Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow or Let’s Kill (Baby) Hitler
See also: “The City on the Edge of Forever” (TOS), “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (TOS), “Time’s Arrow” (TNG), “Past Tense” (DS9), “Future’s End” (VOY), “Storm Front” (ENT), Star Trek IV, Season 2 (PIC)
Contains strange new worlds: Not unless you count Toronto.
Title is a florid but entirely literal reference to a big thing in the episode?: Not this time
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
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. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
- How many of us had to memorize this at some point?
The sidelining of Pike continues, oddly. Was Anson Mount busy? I don’t think filming for this season would have overlapped with Doctor Strange.
Anyway, for the second time, we get to hang out with Paul Wesley’s Jim Kirk, and I’ve just now realized that Paul Wesley played one of the vampire bros in the TV “adaptation” of LJ Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (Scare quotes here because the adaptation was incredibly loose, in the specific sense that they really just made a Twilight TV series and changed the title to a property they could afford the rights to. And, in a move that I hope will make the chronic complainers think twice before complaining about a line in the teaser, once again, he’s playing an alternate universe version of Kirk.
This gives me a segue to bring up something I wanted to mention last week, but didn’t because I ran out of time, what with it being midnight on Tuesday, and Dylan wouldn’t go to bed, and I’d had an absolutely miserable couple of weeks. One thing that’s conspicuously not addressed in “Ad Astra Per Aspera” is the fact that we kinda know that, had Pike not gone through his life-changing experience with his future self, Una would still be in jail. She would very probably be serving out the 20-year sentence for sedition. So what’s changed? It’s weird, because Pike is barely in that episode. The only thing he does is get Neera to agree to defend Una, and I can’t imagine he didn’t do that in the other timeline.
My best guess is that it comes down to Pike’s scene with Batel. Perhaps the unchastened version of Pike, the one who wrote the letter to Maat, would have insisted on taking the stand himself, and in doing so, given testimony that precluded Neera’s asylum defense. Or worse, he could have gotten himself into so much trouble that Una sacrificed herself to keep him from a court-martial. I can believe that the Pike who lived through the experience of “A Quality of Mercy” is one who is more willing to step back and let things unfold as they will, rather than forcing himself into the center of things, convinced – in a Jim Kirk sort of way – that only he could fix it.
Also, if I hadn’t run out of time, I’d have linked to Steve Shives’s Starfleet Lawyer video, because it’s hilarious.
But anyway, we’re full-circle around back to Kirk. I still don’t think Paul Wesley looks right for the part, but I’ll happily admit he acts right for the part. I’m really impressed by the extent to which they are writing him as a younger Kirk in the mold of TOS season 1 as it actually was, rather than the decades of pop culture that accreted around the character. He’s charming and he’s bold, but he’s not overly rogueish, not a huge rulebreaker, and incredibly intelligent. And where we see Kirk Swagger, it’s in him delighting in hot dogs and sightseeing, because he’s from a future where Earth is a barren wasteland. I love that they have him hustle chess to get them some spending money in 21st century Toronto. Apparently enough money that they can afford a three-room suite for a night in a downtown highrise. How much are hotels in Toronto? (Oh, and did you notice? Kirk says that 2D chess is a “child’s game.” Remember how Kirk ultimately beats Khan? By exploiting his two-dimensional thinking. And if you take a close look in the background when La’an meets her ancestor? He’s got a 2-D chess set in his room.
I love that this episode is set in Toronto. I love that Kirk mistakes it for New York. Despite the sign saying “Toronto” in the background.
So just like in Picard Season 2, the timeline gets broken and there’s no Federation. But there’s a nice balance here: humanity doesn’t go Full Nazi in this timeline; they actually do kinda okay for themselves, but not great.
Well, they’re doomed, but still. The Enterprise still exists, with nearly the same crew. But Kirk is the captain instead of Pike. And rather than forming a Federation, Earth goes it alone. But they’re not dicks about it; Kirk is perfectly cordial with this timeline’s Spock (whose existence implies that Earth maintains diplomatic relations with other worlds, even if they’re not allied), and humanity’s refusal to help their neighbors isn’t about xenophobia but resources. They’ve been losing a war to the Romulans for a very long time, and Earth itself is uninhabitable after wars, bombardments, and occupation. I mean, it makes sense that a Romulan seeking to destroy the Federation wouldn’t derail history in a way that causes the MUCH WORSE Earth Confederation to rise, so in this timeline, humanity goes in a similar direction to the prime timeline – they still seem to be doing the whole fully automated luxury gay space communism thing – but they’re in a weaker position with fewer friends.
