Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpeidon, the only natural satellite of a star, Beta Niobe, which is going to explode as a supernova in three-and-a-half hours. Although it has been previously established that a “civilized humanoid species” dwells on the planet,Enterprise sensor scans strangely indicate that there is no intelligent life remaining anywhere on that world. “How can a planet full of people justdisappear?” wonders McCoy. “If they knew that their sun was dying,” offers Kirk, “it could be anything, up to mass suicide.”
A partial answer to this riddle of vanishment is disclosed when an elderly, balding man in a long, lustrous robe appears in an alcove of the official-looking building where the centralized planetary power pulse source was detected, and where the landing party has materialized. Kirk poses to the dignified gentleman the question of where all the people of Sarpeidon have gone. To which Mr. Atoz (Mr. A to Z), played by Ian Wolfe, casually replies, “wherever they wanted to, of course,” as if the explanation were self-evident. “It is strictly up to the individual’s choice.”
Sarpeidon’s global political leaders and chief scientists have known of the impending catastrophic event of the supernova for a long time. They have diligently implemented a mass techno-scientific survival plan, employing an impressive range of biogenetic, multimedia, and time travel technologies.
After the sun goes nova on a calculable date in 2269, Sarpeidon will become permanently uninhabitable. But its billions of inhabitants will not be faced with their own deaths.
Although they are highly advanced technologically, the Sarpeids never channeled their collective efforts into developing spaceflight capabilities. Instead, their entire financial, intellectual, and new media resources were mobilized into the construction of a vast Library, supercomputer, and remarkable reality-bending apparatus administered by technicians. The Library does not contain books, but rather silver VERI-SIM mini-disks, which store the digitized or virtual content of many occurrences in the planet’s history, “available in every detail.” These thin, round, CD-sized plates offer a “wide range of alternatives” to the one-time backwards time traveler, as Mr. Atoz or one of his identical librarian replicas clarifies to the three senior Starfleet officers. Any of the more than twenty thousand disks, systematically arranged and conveniently housed in large storage cabinets with distended drawers, can be studied at leisure with a tripod viewer and headset, located in a private Library carrell or at a reference desk.
In the waning days before the supernova catastrophe, each Sarpeid resident selected her favorite historical time and place from the Library’s immense archives, and had a system operator execute an input device-reading software routine to process the media currently placed in the viewer. The subject submitted herself for bio-engineered physiological alteration devised to ensure cross-temporal survival. She then passed through the sparkling green, yellow, and purple lights of the Time Portal to a destination in the past from which she can never return again. Any attempt to return would result in instant death, since the individual’s cell structure, “brain patterns,” metabolism, and genetic code have been prepared or “transformed” for adaptation to the target historical period.
The Atavachron, or applied quantum mechanics, superstring theory, and chaos sciences technology to facilitate reverse time travel, is the focal point of the Library. This fascinating machine, as Spock calls it while speaking to Mr. Atoz, acts in close conjunction with the Time Portal, through which each Sarpeid citizen has made a definitive exit from the planet’s dying reality. The Atavachron is operated from a horizontal, keyboard-like control panel built over a support stand that protrudes frontwards from a wall console. The overhead-lit wall unit encompasses various graphical data displays, a dark screen backdrop, and a grey circular visual detail magnification instrument.
Having just been told of Lady Macbeth’s death, under siege and generally despised, even sensing that his own end is near, Macbeth falls into despair. He speaks of life’s meaninglessness and how so much effort, full of sound and fury, is exerted in vain. The endlessly repeated actions, the walking shadow, of All Our Yesterdays lead inexorably to the melancholy fate of dusty death.
On one level, the episode’s title indicates the pointlessness of all the yesterdays in recorded time of the people of Sarpeidon, which were merely a prelude to the inevitable supernova catastrophe. Memories and their painful futility are an essential component of Shakespearean humanist or modernist tragedy.
