In the Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations, Commander Benjamin Sisko, Science Officer Jadzia Dax, Constable Odo, Lt. Worf, Chief Miles O’Brien, and Dr. Julian Bashir of the starship Defiant time travel via the Bajoran Orb of Time back to the twenty-third century. They reinsert themselves, thanks to digital video editing and special effects technologies, into the Great Tribble Hunt of The Original Series episode The Trouble With Tribbles. Hollywood’s perfected technologies of virtual time travel – digital recomposition, set reconstruction, frame-by-frame shadow masking, blue stage foreground shooting – are put to full use in this archetypally nostalgic and recombinant episode. Time travel that has already taken place through media technologies outstrips what the astrophysical wormhole engineers, who try to apply the speculations of theoretical physics about spacetime curvature, can ever hope to come up with.
“The Defiant is returning from Cardassian space with the Bajoran Orb of Time. A Klingon named Arne Darvin, surgically altered to look human, has come aboard as a passenger. He uses the Orb to send the Defiant more than one hundred years into the past — near the original U.S.S. Enterprise as it orbited Deep Space Station K-7. Records reveal Darvin was a spy then, and that he was caught having poisoned a shipment of grain on the station. Darvin is out to change history by killing Captain James T. Kirk, who originally exposed him as the spy.” (official STARTREK.COM CBS synopsis of the Deep Space Nine time travel episode Trials and Tribble-ations, the technologically recombinant and self-referential remake of The Original Series episode The Trouble With Tribbles)
Instead of traveling into the timeline fabric intricacy of a seemingly insignificant event that uncannily affects history, as in The City on the Edge of Forever, Arne Darvin, played by Charlie Brill, wants to change the “history” of Star Trek (and save his career with the Klingon Intelligence Agency). Like a baseball nostalgia night, Commander Benjamin Sisko and his away team change into Original Series uniforms, and pretend to be members of the original Enterprise crew. They must capture Darvin before he executes his plan of assassinating Captain Kirk with a bomb disguised as a Tribble. The City on the Edge of Forever dramatizes singular time travel to an open-ended existentialist scene (Kirk just might sacrifice the universe for love) at a pivotal moment in human history (allowing or forestalling the emergence of a North American pacifist movement which would have tilted the outcome of World War II). Trials and Tribble-ations showcases redoubled time travel back to the determinist screen of nostalgia for a future whose chronology and outcome are already known in advance and must take place.
This non-event in the non-history of Star Trek is arrived at through the Hollywood and Silicon Valley time travel technology of digital recomposition. In Forrest Gump-style, the Deep Space Nine officers are inserted into footage from The Trouble With Tribbles. In some newly-filmed sequences, stand-ins for the characters from the late 1960s or the year 2262 are shown from waist to shoulders. “A mask is created which allows the original actors to be seen while blocking out their background. The new footage is then placed behind the old and only the new background which shows through the mask is seen,” as J. Trent Adams explains. (http://www.skotophile.com) Enterprise crew members, led by Deep Space Nine’s Chief Miles O’Brien, have gotten into an unauthorized bar brawl with the Klingons. Kirk has called them to a lineup to dress them down. Two of the original characters are “masked out” and replaced with O’Brien and Dr. Julian Bashir. The highlight is the interactivity achieved between Kirk and O’Brien. Kirk asks a question directly to O’Brien, and the space station Chief of Operations from 2367 responds. Visual effects artists digitally added Bashir’s shadow as a “floating semi-transparent mask,” and enhanced the lighting on Kirk. Set designers built a facsimile of The Original Room, and the production crew filmed O’Brien and Bashir on a “motion-controlled turntable in front of a green screen.” (Star Trek Deep Space Nine Companion) Conversation between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock is overheard in the background during scenes involving Commander Benjamin Sisko and Science Officer Jadzia Dax. When Kirk is fed up after sitting down on the Tribble in his Bridge chair, it is Jadzia Dax who soothes him with a shrug of the shoulders. When Tribbles are dropping on Kirk’s head from the overhead storage compartment bin, it is Dax who is tossing them down. In the Brazilian Portuguese version, The Trouble With Tribbles is called Problemas aos pingos, or Dropping Problems. At the end of the episode, Commander Sisko sneaks an autograph from the legendary Kirk. He substitutes digitally and symbolically for a Yeoman-type subordinate bringing the Captain his logbook to sign (footage of Lt. Marlena Moreau, played by Barbara Luna, from The Original Series episode Mirror, Mirror).
