Return To Tomorrow (2)

DVD, Star Trek S2 (Return To Tomorrow) (2)

Where were Doc Brown and Marty McFly, I felt sure they'd be making an appearance since they probably got the name of their film series from this episode and they were always travelling back in time (come to think of it why was it called 'Back To The Future'?), although this was made before that series, it's set in a future beyond that series, so they would be going forward. Do you ever have the feeling you shouldn't have gone off on a tangent, but don't know how to get back on track? How about beginning at the beginning, that's a safe place to bring things back: Mr. Sulu returns! After being absent for much of the season (George Takei filming the John Wayne film 'The Green Berets,' as anyone worth their Trekker credentials would know), he returns to his seat on the Bridge and even gets the first line of the episode. Don't ask me what it was, I've forgotten already. And Sulu was pretty much forgotten himself after that opening role. He must have wondered what had happened: he comes back on duty and might have expected a rousing round of applause or at the very least a polite enquiry into his health, but he all but disappears for the remainder of the story, only popping up to show a bit of spunk in the face of an alien bodysnatcher within Spock who's taking over the ship and threatens to torture him - the guy didn't even have the common decency to call him by name, referring to him merely as 'Helm.'

Sulu isn't the only one disrespected in this episode, or perhaps it's too much to say that - Scotty is referred to as 'Engineer' several times as if they're trying to create a bit of distance between the rapidly developing Scotsman and the three Main Stars of the series. Perhaps it was felt that, with DeForest Kelley sharing star billing in the credits it would be inevitable for James Doohan to follow suit in Season 3 the way he'd been elevated this season. And pretty soon you'd have every Tom, Dick and Harry (or George, Walter and Nichelle), in the opening credits as if it was an ensemble show - preposterous, Trek would never deign to do such a thing, surely! At least Mr. Scott was in the episode, poor old Chekov doesn't even get a showing and I wonder if Walter Koenig thought his time in the spotlight was up with the return of Sulu, even though the pair had worked together well at Helm and Navigation earlier in the season! There's no question who the stars are since both Kirk and Spock play dual roles this time and McCoy gets to be harried and worried about their health and wellbeing even more than usual. Because it's all about the consciousnesses of a long-dead race being transferred from some kind of energy spheres into the compatible minds of three suitable vessels. There was something about the situation, perhaps it was the idea of minds entrapped without bodies, perhaps because there were three of them, that recalled the brains of 'The Gamesters of Triskelion,' except these aren't unreasonable and cruel beings (mostly), they only want to find a way to perpetuate their race, and all for the best intentions, too.

I came to this episode with preconceptions that they were all bad and were going to force Kirk and the others to allow them residence in their bodies - I had the impression I didn't like the episode very much at all, and looking back on my previous rating, I was right to feel that way. I also came to watch reluctantly, tired and not in the mood for it, but whatever strange brain chemistry was sloshing about up there, and it's always possible low expectations assisted, I really took to this story, to my great surprise. Partly it was due to having 'Picard' on my mind and the questionable finale in which his consciousness is transferred into an identical android body. My thoughts had run to 'The Schizoid Man' and the scientist whose body dies while he hitches a ride in Data's as about the only precedent for such an extreme story development, but I'd forgotten this one. 'TOS' had more than its fair share of androids, not to mention conscious minds being transferred into them (I think also of Dr. Korby in 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?'), sometimes looking entirely human and you wonder how a creation such as Data would end up so nonhuman in appearance. I can't remember if that's ever been addressed because you'd think Dr. Soong would have been able to create human skin tones and eye colour if he'd chosen to. I found it fascinating to see the unfinished android body that Sargon and his assistants (with Scotty), build to house them instead of the flesh and blood vessels they're borrowing from the Enterprise, all slick skin and somehow repellant (it also explains a couple of images in the end credits of recent episodes: one with a makeup test for this 'dummy' body, and another where Spock leans nonchalantly in a doorway with a grin on his face that both looked entirely out of place from any episode!).

If the android body was of interest, much more intriguing were the attitudes on display in the story, competing points of view, and far from Kirk being forcibly manoeuvred into helping these unknown people who by their own admission and by the evidence of their planet, had been the cause of their own extinction, he is inspired to cooperate with them. I kept expecting the reveal, the penny to drop and we realise Kirk is being manipulated from the time he had Sargon within him, but it never came. Instead, he powers out such a strength of words in his 'Risk Is Our Business' speech that even the doubting, concerned McCoy is struck dumb - the episode hadn't impressed up to that point, it seemed like the usual aliens taking over characters plot ('Power Play' from 'TNG' came to mind, but without the qualities of that story), up until they sat around and discussed the situation in the Briefing Room. Somehow, even before the speech, it coalesced in my mind as being something worthy of exploration and to have all the pros and cons, the back and forth, topped off by such an eager display of persuasiveness, it got me on board the episode at last and invested me in what was happening. As we've seen several times this season, 'TNG' was far from having the monopoly on scenes of careful discussion, and the arguments were well put: the risk of damage to their bodies was compared to the promise of vast medical and scientific knowledge that could be learned in the attempt, and though this didn't seem to come to pass (sadly no walnut-sized warp engines for Scotty - or maybe they meant it should be powered by walnuts!), due to the failure of the experiment and sabotage by one megalomaniac, the chance was there.

