1.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             2.

post of metaphysicians, the fixation of theories of Einstein's Relativity and of quantum-mechanics. Every voice crying
in the wilderness lifts his voice -- sometimes in anguish, sometimes in euphoria--about time, in time. "0 Tempora, 0 Mores!"
to "A time for you, a time for me" (Cicero to T. S. Eliot). Time is one element man is given to utilize and dominate; it is
the crown of freedom, the price of the fall from Eden. From Plato to Bergson and beyond, time has been,
and continues to be, man's obsession -- partly because it is man's most precious commodity. From the early Greeks,
through Locke, Newton, Berkeley and others, time was often more theory than fact, more the toy of time-killing
theorists than the empty song of an empty singer of an empty day. Time was always a concern, but with the
advent of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, man's concern with and for time changed: the cause
was change itself. Mankind realized that time, the ancient object of idle metaphysicians, was killing man --
physically and spiritually. The vague and contradictory theories of effete intellectuals became an everyday experience
of brutal day-to-day Darwinism survival a personal as well as a universal experience, not an abstract absolute.
Time was no longer noumenal, as Kant suggested, not a mere subjectivism, but a phenomenal fact,
the sheer tyranny of temporality. Time was no longer a vertical question, but a temporal horizontality. In the case of
man in an industrialized society, time became temps vecu--time lived. In a time where clocks
and watches heralded a world of mechanical gadgets, man reacted with both anticipation and fear. Materialism
wrought change, but the changes effected by the Industrial

                                                                                                                                                                     3.

Revolution were unprecedented in the history of western civilization. Too much happened, too fast to too
many people in too short a time. The changes were abrupt and cataclysmic, brilliant yet devastingly fast in occurring.
Prior to the early 1700's, Great Britain and,  for that matter,  all of western Europe, was an agrarian, rural, feudal
society. The machine age closed the book on centuries of medievalism. The "dark ages" were a time of little change
in the human condition. Although some mechanical discoveries occurred (navigational inventions, the water and
pendulum clocks, the art of ballistics), these discoveries were answers to immediate needs, especially in trade and
mercantilism. Western man's horizons were severely limited partly because changes were few and affected only
the few -- usually the upper classes of society.  Medieval Catholicism, western Europe's major religion before the
Reformation, was a closed world that stressed a vertical view of time and matter by stressing the eternal and the
other-world and by deemphasizing the physical world.
     Man was to live with a view towards eternity, and the earth was a brief interval between eternities of heaven and
hell. One looked up to God or went to hell -- a vertical perspective. The church neglected the here and now as a
temptation and the devil's playground. The anti­-flesh attitude of Catholicism was reinforced later by the Cambridge
Neo-Platonists and by the Calvinistic school of the Protestant Reformation. Medievalism and Catholicism also
stressed conformity to external authority, thereby stiffling the individual and one’s personal freedom in time.
Innovative behavior was not respected, but was held                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                                         4.   

suspect or as evil. Intellect reigned over corporeality, the group over personal creativity. Man lived in an atmosphere
of black and white morality. Medievalism assured man of an afterlife subsequent to the miseries of everyday dumdrudge,
so man sought reward in timelessness, not in the temporal sphere. European life changed little for almost a millennium
in a very closed but secure world symbolized by the very symbol of the passive life -- the castle with its moat as a symbol
of defensive posture against time and change. There was little to rock the boat of man's creative posture. This pentupness,
this feudal, passive posture was not to change slowly over a few centuries, but was to be utterly obliterated
in the Romantic movement in a matter of a few decades. With the fall of medievalism and Neo-Classicism,
western man experienced the violent revolution of two concomitant historical phenomena: the Industrial Revolution
and the rise of Romanticism. With these two movements, the modern age can said to have begun.
     Star Trek's theory of man and time is respectfully situated in the continuing tradition of Romanticism, firmly rooted
as early as Heraclitus, into Hegel and Kant, but intensely beginning with Blake and Wordsworth in nineteenth century,
with British Romanticism, into Bergson, Heidegger and Sartre in the twentieth century. Time in Roddenberry's works is
firmly rooted in the humanistic traditions from Romanticism through and beyond Existentialism and through the rise of
the empirical sciences from the discovery of the steam engine to the tragic voyage of the "Columbia" space shuttle.
Star Trek combines the best of the humanities and the sciences of the past two hundred years in analyzing the
problems involved in modern man's adaptation to change in time.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           5.

After the middle of the eighteenth century, time and change became an obsession, the freedom to progress and

the freedom to regress, the freedom to choose or not to choose, the freedom to grow and the freedom to go underground.

The very term, change, wrought both promise and terror into the hearts and heads of intellectual and common folks alike.

Change rode juggernaut on the wheels of science over the souls and bodies of western man. The effects were devastating.

While the few followed the young Tennyson's cry of "Forward, forward...let us prance/ Let the great world spin forever

down the ringing grooves of change," the many sheltered emotions ranging from skepticism to paralyzing doubt to utter horror

-- a deep sense that something was terribly wrong:

                                          So I triumphed ere my passion sweeping through me left/
                                          me dry,
                                           Left me with the palsied heart, and left me with the/
                                          jaundiced eye;

                                          Eye to which all order festers, all things here are out/
                                          of joint.
                                          Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point/
                                           to point.
                                                 --(Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Locksley Hall," 1837-38).

     The "Iron Age" became what Thomas Carlyle called the age of downtroding and disbelief. Change had heralded the

age of doubt, the age of dualism, dialectics, tensional opposites. Western man was split into two. Star Trek is visible

testament to man's struggle to survive and to grow in the face of adversity and change. Time was to become a Janus, a

Chronos and a Kronos:

                                                          It continues ever true ... that Saturn, or Chronos, or what
                                                                            we call Time, devours all his children: only by
                                                                            incessant Running, by incessant Working, may you
                                                                            (for some three score-and-ten years) escape him; and
                                                                        you too he devours at last, can any
                                                                            Sovereign, or Holy alliance of Sovereigns, bid time
                                                         stand still; even in thought, shake themselves
                                                         free of Time?"
                                                                                     --(Thomas Carlyle, 'Sartor Resartus,' 1833).                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               6.                                           

     Man became acutely aware of time as both creator and destroyer, that life means war with the Time-Spirit (zeitgeist).
The battle lines were clearly drawn between Time as Creator and Time as Destroyer. For man to be dormant meant the
irreversible conquest of man engulfed in the vortex of the tyranny of Time. The rise of modern science drew distinctions and
differences where man had once seen oneness and endurance. The maniacal need to know was soon at war with man's need
to grow-- a distinction first made in the nineteenth century, which forms most of the tension in the human drama that is Star Trek.
Science helped man to look, to inquire into things and into himself. The age of inquiry is our inheritance; man must "analyze,”
must (ala Nomad) "investigate,” and it was this predilection for analysis that was to turn back upon the inquirer, making
analysis a self-destructive process. To analyze via the scientific method means to break down a whole into its constitutive
parts without any reintegration. The learning empirical method was mechanical, not creative or organic or wholistic. Anatomy
became a science and a way of life. Star Trek bodies forth these inquiries and studies the effects of science and self-
consciousness on man.
     Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1881)
showed the rise of analytical science and the tyranny of empirical data clearly felt in every line of Spock, in every computer
from the M-5 to Landru.  The problem of over-inquiry is still the same. Man must, in Roddenberry's thinking, balance
knowledge with wisdom, inquiry with emotional health. These problems struck Britain first as man underwent (and still
undergoes) the concomitant needs for inquiry into the ME (Ich) and into the NOT-ME (nicht-Ich). The "analyze" motif
in Star Trek is a testament to man's continual need for knowledge, making modern man's life a treatise of metaphysics,
i.e., the need for mind to know mind and to transcend mind.

                                                                                                                                                                           7.

       Star Trek's inheritance from the rise of science was a two-edged sword. Traditional customs and beliefs were destroyed
as science's theory of evolution changed man's concept of the ME and of the NOT-ME, the self and the world. New Biblical
theories and treatises replaced faith with fact. Man's studies of the earth vied with traditional religious beliefs that man was barely
one-thousand years old. Darwin and others turned hundreds of years into millions of years. The common man could no longer trust
over a thousand years of inherited religious beliefs as archeology and paleontology became new and respected sciences. Darwin's
theory of evolution was second only to the Copernician solarcentric theory as the most devastating shock to the ego of
western man. Many a mind simply unraveled when the man-monkey theories were supported by anthropological discoveries
in South America and in Africa. It was upon Darwin's theory that man originated in Africa that the Drs. Leaky acted in the
recent decades of our twentieth century. The real job of man's past challenged and altered western man's concept of himself
and of Time forever. Man found the past almost terrifying as the descent of man from other, older and "lower" forms of life
grasped the very heads, hearts and viscera of the common man. The thoughts that one's multi-great uncle may have been a
baboon was not a cheerful and edifying thought for western man who, from Plato until Darwin, had prided himself on his
uniqueness, on his Godly creation, and on his own reason. To take man to the level of brute, primitive instinct left a bad taste
in the mouths of Victorian man; it still gives contemporary groups a sense of                                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                                      8.
 

loathing and repulsion. Star Trek's emphasis on man's primitive instincts, on his animosity, on his emotionality and sexuality,

show the continuing necessity of western man to deal with the fact that he is "still part savage" ("Arena"). Much of man's

inner and outer strength in Star Trek is in his primordial inheritance. Far from being an embarrassment or an evil, man can

acknowledge his violence and brutality and, as Captain Kirk says, we can say we are barbarians while saying I choose not to

kill today. Man, as a dualism of reason and body, can grow from these contraries. In the nineteenth century, man feared or

shunned his animality or ceased to grow out of fear of this new sense of himself and of his role in Time. The present left him

in doubt; the past terrified him or he found refuge in past pockets of a less traumatic nature ("All Our Yesterdays") and the

future filled the common man with uncertainty. The future afterlife became uncertain because of present scientific discoveries,

many of which pertained to man's past. This decimated man's ego and created a dialectic between reason and faith, between

reason and emotion, between past and future. The new accent in Star Trek tries to counteract the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries' accents on differentiation as a negative problem. In Star Trek, differences are a gift, a boon because the Trek

emphasis on IDIC (infinite diversity in its infinite combinations) is a fact that transcends adversity and that creates the beauty

of creation's heterogeneity.

     Star Trek's view of present and future Time is based on humanity's careful knowledge of his recent and primitive past. Change

is not a raging beast, but is a power whereby man may create Time and a better mankind in space and in Time. Science in the

nineteenth  century found the common man in a Tholian web of flux, in a crisis of

                                                                                                                                                                            9.

faith, in a scenario of questions without answers. The erosion of faith in Time and in timelessness created the infamous age of
doubt which, in the twentieth century, becomes a present of existential der angst, of fear and anxiety. It is the Romantic school's
emphasis on the creative interaction between contraries (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley) that created a psychology of organicism,
of wholism that helped, that continues in Star Trek, to turn the "Journey to Babel" with its polyglot and poly-psychologies into
a common effort of the many to achieve what is a good for all infinite diversities.
     The age of doubt and metaphysics fragmented the Neo-Classical unities and securities of a closed world and created unknowns
and unknowables. This virtually fossilized man's life and created the psychology of dualism. The nineteenth and twentieth

centuries have been classified often by one word: schizophrenia. The key to the psychology of time and space in Star Trek is

the twoness versus the oneness in time. From hortas, to Spocks, to Kirks, to whole galaxies, all is two, and the purpose of the

time journey, of the “mission” of the Enterprise, is to seek out and find these twonesses in a universal quest that has as its god a

quest for unity and harmony in a cosmos of diversity and seeming chaos. The rise of science in the post-Industrial Revolution

created a dialectic between science and faith, a schism between the sciences and the humanities -- a schism that continues to

be a ghost haunting Hamlet.

                                                                                                                                                              11.

    
The entire Star Trek phenomenon continues. In man's moral, physical and psychological schizophrenia, man ceased to believe;

he stopped wanting to grow because science proved the existence of empirical bases for beliefs. Man's personality, his ego,

was shattered like the Biblical curtain, into two pieces. Charles Dickens, in his novel Dombey and Son (1849), pictured the

loss of faith in low church attendance in the mid-nineteenth century by using the symbol of dust everywhere in the church --

on the Bible, on the surplice, on the pews. Mice frolicked, throwing dust everywhere in the church. Even the ancient pew-opener

was dust-laden and aged, on the brink of death. The present in Time saw a unity of doubt in past and in future coalescing in

Time present. The past was dead and nothing in the present replaced the breach that broke western civilization into what

T.S. Eliot called the "dissociation of sensibility." Matthew Arnold, in lines well known to students of the Victorian age,

defines the problem of this split in Time:

          Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
        The other powerless to be born,
        With nowhere yet to rest my head ....
        Our fathers watered with their tears
        This sea of time whereon we sail,
        Their voices were in all men’s ears.
        Who passed within their puissant hail.
        Still the same ocean round us raves,
        But we stand mute, and watch the waves."
             --(Matthew Arnold, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” 1852) .

One of the most common themes in literature written after the Industrial Revolution is the dialectic between past and present.                 

                                                                                                                                                                             12.