Picard gave us a dark future where, by implication at least, because it was Soong’s shields rather than Europa’s microbes that kept the Earth alive, humanity never learned to look to the stars for their salvation. La’an mentions that in her history, it was the help of the Vulcans that lifted humanity out of the barbarism of the 21st century wars to start their utopian project. By implication here, in Kirk’s timeline, humanity never went through that barbarous period, never needed friends to help it stand. So whereas Rene Picard taught humanity to look to the stars for salvation, Khan Noonien-Singh taught humanity to look to itself as a source of danger. Remove the first, you get a xenophobic nightmare world that views the outside as a threat. Remove the second, you get a slowly dying state that thinks it has problems enough of its own to involve itself in outside affairs.
Yeah, so, Khan. This episode is in a very deliberate way a response to “The City on the Edge of Forever”. That episode hung on the contrivance that if Edith Keilor, a 1930s humanitarian, were allowed to live, Hitler would win World War II because the peace movement in the US would keep it out of the war. Here, we get basically the reverse: if Khan dies, there’s no eugenics war and contemporary human civilization doesn’t get swept away to make room for the Federation. Instead of killing the good person, we have to save the bad one.
Plus, y’know, Khan is La’an’s great grandpa or something. This is important to her personal journey, since we have several minutes establishing that La’an is having a hard time dealing with her ancestry. She cuts herself off from other people as a reaction to the bigotry she’s faced as a Noonien-Singh, and this episode is about her learning to move past that.
By saying that, no, really, it’s a good thing that grandpa was a genocidal maniac. In the long-term. One thing that is a little hard to take in this episode is just how long it takes her to figure it out. One has to assume it was not just dumb luck that led the dying time traveler to her; he presumably sought her out because of her familial link to Khan. They’re actively trying to figure out how the timelines diverge, yet when Kirk doesn’t recognize her name, she’s too overcome by the warmth it generates in her loins to not have the name precede her to notice that, hey, maybe the apocalyptic war that didn’t happen in the new timeline is the big change they’re supposed to fix.
Of course, it also takes Kirk a very long time to remember that Toronto is doomed to explode in the opening bid of the war his is currently fighting. He’s like, “Yeah, I remember reading about this bridge in Toronto exploding,” and it’s basically hours later that it occurs to him that, “And then a day or two later the whole city got blown up by Romulans.” Memory, she is fickle.
This leads me to the one big complaint I have about the episode, which is the extent to which the plot is driven by the characters just sort of luckily stumbling forward into things. The time agent just happens to escape to the Enterprise in front of La’an (Okay, he probably did that on purpose? Because she carries the genetic marker that unlocks the door? Now, having your door locks key to a genetic marker that is implanted in the user rather than using biometrics is dumb… But it is believably dumb for the sort of insane billionaires I imagine are running the Noonien-Singh institute. I bet they ) They just happen to get a hotel room with a view of the bridge, then just happen to encounter the Romulan agent when Kirk’s getting harassed by the cops, then literally wander around Toronto at night until they luck into wandering close enough to the secret underground fusion reactor to set off Pelia’s watch. And, I mean, that’s kinda how “City on the Edge of Forever” goes too – everyone just happens to show up at the exact right place and time for the climax. So it does end up working, I think, but it works on the strength of the character performance rather than the plot.
Like, Kirk is satisfied with his life and his timeline, despite the problems, and he calls La’an out on the presumption that she has a right to replace it with hers. What wins him over is the reveal that Sam is alive in her timeline. He doesn’t specify what became of Sam in his, but Sam Kirk is a rich source of tragicomedy. Sam died in Kirk’s timeline, but he’s also going to die tragically in the prime timeline. It’s just that it’s a few years off. Also, possibly to appease the fanboys, Kirk reiterates a point from “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” where he claims that everyone else calls him “George”: La’an simply calls him out as mistaken on this. It turns a continuity blunder into part of Strange New Worlds’s implicit running gag that Kirk is weirdly oblivious to the personal lives of those around him.
Kirk is oddly unconcerned with the fate of his crew, but never mind that. It actually feel pleasingly human to have him focus on the fact that, if they succeed, he personally will cease to exist, replaced by a doppleganger. Kirk, of all people, would accept this as his duty, and he kinda does. But it’s a hard thing to accept, and Trek is full of people in similar circumstances just stoically accepting it rather than expressing the fact that, yeah, dude is about to un-write his own past. La’an proposes that she might be able to save him, thanks to the time device’s ability to shield people from timeline changes, which is so obviously untenable going forward that her just saying it kind of seals Kirk’s fate.
Yeah, Kirk is going to die, much in the way that I kept expecting him to die last season. We’ll get to that.
