Treat this as the first time the episode has aired, no later episodes to be mentioned, This is all in original air dates blah blah… Onwards and upwards
Synopsis: The Enterprise is flung into the 1960s after an accident. Trying to escape the atmosphere they are picked up by US radar and a jet is sent out to intercept them. Using the tractor beam to hold it back they accidentally destroy the small craft. Luckily the pilot, Capt John Christopher, is saved. Trapped in the past the Crew must try to erase all records of their appearance and prevent the pilot from destroying the future with the knowledge he has. Can they get back to their own time?
As the episode started I was wondering if Star Trek had been replaced with another show. It was great that the UFO turned out to be the Enterprise.
I liked how they were in our time… well looks like the end of the decade as Kirk mentions the Moon landing occurs at the end of teh decade.
The plot seemed a little patched together. There were some good moments but over all the mood seemed wrong. Also the ending did not make sense.
Ok so there are 12 ships like the Enterprise and Kirk finally tells us what UESPA stands for. The Ships are part of the United Earth Space Probe Agency. Glad that is finally settled once and for all.
Spock’s line “neither do I” regarding believing in little green men was funny as was the gaurds reaction to being beamed aboard.
Kirk’s fighting abilities are… well weird. He throws his whole body at two or three gaurds and jumps over people and kinda just flails around. His shirt didn’t rip though. [2005] which is probably why he lost the fight [/2005]
Man will land on the moon at the end of the decade eh? I’ll believe that when I see it, nice try Star Trek…
I liked Shatners reaction as the colnel tossed the phaser to the guard almost as if he expected the thing to go off… nice touch.
I don’t understand the ending at all. How did they beam those guys into themselves and why did the Enterprise disapear from the past?
Not a great episode… almost not a good one… Still it’s superior to Lost in Space.
Idunno, the idea of a United Earth exploration agency is really cool, but since we know there are lots of other races out there, I think some kind of unified organization of those would be better. Maybe some kind of Interstellar Hegemony, dedicated to peacefully exploring the galaxy and learning from all that new life and all those new civilizations.
Yeah, that ending was confusing. It’s as tho they had a reset button for time travel or something. Hopefully, they’ll never try something so lame ever again. (My little nephews, Berman and Bragga loved the ending of this episode, but what do kids know?) I’m guessing they just wanted to wrap it up so it didn’t go to two parts.
I really enjoyed the idea of the future Star Trekkers being in our time. It almost seemed as tho they were more having fun than working.
The tractor beam breaking up the jet was a nice detail. I guess they use stronger materials in the future.
Even with the nits, I liked it. It has a nice beat you can dance to. I give it a 74.
I think it was just a continuous effect. They beamed him out of the plane in the first place, and then beamed him back in the instant he was gone. It is confusing, though. I could be dead wrong.
I love the guy showing up backwards on the transporter pad! Next I want to see someone materialize lying down, or on their head. Sometimes in science fiction it seems like there’s a universal up/down/back/front.
Nice one liner from McCoy, when Kirk says the Doctor’s acting like Spock. “If you’re going to get nasty, I’m going to leave.”
Isn’t just telling Col. Chistopher about his son a problem in and of itself? The knowledge that his son is ‘supposed’ to do something could affect his Christopher’s behaviour in all sorts of ways. Who knows what he could be messing up?
So… the protocol for handling an emergency signal from a communicator is to, what? Immediately beam the possible trouble into the middle of the ship. That seem like a bad idea to anyone else?
Nice fight scene with Kirk and the security guards… which was completely ruined by Kirk’s little gymnastic routines right in the middle. How goofy was that?
Time travel’s a pretty nifty idea, though. I’ve red H.G. Wells’ book. Have their been many other time travel stories? The possibilities seem endless. I bet you could do story after story after story about time travel. Again and again. You could keep going back to it long after you ran out of other ideas. Over and over and over.
All in all, a pretty poor episode. Better than Galileo Seven, but still not up to the standards we know they can achieve.
[2005] In case you hadn’t guessed, I flippin’ hate time travel stories, especially on Trek. I try to give this one respect as the first time the series went to that particular well (except for the little blip in “Naked Time”, but it really is a pretty weak episode.[/2005]
Yeah, I almost changed the channel- I thought some other show had come on.
Those shots of the Enterprise in the atmosphere were cool. For some reason, the ship looks more dynamic from a below/behind angle.