     The Industrial Revolution also created a dialectic between matter and spirit, both in man and between man [ME], and matter
 [NOT-ME] The nineteenth century broke down into two schools, both based on the philosophies of matter and spirit. The
Utilitarians or Benthamites became the proponents of material progress, and they equated material evolution in time

(physical change) with spiritual change, i.e., man was a better man because he created new and better changes -- mostly in

the form of scientific inventions, such as the railroad, the thresher, electricity, etc. These materialists saw physical change as

progress in time, as a symbol of man's overall progress. Therefore, man was matter without spirit, without soul. This school

believed in the greatest happiness principle, a soma pill psychology of keeping the masses happy by making day-to-day life easier.
The phrase "all's well with the world" is the first and best-known slogan of Utilitarianism. What gives pleasure is good;
what gives pain is evil -- a simple morality based solely on matter and the flesh.
     This philosophy of matter without spirit is a form of change unacceptable to Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek because man is not
a body distinct from or living without a soul. As Carlyle says, 'Soul is not synonymous with stomach,' and Carlyle, as with
Roddenberry, agrees that the ethic of Mammonism, of only material changes as the root of man's progress in time, is unacceptable
because it is only, at best, half of the experience of man in time. The second school that developed in the nineteenth century

as a result of the Industrial Revolution and its rise of science was the

                                                                                                                                                                               13.

Coleridgean or Spiritualist School, named after its Romantic mentor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, with William Wordsworth,
published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a work considered to be the official, written beginning of British Romanticism. Spiritualism
was a reaction to and rebellion against the increasing materialistic changes wrought by modern man and science. The Spiritualists
still exist today, and will continue to exist as long as man worships what Bacon called the idols of the market place: things,

inventions, places his stomach, the flesh without regard to man's spiritual evolution in time without regard to his immortal half --
his soul, his mind, his internal change as a man. This is the Spiritualist "school" whose founders began the Romantic movement in
Industrial England as an attempt to achieve a balance between spirit and matter by insisting on the creative relationship between
the two, by showing that these contraries are necessary for human progress in time.
These men extend from William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, A.L. Tennyson,
Robert Browning well into the twentieth century: William Faulkner, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Saul Bellow, M. Heidegger,
Albert Camus, John Fowles into the present. To this list must he added the name of Gene Roddenberry. The above men,
and a hundred other well-known philosophers, such as Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Martin Buber, great poets like T. S. Eliot,
W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, W. H. Auden, are all concerned with man’s spiritual change, as man, in Time.

                                                                                                                                                                              14.

They all seek to show that material change must be accompanied by spiritual change. Gene Roddenberry is one of these men for
all seasons who saw and see material growth (computers, television, and all technology) as a one-sided obsession with this world
of temporality. They seek to restore the balance by emphasizing man's spirit/soul, his moral well-being, his intangible being.
Roddenberry and his predecessors see earth and mechanical ("clock") time as Mammonistic opiates keeping man from his
past and his future: the soul and eternity. Science is necessary as a tool, but the danger is that technology becomes Landru
and the creator becomes the thing created. Thingization is the moralist's nightmare. Science is a juggernaut whose wheels
create a science-faith schism, developing knowledge without wisdom.

           Shall your Science… proceed in the
           small chunk-lighted, or even oil­-
          lighted underground workshop of Logic
          alone; and man’s mind become
          an Arithmetical Mill? ... Thought without
          Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous.
                     (T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1833).

The same cry of the soul echoes like an angelic anthem as great men examine the spirit within:

          To drift with every passion till my soul
          Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play…
          Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
          Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
         With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
         Which do but mar the secret of the whole…
         And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
                     (Oscar Wilde, "Helas," 1881).

Arthur Symons in 1891 in "Emmy" says "Soul for soul: and think the soul of a man/ Shall answer ... in hell."  To those thinkers who
precede Roddenberry, the matter of soul must be considered in man's changes

                                                                                                                                                                             15.

in time and space. Matter is a context, even a catalyst for man's inner growth. He must grow and change as the world presents man with
Tholian webs, arenas, bread and circuses, requiems, and, as will be analyzed, with all things past, present and future--our yesterdays,
our todays and our tomorrows are words that form the titles of many Star Trek episodes. Man cannot call change a progress in a
world full of poverty, illiteracy, drugs and deviates. What is man if he gains the world and loses his immortal soul? As the reader
may see, Gene Roddenberry stands at the current end in time present who realize that rapid change can cause time distortions
(example, wormholes) in the space which man occupies and which occupies him.

     The insistence, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the philosophical father of Romanticism and the French Revolution) to Heidegger,
to Faulkner, to Roddenberry, is that time not be considered in terms of an abstract absolute, a theoretical reality, but that time be
seen as anthropocentric time. It is one of the tenets of the Romantic and past Romantic eras (including existentialism) that life is
an intensely personal and individual experience, that time be measured not in terms of the Newtonian clock, but in terms of the
 lived experiences of the individual. Prior to the modern age (1750 and beyond), man was always viewed qua genus, as a classification,
a group called homo sapiens. The characters of Squire Western and Tom Jones in Henry Fielding's novel, Tom Jones, are
types, two-dimensional figures with no three dimensional “realistic” complexities. Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe
are representative of human typologies. Moll is a harlot, a thief, a wife, etc., but little more. However,

                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                  16.

with the growth of the Romantic movement, man's view of man became man’s view of men in a distinct spatio-

temporal dimension, i.e., a material environment. George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver in The Mill On the Floss and Thomas

Hardy's heroine, Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles are tragic heroines whose struggles are external (man versus man), internal

(man versus self) and metaphysical (man versus the zeitgeist, society and nature). Modern man and the science of psychology

evolved from the Romantic movement's new focus on the individual, not on man as genus. The novels of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries focus on the deeply-lived intensity, the strife, the sweat, the agonies and ecstasies of the individual

in nature and in society. Man is no longer interesting for what thesis he metaphorically represented or how well-mannered

he was (externals), but in who he was, in what he did and in the struggle of human existence. Man was not the

mere victim of time, but he emerges as the arbiter of time who determines the nature and the form of time. Time was and is an

anthropocentric deed in Star Trek. Man must act. To be means to do. Doing is being. Time is no longer some abstract,

speculative theory where one counts the number of angels on the head of a pin (Aquinas) or where scientists

attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers or to turn human excrement back into its original food

(Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Book III). Time becomes time experienced, time lived (temps vecu) -- not time

thought. In Star Trek, time is a psychology of changes to be effected by the individual by freely-willed acts

performed in a temporal horizon

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  17.
 

with an aim of overcoming obstacles in order to grow, to expand the frontiers of time by effecting changes that create time
and new time.Rousseau held, as one of his basic concepts of the individual, that the self had within him infinite possibilities.
William Blake iterated this philosophy of time and man: "No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings"
(The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1780). Star Trek demonstrates a recognition of and a determination to overcome the
problem that arises when a belief in man's infinite possibilities joins the rise of science with its traumatic expansion of
human knowledge. A dialectic between reason and emotion developed and the individual become static from the terror
incited by the possibilities and by the achievements of man in time. The desire became separated from the deed
and modern man's greatest crisis developed. Man withdrew. Star Trek is in the tradition of philosophy and literature which
exhorts man to action. Only one evil exists for modern man: stasis. Man must dominate and control time. Inertia prevents
the forward movement and therefore keeps modern man from changing and initiating change with his environment.
The disease of modern man is symbolized by his withdrawal from the confrontational ethic, from the need to know
and to act and to grow.

                                 He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence…

                                 The cistern contains: the fountain overflows…

                                  For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru narrow/ chinks of his cavern.

                                                     -- (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1780 ).

Doubt created stasis; man ran from the changes brought about by the

                                                                                                                                                                      19.

overcomes all obstacles, even age (ironically a factor in "The Deadly Years" and in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture").

Kirk bodies forth Roddenberry's inherited abhorrence of physical and moral inertia. Roddenberry would agree with Carlyle:

           Not in watching, not in knowing which, but
           in working outwardly to the fulfillment of its
          aim, does the well-being of Society
          consist....The mere existence and necessity
          of a Philosophy is an evil. Man is sent hither
           not to question, but to work; 'the evil of man ...
           is an Action, not a Thought. '
               -- (Thomas Carlyle, "Characteristics," 1831).

In his theory of man and time, Roddenberry writes in a strong tradition of writers and philosophers

who see man withdrawing from space and time. The cure for the disease of man internalization, his withdrawal

into the shell of the ME is the therapy of acting, regardless of the nature of the act. Old-fashioned psychic

externalization was discovered by religious and literatures long before Freud invented the subconscious.

Man must be the changer, not the changé.  To the thinkers in the nineteenth century doubt existed, not in

the background, but in the foreground. Roddenberry's solution is based on a perceptive knowledge of man

The problem is not to deny, but "to ascertain and perform." This is the mission of the Enterprise;

to explore space, to confront and to create time by creating change by the deed! Roddenberry's episodes and

movies scream to a deaf and fearful twentieth century--don't just sit there--do something! In 1833,

an almost unknown Scotsman was saying

                                                                                                                                             23.

     Star Trek stresses the real and the ideal of change and man's adaptation to change to avoid the disease of

turning inward. Matthew Arnold's Empedocles embodies the dilemma of modern man as Callicles talks to himself:

          There is some root of suffering in himself,
          Some secret and unfollowed vein of woe....
          Pester him not in this his somber mood
          With questioning about an idle tale…
          Keep his mind from preying on itself....

Empedocles, alone, states the problem and the solution:

          We do not what we ought,
          What we ought not, we do,
            And lean upon the thought
          That chance will bring us through;
          But our own acts for good, or ill, are mightier
          powers ….
          What were the wise man's plan?
            Through this sharp toil-set life,
          To work as best he can,
          And win that's won by strife.
                 -- (Matthew Arnold, "Empedoc1es On Etna," 1852).

Empedocles is the diseased modern man who is reduced to a "devouring flame of thought," an "eternally restless mind" who

jumps into the volcano because he cannot act, but is a "slave of thought" who cheats the gods of their mockery by

suicide which is, tragically, man's act of freedom from the march of mind, the hell of self-consciousness,

thought without creative action.

     Star Trek is a monumental statement against the Prufrockian syndrome: desire without action. It is in his

first published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) that T. S. Eliot introduces the man who desires

but acts not--a testament to the fact that from 1780 to 1917, western civilization's greatest minds saw

no change in

                                                                                                                                      24.

the nature of the problem: doubt and self-consciousness were eating man from the inside out.
Prufrock is modern man whose consciousness of time is nightmarish:

              And indeed there will be time
             For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
             Rubbing its back upon the windowpanes;
             There will be time, there will be time
             To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
             There will be time to murder and create…
             Time for you and time for me,
             And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
             Before the taking of a toast and tea.
                      -- (T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J.A1fred Prufrock," 1917).

"Prufrock" is a tragic figure, the plight of a hesitant, inhibited man, a dreamer in decaying middle-class
surroundings. His flaw is inaction through fear. Prufrock is in hell, the hell of the unchanging self in a world
where, by doing nothing, Prufrock ages more and more. The theme of man's ability to "murder" time
is important because, in doing nothing, man has "time to kill." As Prufrock says, "I have measured out my life
with coffee spoons." The nightmare of no creation in time comes down to a simple line:
"Do I dare to eat a peach?" Taken literally, this line shows the terrifying realism of what man has
regressed into--a creative drowning in his own fantasies, who contributes nothing, who creates nothing,
who is nothing, who is really no one.
     What Star Trek presents is the opposite of Prufrockianism -- the philosophy first iterated by William
Blake almost two-hundred years ago, i.e., dynamism, vitalism --terms used Henri Bergson in his
Introduction to Metaphysics, 1912, when he describes the self acting. When living in the memory
of the past (durée), hesitation destroys creative action. It was Goethe who altered the first verse of the

                                                                                                                                           25.

                                                                                                                                             26.

is "Time to murder and create." Star Trek's observations about the three time zones -- past, present, and future --

will be seen more closely as this chapter examines specific episodes; but in man's day-to-day twentieth century existence

we see an age without heroes, men clinging to the past to escape the present; men ignoring the present by going

underground or in escaping on time machines or on fantasy; utopian dreamers with refuge in daydreams about future

maybes to escape the past and/or the present. On the other hand, suffice it to say that Star Trek

envisions time as a very physical and palpable reality tenanted by a sense of urgency, pain and impotence. We study a

crew of 430 men and women, a microcosm of all mankind, on the "Enterprise" trying to do what that ship's name entails--

man creating, enterprising, seeking out new life forms amid change and constancy. Star Trek is much like the voice of the

devil who prefaces "The Proverbs of Hell" with this invitation to all mankind -- the invitation to experience time:

          How do you know but ev'ry Bud that cuts the airy way,

          Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

                --(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790).