The megalomaniac in question is one Henoch, who takes the body of Spock - he's given it freely, at first, because although Sargon doesn't force Kirk to do what he wants, he does use force to get him to at least consider the situation they're in and they can't do that until they've gone down to the vault (of Tomorrow?), to witness for themselves the state of play. Sargon shows himself to be an honourable man, but we're dealing with power beyond our characters' control, so there's a healthy suspicion there. Sargon claims that to all races comes a crisis they must face, the development of atomic weapons. Kirk is quick to point out that Earth survived its early nuclear age, which gives hope for the people of the Sixties, the contemporary viewers who had seen the effects of the atomic bombs dropped to end the Second World War only two decades before, and were in a Cold War with Russia which many feared could result in devastation of the planet. Kirk is saying it'll be alright, they'll survive and so this is very much part of that hopeful future Roddenberry wanted to portray, and we also hear a snippet of history, too, when Kirk talks of the first Apollo mission to the Moon, which actually took place the very year this episode came out, and the year before the actual first landing of astronauts on the Moon itself, so there's an impression of the coming Space Age, both carrot (space exploration), and stick (nuclear weaponry), had come to a point, so seemed, that we'd either progress out (onto Mars, then the nearest star, Kirk recalls), or end up like squashed grape, as Sargon's people did.

If it is designed to be an inspiration, it can also be seen as a warning - so things didn't pan out as people thought back then, we didn't keep progressing outwards, and instead turned inwards after disasters, both scientific and terrorist, effectively regressed the beliefs and hunger for exploring space, but neither did the Sword of Damocles fall (yet), and Trek is still there to tell the tale, which is something else they would never have foreseen from the view they had at that time. There's also a warning about arrogance as Sargon's race developed so far that they came to see themselves as godlike, putting their own achievements above that of the Creator of all - not that they referenced God himself in the episode, but there is a strong analogy to draw, if a slightly confused one: Sargon calls the Enterprise crew his children and this booming, disembodied voice is often the cliched view of how God speaks, a human interpretation of power and almightiness that doesn't really fit with the God of the Bible. Sargon is therefore a combination God and Adam in this case, but rather than the first man, the last man, or the first in a new era in which it's hoped to build an 'android robot' (as they sometimes call it in the episode!), body to house him and the other two survivors so he can spread his wisdom to the younger races that have followed, to teach them and help to avoid the fate of his own world.

It doesn't get any more explicit than when Sargon suggests Adam and Eve were themselves two of their own kind who travelled to Earth, since his people were colonising space six thousand centuries ago. The half a million years they'd been trapped in these containers suggests they were only active for about a hundred thousand years, but that's still almost unimaginable from our perspective. Could this race have been the same as that seen in the 'TNG' episode 'The Chase' which gave a similar explanation for how so many human-like races sprang up in the galaxy, they were all 'seeded' by this one race of space travellers? I'm surprised there wasn't a more definite connection between this and the later episode as it seems somewhat to correlate, though I don't remember the details clearly enough to be certain. Dr. Ann Mulhall, the guest crewmember of the week, there to conveniently host the female consciousness of Thalassa, does mention the theory of evolution, so it's not all Biblical allusions, though at this time Trek was much more open to being inclusive to such things, the Bible was, rightly, still looked upon as an authority by Western society at that time, though sadly Trek has reflected the general trend away from it ever since.

If Sargon and Thalassa play the roles of a new Adam and Eve, Henoch must by definition be a new serpent in the Garden of Eden, there to cause chaos, not obviously evil at first, but there to speak 'reasonably,' to show why God/Adam aren't giving Eve the best she could have and tempting her with what she wants: in this case a permanent place in a warm and feeling biological body. Sargon may be satisfied with survival within an artificial shell, they've been doing it for five hundred thousand years after all, but once Thalassa has felt the breath in her lungs and the blood coursing through her veins again, she doesn't want to go back and has no qualms about taking what is not hers from its rightful owner, where Sargon has a moral stance and won't ensure his liberty at the expense of others. That's why I suspected him at first because he seemed so reasonable and yet had so much power - he isn't omnipotent, only when the Enterprise is within range can he draw it closer, and only when it's close enough can he communicate with those aboard, so his power is immense, but it shows his weakness too. Kirk already pointed out the flaws of the race from the destruction on their planet, and we're also seeing his limitations, but floating in an orb for half a million years gives them time to think, there's nothing else to do, and either they'd have gone mad or they'd have reasoned out a course of action, and I love the idea of Sargon as this watchtower, searching out the voids of space forever hoping for a ship to come near.