But the phrase All Our Yesterdays has a deeper meaning. Modernist tragedy is overturned, in this tale told by an idiot, by a hypermodernist techno-scientific project where the past has become a multimedia resource data bank for use by the reality-reshaping system. Memories or “yesterdays” are now database records. The reference to the Bard is ironic, as tragedy goes into chaotic hyperdrive. The tandem of the Atavachron and the Time Portal metaphorically encapsulates the working up of the post-classical scientific knowledge of uncertainty and complexity intotechnologies of disappearance. Futuristic technologies of the twenty-first century and beyond manipulate the parameters of familiar reality in hopeful and exciting ways in relation to “saving or improving lives.” Yet they also risk dangerously undermining the very fabric of that reality and the coherent processes of history. The popular idea of history as a collection of names, places, and dates without context or subjective dimension encourages the assumption that the technological recreation or accumulation of all the facts and details of a given historical era constitutes progress towards the preservation or understanding of history. This Disneyland-style or positivist historiography begins to get called into question by this Star Trek episode. The true effect on reality of such a consumerist or mimetic fetishism might even be the opposite. The technical procedures made possible by the neo-sciences of quantum theory, superstring hyper-dimensionality, and complex systems go beyond merely enabling the “reproduction” of events to active intervention in the constellation of factors that define their occurrence. These technologies introduce turbulence and instability into the very fields of reality and history in which they seek to operate for averred utilitarian purposes.
The Library and its “A to Z” overseer are symbolic of the modern Rationalist dream of the state of Betterment and Enlightenment that is brought about by the quantitative accruing of scientific knowledge or historical information, in accordance with a somewhat arbitrary classificatory plan. But the modernist Library has crossed the line to become the hypermodernist Atavachron.As technologies of knowledge intensify the working over of their “historical” or “natural-cultural” objects, the latter are transformed into the scenes of chaotic reality disturbances. What is so interestingly juxtaposed in All Our Yesterdays is the ready-made ease and consumerist media handiness of the self-contained “period piece” disks and the hyper-accelerated tragediesthat befall Kirk, Spock, and McCoy after they traverse the Time Portal into Sarpeidon’s past. To top it off, what better metaphor could there be for the gravely consequential implications or collapsed point of reversal of a burgeoning system of complexity than the supernova itself?
Captain Kirk smiles as he peers into his tripod viewer at a minidisk simulation of people riding in horse-drawn carriages on a cobblestone street. It is a setting evocative of late seventeenth-century England. Kirk suddenly hears a woman screaming for help from behind him. He runs without forethought into the Time Portal. “Wait! I haven’t ‘prepared’ you!” cries out Mr. Atoz. Kirkdisappears from the twenty-third century and reemerges in a nocturnal alley in front of a brick wall. Two “Fops” in velvet and lace are badgering a woman dressed like a gypsy, played by Anna Karen, who speaks in the Canting slang of Early Modern English, and who apparently just tried to pick their pockets. The dandies address Kirk as “slave.” They run off after the Captain successfully defends the woman and himself in a daring bout of fencing. They return a few minutes later with two Constables. Kirk is arrested for being the “Mort’s accomplice” in thievery, as well as on the more serious charge of witchery. He tries to fend off his captors by moving towards the spot in the back street wall where the Time Portal opening might still be and speaking out loud to “Spock and Bones.” Five witnesses will attest to hearing the voices of Kirk’s companions coming from behind solid brick, the utterances of evil spirits conjured up by the stranger’s alleged sorcery. “He’s a witch! He speaks to unseen spirits! He cast a spell!” as the gypsy woman taken prisoner along with Kirk shouts from her jail cell across the corridor from his. “They’ll burn ya!”
After Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, a final intensive round of witch hunting took place in towns such as the Scottish burgh of Forfar. Forty-two people, mostly women, were prosecuted there for witchcraft, which was punishable by either burning at the stake or the more “merciful” method of strangulation. Forfar was surrounded by water, and, in the James Blish “more original” adapted version, Kirk tells Spock through the Time Portal that “it’s foggy here, and I can smell the ocean.” (James Blish narrative version)
The Sarpeids’ awareness of the coming supernova of their sun represents the usefulness of knowledge of the physical world and the beneficent progress afforded by the Scientific Revolution, tellingly emblematized by astronomical knowledge. Kirk’s experience in the planet’s obscurantist past stands for the fear of disinterested, objective knowledge that was embodied in the “popular culture” of magic, alchemy, astrology, and the occult. This “irrational underside” of Western beliefs ironically coexisted in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe with the high culture of Reason.
In spite of the immorality and corruption of Charles II’s court, it was also on his decree that the Royal Scientific Society was founded and the Royal Observatory built in 1675, with the intention of improving the cartography of the stars and the measurement of longitude to help ships at sea navigate more accurately.