Star Trek's appeal is subtle and is still revolutionary because the ideas about man and time still go misunderstood or

unheeded. Gene Roddenberry challenges our minds, tries to get us to think because, as a famous philosopher says,

"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

Star Trek's theory of how change is effected by man is a complex, but traditional one first proposed by the German

Romantics, especially Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling, and Goethe. This concept of the creational
 

                                                                                                                                         27                                                         

interaction between and among opposites was first proposed in the English by Blake, followed shortly by
Wordsworth and Shelley. The basis of modern man's view of change and of man's ability to change,
to create time was and is based on the dichotomy between mind and matter, which was best analyzed by
Emanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant is important as the philosophical father of Romanticism.
Kant first postulated the mind and matter dichotomy, but his philosophy emphasized the thinking mind
as the source of an object's meaning. The philosophy of Kantian noumenalism (the subject) also postulated
the problem of phenomenalism (the object), but Kant, even in his insistence of Kant’s intuition,
fell short of giving existence outside man's mind its own identity and ontology. The contemporary twentieth-
century philosopher Heidegger wrote a well-known book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1962),
in which Heidegger seeks to reinstate the need for mind and matter to exist separately, yet to interrelate--
thereby asserting the view of such authors as Goethe, Fichte and Schelling in Germany, and the Romantic poets,
Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, and Keats -- that pure subjectivism was one-sided, and that matter has its own ontology.
Kant's thinking about man's intuition, his pure understanding, his imagination, however, is part of Gene Roddenberry's
view of man, change and time. But if man had to struggle only with his mind, Star Trek would be dealing only with
half-truths. Roddenberry belongs in the tradition of Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Keats through the philosophy of
nineteenth-century logical positivism into twentieth-century existentialism in asserting the harmony for man means a
struggle against meaninglessness and nihilism by an assertion that time and human creativity depend on the

                                                                                                                                         28.

assertion of the ontology of that-which-is outside the mind of man. Without this, there would be no change

and no time. In order to understand Roddenberry's time and man ethic, the strengths and short-

comings of Kant's view of mind and matter is crucial. For Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, and Roddenberry,

the thing must have being outside our perception of it. For Kant, the thing that-is is "something in

general (etwas uberhaupt)"a general kind of thing, not a specific thing nor a specific perceived object. Kant

called it a "transcendental object." One evaluator (H. J. Paton)of Kant notes:

          The something (is) an abstraction....it cannot
           be known by means of intuition, it cannot be
           known at all, it can only be conceived as thought;
           and the concept of something infernal (i.e.,
           of its "thingness" or "objectivity"), since it
           contains no element derived from empirical
           intuition, must be a pure concept.
                (H.J. Paton. Kant's Metaphysics of Experience:
                 A Commentary on the First Half of the "Kritik
                 der reinen Vernunft.” London: George Allen and Unwin;
                 New York: Macmillan, 1961. Vol. I, p.4l8).

Roddenberry, like Heidegger and his predecessors, seeks to restore the balance between man and his world

through the use of the human imagination. It is Roddenberry's belief that, as Heidegger asserts:

          The objects which I perceive are not created by me....
          If the object is to be met in experience, it must, as
          precondition for such an encounter by me with it, be
          recognized as a thing that is at hand, as a thing that
          already is here for me to encounter. The factuality      
                                                          

                                                                                                                                              30.

with things outside himself. Time becomes a path or mode of relating experiences. Kant's influence in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is enormous because his followers in the

humanities fostered a dichotomy between art and science, between subjectivity and objectivity, between

mind and matter. This dichotomy stunned western man because it fostered an interiorization,

an internalization of all reality as an extension of man's ego. The objectivity of the natural sciences

in the nineteenth century enhanced man's sense of alienation and isolation as he withdrew into the ME

out of fear and doubt regarding the NOT-ME which was more than man could comprehend intellectually or

absorb emotionally. Heidegger states the limitations of Kant's view of time as purely subjective as:

          ...an extension of the domain within which time
          can function as an anticipatory mode of intuition
           ...Time is immediately limited to the data if
          internal sense is, at the same time, ontologically
          more universal than space only if the subjectivity
          of the subject consists in being open to the
          thing-that-is.
                --(Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
                   Trans. and Intro. by James S. Churchill. (Bloomington:
                   Indiana University Press, 1962), 51-52).

For Roddenberry, Heidegger and contemporary humanists, Time has two critical functions: it makes mind

an interpreter of experience and time; it is also the dynamic mode of human experience. Both exist

only because time is a matter of horizontal horizon of objectivity and is a key to the unification of

mind and matter (thought and sense, the ME and the NOT-ME) in temporality. Kant was correct in

indicating that speculative concepts must be about something, i.e., experience, but Kant was to create

200 years of human obsession with the ME by neutralizing the Newtonian view of a priori outer space (versus

Kant's inner space) and a priori outer time (versus Kant's inner time).  Kant rejects what
Roddenberry seeks to re-establish, i.e., that space and time are real beings, real functions. But Newton
neglected the

                                                                 
                                                                                                                                                   33.      

concept of man and time. Wordsworth notes, "What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects

that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other….” (“Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1800).

This is the key to William Wordsworth's theory of man and nature whereby the imagination creates a

synthesis between the ME and the NOT-ME. Roddenberry's works reflect and maintain the quest for

harmonia between man's mind and the physical world--an identity, yet a reality needed

by modern man if he is to live and work in the temporal horizon. William Wordsworth reflects Blake

in the choice of the symbol of marriage as the effect of the imagination:

          For the discerning intellect of Man,
          When wedded to this goodly universe
          In love and holy passion, shall find these
          A simple produce of the common day.
               --(William Wordsworth, "Prospectus to The Recluse, 1814).

Love is based on simple understanding of and open receptivity to the world of matter. When Wordsworth

speaks of humanity, it is in the context of "fields and groves," in the created world, and this world is

good. Star Trek retains the need for the visionary in man who possesses both intellect and feeling:

          The fullness of your bliss, I feel -- I feel it all.
                Oh, evil day~ if I were sullen
                While Earth herself is adoring .. "
                   --(William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," 1802-04).

Nature is man's solace, his solace in times of melancholy and isolation because man can externalize his

feelings and thoughts by a healthful receptivity towards the NOT-ME. The natural world

of space-time in Star Trek can give man a sense of new life, a kind of shore leave from the chaos and

self-centeredness of industrialized discord:

                                                                                                                                                                   34.

         
          Though nothing can bring back the hour
          Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
          We will grieve not, rather find
          Strength in what remains behind;
          In the primal sympathy ...
          In the soothing thoughts that spring
          Out of human suffering.
             (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immorality," 1802-04).

For Wordsworth and for Roddenberry's characters, nature is also a teacher of good and evil:

          One impulse from a vernal wood
          May teach you more of man,
          Of moral evil and of good
          Than all the sages can.
              --(Wm. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” 1798).

Man must lean his capabilities by interacting with “The Universe...a mighty Sphinx-riddle.”

Again, Carlyle foretells the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' need for time:

          Our whole terrestrial being is based on time
          and built of Time; it is wholly a Movement,
          a Time-impulse; Time is the author of it,
          the material of it. Hence also our Whole Duty,
          which is to move, to work--in the right
          direction....Whatso we have done, is done, and
          for us annihilated, and ever must we go and
          do anew.
                    --(Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1833).

The alternative is dreadful passivity,  “To eat unto itself for lack/ Of Something else to hew and hack."

Man's attitude toward his world is today too defensive. The attitude is one of meeting

the NOT-ME, head on if necessary. Star Trek is a testament to the infinite possibilities of man.


                                                                                                                                                              38.

                                Carl Jung's Archetype of Transformation in Star Trek

     In 1940, with revisions in 1950, Carl Gustav Jung published his theory of the rebirth archetype.

(C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. Trans. by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1959, Vol. 9, Part I) underlying the archetype of transformations is the notion that

one can experience many changes or rebirths during his given life-span in Time. For the most part, man's

traditional temporal horizon--past, present, and future--form the time context for these changes;

therefore, Jung's types of rebirth are an inextricable part of man's change in past, present, and future.

The purpose of this section of the chapter on Time is to show the relationship of the goals of typologies

of human change as they pertain to Star Trek--rebirth--and the temporal or eternal horizons wherein

and whereby rebirth occurs (all quotes from Jung are from the Princeton Bol1igen Series XX, The Collected

Works of C. G.. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1).

The forms of rebirth germane to Star Trek include:

          I. Metempsychosis--transmigration of souls; life prolonged in time by passing through different
              bodily existences.

         II. Participation in the process of transmutation-­indirect rebirth; one has to witness, or take part in,
              some rite of transformation.

        III. Resurrection--re-estab1ishiment of the human existence after death; change in one's being;
              essential - being is different one; non­essential - only general conditions of existence change;
              in different place; in different body.

         IV. Rebirth (renovatio)--rebirth within the span of individual life; non-essential - functions, parts;
               essential - total rebirth of the individual.

          V. Participation in the process of transformation-­indirect rebirth; one has to witness, or take part in,
             some rite of transformation.
                   --(Jung, Vol. 9, 113-15).

                                                                                                                                                                    40.

Subjective Transformation (Jung, Vol. 9., 119-34): Bildung and the Individual:

A. Diminution of personality--loss of soul; paralysis of will; loss of unity of consciousness.

B. Enlargement of personality--inner amplitude; mental receptivity to objects; growth (psychic)

C. Change of internal structure—possession/obsession; inferior function; identity with persona.

D. Identification with a group--mass intoxication; past animus/anima; participation mystique;
     mass suggestion.

E. Identification with a cult hero--totemism: god.

F. Magical procedures--change coming from rites.

G. Technical transformation--mechanism.

H. Natural transformation (individuation)--i.e., birth into another being who is equal to the other
     person in ourselves (inner friend/enemy) someone who is self, yet which we cannot completely alter
     I-Thou inner dialogue; aliguem alium internum defined as certain other one, within; conflict can lead
     to higher growth if the ego is strong; supremacy of the ego =  consciousness versus self-­dissolution.
     Rebirth is equal to rebirth within one’s lifetime (timespan)--past, present, future, atemporality.

All subjective transformations are of two types:

                                             a.  non-essential--no changing in being, in essential personality, but only
        in functions of parts of personality: a strengthening, improvement.

                                             b. essential transformation--total rebirth of the individual = transmutation.
      examples: mortal into immortal; bodily into incorporeal; human into
      divine (Christ). 

     In essence, time past, present, and future are never truly mutually exclusive, but represent

cubbyholes in an artificial, linear view of successions in time moving from what was before to what is now,

to what can be when. Paul Fraisse, in The Psychology of Time, has addressed the subject of time:

 

                                                                                                                                                            42.

(Reprinted in Paul Fraisse, The Psychology of Time. Trans. by Jennifer Leith. New York: Harper and Row,
 
1963, p. 208; this writer is indebted to Mr. Fraisse's discussion of time zone direction and refuge).

     Asthenics have "feelings of emptiness"; they desire nothing and have no feeling of direction, and

therefore, have no frustration. Thus, to times past, present, and future, one must add the zones

of the void and of atemporality. As in the treatment of the imagination, Roddenberry's time-space

episodes deal specifically with time stress, creative rebirth in terms of the synthesis of past to future,

and of future to the present. The psychical emphasis of one zone or of two zones to the exclusion of others

can have destructive or psychotic results. Roddenberry's approach to man's rebirths in time is wholistic

in conception and in execution, and, as a few illustrations will show, rebirth and time in Star Trek are

not only quantitative, but also qualitative in nature.

 

                                                                       “Metamorphosis”

                                          

     The specific Star Trek episodes dealing with change and time begin with "Metamorphosis," an episode

whose limited special effects bring about an intensely human drama on the limited threshold of

the planetoid Epsilon Canaris Three.  Gene Coon's story of the hijacked and marooned Zefram Cochrane

(played by Glen Corbett) presents the story of one man who, isolated from mankind, has

ironically achieved what classical man has always sought--immortality,

In one-hundred and fifty years, Cochrane has not changed because the Companion rejuvenated him

and caused a hiatus in the usually human aging process. But Cochrane's rebirth cannot fully depend upon

a time vacuum, i.e., no change. The Companion, a purely

                                                                                                                                             45.

reminds everyone, “We're running out of time,” and little time re­mains for medical treatment. McCoy's comment
about time pertains to the entire marooning situation on Epsilon Canaris Three. When Kirk says, "We were forced
off our course and taken here by some force we couldn't identify," the remark transcends one man's or woman's plight,
but becomes an archetype of isolated man caught in timelessness--the non-temporality of immortality. When Spock
agrees to try to start the shuttlecraft, Cochrane quips, "You got plenty of time"--an understatement in light
of the situation. When Cochrane offers Commissioner Redford a hot bath, she nosily quips, "How perceptive of you
to notice that I needed one." When McCoy asks Hedford how she feels, the litany of sarcasms continues.
"I feel infuriated, deeply put upon, and absolutely outraged." Nancy Hedford, like Cochrane, has sought refuge in the
non-temporal. For Cochrane, it was aging; for Hedford it is an autism and psychic disintegration, an aging woman who
has sought escape from human love in and through the work ethic. She has filled all her time with projects lest she
waste one second in thinking about her old maid status. She kills time, leaving herself a dead past, a psychically
and humanly dead present, and no sense of future at all. For her, time has been reduced to mathematical formulae,
a continual shuttle aboard shuttlecrafts from one external crisis to another. It is ironic that Hedford's job as
Commissioner is to mediate between warring factions and planets, an emissary

