think be unfair, but it wouldn’t be totally unfair.
Here though we return once more to the idea of the episode existing as an intersection point between past and future. It isn’t just that Christopher’s behaviour offers us no counter-evidence for the theory that Trek was postulating the imminent victory of social liberalism. It’s that Roddenberry had been working towards that goal for his entire career as a TV writer.
I don’t want to engage in hagiography of the “Great Bird of the Galaxy”. There’s no shortage of that sort of thing elsewhere. There are all sorts of ways in which he failed to live up to his own rhetoric, from his random outbursts of concentrated misogyny to the fact he stole this whole story from Robert Justman. That said, the man genuinely had form when it came to trying to write racially progressive television. When he was told there were to be no black people on the show Riverboat he was writing, he caused such a stink with the suits that they fired him. He was responsible for the Department of Defense withdrawing its support for The Lieutenant after he wrote an episode in which two marines, one black and one white, found common ground. Even before Star Trek was Star Trek, and it was just a half-formed idea in Roddenberry’s head about an airship that flew around having adventures, the idea the crew would be multi-racial was firmly lodged in his head.
For all Roddenberry’s faults, then, his intentions for Trek are enough to let the optimistic reading stick. Even if it’s only accidentally doing what it’s supposed to, it was supposed to be doing it. I don’t know if Trek made it there first, but it was Trek that everyone heard throwing down the spacesuit gauntlet. This can be done. Why the hell aren’t you doing it? Again, we’re in the liminal space, with Trek suggesting the endpoint of humanity’s journeys to other celestial bodies before we’d even reached the closest one – an Earth standing united, proud in its diversity and seeking more of the same.
More than fifty years later, we’re still struggling to live up to the future it imagined for us. It didn’t arrive yesterday, and it isn’t going to arrive today. But like Fontana and Roddenberry before me, I refuse to not bet on it coming soon.
[1] Plus, they’d arguably already covered at least part of Roddenberry’s experiences in the skies with “Galileo Seven”. As well as reworking the film Five Came Back, that episodes sports shades of June 1947, when a plane Roddenberry was on crashed in the Syrian desert, and despite suffering two broken ribs he helped lead the survivors to safety.
[2] I take no small delight in editing this post just days after the "Colson 4" were exonerated for pushing that foul monument to human misery into Bristol Harbour.
[3] This is both a very different idea to him having a reputation as a womaniser, and one vastly easier to justify from the text.
[4] Another example of the American space program paying for its haste with the lives of its astronauts.