There is also an intimation of the secret relationship between rationalist knowledge and political power in Kirk’s encounter with the Prosecutor, played by Kermit Murdock, who comes to fetch the Accused to bring him before the Inquisitional Tribunal, where “the matter of [his] witchcraft will be decided.” The Public Prosecutor is a portly, middle-aged fellow with long white hair, wearing a black vest with white shoulder patches and a Cossack cap. He enters Kirk’s jail cell and sits on a stool in front of the weary Captain. “You’re the thief who talks to spirits!” exclaims the Officer of the Court. Kirk responds that he had never met the “Gypsy Woman” before tonight. “I was reading in the Library when I heard her scream,” he says. The Prosecutor is dramatically taken aback by this mention of the Library. Captain Kirk immediately surmises that he too is from the future and has traveled here through the Time Portal. Kirk threatens to expose the Prosecutor to the Inquisitional Tribunal as an imposter from another world who secretly knows the truth that there is no such thing as witches, but cynically hides this knowledge for his own gain. Kirk breaks out of the primitive jail cell. He physically forces the Prosecutor to take him again to the alley where the Time Portal gateway to Mr. Atoz’s Library is located. Kirk slides through the transparent aperture back to the present. He flips open his communicator to check in with Scotty, who informs him that there are only seventeen minutes left until the nova explosion.
We can presume that the Prosecutor, who had another identity in twenty-third century Sarpeidon, made the choice of the epoch of witchcraft trials as his preferred historical destination in order to enjoy the privileges and power that he would wield there. His machinations are like the story of the Grand Inquisitor that Ivan Karamazov tells in Chapter Five of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor was a champion of the Catholic Church’s virulent campaign against heresy. He argues in his central philosophical monologue that elites in history have the religious duty to act to suppress diversity and dissent in the world in order to relieve the masses of the existential burden of having to decide for themselves what is right and wrong. Human beings, according to the Inquisitor, are by nature not capable of handling the freedom and moral responsibility that go hand in hand with exposure to circumstances of difference and otherness. Such situations of real contact with radical others would constrain humans to have to evaluate without prejudice or dogma if they are themselves living in the right way.
Brutal repression, even to the tune of hundreds of heretics burned per day, is the deed demanded of political leaders (by the Inquisitor) if the interests of the majority are to be upheld and general social tranquility maintained. Alyosha Karamazov interrupts his brother Ivan’s parable to incisively comment that the Grand Inquisitor is really an atheist, not a Christian Believer. “Your Inquisitor does not believe in God, that’s his secret!” He knows the secret that God does not exist. Yet he guards this secret knowledge for himself both to protect his position of power and to maneuver even more effectively as the only one who is not deceived. Captain Kirk compels the time-traveling Sarpeid Prosecutor to admit to the duplicity of his own crafty manipulations.
Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy follow Kirk through the Time Portal, but arrive at a different destination. They reappear in the desolate scene that the Doctor was viewing through his mini-disk. It is a frozen glacial plain during Sarpeidon’s Last Ice Age, five thousand years ago.
With their backs to an ice cliff, thrust into sub-zero temperatures, and opposed by terminal moraines and snow drifts on all sides, the predicament of the Science Officer and the Chief Surgeon of the Enterprisequickly turns desperate. Spock has the idea of blasting a large rock with his phaser to provide heat, but the hand-held weapon does not fire. McCoy collapses from the extreme cold and howling wind of the blizzard. He is near death. A humanoid figure in a thick, hooded fur parka astonishingly comes into sight. The stranger leads the two Starfleet officers to the warm, lighted interior of a cave dwelling. Mr. Spock carries the unconscious Dr. McCoy over his shoulder to safety. The half-Vulcan is the first to see and converse with the brave and beautiful young woman named Zarabeth, played by Mariette Hartley, who subsists entirely alone in this forsaken arctic wasteland. The courageous temporal exile explains to Spock that she was condemned to her solitary fate by the dictator Zor Khan the Tyrant, whose notorious rule Spock had read about in the Library. Zor Khan originally used the advanced technology of the Atavachron to banish his political enemies and their kinsmen to forgotten places “no one could ever find [them].” Zarabeth has been alone and living in such abject conditions for so long that she fears she is going mad, that Spock and McCoy are her hallucinations. Spock grabs her hands and tells her that he is firmly convinced that he is real. “I am substantial. You are not imagining this.”