These changes are at the essense of man's humanity; he must change and time must change him
and with him.
     Commissioner Hedford, in overhearing Cochrane's rejection of the Companion's love for him
as indecent, cries and breaks down, sobbing,  "I've heard. He was loved and he resents it ...
I don't want to die. I've been good at my job, but I've never been loved. Ever. What kind of
life is that ... not to be loved ... never to have shown love, and he runs away from love?"
Before her death as Nancy Hedford, she undergoes a rebirth in her recognition about love and
life. Her rebirth via the Companion is symbolic of her psychical rebirth as a woman, her
reintegration in time with a synchronized sense of the temporal horizon. She is whole after
many years of disintegration. Both Cochrane and Nancy, by their "joining" as man and woman,
experience total psychical rebirth, in Jung's sense of a rebirth archetype, in and through the
temporal horizon.
     A discussion of "Metamorphosis" is not complete without the central and most enigmatic character
the Companion. The Companion has been Zefram Cochrane's companion, his only sense of NOT-ME for
over a century and Cochrane has no idea as to the nature and love value of this life-giving entity.
The Companion has the power to change matter and to alter time. The Companion is immortality,
a being purely immaterial. In a real sense, the relationship between Cochrane and the Companion
shows the harmonic fusion between matter and antimatter, between the ME and the NOT-ME, between
pure mind and man as matter and mind. Zefram Cochrane is

                                                                                                                                48.

the past living in the present; he is living history. The Com­panion, as pure spirit, has no
temporal horizon because it is eternal. It has no past, no present, no future in
any distinctive or synthesized sense. The Companion is eternity in time, and
“she” represents an unusual opportunity to study the symbiotic relationship between
energy and matter, between timelessness and time. Much emphasis can be placed on what
the Companion is and possesses, but something must be said for what "he" has not and
therefore is not. In the true sense of the Romantic theory of opposites, the Companion is
understandable in opposition to Cochrane, the man.  The Companion is an excellent
example of William Blake's proverb, "Eternity is in love with the Productions of Time."
She can freeze time and change; she can alter the past to suit the present without altering
duration or personality. Yet with all her power, the Companion, like Cochrane and Hedford,
is involved and lonely. Immortality, as Cochrane says, consists mostly of boredom. But think of
what it must be like to see time from eternity's point of view. Eternity is jealous of time
because eternity cannot, of its very nature, change itself in any way. Immortality is
non-change. Therefore man has an advantage, an edge, over eternity because man can and does
change. It is eternity that is bored and would love to do "what man does, would love to be loved
as man does--in time. When Cochrane first sees Commissioner Herford, he says, "Are you real?"
"A woman...a beautiful one at that...food to a starving man.” The fusion between Cochrane
and the

The question arises as to whether the Companion actively permits Hedford to die. The Companion,

says Cochrane:

          It...saved my life. It's taken care of me
          all these years. Very close in a way that's
          hard to explain. I suppose I have even a
          sort of affection  for it....I don't want
          it killed.

Cochrane's selflessness is an interesting contrast to the Companion's selfishness.

Until Hedford's death, an eternal triangle looms. In his own way, Cochrane loves without knowing

that he is loved; the Companion both loves and is loved, but is unwilling to share with

others by remaining eternal and immortally aloof in her too human jealousy. Kirk's imagination

and knowledge of women and use of the universal translator as communication between matter and anti-

matter, between time and timelessness, bridges not only a gap in time, but a gap between the universal

concepts of male and female, thereby opening the door to the possibility of male and female joining

in time:

          Kirk: How do you fight a thing like that?
          McCoy: Why not try a carrot instead of a stick?

McCoy is a catalyst in effecting the episode's resolution. Kirk must play on the Companion's

femininity and the universal qualities of womanhood in love. A man must be free to love and to

be loved. By loving "the man," the Companion has committed Cochrane to unchanging servitude.

          Kirk: It is the nature of our species to be free...
                  We will cease to exist in captivity.

          Companion: Your bodies have stopped their peculiar
                            degeneration. There will be nothing to harm
                             you. You will continue and the man will continue."

                                                     51.

The Companion has mistaken mere existence in time as living in time. Ironically, even as an immortal, the

Companion, like Cochrane and Hedford, merely exists. Love makes the difference between mere "continuation"

and living. Living in freedom requires degeneration. The price of loving is dying, but it is worth the

price. Cochrane’s "parochial" attitude in seeing the Companion as female as obscene and indecent, is not

fully human: “I’m not going to be fodder for some inhuman monster.^”  Spock: "Fascinating! A totally

parochial attitude." Cochrane must overcome his missed past of 150 years and raise himself, just as the

Companion must lower (in a sense) herself to see life from a human point of view. Cochrane rejects the love

he has experienced for 150 years because that love is not temporal.

     It is during the fourth fusion that Kirk reveals a fundamental keystone in Roddenberry's concept of man in time--

 the old-fashioned work ethic. Eternity is detrimental to, and wrong for, man because he/she cannot change

changelessness --outside the temporal horizon. It is man's job in time to work, to overcome negativities

and obstacles. Without constant challenge from within and from without, man atrophies and

disintegrates as man. The challenge is necessary for the constant rebirth of the human spirit in time:

          Companion: He does not age; he remains forever.
          Kirk: You speak of his body. I speak of his spirit....
                   Our species can only survive if we have obstacles
                   to overcome. You take away all obstacles. With-
                   ­out them to strengthen us we will weaken and
                  die…you amuse yourself with him.... "
          Companion: I care for him.  

          Kirk: But you can't really love him. You haven't the
                   slightest knowledge of love -- the total union of
                   two people. You are the Companion. He is the man.
                   You are two different things. You can’t love...
                   You will always be separate, apart from him.  
         Companion: If I were human, there can be love?

                                                                   52.                                                                         

One key to love is "self-sacrifice." Kirk gambles that the Companion's love for Cochrane

will create self-abnegation and freedom for "the man^" through ego dissolution. When Nancy

Hedford appears , and utters "Zefram Cochrane...we understand," a Jungian reincarnation by the

Companion has taken place. Eternity has become one of and with time -- a marriage of

opposites in a temporal place. The Companion becomes part human, and there is love. The

Nancy/Companion synthesis is another Roddenberry victory for humanity and its ability

to shift timelessness into love for man the creator. Like Kollos, who first experiences

Spock's body and man's loneliness, the Companion shows that one must physically experience

humanity to understand the agonies and the ecstasies, the terrifying and brilliant creature

that is man:

          Nancy/Companion:  We are one ... Zefram, we
                                         frightened you. We never frightened
                                         you before. This is loneliness. What
                                         a bitter ... O, Zefram, how do you bear
                                         it, this loneliness? .... (to Kirk) You
                                         said we would not know love because we
                                         were not human. Now we are human. We
                                         will know the change of the days. We
                                         will know death. But to touch the hand
                                         of man ... nothing is as important.

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time" and becomes human via reincarnation and
sacrificial love. The Companion's reincarnation through Nancy Redford's dying body is
a rebirth both for Nancy and for the Companion. In saving part of Nancy, the Companion
has permitted Nancy the love she never gave nor received, ironically through an

                                                                                                                                  53.
unselfish act.

     Gene Coon's charming story is a eulogy to what it means to be fully human. To love is to change,

to live is to die, to be human is to accept the violent contraries of humanity. The Black-American poet,

Georgia Johnson, says it splendidly:

             How much loving have you done?
             How full and free you giving?
             For living is but loving
             And loving only giving.
               --("The Poet Speaks")

It is the desire of the creator/preserver to be like the created objects. Eternity

cannot feel and feeling is man's perigee and his apogee:

          Nancy/Companion: Let me walk ... feel the earth
                                        beneath my feet. Let me feel the warmth
                                        of the sun upon my face. You beside
                                        me. Let me feel these things.

The Companion and Cochrane are co-creators of their own rebirths and new lives. Cochrane cannot leave

the planetoid and the Companion because, to love her, Cochrane must sacrifice the glories and kudos that

would be his if he were to return to Alpha Centauri. To love her, Cochrane must sacrifice part of himself

just as the Companion sacrificed part of herself. Both halves form one synthesis.

          Zefram Cochrane: You mean you gave up everything
                                       to be human?
          Nancy/Companion: The joy of this hour. I am
                                         pleased.
          Zefram Cochrane: You loved me. I never understood. I
                                      do now.

So the new Adam and Eve cannot leave each other because, as Spock quips, "You are after all a human

being...essentially irrational..."
 

                                                                                                                  54.                                                                                                 

          Spock: But you will age, both of you. There will
                      be no immortality. You'll both grow old
                      here and finally die here.
          Zefram Cochrane:   That’s been happening to men and women for a
                                         long time. I’ve got the feeling it’s one of the
                                         pleasanter things about being human.
                                        As long as you grow old together.

In being able to see and to touch Nancy Companion, Cochrane can affirm, “I love her.”
In conclusion, Nancy Hedford, the Companion, and Zefram Cochrane experience rebirth
by mutual life-giving love, the synthesis of mind and matter that is at the heart of
Romantic art and human love. For man, living is loving, and loving is giving. Living is dying,
but life redeemed through love is worth the greatest price to be one with
humanity, to be fully human. Nancy Hedford has stopped a war and two human beings
have gained a world.

                                                                         (End of “Metamorphosis”)

                                                                                              xxxx

                                                                          “The Deadly Years”

          Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
                  --(A.L. Tennyson, "Ulysses," 1842).

          I grow old ... I grow old...
          I shall wear the bottoms of my
          trousers rolled.
                  --(T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," 1917).

     Modern technology and advances in medicine have made gerontology a new and separate
science. Aging and its relationship to time and change has become the object of man's
microscope. In short, people live longer today than their forbears of even a few
centuries ago. It was not unusual to be old at forty-five in the mid-eighteenth

                                                                                                                              55.

century. J. S. Bach was a rather old sixty-five at the time of the composer's death
in 1750. Three-score and ten was more average in the nineteenth century. The average
life span has increased notice­ably, thereby expanding human productivity way beyond
so-called mandatory retirement. At age sixty-five, many people are beginning new and
productive lives and are contributive members of modern society as septo and octogenarians.
Society's willingness to accept and to utilize the vast repository of age's wisdom is less
optimistic. A vital human resource often goes unaccepted or ignored. The potential of age
to regenerate and to teach youth about time lived and experienced is a key to a solid
temporal horizon. The fact that age splits the temporal horizon as well as the individual
personality is one concern of the episode, "The Deadly Years."  But age is both a
physiological and a psychological phenomenon. Some people are old at 35, while 55 year
old children are a frequent sight. Age does not necessarily produce maturity.
"The Deadly Years” posits the necessity to use time well and wisely because time is man's most
previous commodity, and his most wasted resource. Old age has peculiar forms, and
senility is its most abused label. Just what does it mean to grow old? The uniqueness
of Star Trek’s look into age is that modern technology plus natural phenomena permit
the landing party on Gamma Hydra IV (except Chekov) to experience old age without
experiencing its natural result--death. Kirk, Scotty and McCoy grow old and yet
live to tell of their old age -- an experience to remember in our old age, as Kirk
puts it at the end of the episode. They live to tell the tale of the heretofore
untold and untellable. They experience

                                                                                                                             56.

the future in time, yet they return to the past, all while experiencing succession in
time present. This time machine/warp effect enables Star Trek viewers to experience
man's full temporal horizon. The landing crew to Gamma Hydra IV change. Some die
(ex., Lt. Galway); others live. The survivors who are cured through the re­discovery
of adrenaline (the cure to the present future is a hormone forgotten in the past, i.e.,
past cures present) are changed in personality and are the better and the wiser because
they can use the knowledge of the future and can apply it to the present and to the new
future yet to be experienced. Past, present, and future collide yet coalesce as man's mind
and glands atrophy. It is important to note in this brilliantly staged drama of one
of life's most inescapable and unusual experiences, that the cure for age lies within the
individual himself. The hormone, adrenaline, is manufactured within man. The cure is man;
the problem is man. Roddenberry insists time and time again that man's redemption is wrought
by changes from within the individual. A closer look at the nature of changes wrought by old
age is called for. Growing old is not simply a hardening of man's physical arteries,
thereby slowing down his autonomic system, his reflexes, and his willed processes. Growing
old is also a psychological phenomenon involving hardening of the heart, hardening of the
will, a closing off of oneself from the NOT-ME with a concomitant intolerance of change
or unwillingness to effect change even when physical abilities are not impaired. A famous
poet poses the crucial question and provides a stinging answer

                                                     57.

          What is it to grow old?
          Is it to lose the glory of the form,
          The luster of the eye?...
          Is it to feel each limb
          Grow stiffer, every function less exact?...

          It is to spend long days
          And not once feel that we were ever young ...
          It is to suffer this,
          And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
          Deep in our hidden heart
          Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
           But no emotion--none.

         It is--last stage of all--
         When we are frozen up within, and quite
          The phantom of ourselves,
         To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
         Which blamed the living man.
               --(Matthew Arnold, "Growing Old," 1867).

Old age can become a living death, a self-imposed prison wherein the ME loses its

ability to feel, to have memory but no emotion. Moral calcification and moral

fossilization wherein one loses the essence of what he is becomes true oldness.

