Star Trek – All Our Yesterdays

★★★★ March 14, 1969 Season 3 Episode 23

If want to see where we are…and you missed a few…HERE is a list of the episodes in my index located at the top of my blog. 

This show was written by Gene Roddenberry, Jean Lisette Aroeste, and Arthur H. Singer

Only one more episode after this one. This is one that you see Spock fall for a lady named Zarabeth who is played beautifully by Mariette Hartley. You see Spock revert back to the time before Vulcan developed the logical way of life. Personally, I think Spock could have been happy there in the cold with Zarabeth…I know I would! This is one of my favorite episodes of the third season. They don’t spend hardly any time in the Enterprise. 

Kirk and crew land on a lonely planet where the sun is about to explode. They intend to evacuate the inhabitants but find the place deserted except for Mr. Atoz who operates some sort of high-tech library. Despite trying to get a straight answer from him about everyone’s whereabouts, Atoz is indifferent to their questions and insists they must quickly ‘make a selection while there is still time. The reason for the short time is a star is about to nova, and the three arrive on the planet, hoping to help evacuate the population

They have no idea what he’s talking about but wander about looking at the hand mirror-like disks on the viewers and they see images of the planet’s past. Then, while a disk is in the viewer, Kirk runs through the doorway and is magically transported back in time to what on Earth would look like the time of Louis XIV (the 1660s). When McCoy and Spock follow, a different disk is in the viewer and they are sent to an ice-age hell. All too late they realize that the library is a time travel machine and repository.

While Kirk’s visit is pretty short and not all that exciting, Spock and McCoy’s is much more eventful, as Spock falls head over heels for Mariette Hartley–who was sent to this awful place as a punishment. The scenes with Spock are exceptionally interesting and very atypical of the normally logical Vulcan. McCoy almost freezes to death but Spock looks after him but that doesn’t mean we don’t get some verbal jabs from each of them to each other. 

One of the best episodes of the 3rd season in my opinion. I do like Time Travel also so that played a part. 

From IMDB:

The name of the librarian Mr. Atoz is a play on the phrase “A to Z”. Author Jean Lisette Aroeste was a UCLA librarian at the time she wrote this script.

Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov do not appear in this episode. Scotty does not appear on screen but has several voice-over lines. In no other episode are only three regular members of the crew seen in person.

The title is taken from “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare, Act 5, Scene 5: The title character speaks “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time, / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.”

The name of the device, the Atavachron, is quite a descriptive one. “Atavus” is Latin for “… (an) ancestor or ancestral type from which a character is assumed to be inherited”, and “chron” is from the Greek “chronos” (“time”), so, an Atavachron is a device which can send you to an ancestral place of any time period.

According to the stardate, this episode is chronologically the last of the series, even though its production number and air date are earlier than Turnabout Intruder (1969). This is therefore the last voyage of the USS Enterprise in the original series. This is also the last time-travel episode of the original series.

Part of the set depicting the surface of the ice age planet where Spock and McCoy are transported was recycled from the MGM film Ice Station Zebra (1968), made the previous year.

There is no footage aboard the Enterprise in this story. Only three crew members (Kirk, Spock & McCoy) are seen and only one stock footage shot of the exterior is used. This was a deliberate attempt to cut costs and to film this episode quickly by using a minimal number of sets. Sets from previous episodes were reused as well.

The Atavachron computer used by Mr. Atoz is the same one as used by Gary Seven in Assignment: Earth (1968).

Mariette Hartley (Zarabeth) was not allowed to show her belly-button in this episode, despite the appearances of other women’s navels in previous episodes. To comment on this censorship, Gene Roddenberry gave Hartley’s character two navels in his pilot Genesis II (1973), stating that “the network owed me one.”

There were two highly successful sequel books, “Yesterday’s Son” and “Time for Yesterday”, both by A.C. Crispin.

The stock footage showing the endless snow fields on the disc McCoy watches was also used as the surface of Exo III in What Are Little Girls Made Of? (1966).

The sound effect used for the Atavachron is the experimental time code broadcast by radio stations WWV and WWVH in the 1960s. A time code seems appropriate for a time machine.

Summary

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpeidon to learn what has happened to its population. The planet, which will be completely destroyed when its sun goes supernova in a few hours’ time, once had a thriving population but has now been reduced to one person, the librarian Mr. Atoz. It would appear that the planet’s entire population has gone back in time to a period of their choice in the planet’s history. When the three crewmen unknowingly have gone through the time portal, Kirk ends up in a society similar to 17th-century Earth while McCoy and Spock end up in a frozen ice age. With Kirk arrested and accused of witchcraft and the others having to survive the harsh Arctic-like climate, they have only a short time to find their way back and return to the Enterprise before the planet explodes. For Mr. Spock, he finds a time from before the existence of Vulcan and he’s regressing to an emotional state.

CAST

William Shatner … Captain James Tiberius ‘Jim’ Kirk
Leonard Nimoy … Mister Spock
DeForest Kelley … Dr. McCoy
Mariette Hartley … Zarabeth
Ian Wolfe … Mr. Atoz
Kermit Murdock … The Prosecutor
Ed Bakey … The First Fop
James Doohan … Scott (voice)
Anna Karen … Woman
Albert Cavens … Second Fop (as Al Cavens)
Stan Barrett … The Jailor
Johnny Haymer … The Constable