“Yesterday’s Enterprise”
“Yesterday’s Enterprise” The Enterprise-C was lost with all hands 22 years ago when the ship defended the Klingon outpost at Narendra III against the Romulans. Now the ship appears from a temporal rift, and reality on the Enterprise-D changes. Worf is gone, but Tasha Yar is alive. The Federation is now at war with the Klingons, obviously because the Enterprise-C is missing in the past and does not support the Klingons. Guinan is the only one to notice the change, and eventually she can convince Picard to send the Enterprise-C back to correct history. When she learns that she should be dead, Tasha decides to stay on the Enterprise-C although the ship is facing a hopeless battle. Just when the Enterprise-D is about to be destroyed by Klingon ships, the Enterprise-C enters the rift, and the “real” history is restored. summary by Ex-Astris-Scientia
Well, yet another mirror universe… Oh, I know I’ve mentioned I kinda liked these but…
Okay, was a bit dramatic and it was nice to see the more warrior-like side of TNG and… Somehow I can’t really say what irritated me about this one. Not entirely hopeless, though.
August 17th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
It’s been ages since I watched this episode, but if there was anything I didn’t like about it, it must have been Guinan.
What is she doing on a frontline ship like the alternate E-D in the first place? And even if she has some special abilities, how can she know that the new timeline is wrong when she is supposed to have never known anything else, given the shift in realities and that she must have lived her “new” life entirely in this timeline?
If this episode left any lasting impression with me it’s that Guinan was used as too obvious a plot device for my taste. To me it almost looked like the writers had come up with an interesting idea, but then suddenly realized that they couldn’t “reset” the story and had written themselves into a corner, until someone came up with the bright idea to play the “mysterious alien power” card.
August 18th, 2006 at 8:30 pm
Hi Andreas!
Nice to see you here.
Guinan you say? Ahh, but she’s an El-Aurian, don’t you remember? They are supposed to have this sort of sensitivity to time and space, not available to any other humanoid races. You must have read Travis Anderson’s “Special Investigations Division”? Or, there’s this movie (I don’t remember it since Trek movies as well as the animated series are sort of… off cannon for me).In this movie, a mad scientist wants to destroy the whole solar system or something? Could it be “Nexus”? Anyway, the scientist is an El-Aurian as well. And I’m sure it has been mentioned about Guinan. They’re called listeners and they know more than they’re willing to admit. It doesn’t seem so unbelievable for me that she’d sense something’s not right. Actually, it was one of the brighter spots of the episode for me.
August 19th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
Well, yes, she’s an El-Aurian, I sure remember that. But what El-Aurians can or can’t do is something that strikes me as a “plot device” the writers pretty much made up “on the fly”, whenever they needed to.
But I suppose you are right in some way: Having a character who says “all this fighting is just plain wrong” is pretty fitting for a TNG story, even if the… wrongness derives from a changed timeline.
Still… in this episode it just strikes me as wrong that she can recall (even faintly) something that is not supposed to have happened in the timeline she finds herself in. But perhaps I’m just overanalyzing Trek science, which almost always leads to a headache anyway, especially in the case of changed timelines and parallel universes.
But to me it still feels like there was just a bit too much “deus ex machina” in this episode. After all, how could the episode have turned into a “regular” TNG episode if the writers hadn’t pulled the “Guinan trick”?
August 25th, 2006 at 7:40 am
I hear you. I’ve always thought you’re much more sensitive to the probability factor that I am. For me quite often being on the cool side is far more important