To shun change, to become a mere phantom of what one once was, is to die long before

one's physical death. This moral hardening of the arteries must be considered as

the "deadly" aspect of "The Deadly Years." Old age is deadly in a literal sense,

yes. But the loss of feeling and the loss of the sense of change can kill time

because the man has ceased to be a "living man" by  becoming a "hollow ghost" of his

former self. As Tennyson says, there is yet honor in old age; there is yet the

newness of experience to be confronted. One must live and live intensely or one is not

truly living.

     In "The Deadly Years," the members of the landing crew age geometrically in a

format resembling rapid photography movement. The aging, although caused by the tail

of the rogue comet that passed

                                                                                                                               58                                                                                                    
Gamma Hydra IV, is symbolic as well as literal. The crew members die due partly to an aspect of their
past selves. The use of an artificial antidote (hyronalyn) for radiation poisoning has superseded the use
of man's inherent hormone, adrenaline. In a sense, man's own immunity apparatus has made him vulnerable
in a technological age. It is the re-emergence of past knowledge via McCoy's old country doctor's memory
of adrenaline, that provides the antidote to a future experience (aging) being experienced now in time present.
Man, while exploring the future, must remember and must utilize his past experiences to effect change or survival.
The past cures the present future -- an unusual use of the temporal horizon where Roddenberry insists that
psychical stability depends on the working interrelationship among all three time zones.

     Aging, with its psychological effect, forces a one-sidedness, a shrinking within the temporal horizon.
Aging precludes a concern for a future (immanent death), a detachment from the vitality of the past
(except as doting memories) and a preoccupation with and refuge in time present. The psychologist, Visher,
sees age in the adult bringing about interest in the to-be, and an increase in the importance of what
has been: "Old people shut themselves up more and more in a present which they live only by reference to the
past." (A.L. Visher, "Psychological Problems of the Aging Personality." Bull schweiz. Akad. Wiss., 1947, 2, 280-286.
Reprinted in Fraisse, The Psychology of Time, p. 181). The blurring of the coherence of the mind blurs the temporal
horizon. The result, in Star Trek, is a strength of will (such as Kirk's defiance of the aging process) at
odds with physical and

                                                                                                                                     59.

intellectual vision. The psychologist, Minkowski, says serenity comes with this blurring of past
and future, but Roddenberry's main characters range from Scotty's subdued acquiescence (a paradox
in light of his love for life) to Spock's reluctant acceptance of a fact that he understands,
to Kirk's "No ... No!”

          This impotence of anticipation and imperfection of
          retrospection condition an unconcern which is not
          indifference but serenity....The possibility of
          such complete detachment from the past and the
          future, from people and things, is perhaps only the
          natural end of the human mentality when the  
          organism is spared by illness and succumbs to the exhaustion
          of old age.
               --(E. Minkowski, Le Temps Vecu, pp. 340-41. Reprinted in Fraisse,
                  The Psychology of Time, p. 185).

Senility is a form of time displacement, misplacement, and replacement fostered by uncontrollable time
succession and the inability to place duration in its proper temporal horizons. Some sense
of succession in the present is maintained. The dearth of wholism disrupts the orientation
of the human personality because the past, present, and future continuity has been destroyed.
The deadly years make Galway, McCoy, Scotty, Spock, and Kirk prisoners of time present. They face the changing
present anchored to a scenario of past memories. Each individual ironically regresses into what he has already
experienced into what he has already been while still very much in the summer of their lives! It is the factor of will
that produces a variation in the aging process itself. Kirk ages less dramatically because of his stubbornness in the
face of the unknown -- a trait that distinguishes commander from commanded. It is the awareness of the

                                                                                                                                                                                  60.

aging future/ past in the present that lends perspective to the final antidote to the aging phenomenon in "The Deadly Years."
It is because age is supposed to be a yet-to-be; it is because this future yet-to-be is the present; it is because this yet-to-be has
past precedent, that Roddenberry's characters maintain an awareness of the present. The human problem that is most essential is
that aging brings about a reduction in the human capacity to coalesce the opposing temporal perspectives and to act based on dwindling
mental faculties. The need to fight the unknown, the will to fight the unknown, the compulsion to fight the unknown can and will
restore the integrated personality and the harmonic temporal horizon originally distorted by the aging process.
     In "The Deadly Years,” old age is a loss of perception of succession with limitation of the apprehension of time as series with the
concomitant loss of rebirth potential in the present becauseof excessive concern with memory, i.e., with what has been experienced,
and with zero futurity. Age is a psychological hazard because it represents little or no change, and no change means no rebirth,
no creativity. The years are “deadly” because they mean non-productivity in the present and a loss of temporal horizon perspective
necessary for change. To not change is to die prematurely. Stagnation in the present is a psychological and a moral death that is an
abhorrence in all of Roddenberry's Star Trek. The characters who are least likely to be reborn under normal temporal circumstances,
such as Lt. Galway, die literally because they are least likely to create a 

                                                                                                                                                                        61.

future. The life-loving Scotty becomes overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of the present; he simply needs a "wee-bit of sleep,"
thereby submerged by the life he has not always fought to control. Scotty, who has probably experienced more of life's Epicurean vein,
who has quaffed the wine of life deeply, has little but repetition and little dregs in a lived future. As a result, his silence has some basis in
logging in that his already-having-achieved has been great and satisfying. McCoy regresses into the past and age causes
the unconscious to surface in the clothes of the old country doctor with a sardonic Georgian dialect complete with lip-moistening and
countrified humor. Spock's logic enables him to comprehend the situation, to face the fact of unnaturally premature change with the
knowledge of its empirical causality. An edgy security exists in complete, rational comprehension of oneself and one's situation. Kirk has
the highest resistance because he is the greatest combatant in Star Trek. His incredible will refuses to accept anything that is
unnaturally out of time as inevitable. His enlightened vitalism is the focal point of this episode. His psychosomatics simply refuse change
when that change means death, not rebirth; this is the "stuff" of which heroes are made. A true creator will not die until time itself
exhausts all chances for change. He remains "the Kirk...the creator" (cf., "The Changing").
     In the opening lines of "The Deadly Years," Dr. McCoy examines the aged, deceased man whose appearance saved Chekov from
experiencing the deadly years, and notes: "Death by natural causes ... old age." Alvin's death is "natural." The deaths of Robert Johnson
(aged 29) and

                                                                                                                                                                   62.

his wife Elaine (aged 27) are from extreme old age, not natural cause. The presence and the omission of the one
word presents the paradox of modern man's paradoxical approach to dying: death is both natural and unnatural.
By nature, man must die; however, modern science, with all its breakthroughs in extending life, has no "cure" for man's ultimate
destiny and enigma: he is born to die. In this episode, known for its brilliant make-up effects, biological time goes into a type of time
warp and is accelerated unnaturally. The future is the living present. The laws of nature are being violated. Old age is a question of
nowness. One must confront what he will be by confronting the to be in time present. This is a metabolic variation on the
"metamorphosis" motif.  What is ironic throughout this metamorphosis is that old age is treated as a disease, not as something natural.
Although the rogue comet is the logical cause, the effect is not treated by science personnel as a natural phenomenon. In this episode,
man must confront what existentialist philosophers, such as Kierkegaard and Sartre, placed as first priority, i.e., before man could live,
he must first accept the inevitable fact of death. The metaphysical acceptance of death is an important aspect of Roddenberry's concept
of the living, dynamic individual. Star Trek’s main characters confront death, in varying masks, in every episode. The Cumean
Sybil was given immortality, but it was not the immortality of youth; it was immortal old age. Her response was "I want to die."
 (cf., Petronius, Satyrion). Not even modern science has invented the perfect Venus pill (cf., "Mudd's Women") to halt the process
of aging. In this Star Trek episode, to not age would be as unnatural as to age unnaturally because not to age means not to change,
and it is crucial to Star Trek's concept of man that one change and create change. This critical argument must be understood before
one can see why Roddenberry deals  

                                                                                                                                                        63.

with age at all. We know that age is partly a question of personality; indeed, one could say that one changes physically in
accordance with the way that one changes time. Too much psychical change can short circuit the emotions and cause premature
"burnout.” Insufficient life experience via change can produce no mental growth and walking bipeds who live a long life because
they have never truly lived in the sense of confronting relentless change. One can age mentally, like Lord Byron, who, at are thirty,
noted his graying hair and wondered what he would look like at forty. Byron died at age thirty-six.
     In Robert Johnson, one sees how old age is a preoccupation with time past because it constitutes the bulk of his experienced life.
The result is a rhapsody of memories: "Elaine was so beautiful" compensates for what Robert Johnson cannot experience in the present
and in the future. In Robert Johnson's noble face, one also studies the dignity of death. When Elaine died, Robert too died a little more
because love had lent him perspective in time. He could accept age because all around him, especially his wife, also aged.
There is no fear in Johnson's dying eyes. There is a beauty in death when one fares well in life by being creative. Old age is a lived and a
living experience unfolding before one's eyes, but some of the dying live to tell the tale in their old age. Western man has always had an
obsession with the future, but the progress of science's palsied feet has created fears of and neglect of the future. This is coupled with
an anxiety about the passing present that drives a Robert Johnson into fantasies of the good(or better) old days when one was not old.
In Star Trek's

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         64.

treatment of gerontology, time becomes a delayed reaction. Temporal perspectives become more fully developed when one can
experience a future, a future that is not a fearful fantasy, but a future experienced in the present with revitalism of the past, forming
a unification of the temporal horizon. In “The Deadly Years,” it is not old age that is deadly. The unknown comes closer to experienced
reality. McCoy says to Kirk (who is talking to the aging Robert Johnson): “He can hear you, Jim, but he doesn't understand.^"   
Doesn't he? Who is it who "doesn't understand?" Age produces the disjointed thoughts and associative psychology that John Locke
called madness. Inaction becomes the succession of ideas in the mind, an illogical babbling that forms its own pattern, thereby
making full communication an impossibility. Senility is not ipso facto old age. In Star Trek, age merely forces to the surface
the universal problem of non-communication, and the difference between hearing and understanding. Many listen, but without
actual physical experience of the thought communicated; the auditor hears, but does not understand. The nature of the interpretative
process above and beyond mere sensory experience is one theme in "The Deadly Years." The inability or unwillingness to
understand is a form of death. Death is often painful and wretched; it "sucks," but "No one here gets out alive" ("The Doors").
     "The Deadly Years" has, as another important Star Trek theme, glands. Yes, glands. Thinking and understanding are
also glandularly based. One does think with his glands, especially McCoy who is the one chided by Kirk for overly-emotional
thinking without some Vulcan logic.

                                                                                                                                                                             65.

Glands confront logic in this complex episode. A glandular hormone, adrenaline, is the cure for the "disease." Glands are

also at the very heart of time and the process of change. Glands effect and are affected by change. The best example is the

chemistry that exists between Kirk and Dr. Janet Wallace, who is, ironically, an endochronologist. Being a female doctor makes

her glandularity all the more interesting. As every Star Trek viewer knows, Dr. Wallace was once in love with Kirk, and now as a

widow, her glands are stirred once again by her old flame, Kirk. The gland theme unites the themes of time and change by presenting

us with a play within the play between Kirk and Wallace. Kirk to Wallace: "Neither one of us will change." This means that Kirk's

devotion to his job will never change and that Dr. Wallace's love for Kirk has not and will not change. The result

is an impasse: no change. Here, in a normal time present, Kirk's aging process cannot be aided by an emotional endochronologist;

however, Janet Wallace serves to keep Kirk's mind and glands on resisting the uncontrollable force. Dr. Wallace is middle aged

(the bun in her hair helps) who married a scientist who was twenty-six years her senior. Age is her favorite subject, but she displays

little emotion: (in the corridor outside sickbay):

          Kirk: You sound like my first officer.
          Dr. Wallace: No problem is insoluble, not
                             even ours...Our situation doesn't
                             have its roots in logic....the heart
                             is not a logical organ....

          Kirk: How much older was your husband?’
          Dr. Wallace: 26 years ....
          Kirk: Look at me. What do you see? .. old
                 and rapidly growing older. What are
                 you offering me, Jan? Love or a going-
                 away present?
 

                                                                66.

The relationship between Kirk and Dr. Wallace forces, on a one-to-­one personal basis, the overall problem of age in time and change.
 It becomes clear that illogic's glands often come from so-called logical sources. Wallace loved Kirk, could not have him,
and so thwarted her emotions by marrying old age via her husband; therefore, Dr. Wallace forces age upon herself prematurely, the
very crisis affecting the man she now loves again. But her unwillingness to see Kirk's aging and the futility of any present or
future rebirth through love makes Dr. Wallace a tragic figure because the age factor that she now confronts in the man she loves,
and Kirk at computer's age estimation of 64, makes him nearly the age of Wallace's husband. Dr. Wallace is a failure both as a woman
and as an endocrinologist: she cannot use her glands for creation through love, and she cannot cure the crew's glandularly-based aging
process because she chooses to hear, but not to understand. Although only middle-aged, Dr. Wallace shows all the psychological
and intellectual signs of Robert Johnson as he lay dying of extreme old age.
     The inability to interpret sensory perceptions is a symptom of old age, but in "The Deadly Years," it becomes an ageless, universal
problem/challenge inherent to human nature. Old age merely exaggerates propensities already in existence. Any slight aberration
from the conventional, normative behavior is noticed and analyzed. Kirk says to Sulu: “Maintain standard orbit...." Kirk's first memory
lapse begins as a reiteration. Lt. Galway's first appearance in sickbay is caused by her poor hearing. Ironically, Dr. McCoy fails
to make any diagnosis based on visible changes in Galway's face. While involved in a given

                                                                                                                                                                                   67.         

time/change experience, a trained doctor fails to see the aging process so obvious on Galway's face. In his solipsism McCoy does

not notice the aging of others even though the symptoms are obvious. Man often sees without perceiving, just as man often hears

without understanding. Man's glands can shut down his intellect. Kirk sees the aging process in McCoy, but fails to see it in himself,

and dismisses it as a muscle twinge.