Considering later events in the episode you'd think he might have simply transferred his consciousness straight into the Enterprise herself, that's what he does when Kirk as host is killed by the deadly injections formulated by Henoch, but it may be he needed closer proximity to the ship and to get aboard he'd need to be within a biological entity, although even there they must have beamed up the spheres. It may have been necessary to be in a body first, but this side of the story is a little sketchy, and in any case, Sargon wasn't going to impose himself. Henoch was another matter entirely, but it's possible once leaving a human mind it wouldn't have been possible to get back from the ship's computer, but that's where the whole thing is a bit uneven since Henoch is tricked into leaving Spock's body, jumping into 'oblivion' because he'll cease to exist, presumably, if he remains in a body that dies - Sargon was able to leap into the mechanism of the ship, but maybe Henoch doesn't have that knowledge? It's great in showing the kind of society Sargon now represents that both sides in the conflict were given space in the vault so that not one side would be considered the 'victor' since no one had really won, they'd both lost by ruining their planet. But Henoch really is evil, he is the mirror of Sargon, he'll do whatever it takes to hold onto this new life he's waited so long for, and you can imagine while Sargon pondered on the evils of his world and how to avoid them in the future, he must have brooded and planned for this day he could continue the fight he'd never given up.

Events take an interesting turn when Kirk, Spock and Mulhall allow the aliens to use their bodies, though I wasn't quite sure if they were sharing them with the host consciousness still within, or whether the minds were swapped into the spheres. Later, this becomes obvious because Spock's mind was in Henoch's sphere when it was destroyed and we think all is over for him - we don't really, because we know he's got another season to go, plus eight films and a cameo in a couple of 'TNG' episodes, but I wondered it was going to be some kind of alien jiggery-pokery to make things right. In fact the solution was truly brilliant and surprised and amazed in its audacity and clever plotting, the kind of thing modern TV is always aiming for but rarely achieves! To back up, once Spock has played host to this smarmy, suspicious character your hackles go up. Seeing the usual precision and control of the Vulcan altered into an easy grin and relaxed attitude you can't help but feel badly towards him. The beauty of Trek was its continuity and they had built up this connection between Spock and Chapel that they were able to play with here. Henoch uses some kind of mind meld that was more akin to the brief touch he used on McCoy to transfer his katra in 'Star Trek II' before making the ultimate sacrifice, but Henoch's motives are far from pure, implanting the command to use the deadly hypospray (which she uses a stylus, interestingly, to 'code mark' for each body). Hypnotic suggestion is supposed to be unable to make a person do what isn't in their character, such as murder, but Vulcan mind powers are an entirely different class and Chapel has no choice but to obey.

She does at least show concern and uncertainty for the rest of the episode as if there's something at the back of her mind that doesn't make sense, but she can't bring it to the fore. But it was an absolute masterstroke when we learn Spock's mind was carried by her, sharing consciousness to her undoubted joy, closer to him than she could ever have dreamed, and what a stunning coup that just as McCoy is about to 'kill' the body of Spock, Chapel, apparently still under the power of Henoch's mastery of Vulcan control is ordered to use this same hypospray on a frozen McCoy and at the last second turns and injects Henoch to his utter bafflement. Truly one of the greatest moments in 'TOS' and left me astounded at the simplicity of the solution and the elegance of how it played out. My only quibble is that you'd expect Henoch not to be fooled by the hypo which was actually just a knockout compound, but when he's just suffered such a shock betrayal and had previously read McCoy's mind as to it being full of a deadly poison, it makes sense he'd react in panic - he doesn't have Spock's careful cognisance and a logical calm at all times and is defeated magnificently. It couldn't have happened without Sargon and Thalassa, the second of which gives in to temptation, going as far as torturing McCoy with illusory tongues of flame (a bit like Pike by the Talosians), until she realises there's nothing for it but to give up what was not hers in the first place. In this she reminded me of Galadriel in 'The Lord of The Rings,' this powerful woman who is given the very thing she desires right there in the palm of her hand, but after consideration consciously chooses the right path, even though it be to her harm, understanding the temptation is too great for her.