McCoy begins to recover his health and regains consciousness. Spock retrogresses, in a strange atavism, to the highly volatile emotional behavior characteristic of pre-civilized Vulcans, before the philosopher Surak united the people of Spock’s home planet during the Time of Awakening and taught them how to control violent thoughts. The Enterprise‘s First Officer loses his singular ability to make logical, coolly calculated decisions. He cannot make up his mind on the proper course of action to follow, whether to stay and cure McCoy or go back to the steep icy wall and try to return to the Library. “It should be an equation. I should be able to resolve this problem logically.” Instead he becomes increasingly aggressive, devious, inconstant, passionate, and jealous. He declares his love to Zarabeth, lifting her in his arms. “You are beautiful, more beautiful than any dream of beauty I’ve ever known.” He casts aside his usual Vulcan vegetarianism and eats meat. “I’m behaving disgracefully. I have eaten animal flesh and I’ve enjoyed it. What is wrong with me?”
McCoy deduces that time travel to the remote past has induced in Spock a reversion to the primitive instincts of his warlike barbarian ancestors “who nearly killed themselves off with their own passions.” Bones also pries the information from the reluctant Zarabeth that anyone who passes through the Time Portal, as Spock and McCoy have done, without having been physiologically “prepared” for the designated target site by the Atavachron will die within a matter of days. McCoy persuades a Spock who has not yet completely lost reason that they must try to go back through the Portal or perish for sure. At the foot of the ice cliff, they again find the open door to the Library. A devastated yet stoical Zarabeth is tragically left by herself, deprived of the brief candle of companionship whose light has been snuffed out. She must live out the remainder of her life in the frigid tundra nowhere land.
Restored to the present, Spock at once regains his normal “logical” composure. He deflects McCoy’s voiced concern over whether he is feeling anguish and loss by observing that the events to which the Doctor is referring happened some five thousand years ago, and that Zarabeth is long since dead and buried. In a closed timelike curve, what Spock just sorrowfully lived transpired millennia ago.
Lt. Commander Scott is eager to beam the landing party up to the Transporter Room and to immediately warp out of orbit to evade the violent eruption of Beta Niobe, which is now imminent.
At the very last moment before the supernova explosion, Atoz inserts his personal mini-disk into an auxiliary Atavachron media viewer, races past Kirk, and dives into the Time Portal. He heads off to join the wife and kids at the most exclusive virtual history theme park. Mr. Atoz was The Last Technician, left behind to operate the Library, with the assistance of his android replicas, after all the others have gone. Since Mr. Spock’s tricorder picked up no signs of sentient life-forms anywhere on the planet, it is possible that the “original” Mr. Atoz is himself an android. His behavior is at times rather “programmed.” He mistakes Kirk, Spock, and McCoy for Sarpeid last-minute procrastinators, imploring them to quickly choose their permanent vacation destinations, from among the many deluxe options, before it is too late.
Like The Last Computer of the Original Series episode The Ultimate Computer, the Last Technician is a “strategy of deterrence” of the modernist real against the advent of postmodern simulation and hyper-reality, attempting to conceal the fact that “the real is no longer real.” In Mr. Atoz’s Library, information and video games are not circulating endlessly in self-referential truth-effects. There are still reference desks, classification schemes, and the efficient handling of the “problem” of the supernova through a top-down organized rational deployment. It is the last stand of the real, the “saving of the reality principle,” before giving way to the hyper-real. Before we disappear into virtual reality and time travel, we leave behind the Last Technician to operate the Library, as the “automatic pilot” of history,deterring us from awareness that knowledge and technology have passed beyond a certain “point of no return.” Atoz’s job is to still consider thesetechnologies of disappearance within the framework of a purposive-rational strategy and the epistème of the conventional real. On the other side of the Time Portal, we see the truly unsettling nature of time travel and the chaos that is experienced by those sent to the past.