           Kirk: Bones, I believe you're getting gray.
           McCoy: (upon exam)...advanced arthritis.

Scotty's entrance into sickbay devastates McCoy and Kirk and effects the first universal recognition of change in Scotty's ancient

and haggard face. Often in Star Trek, disease is an externalization of an internal, unstable condition. Scotty's internal structure

indicates total fatigue, and he seeks only a "'wee bit  ‘a rest,”  while Spock is "healthy for any Vulcan on the high side of a hundred."

While McCoy makes humorous cracks about Spock's need for heat in his quarters ("no house calls"), Galway enunciates the

absolute terror which is at the heart of technological man--the total terror of change itself. Change calcifies; change kills, but does

change create?

          Galway: I don't want to sleep ... if I sleep,
                       what will I find when I wake up?

Unlike Scotty, who wants sleep, Galway fears sleep. As if nothing had changed, Kirk ironically overlooks Galway's immanent

death and says, "Assume your duties." Part of the death in “The Deadly Years”   is man's unwillingness and inability to see in himself

what he cannot see in others, or to act as if drastic change were

                                                               68.

somehow normal by refusing to accept change. All this trauma about dying prematurely is sharpened by the dialogue between

Sulu and Chekov on the bridge. Chekov, victimized by a multitude of physical exams, hurts all over, but the humor is grim:

          Sulu: You’ll live.
          Chekov: I'll  live, but I won't enjoy it.

This verbal irony is brilliant; it provides comic relief while, by contrasting youth and age, providing thematic reinforcement.

     The last basic theme of “The Deadly Years" is memory. Loss of memory is interpreted as an early sign of senility. Kirk forgets

his 20,000 perigee order; he forgets that he signed the fuel consumption report; he forgets that Gamma Hydra II is not Gamma

Hydra IV. Captain Kirk's inherent predilection for detailed perfection takes the form of repeated orders and forgotten deeds.

His loss of memory is an external symbol of his inherent love of order and precision. A good, once exaggerated, becomes an

evil. Perfectionism suddenly becomes senility just because others interpret reality through Kirk’s gray hairs. Technological man,

as envisioned in this brilliant episode, is so constantly confronted with changes wrought by technology, that his inner stress mechanisms

(including his glands) are rebelling against his controlling intellect. The body literally breaks down prematurely under the severe pressure

of contemporary living. Roddenberry's approach to modern man is a balanced, psychosomatic one,
 

                                                                                                                                                                         69.

seeing man's emotions and reason simultaneously and interrelatedly. Man's body and mind grow old as change takes its toll and
it is indeed a fact that stress can age a man prematurely, can literally kill him from the inside out. To say, as McCoy does,
that "People age normally at different speeds" is an understatement, and it does not consider the abnormal, created by rapid change,
that cannot be absorbed by a polysaturated psyche and by a body whose evolution lags behind that of its mind/controller. As a result,
Code 3 is forgotten in favor of Code 2 and memory, which is man's change/link to the past via the present, becomes disjointed. Kirk
tells Uhura to send the message “immediately" while a stunned Uhura obeys orders that are no longer relevant to a present situation.
In the now, there is an urgency in time present to solve the future maturing in time present. This episode is a scientific study concerning
the extent to which acceleration of duration in time alters the human personality; it studies the certain normalcy present in the midst
of abnormality. Memory means taking refuge in time past in seeking escape from the pressures of contemporary civilization; however,
this episode shows that memory of time past is the key, the cure to a future (old age) experienced in time present. Therefore, the past
is reasoning for the future and visa versa--both as they converge and emerge in time present. When man^'s temporal threshold--
the balance among past, present, and future--is restored, the psychosomatic aberration of old age is itself changed and normal age is
restored as normal time is restored through man's ability to create new change in the
 

                                                                  70.

midst of change, i.e., to change change itself. Adrenaline, that glandular hormone, is a symbol of man's inner responses to solve his
external problems from within. Symbolically, old age is conquered by man's own glands and his memory, as McCoy fidgetly
remembers, the late twentieth century cure for radiation sickness. The past holds the cure for the present. The disease comes from
within; the cure also must come from within. This  is  the  nature of  "The Deadly Years.^”  In order to see now, one must note
when; in order to achieve the to-be and the yet-to-be, one must remember what was because what was is and both will create
what is yet-to be.
     What is most essential for man in terms of time is that he work creatively and productively. The idea of "time to kill” is an abhorrence
in Star Trek. This raises the question of the greatest anomaly in “The Deadly Years"--the extraordinary competency hearing called for
by Commodore Stocker via Mr. Spock, all in keeping with “regulations." Stocker is well-intentioned in his desire to reach Starbase 10
in order to "save” the lives of the aging crewmembers of the Enterprise,  but his logic is misdirected due in part to the fact that
he is not one of the affected. In his obsession with the future (his new command), Stocker violates logic and thwarts creative change
by obstructing time. He lives by the book, but the phenomena of aging in this episode does not go by the book. He thinks too much
with his glands, and not enough with his head. Stocker does not change to adapt himself to the existing reality; he too sees, but
does not understand; he too hears, but does not listen. It is ironic that the

                                                                                                                                                               71.

afflicted personnel struggle actively toward a cure, while the so-called normal people in time react emotionally to the point of

destructivity. The very drama of the hearing repeats what every viewer has already seen; it repeats what each participant already

knows. Nothing new or constructive results from the competency hearing. The function of the hearing is to show how time is wasted,

misused, thereby contributing to the aging process. Every wasted question wastes time, and time is the episode’s most precious

commodity:

          Kirk:  ...nonsense about a competency hearing.
                   Trying to relieve a captain of his
                   command ... that is      Spock, I wouldn't have be-
                   lieved it of you. There's a lot more about
                   running a starship than answering a lot of fool
                   questions.

This quote is to be taken literally. Senility does not denote incompetency, and an experienced captain is superior to a

"chair-bound paper- pusher" because Kirk is still able to act. His memory is not impaired, nor is his will. The hearing causes a

temporary friction between Kirk and Spock, thereby thwarting constructive change. The will can and does overcome physical

shortcomings because Kirk is not afraid to act:

          Kirk: I am not old, Jan. I'm not….You don’t run
                  a starship with your arms.
                  You run it with your head.                              
                  
The hearing has only served to heighten Kirk's awareness, to harden his will and determination. Commodore Stocker symbolizes

the walking biped, the technologized individual who is incapable of action because of fear. In the clutch, he freezes and his inability

to effect change

                                                                                                                                                                       72.

makes Stocker, a man in good health, a deadly force. Bracketed by the Romulans while crossing the neutral zone,

the Enterprise is in the hands of the worst of modern civilization's mental incompetents: "He who desires, but acts not breeds

pestilence.”  Stocker cannot act:

          Commodore Stocker:  Opinion, Mr. Sulu ... We have no alternative but to surrender. Stocker is a man in full possession

of his mental and physical capabilities, but he cannot act. The deadliest evil in Star Trek is not the Romulans, but the technologized

man who cannot act in time, who cannot change. Stocker is an excellent foil for the aging Kirk. In Star Trek, there is always that

other alternative (cf., "Operation Annihilate").  Commodore Stocker: What am I going to do? I've got to do something.

The inability of modern man to react intelligently and creatively to a change in time is the real disease in “The Deadly Years." Stocker

is dead inside, and is deadly to others. A starship, as Kirk asserts, is a self-sufficient society which must be capable of solving its own

problems from within by utilizing its inner resources. Stocker is Roddenberry's answer to T. S. Eliot's Prufrock. Stocker is destroyed

by change; Kirk, compliments of adrenaline, appears on the bridge, and, in seconds, by brilliant imagination, he chooses and

acts based on his assessment of the problem. The old corbomite ruse ("polka") works. Kirk is the epitome of what Roddenberry

says modern man should and must be if he is to develop, to change, to grow:

          Commodore Stocker (to Kirk): "I did what I thought
                                            best to save you and the men.   I am now quite
                                            aware of what a starship can do with the right
                                            man at the helm"

                                                                                                                                                                   73.

It is the man, the right man who overcomes and absorbs the right situation by imaginative change who will build a

greater world because he is not afraid to make a decision, because he is not caught in what Matthew Arnold called

"the dialogue of the mind with itself,"  because he sees, he evaluates, he chooses, and he acts based on what his senses tell him.

Kirk effects change by using his past experiences, his present imagination with a sense of salvaging a future from the seemingly hopeless

Stockers of the world. Without the basic human processes of will and change, technology is a blinded servant and a useless tool.

Good health and harmony are restored. Because Spock is a Vulcan, McCoy has prepared a very large shot:

          McCoy: I've prepared an extraordinarily potent
                       shot and removed all breakables from
                       sickbay….
          Kirk: ... an experience we'll remember in our
                   old age which won't be for some while I hope.

Old age has brought about rebirth for Kirk, for McCoy, for Scotty, and for Spock. Unlike other aging figures who rarely have the desire

or facilities to say "This is what dying is like," the Enterprise crew has lived through extreme old age and, unlike no others in history,

have lived to tell the tale, have changed and reversed time in order to live in the present with the knowledge of what the inevitable

future brings. This fact makes them better men for the experience of the temporal horizon. "The Deadly Years”  is an extraordinary state-

ment on man's need to accept and to utilize change, not to fear it because to fear it means living death and spiritual extinction. What

is most interesting is to compare the "made-up" Scotty, McCoy and Kirk to the REAL, aged Scotty, McCoy and Kirk;  two are

gone now, but they lived into old age. Jimmy died at age 85, DeForest at age 79. Bill is 77 at the time of this writing and is more

active than ever! The makeup did not do them justice.
 

                                                              74.

                       “City On The Edge Of Forever”
                                                 

Eight other Star Trek episodes deal explicitly with the temporal horizon via the harmonic relationship among past, present,
and future. Often, time is an explicit matrix of an episode and time issues from an episode's very title. A first such episode is
Harlan Ellison's well­-conceived work "The City on The Edge of Forever." The major theme of this impressive tale is the
resentment of historical perspective via restoration of the temporal threshold’s harmony. It is one of two "time portal" episodes
which assert the motif of time as history, and man as the focal point, as the creator of time itself through actions aimed at restoring
and creating history. In “The City on The Edge of Forever," history must be re-changed and restored because of human distinction
of history. Thomas Carlyle once defined history as the essence of innumerable biographies, i.e., that man and the human personality
constitute history, and that history ceases to be of interest if it is not the story of its kinetic human personalities whose interaction
with time create the past as living present for all mankind to read and to relive. History must convey that sense of being there in
the midst of change itself.
     On this unusual journey, the Enterprise encounters “ripples in time" from a source that "can effect changes in time." The tone
for this time-machine episode is set by a triggering incident that takes place on the bridge of the Enterprise just before the ship
undergoes the last large time displacement wave. The problem is electrical shock incurred by Mr. Sulu that causes heart irregularity
or temporary cessation of heart movement. Dr. McCoy suddenly introduces the cordrazine

                                                                                                                                               75.

injection and Sulu is awake and normal, even though Captain Kirk was wary of cordrazine as a rather drastic over-reactive
solution. Cordrazine does, in a sense, cause the episode’s plot; confrontation with the Guardian of Forever becomes
unavoidable if the accidental self-injection by McCoy, his subsequent paranoia and beam-down, are to be rectified.
McCoy must be found. Therefore, the time ripples and the cordrazine interact to form a cohesive plot and a close cause-
effect relationship. The root of cordrazine comes from the Latin, cordis--meaning heart. It also can arise from the French cordi,
implying tied up or tied together. To be brief, the heart is the key to the theme of time in “City” Two drops can
cure and McCoy took one-hundred times that amount, thus causing ripples, distortions that drive the individual into a metabolic
time warp, propelling him forward, yet backward, via the Guardian of Forever. Acceleration and its concomitant time distortion
become a theme even before McCoy leaps into the time portal. The heart, as the traditional seat of the
love-related emotions, becomes a factor when heart interacts with or against historical or mechanical time. For example, Kirk's
love for Edith Keiler jeopardizes the restoration of history because emotion, when distorted, warps reason and the sense of
duty. Kirk, for a moment, forgets or refuses to admit that Edith Keiler must die. Time and the human heart are all too frequently
contradictory because time has no heart, no room for extraneous emotions. Time becomes what Thomas Hardy calls
"Crass Casualty"; it takes its toll by destruction. Kirk must, as Spock insists, put aside his feelings for Miss Keiler and

                                                                                                                                               76.

must instead consider the larger historical consequences, the wholistic ramifications of a selfish act just as McCoy's unselfish

act of originally saving Miss Keiler's life was ironically selfish in that saving the life of one woman meant a German victory in

World War II, more millions of deaths, the German development of and possession of atomic energy, and, above all, no future as

Starfleet knows it--no Enterprise:

          Spock: I saw her (Edith Keiler's) obituary. Some sort of traffic accident.
          Kirk: She has two possible futures, then. And depending on whether she lives
                 or dies....all of history will be changed.
                 And McCoy...
           Spock:…is the random element.
           Kirk: "In his condition, does he kill her?"
           Spock: "Or perhaps prevents her from being killed…. "

 Both Kirk and McCoy act out of heart, but heart is at odds with time and empirical history. Also, the heart presents a clear

and distinct picture for history because the emotional actions of only one individual can alter and have changed the course

of history. One man (McCoy) can and does change history, but not for the better. This episode makes it clear that one human

being and his deed are history, that the present deed creates the as-yet future, that one man's heart can cause the death of countless

millions of mankind:

         Spock: While peace negotiations passed on, Germany had time to complete its
                     heavy water experiments.
          Kirk:  (Germany) ... won the second World War…
          Spock: ... because all this lets them develop the
                     A-bomb first. There’s no mistake, Captain."
          Kirk: She was right.  Peace was the way...
          Spock: She was right, but at the wrong time.
                     All this because McCoy came back and somehow
                     kept her from dying in a street accident as she               
                     was meant to. We must stop him, Jim.