That's exactly the kind of redemptive arc I love to see and which Trek has succeeded so often with in the past (emphasis on past!). Once again it proves that it's not what you do, but how you do it. In 'Picard' it doesn't feel right for a 'grounded,' more sophisticated series to have the main character die and be restored in android form (especially with the daft stipulations that he'll continue to age as normal! Even the bodies Sargon made were designed to last as a 'thousand year cage,' as Henoch describes them negatively). A version of Kirk died in another universe, in 'Into Darkness,' which also happened right near the end of the episode, but in that case it was entirely ridiculous, designed shamefully as merely a motivation for an action scene ride. Kirk's body dies here (though not his mind, stored as it was in the sphere - but was his mind swapped with the sphere on the planet when they first beamed down because he never mentions what it was like being out of his body), but it's all part of the building story, it's used as a bargaining chip with which Thalassa tries to tempt McCoy - this woman is of no consequence to him, he doesn't know her and if he stays silent and lets her live out her days pretending to be Mulhall, she'll restore Kirk to life. It's as if McCoy is now in the position of Adam, to take or refuse the fruit from Eve that will give him what he wants. But McCoy is more principled and won't give in, even under torture, forcing Thalassa to reevaluate herself and what she's becoming. Beautifully written and dramatically satisfying.

Which also goes for the final fate of Sargon and Thalassa, that they have no place to go other than oblivion, whatever that means, but they'll be together, and after one last moment of revival in the bodies of Kirk and Mulhall they are resigned to the end, a touching and noble tragedy that concludes the episode strongly. What most excited me about the episode was the ground it was breaking for the idea of Vulcan katras and the movement of the mind between vessels. It's very much science fiction, and awkwardly it also brings to mind 'Spock's Brain' when a revived Kirk says they must kill his body now that Spock's consciousness is gone! I wonder if this was what inspired the notorious Season 3 opener? And yet again the poor reception of that episode shows that it's the way you do something that makes it true to the drama and the characters, or a ludicrous stunt. And the episode even throws in another potent question that people probably hadn't thought of before: why didn't the Vulcans conquer humanity? We know it's because they're the good guys, and Spock being controlled by an evil man shows just what a formidable foe he would be, much like Data as a figure of threat when he's taken over in 'TNG' (such as in 'Brothers'). Superior strength, superior ability, superior ambition… I'm not going to make the usual joke about returning to visit the space seeds in a hundred years because this was the end of that civilisation, but Spock and the Vulcans are in many ways a superior breed. McCoy gives us the answer: the Vulcans worship peace above all else, and while this doesn't always ring true for the Vulcans seen in 'Enterprise' and 'DSC,' they are the exceptions to the rule of the greatest race Trek ever devised.

It's good to know the Enterprise is out so far beyond where any 'Earth ship' has gone before (hundreds of lightyears in fact - it'll take them three weeks to get a message to Starfleet!), since that is the mission, the subject of the opening monologue of the credits, because sometimes space seems a little overpopulated. But visiting a long-dead planet, transporting down through solid rock (the look on McCoy's face, always the voice of rationality and common sense rather than mechanical marvels!), to a vault deep underground, finding the last remnants who have reached out for them, is a very poignant setup. Even though it's a thoughtful episode that draws you in with big concepts there's still room to witness the day to day life of the Enterprise, the community (such as another nurse who also has that same red cross badge), and the formality, such as Sulu being left in charge of the conn when Kirk and Spock are off to beam down. For once Kirk shows good sense when suggesting it's too risky for both Captain and First Officer to beam down (I thought risk was part of the job…), in stark contrast to the rest of the season when it's almost always been he and Spock on Landing Party duty! It was only really there so they could show more of Sargon's power, who wants Spock along as the kind of mind needed for his plan, and it's one of those cases when the Transporter only selectively beams down users: the Security Guards (including a Leslie brother), are left behind. That's why Scotty doesn't get to operate the device, though it's strange that he wasn't given command instead of Sulu as he usually takes over as third-in-command. Perhaps it was felt the best man for the job was required for such a delicate beaming operation and maybe that's why Sulu didn't sit in the centre seat as he was just keeping the standard orbit steady rather than commanding?

I had a feeling James Doohan was the booming voice of Sargon, though I soon forgot about it as I was pulled into the story, and so it proved (though he went uncredited for it), and it's fun to realise William Blackburn played the android (he was usually seen as Mr. Hadley), but the most noteworthy casting choice was for Dr, Mulhall played by Diana Muldaur, later to reappear in another role in Season 3 (also in an episode of high quality), and more importantly as the divisive Dr. Katherine Pulaski in one season of 'TNG,' then never seen or heard from again. She has the same forthright attitude and commanding presence as she'd later have as a main character, and it's somewhat strange to see her so young with it, but it's one of those terrific Trek connections that resonated across the decades, no matter how you react to Pulaski. It adds a further interest to a story that really impressed me, and surprised me that I didn't take to it before. Sometimes a lesser known or remembered instalment can do that and it's one reason I actively like to forget all the details of an episode, coming back to it a few years later to rediscover it to some degree, though it's going to be harder in future to follow that pattern as I've watched the episodes more and more over the years and with much greater analytical depth. A bit like Sargon sitting in his sphere with all that time in which to ponder.

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