Why did they get a “Welcome Back” from Starfleet? Who could have known they were gone?
Now that they’ve established that time travel is possible, they should start some kind of agency to correct mistakes (like McCoy, when he went back in time and erased everything. ((2005) Assuming “City” has already aired- I’m not sure(/2005)).
[2005] It hasn’t here is a Link with the air date order for reference. [/2005]
Thwartme, that beam in/out may work for Christopher but the guard is a totally different story. He gets beamed in as he opens the door but was beamed out after he captured Sulu and Kirk… and it seems almost as if the Enterprise was never there from their reactions… I don’t know the whole thing was baffling. Perhaps the idea of a “reset Button” seems to be just what happened. (By the way what exactly is a reset button???)
Christopher’s plane looked like an F-104. It’s an interceptor – it flies fast, it flies very high, but pilots crash them a lot. Looks like it doesn’t stand up too well to tractor beams, either.
Overall I was kind of let down, but that’s because the main idea – how can we get out of here as quietly and least disruptively as possible – really works against any big, broad action segments.
Can I be the first to remark how cheesy those Earth sets were? You would think that at a cost of over $150,000 per episode (you could make a full season of Petticoat Junction for that sort of money!) it would look better but all we got was stock footage and flat, gray walls. Well, they were gray for me since I have a B&W TV, but they looked like a color TV wouldn’t help.
By the way, I have a question for you people with color TVs: Is Spock really green?
Ha! No, Spock isn’t green. In fact, except for the ears and the arched eyebrows, he looks pretty much entirely human. Yes, he has an odd haircut, but that’s not really alien, now is it?
Which raises the question, why were the reactions of Christopher and the other guy so pronounced on seeing Spock? Does anyone else think he’s obviously alien-looking? I think if I saw a man with sharp-pointed ears, I’d think “Hey, look at how weird that guys ears are!” long before I thought “Alien!!!”
And yeah, the transport thing doesn’t really work for the other guy, does it? Hmm…
Okay, someone take a shot at actually explaining this ending. There’s gotta be a way it all makes sense.
I heard that the writer of this episode, D.C. Fontana, is actually a woman, who named the colonel’s as-yet-unborn son “Sean Geoffrey Christopher” after her own three sons. Don’t know if it’s hard for women to make a living as screenwriters in Hollywood nowadays, but hopefully Mr. Roddenberry will keep her on the “Star Trek” staff. She’s definitely got talent.
The ending implies that everything that was thrown out of kilter in the past because of NCC-1701 showing has been reset to normal by beaming the 20th Century people back as the Enterprise was making its way through time again. They went back at almost the exact instant they were first taken, so they were “not taken” in the first place.
A RESET BUTTON. It’s been used in some other time travel sci-fi stories I’ve read, but I don’t recall seeing it on TV or movies before now.
That show was like so groovy man. I thought that the crew was going come back here and stick it to The Man. I thought that they would end the war (hopefully before my number comes up) [2005] I don’t know when the draft did end, hopefully it was after this air date. [/2005].
At the very least they could told MLK to keep fighting the good fight.
Ok I thought about it… What if nothing can be two places at the same time? Or at least you can’t ahve a duplicate. That would mean as the Enterprise escaped the past it erased istself so that it never was there at all? That would mean that the Captain and the guard never saw anything because it didn’t exist.
Aw that sounds like a load of hooey. But that was the best I could come up with. It would also mean that they would have earsed Christopher and the gaurd’s existance when they travelled backwards through time.
Nope the ending just can’t work no matter what explaination you try to come up with. (that’s a challenge by the way)
It’s a thing they have on tape recorders. With a tape reel you can’t see where one song ends and the next starts like you can with a record, so they have a little counter (it looks like the odometer on your car) that goes up as you play or fast forward through the tape.
When you remove one tape and put on another the counter is showing some odd number, so you push the “reset” button to set it back to showing all zeros since you are at the beginning of a new tape. So “pushing the reset button” means the same as “going back to the way it was at the beginning”.
[2005]Close. . . D. C. Fontana named the character after Shaun, Jeffrey and Chritopher Black, sons of fellow Trek writer John D. F. Black. This teleplay basic storyline was submitted as a one-page proposal by producer Robert Justman, who never received credit. Originally it was to be “Part Two” of “The Naked Time.” The trip back in time at the end of that episode would have hurled them back to 1969.[/2005]
