There but for the grace of Time go I

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” is an alternate-timeline episode of ST:TNG, and if someone had told me that before I watched it, I might have skipped to the next episode. I don’t have an absolute objection to stories that deal in time-travel or other forms of timeplay, but such tactics are very easy to do badly. They’re often the first refuge of lazy writers (I’m looking at you, MCU) who can’t be bothered to deal rationally with the consequences of their own prior storytelling decisions. But when handled well, timeplay stories can be very powerful.

(By the way, I happen to know of a pair of novels coming out in the not-too-distant future that may together constitute the best alternate-timeline story I have ever read. More on that in due course.)

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” seems to have originated as a bit of fan service. At some point during the filming of the first season, Denise Crosby decided that she would not return as Lieutenant Tasha Yar, so late in the season the writers killed her off, rather unceremoniously. The show’s fans were unhappy with her departure, and Crosby herself seems to have regretted her decision to leave. This episode allows the show to bring Tasha Yar back, if only briefly, and to give Crosby a star turn and a proper sendoff. All that is well done, I think, but that’s not what interests me about the episode.

I won’t explain how we get into the alternate timeline (T2), but the point of the shift is clear. One of the essential conditions of the show’s world (T1) is peace: the Federation has achieved reconciliation with their old enemies the Klingons — thus the presence of a Klingon, Worf, on the Enterprise’s crew — but in T2 the Federation has been at war with the Klingons for two decades and is losing badly. Indeed, the defeat of the Federation seems to be only months away.

And the stresses of an unsuccessful war have taken quite a toll on the crew of the Enterprise — especially on Captain Picard and his Number One, Commander Riker. In T1 their relationship is mutually respectful and affectionate: Riker thinks Picard an exemplary captain, and earlier in Season 3 Picard says that Riker is the best officer he has ever worked with. In T2 they seem to despise each other: Riker is generally belligerent, full of hatred for the Klingons, but also constantly seething with frustration at Picard’s refusal to listen to anything he has to say. Indeed, Picard snaps contemptuously at Riker whenever he tries to offer an opinion.

What has become of the collaborative, inclusive, humble Picard? The guy who when faced with a difficult decision would immediately seek the counsel of his officers? There are two possibilities.

One is that coming up as an officer in time of war — T2 Picard would have been relatively early in his career when the war with the Klingons began — he never developed the collaborative virtues that characterize hinm in T1. We do hear at times in the series that he was an arrogant and even combative young officer: that inclination cost him his heart and nearly cost him his life. Perhaps he could only have had the opportunity to discern the value of consultation in a world largely at peace.

The other possibility is that T2 Picard, for all his youthful hotheadedness, felt from the beginning the inclination to trust his colleagues and draw on their resources, but then had that instinct driven out of him by the exigencies of war. And those exigencies would also have affected the crew: maybe in a condition of constant battle and threat T2 Riker never developed the skills and shrewdness and breadth of vision that made T1 Riker such an admirable Number One.

In T2 Picard and Riker are both recognizably themselves in some respects, but they are reduced, simplified; they’ve been made crude by war.

One of the fundamental laws of human nature: We blame our vices on circumstances beyond our control, but we give ourselves full credit for our virtues. I’ve been a pretty consistent critic over the years of the Fake First Person Plural, that is, when writers use “we” when what they really mean is “you stupid losers.“ But in this case I am using “we“ quite deliberately: I am as prone to this mental disease as anyone. On some deep level I really do believe that my fundamental moral commitments would be the same if I had had a very different life — I believe it, even though I know it isn’t true. And “Yesterday’s Enterprise” reminds me why it isn’t true.