                                                                                                                                                  77.          

                    Kirk:  Spock, I believe ... I’m in love with Edith Keiler.

                   Spock: "Jim, Edith Keiler must die."

No man has the right to alter history for personal, emotional gain if, as the novelist George Eliot notes, the act brings sorrow in any

form into the lives of others. The individual and crass casuality conflict and history, even though it may work counter to the heart

of a man, works ultimately in the best interests of that man and, more importantly, of all mankind. As is the case in Greek tragedy,

one individual can and does change time, but he is morally responsible for any and all ramifications of his deed, whether conscious

or unconscious. Oedipus Rex kills his father, Laertes, not knowing it was his father. Oedipus marries his mother, not knowing at

the time that she was indeed his mother. Ignorance of the future effects of present acts does not exonerate the creator from the evils

reeked on all mankind because of one act by one individual who acted out of the passion and of the heart, instead of out of a sense

of history and of the head. Every man is responsible for his own acts because every deed now serves to create one's future, past as

every deed then (past) served to create one's present. To save the future of an entire galaxy and a way of life, Spock and Kirk

must restore historicity's normalcy by undoing McCoy's random act in the past that destroyed the future which is the Enterprise’s  

present. This entire scenario is based on the symbolic ramifications of the drug, cordrazine, and "City” tells us of history and the

affairs of the heart.

                                                                                                                                        78.

     One of Roddenberry's major concerns in all the episodes dealing explicitly with time and change is the loss

of temporal horizontality by refuge in, or absorption by, one temporal zone and the exclusion

of the other two. Frequently, mankind seeks escapes from the present by seeking refuge in the past or in the present. Before

Dr. McCoy takes his leap into the time portal, all three major characters are strongly dominated by the past--almost to the

point of empathic infatuation. This hyper-concern with the past is symbolized in the setting which houses the Guardian of Forever.

The men of the future confront the ruins of the past. Kirk notes: "These ruins extend to the horizon." The city is dead as the landing

crew views the past of a once-vital civilization in time present. The immediate theme becomes history. Kirk directs Uhura to "begin

recording,” as if he senses the need for an historical record of what is about to take place. The dialogue stresses the age of the ruins

as Spock reacts: " ...on the order of ten-thousand centuries old...of considerable age.” The theme of the ruin’s age is equated with

the power it brings forth. The Guardian of Forever is in itself a contradiction: it  emits power, yet it  should not be doing so; it

exists alive--a living symbol of eternity amid past and present mutability:

          Spock:     For this to do what it does is impossible
                          by any science I understand ... it can't be
                          a machine as we understand mechanics.

The Guardian of Forever projects scenes (ala DeMille) that move from the beginning to the near present. Science from ancient

Rome to the

                                                                                                                            79.

early twentieth-century America unfolds as Kirk and Spock gape infatuated with the supposedly

impossible:

       Kirk: What is it ?
      Guardian: Since before your sun burned hot
                      in space, and before your race was born,
                      I have awaited a question
       Kirk: What are you?
       Guardian: I am the Guardian of Forever.
       Kirk: Are you machine or being?
       Guardian: I am both, and neither. I am
                       my own beginning, my own ending.

The Guardian claims to be its own alpha and omega (eternity and god), thus destroying the temporal threshold;

however, the Guardian really is limited in its forever, to the same projections of time past. Both Kirk and Spock

stare transfixed by the images of the dead past as they are recreated in the present. While McCoy screams,

"murderers ... killers" at the other members of the landing party, Kirk remarks: "...strangely compelling to lose oneself

in another world." Kirk seeks refuge in the past from the anxieties of the present--a theme that recurs in Star Trek.

Spock too is absorbed, however momentarily, like Kirk by the tease of time unfolding before the eyes

of the present. As a result, Spock loses his scientific objectivity and forgets: “am a fool...l've  missed taping centuries

of living history which no man before has ever .…”  At that second, McCoy jumps into the time portal. He overhears

Kirk's and Spock's eulogizing of the miracle of living history, and he too is absorbed literally by the

past.  The Guardian notes:  "He has passed into what was” --an interesting double entendre. After McCoy's absorption

in and by the

                                                  80.

past, the present ceases to exist due to an altered past. The Guardian of Forever states the terrifying dilemma of

NOT ME: "Your vessel, your beginning, all that you knew is gone." The present as lived is now dead. Kirk notes

the obvious induction: "McCoy has somehow changed history," and in doing so has changed the present and destroyed

the future of the landing crew and of the known world of space and time. McCoy did something not-yet done

(future) while in the past (the-already-done). As a result, Kirk and Spock must do something not yet done in the past.

For all three men, the past is an ironic refuge from the doubts of the present, a possible cure to restore the present as

experienced in the future of their current lives. McCoy's great leap backward destroys the infatuation with the past into

a dreaded necessity to travel in a time machine in order to restore and to recreate history. The time voyage is

necessitated by a domination by the non-temporal, i.e., by no time.

          Scotty: Stranded down here...
          Spock: With no past, no future.
          Kirk: Earth's not there .... We're totally
                   alone….For us time does not exist.

A change effected by McCoy in the past has caused a change in the time-line, but it is not not eternity. All history has

been changed. The future is now relative to dynamic human activity to create a future via a present action of entering

into the past of the time portal. Past, present, and future converge for the first time in and through the Guardian

of Forever. Kirk and Spock must recreate time because McCoy has

                                                                                                                          81

destroyed time as the Enterprise knows time in relationship to its own present sense of time. History has now become

the matter of human deeds that link and ultimately restore the temporal threshold.

     The life for Star Trek's men of the future in the past is bitter-sweet, full of anxiety and terror, but also replete with

incredible levity and jolly-good spirits. The experience of total horizontality is a total, human experience full of old cars,

old clothes (all circa 1930). Kirk breaks the tension:

          Kirk: I think I'm going to like this century.
                  Simple. Easier to manage...  

Both men are caught by a N.Y. cop in his "traditional accoutrements^" in the act of theft. Ironically, Kirk tries to

explain away the future and the present (Spock's ears and the rice picker) while the cop concentrates on the theft.

Kirk and Spock are out-of-time as they have experienced it in the now distant future. Time has created what

literatures call situational irony, and the chatty dialogue serves as comic relief to the almost hopeless nature of their task

in the America of the 1930's depression era. The poverty and hunger of this period in history is a poignant setting

(somewhat akin to the ruins around the Guardian in the future) because hard times make creativity and change all the

more difficult. The scenes of men on soup-lines, the irony of Spock and Kirk sweeping floors, the feeding of

human beings, and the pouring of coffee serve to show many similarities between the past and the future. To men of the

future, the 21st century may someday also be a "zinc-plated, vacuum-tube culture." Even the terminology of the past

helps men of the future remember their roots and their common history

                                                                                                                   82.

 (ex. , , a "flop"). Spock's job is to adapt 2lst century electronics to vacuum tube technology,

 but he does adapt:

                 Spock: You are asking me to deal with
                              equipment that is hardly very
                              ahead of stone knives and bear
                               skins....I am endeavoring, maam (Edith Keiler)
                               to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using
                               stone knives and bear skins.

The trip into the past is nostalgic, especially to Kirk whose cultural flexibility enables him to cope best with

changes in time. “Goodnight, Sweetheart" played in an old radio-repair shop (vestiges of the embryonic beginnings

of modern technology), the name of Clark Gable--all contribute to counteract the poverty of the Great Depression.

     The last major character with a time obsession and a time consciousness is Edith Keiler, whose knowledge

of time is second only to that of the Guardian of Forever. She strikes chords of time-truth that are visionary. Her talk

about space ships, about trips to the moon, and about harnessing the atom are treated by Spock as "speculation" or

as gifted insight, yet, her time sensibility is acute:

          Edith Keiler: ... how out of place you two
                              are around here.
                       Spock: Where would you estimate we belong,
                                   Miss Keiler?
                       Edith Keiler: You? At his (Kirk's) side
                                           as if you've always been there
                                           and always will ... and you(Kirk) ...
                                           you belong in another place ....
                                           Captain! Even when he does not
                                           say it, he does.

Edith Keiler, the "keel^" or focal point in time, gives the episode

                                                                                                                 83.                 

its sense of direction, as her name connotes: "A lie is a very poor way to say hello" comes from a lady whom Kirk

finds "most uncommon."  Love is love in any time, but certain loves are, for Kirk, certain duties. He must choose

between the keel of 1930 and the helm of the Enterprise. Unlike Kirk and Spock who are infatuated with and absorbed

by the past, Edith Keiler is dominated by the future, partly as an example from the depression of the 1930's and from

the arduous task as Keeper of the 21st Street Mission where Rodent calls her “Miss Goodytwoshoes" for

her moral preachings as retribution for a bum's free meal. Her obsession with the future enables Edith Keiler to

preach survival and human dignity to bums and alcoholics in the present. Her sense of her own worth, her dignity of

presence, and her altruism make Edith Keiler one of Star Trek's strongest heroines. Her philosophy of time is to exist

now in order to live in the future. Her gifted, visionary futurism contrasts with Kirk and Spock's less universal

concerns. Also in a sense, Edith Keiler is a symbol of the future (Kirk's past and present) in time past:

          Edith Keiler: I do insist that you do survive
                              because the days and the years ahead are worth living for...
                              a way to give each man hope and
                              a common future. And those are
                              the days worth living for.

Edith Keiler continues head and heart--so much so that McCoy's saving of her life puts Edith at the head of a peace

movement that permits Germany to win World War II. She has the right idea, but the wrong time.

 

                                                                                                         84.

          Kirk: It's not yet time.  McCoy isn't there ;
          Spock: We're not that sure of our facts.
                       Who's to say when the exact time will
                       come? Save her, do as your heart tells
                       you to do, and millions will die who
                      did not die before."

McCoy says to Edith, "You may have saved my life," yet ironically he saves her to change history for the worse;

also ironically, he cannot save her (prevented by Kirk) as she saved him--thwarting McCoy's incipient love for

Edith Keiler and thwarting his Hippocratic obligation to save lives.

          McCoy (to Kirk): Do you know what you just did?
          Spock:  He knows, doctor. He knows.

When all three major characters return to the future (their now- present) after permitting Edith Keiler to die, after making

her die lest millions die, it is clear in the grim facial features of Kirk, of Spock, of McCoy, that "We were successful"

in what Scotty's present sensibility calls "only ... a moment ago," is a bitter-sweet success. History is restored;

temporal horizontality is restored, but as is often true of redemptive action in time, a toll is taken. One must die that

others might live, but that one is still very dead--a fact no man can change without destroying all of that-which-is:

          Guardian: Time has resumed its slope. All is
                         as it was before. Many such journeys
                         are possible. Let me be your gateway.
           Uhura: Captain, the Enterprise is up there.
                      They're asking if we want to beam Up.”

In a breach of Star Trek's fairly level vocabulary, Kirk, who rarely breaches verbal decorum, shows that change

by man the

                                           85.

creator/recreator is not always enjoyable, even if such change of the past, of the present, and of the future are
successful, the heart of man does not have to like it: "Let's get the hell out of here! " Kirk is more the Ulysses,
less the T.S. Eliot  Prufrock man of fear and inaction who says, "There will be time to murder and create,"
thus punctuating the dual nature of man's power over time. Because in order to create, modern man may also have
to destroy--all in due time. To be reborn is to die once again.  Renovatio is NEW time or restoration of THE
time of history by altering the alteration one makes in the timeline of what is. Yet all is changed in the process.

                                                (end of "The City On The Edge of Forever")

                                                                           xxxxx
 

                                                                   86.