Now, the plot is not entirely “People just wander around.” There’s a few very good setup-and-payoff scenes, it’s just that they’re not central to the plot. Like, we get a fun scene of Pelia at the beginning, framed as a combination of comic relief and insight into La’an estrangement from the people around her. But it ends up setting up La’an and Kirk’s trek out to Vermont to meet an inperceptibly younger Pelia. Who ends up not being able to help them, because she’s not an engineer yet. But that’s okay they just sort of luck into the fact that the radium hands on old watches (the ones that made the painters’ lips fall off!) would act as a fusion reactor detector anyway. Characters going back in time and pre-meeting their colleagues is something Trek’s done several times, but Guinan is the only one where we had the advantage of meeting them when they’re in a completely different place in their life.
It’s also pretty well-played how the Romulan agent sets up Kirk and La’an. That photo of a Romulan warbird is presumably fake – she faked it knowing Kirk would recognize it, in order to manipulate him into pursuing the fusion reactor, and leading her to the Noonien-Singh institute (Okay, wait, though. It’s on the wall in big letters. This is not a secret facility. Sure, what they do might be a secret, but who they are clearly isn’t. I’d been thinking that she blew up the bridge hoping to follow whoever came to retrieve the evidence. But she could’ve just looked them up in the Yellow Pages. Kirk and La’an needed to follow them because they didn’t know what they were looking for, but the Romulan did). She’s pretty great as an antagonistic character. I like the angle of her having been stuck on Earth for 30 years (But still isn’t used to the ears) because Khan wasn’t from the ’90s like he was supposed to be. “I hate temporal mechanics,” yeah, yeah. (My fan-theory: “Project Khan” was a ’90s genetic experimentation program. Khan was named for it. By the 23rd century, confusion in the historical record has caused people to conflate Khan the 21st century man with the older project. Khan himself might have encouraged this as propaganda to build up his own mythos). I like that on hearing La’an’s name, she tries to win her over with the promise that she can survive the change to the timeline. And it’s a nice callback to Picard that with her dying breath, she triggers her self-destruct implant. Harder to reconcile with Picard is that Romulan time agents don’t even know how their plans are supposed to work, they just do what the computer tells them. Romulans have a deep distrust of Thinking Machines according to Picard, so that’s hard to swallow. If she’d gone with, “I just follow orders; my superiors made the call,” that would fit a little better, since it would be reflective of the paranoia and secrecy of Romulan culture. I do like the idea of the assassin not really knowing how her actions are supposed to affect world affairs because knowing isn’t her job. Just find the details a little flaky.
Then, of course, there’s the dead body in the room. It’s pretty interesting that Kirk, famous for some high-stakes bluffs, dies from having his bluff called… Except, as he points out with his dying breath, he wasn’t bluffing. It doesn’t do much good, but he’s exactly right that shooting him would set off the alarms. It’s a solid choice that Kirk’s death isn’t some big noble sacrifice, too. You could easily see that coming, but no, he just gets shot by the bad guy in the course of the climax. Doesn’t even actually resolve the plot, since even with the alarm going off, they still make it all the way to Khan’s bedroom. They have done such a good job of introducing Kirk in a way that is true to TOS, but doesn’t allow Kirk’s gravity to become a black hole. Here, he’s just a good guy who’s fun to hang out with, and while we all know who he’ll be someday, he’s not the hero of this moment. So Kirk dies, Khan lives, history is saved. Green Omni, kid; good job. (I am pleased to see that I am not the only person on the internet who thought of Voyagers! when they saw the hand-held time device that lights up red and turns green when you’ve fixed history).
La’an can’t talk to anyone about it, and they even skip the expected scene at the end where Pelia reminisces about the mysterious woman who stole a watch and convinced her to go into engineering. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pelia doesn’t remember these events at all; it was a long time ago, after all.
Looks like next week, we’ll be getting back to more traditional ensemble adventures on strange new worlds. But before that, I’ll leave you with this thought: The assassin melts her body to nothing to destroy the evidence. La’an wipes her fingerprints from the gun then leaves it in a room with a young boy. Okay. Fine, I mean, this is baby Space-Hitler after all. But… There’s a dead body out in the foyer (A lot of people seem to take it for granted that Kirk’s body would disappear when the timeline corrected, but I don’t see how that follows. They’ve already diverged from his timeline before he dies; in his timeline, the Romulan blew up the fusion reactor, she didn’t try to assassinate Khan directly). A body that was killed with that gun.
Now, we do have to assume that this is a powerful, clandestine operation, so Khan isn’t going to be arrested or anything, but surely there is going to be some complicated questions over why he’s got the murder weapon from a crime that occurred in the foyer. Perhaps his start of darkness will be that time he was falsely accused of murder? Perhaps they brought him out there and asked if he knew anything about this dead guy… And Khan never forgets a face…