Mini-Review: "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG 163)

SPOILER WARNING! Yes, I know, the episode is nearly 20 years old, but it's possible that there are those out there who'd be offended by my giving away the plot in this review. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.




Synopsis: The U.S.S. Enterprise-C, thought lost some 22 years prior to the episode's beginning, emerges from a temporal rift and changes history very much for the worse. Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D must get them back to where and, more importantly, when they belong so that history can be corrected.

I'm not altogether a huge fan of the 24th century, the "modern" era of Star Trek, having grown up on the rough-and-tumble 23rd century of the original series. I'll watch TNG reruns sometimes when I catch them, or they catch me, as the case may be, but I don't seek it out as a rule.

My wife got me the Time Travel Fan Collective for Father's Day, and it happened to have the first bit of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I owned on DVD, and in the case of many of the episodes, it was the first time I'd seen them in a good 10 years at least. So it was with a good deal of surprise that, as I watched "Yesterday's Enterprise," I realized that I probably had not seen this particular episode since it originally aired in 1990.

Nearly 20 years. I'd talked about it, knew what it was about, discussed it...and I hadn't seen it in nearly 20 years. So, not quite remembering what to expect, I put it in and pressed "Play."

Boy, am I glad I did, too. "Yesterday's Enterprise" is one of The Next Generation's Top 10 episodes for a reason. The writing was tight, the acting well-executed, and the effects mostly non-intrusive. The best part, for me, was writing that cheerfully threw anything that wasn't story overboard for the benefit of all. And a cracker of a story it was, too, one of the few time-travel stories that Star Trek would tell that was any damn good. There were a lot of nice touches, including the performance of Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan, a character I could normally do very much without. She is, however, integral to the plot in this one, and plays it straight instead of her usual attempts at light comedy.

Most surprising to me was the effectiveness of Denise Crosby as Lt. Tasha Yar, who in the new timeline created by the survival of Enterprise-C had not died a senseless and petty death in "Skin of Evil." I am not one of Crosby's biggest fans, but this performance gave her a chance to make a worthwhile exit from the series, something the aforementioned "Skin of Evil" had not allowed.

If there was anything that would have made this better, in my opinion, it would have been to make this a two-parter instead of some of the lame two-parters that the series would crank out during the rest of its run. The only real fault the episode had was that it felt rushed. I would very much have liked to have seen more development between Yar and the helmsman of the Enterprise-C, Lt. Richard Castillo (played admirably by Christopher McDonald).

You can't have everything, though, and knowing the production crew of TNG, they would have probably found a way to mess that up, so it might be just as well.

8 of 10 stars for this one.