Towards the end of a massive star’s lifetime, a critical stage is attained where nuclear fuel in the stellar core is no longer sufficient to maintain the equilibrium between the star’s inward-directed force of gravity and the outward-driving pressure exerted by the fusion energy transfer process. The normal transformative procedure of hydrogen burning into helium is exhausted. Repeated cycles of new types of nuclear reaction, succeeded by further core contraction, take place. Hydrogen burns into different chemical elements: first into carbon and oxygen; then into neon, sodium, and magnesium. Oxygen in turn radiates into silicon and sulphur, and silicon is transmuted into iron. The conversion to iron is the end of the line, and the star is reduced in less than a second to an object ten kilometers in diameter in a sudden gravitational collapse. A state of superheated neutron decay is followed by a cataclysmic shock wave, unleashing unfathomable quantities of recoiling repulsive energy towards the periphery. Core temperatures rise to over 100 billion degrees. The surface bursts into a rapidly expanding envelope whose thinning out allows the intense radiation and light from deep within the self-luminous celestial body’s center to be revealed. The brightness of the supernova fireball explosion “rivals, for a few days, the combined light output of all the rest of the stars in the galaxy.” (Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council)
The heliocentric discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo exemplify the ascendent and purely positive phase of the Scientific Revolution, still unambivalently associated with progress. The Copernican model of the sun-earth relationship, which challenged and replaced the geocentric universe of Ptolemy, was not accepted for centuries due to the anxiety about humanity’s status in the cosmos that it provoked. Humans, created in God’s image, were not the center of the universe any more. The sun does not revolve around the earth as was previously believed; the earth revolves around the sun. With Copernicus, the sun “expanded” and physical reality and its classical laws (which only operate until you approach the speed of light, or the hyperbolic speed of the electronic media and computers) were elevated to a sovereign, more permanent status in relation to mortals.
But the “sun of knowledge,” also known as Illumination or Enlightenment, kept on expanding. Beyond a certain critical point, this knowledge system expands excessively. It enters a perilous region of reversibility where it is at risk of becoming alien to its stated original goals. While it is crossing this zone, technoscience is in danger of no longer being exclusively identified with progress. Star Trek is deeply and complexly ambivalent about the techno-scientific applications for controlling nature and reality around which it spins narrative webs. The tension between the gravitational pull of rational knowing’s positive side and the pressures pulling into the zone of excess is felt across the full gamut of “twenty-first century and beyond” technologies explored in Star Trek‘s technoscience stories, from VR and artificially intelligent androids to genetic engineering and quantum teleportation. In All Our Yesterdays, the original physical reality of Sarpeidon is wiped out by the supernova of its life-sustaining star. But a second, substitute, cloned reality has been preserved for the planet’s inhabitants thanks to the virtuality engines of interactive-digital, quantum-computational, and chaos-harnessing time travel technologies. The Sarpeids can go anywhere they want to go, as the ubiquitous Microsoft advertising slogan might say, but on a one-way ticket.
The metaphor of the supernova suggests a “critical mass” being reached by the system of techno-scientific knowledge accumulation that transforms this system into the fosterer of chaotic reality perturbations. It is no longer advisable to comprehend that complex system’s workings and purposes in the terms that were elaborated by previous generations of scientists and technicians, such as “dominating nature,” “mastering chaos,” or “bringing good things to life.” Nor is it judicious to regard the further growth of an already bloated system as a strictly favorable development. The cognition of “deterministic chaos” by the new sciences of complexity must reflexivelyinform our understanding of the structural nonlinear dynamics and environmental effects of that apprehension itself. All Our Yesterdays as cautionary tale underlines the strained relationship between the lucid modernist scientific knowledge of the supernova and the ambiguous hypermodernist techno-scientific knowledge of the Atavachron. The Atavachron is an applied collective planetary project undertaken as a consequence of the sobering news brought to light by astronomical knowledge of the supernova. It is depicted in dystopian hues as leading to distortions in traditional cause-and-effect sequences and unjust human tragedies.
Chaos theorist René Thom defines a catastrophe as a bifurcation point orpure event that, in a flash, collapses a dynamical system inside out, mutating its organization in compliance with a newly hypercharged pivotal reference. There is a paradigm shift “from a fixed point or other linear attractor to a strange or chaotic attractor.” (John Casti, Complexification; Brian Ward, “The Literary Appropriation of Chaos Theory”)
With Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy safely back on board, theEnterprisewarp speeded away from the changing starscape background in a last-second escape. “Behind it, the nova began to erupt, in all its terrifying, inhuman glory.” (James Blish narrative version)