                                                              “All Our Yesterdays”

                                             

     "All Our Yesterdays" is the next to the last Trek episode of the series' last year. Although many Trek fans hold the
opinion that the 1968/69 year was weak in content and in conception, the exceptional episodes that appeared that
third year far outweigh the few ho-hum episodes that frequently mar a network series that has been marked for
cancellation. "All Our Yesterdays” is one such exceptional episode because it tends to reiterate and to synthesize
Gene Roddenberry's obsession with man in time. Even the repetitious elements, such as the time portal concept, take
on new, ironic twists and an energy of one creator's final statement on the concept of time and on man's role as creator
in and of time. In this episode, man is clearly time's prisoner as the theme "can't get back^" becomes time's theme.
More than any other work, “back" is repeated again and again--“can’t get back"; yet, ironically, the people of
Sarpeidon have all gone back and can never "get back."  In taking refuge into their planet's past, they have gone back;
however, because of the immanent nova of Beta Niobe and because they have been "prepared" to live only in the past,
they can never "get back" to time present. The theme of "All Our Yesterdays," as the title denotes, is man's domination
by, and refuge in, time past. "All Our Yesterdays" are all that is left for man to experience, are a dead end in terms of
man^'s creativity. In reliving what was already lived as a then-vital present in search of a to-be vital future, the Sarpeidons
have to "live out our lives here in the past" as the Prosecutor sorrowfully admits to Kirk. The past that is not really
their past is a moral impasse, a last refuge which is rationalized as preferable to death in time present. The episode is a
statement on the moral aridity

                                                                                                                          87.

of existing (versus living) in an alien time era. Being “prepared" by the atavacron prepares man's cell structure for existing
where he really does not belong and where he really does not want to be. It simply gives the Sarpeidons a brief reprieve from
time's inevitable lot--death without human creativity. The lives they live are not their own. They have lost their temporal
threshold because the past of the ancestors has become their present where life is a mirage created by a time portal, and
they "cant get back." The atavacron has become their Guardian of Forever, and, like the Guardian, the only forever is the
forever in the past. Like the Guardian of Forever in “The City on the Edge of Forever," the atavacron guards only the past.
     There is no true time present anymore. The atavacron is technology creating a wasteland of hollow men who have no time
to create, only time to destroy because Sarpeidon's past no longer exists; therefore, the Prosecutor and Zarabeth are dead.
Technology has negative impact on man's creative potential because it distorts man's temporal horizon by placing him where
he no longer exists, no longer lives. "All Our Yesterdays" is a study of death in time. While Beta Niobe ends with a nova,
Sarpeidon's populations end with barely a whimper because in choosing refuge in the past, they no longer choose the path
of forward, prospective action. Regression is death; only progression breeds life. The looks on the Prosecutor's face and the
lyrical sorrow in his voice create a Roddenberry ring in Star Trek's version of Dante's Purgatorio and Inferno. Sarpeidon's
inhabitants, especially the thoughtful ones like the Prosecutor and Zarabeth, know that they are in hell, that

                                                    88.

hell is isolation in time, that hell is action without direction, that hell is the wrong place in time, that hell is a void, and a state of mind
devoid of hope and of the consciousness of being truly human.
     The unifying symbol, the locus, and the focal point for time is the library, which is the alpha and the omega of all the time travelers in
"All Our Yesterdays." It is the technological cause and effect of the time travellers: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The library is a massive
symbol and an example of double entendre. Etymologically speaking, the word "library" comes from the Latin term 1ibrarius, meaning
copier or transcriber of books--the role of Mr. Atoz (a cute term denoting a librarian's "A" to “Z" function). Also, Mr. Atoz is a
copier of sorts because he can copy, i.e., reproduce, replicas of himself. The term "library,” also has its root in the Latin "liber,"
meaning freedom. In this sense, the inhabitants of Sarpeidon have been freed from the nova in and through the library. But libris,
as in the constellation Libra, refers to the astrological concept of scales, i.e., of balance, and, therefore, the term stresses the theme
of the need for physical and psychical balance between time periods in this episode.
     A lack of balance between past and present is embodied in the hormonal, cellular, and psychical imbalance experienced
by the landing party when they arrive in time zones for which they have not been "prepared" and in which they do not belong because
they are creatures of another time, of another place, of another society and of another history. Lastly, the library is a complete
compilation of history, of the past--both near and remote. The library is a summarial history, a living history of words and pictures
of a people's entire past. The library is the past living in the present because man's present is the sum of his past and because man's

 

                                                                                                                              89.

creativity in the present should, according to Roddenberry, be based upon a firm and vital knowledge of the past. Because the
Sarpeidons have no present, creativity in a dead past has been nullified. The past is of value only to he who sees the balanced
temporal relationship between present and past and who can act in the present based on kinetic knowledge of the past in order
to create a future. The library of Sarpeidon, devoid of users, of researchers who want to know their ME, is a dead place because
a library ceases to function, to be a library, without vital minds to use its contents. Sarpeidon's library is as void as its one-time
inhabitants. Sarpeidon is its library and only its library for a few, brief moments in time present as the impending nova waits to
destroy all of Sarpeidon; however, there is nothing left to destroy in the nova of Beta Niobe but nothingness itself.
     Even the Enterprise sensors detect that "No intelligent life remains on the planet." This would include, of course, Mr. Atoz. Kirk's
seemingly innocuous remark, "...could be mass suicide" is devastating in its irony because the comment has a certain validity by the end
of the episode. Such comments made on the bridge before the beamdown set the tone and the terrifying truth that the nova may not be
the greatest danger to the men and women of Sarpeidon who cannot "get back." A few dialogues between Kirk and Atoz illustrate the
importance of the library as the key to time and to change. Comments such as the following
 

                                                 90.

form a dialectic between past and present, between death and life:

          Kirk (to Prosecutor): Then help me!  Help me
                   return to the library. I've lost my way.
                   I must get back there.

          Prosecutor: We can never go back. We must live
                            out our lives here in the past.
          (Earlier)
          Mr. Atoz: ...history of the planet is available
                         in every detail, just choose what
                         interests you the most....
                         The library is your key.
                         (my italics--note the tenses).

Yes, the library is the key and the key is a time-key and a turnkey whereby the Sarpeidons escaped destruction in the present by choos-

ing a dead past. Is this really a freely-willed choice? Is this living? The theme of history becomes a theme of time, and history

is based on two principles: necessity and volition. When asked by Kirk where all the planet's inhabitants had gone, Atoz notes:

“lt depended on the individual of course," i.e., on individual volition; however, "a wide range of alternatives is a mixed blessing" and
 
“we have so little on recent history.  There is so little demand for it.” :

          Kirk: Where did they go?
          Mr. Atoz: Wherever they wanted to go, of course.

This line is worth repeating because Roddenberry insists on man having a free will to choose, but Mr. Roddenberry also admits man's

ineptitude in choosing both where there are too many choices and where many choices can be a ruse for no real choice at all,

i.e., necessity as a creator of history. In this case, necessity creates the atavacron, thereby terminating history. Folks such as
 

                                                          91.

Moll Cutpurse, the Prosecutor, and Zarabeth, are fated to a chosen dead end. As Zarabeth says, "I can't go through the portal again.
If I do, I will die." There is no growth potential to create a to-be by acting in the what-is. Their characters are thwarted just as their
cell structures are altered into a stunted moral inferno. The result is an illusion of refuge in the past that is in reality a psychical neurosis
effected by a domination of the past and by a rationalized, technologized refuge in the past with a subsequent loss of temporal horizon.
The result is an imbalance symbolized by the nova of Beta Niobe.
     "All Our Yesterdays" is replete with an apolyptical urgency, a sense of the death of time itself, an aura of the twilight of mankind.
"Hurry up please. It's time," is spoken by the pub keeper T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" with the same apocolyptical ring that Lil, Albert
and all the bipeds who constitute the wasteland are killing time either by libidinous activity or by no activity at all. The third (the real)
Mr. Atoz begins (like the mad hatter) the warning refrain: "You're very late! Where have you been?" While Atoz counts down his
hour to escape the nova as his "Z" hour approaches, Kirk's moral myopia effects a contrast in the concern for and the nature
of the emergency of being late. Each has a differing perspective as to what being "very late" means. Atoz quips, "Make your
escape before it's too late," while Kirk is concerned only with the physical viability and the safety of the planet's inhabitants.
Atoz assures Kirk, "all are safe."
 

                                                                                                                                  92.

      Kirk defines safety in terms of the immanent destruction of the planet in time present with the implied concern for its future.

Atoz knows there is and can be no future for Sarpeidon's population. Mr. Atoz sees only escape in terms of time past. The

result is a dialectic between two opposing time perspectives and an incommunicative atmosphere that eventually causes physical

hostility between Kirk's misguided altruism and Atoz's pre-planned egoism. The result is an altercation and a physical struggle as

Atoz fights, ironically, to ensure Kirk's safety by trying to push Kirk back through the time portal. Atoz yields to Kirk's superior

force, noting "You're a most determined man," but the determination is misplaced as Kirk himself is obsessed with only one aspect

of the temporal horizon. Kirk asks Scotty several times about how much time there is:

          Kirk: "Scotty, how much time is there?"
          Both Scott and McCoy say, "Now!"
          Kirk: (to McCoy and Spock at the portal)Hurry through. Time is running out.

One of the distinct themes of "All Our Yesterdays" is the lack of time mankind in general has to avoid cataclysm and to act in order

to avoid physical death. Roddenberry focuses intensely on man's necessity to utilize time wisely or else time will use man--unwisely

and detrimentally. Time is man's greatest enemy, other than himself. Andrew Marvell sounds the theme, howbeit in a loose context:

                                                                                                                                  93.

           Had we world enough and time,
           This coyness, mistress, t'were no crime ....
           But at my back I hear
           Time's winged chariot drawing near.
                    --(A. Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress.")

The winged chariot is impending death, a fact that enhances man's need to act now before time is no more. Once out of time,

 man cannot create. A nineteenth century British historian and philosopher sounds the same apocalyptical note:

          Produce, Produce. Were it but the pitifullest
          infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it,
          in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee,
          out with it, then. Up, up: Whatsoever thy hand
          findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work
          while it is called Today; for the Night cometh,
          wherein no man can work.
               --(Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, II, 9, 1833)

Life and moral continuance depend on the philosophy that there is no such thing as "Time to Kill," but man continues to murder

time and the chances for change and rebirth in time. "Hurry up please! It's Time!" while "London Bridge is falling down"

(T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland," 1922). For every time, there must be that man for that time.  In "All Our Yesterdays," there is no

time, no place for a "man for all seasons" because each individual has been born in and reared for his season and for the season

he alone must create as his time present creates his to-be time. Man develops in accordance with a pattern which he inherits and

which he molds and recreates during his lifetime. A Neanderthal is just as out of time in the twentieth
 

                                                     94.

century as is a twentieth-third century Vulcan in an Ice Age 5,000 years in the past in an environment which is not his place (locus)
in time. In this episode, Roddenberry deals with what it means to be out of place and out of one's time spectrum. Time is both a
chronological and an environmental phenomenon. Space and time blend as creators and destroyers of man who is also a creator
and a destroyer of time.
     This "time-portal" episode symbolizes the theme of dualism perhaps technological man's greatest disease. The time portal
phenomenon, while interesting scientifically, is also fascinating psychologically and morally because modern man is split both between
time zones and between place zones. The result is the ripping apart of what the great twentieth century psychologist, Jung, calls wholism
--a concept akin to the nineteenth century Romantic writers’ concept of organicism. One must seek wholism within the individual
psyche, and thus between the ME and the NOT-ME in the space/time continuum. The atavacron is the product as well as the
cause of modern man's psychical fragmentation amid an urgent quest for organic wholism. The nova is the tertium quid, or the
random element of nature. Modern man is caught, as Matthew Arnold says, "between two worlds" neither of which is wholistically
viable. The very dramatic format of "All Our Yesterdays" symbolizes this dualism in the form of a dialectic between time zones,
between centuries, between cultures, and between individuals caught up in the schism of modernity. A death of who and what one is,
aggravated by anxiety and physio/psychical regression (in time past), becomes a plague that
 

                                                                                                                              95.

eventually turns the individual psyche into an internal schizophrena, a dialogue of the mind with itself. To live in a world

and in a time, Roddenberry insists that a Spock, a McCoy, or a Kirk be "prepared.” Too much change coming too soon withers the

individual. Our environment and our own natural instinctual tendencies permit a natural evolution of the ME in time. In this episode, the

format is that of a dialectic in and between time--as in Daniel’s DeFoe’s harlot:

          Moll (to Kirk): "You’re not one of us, are ya?"
          Kirk: Come back with me to Li.brary  
          Moll: Where is library?

While Kirk enters a time of superstitious witchcraft resembling a Cromwellian England blended with a Puritan America (Moll is an

English cockney; whereas the Prosecutor speaks American English, as does Zarabeth), Spock and McCoy enter the distant past--a

dualism spanning almost 5,000 years in Sarpeidon history. A dialogue between the near past and the remote past ensues, both

with the library as time locus. McCoy and Spock yell out 5,000 years ago to Kirk in the seventeenth century some 600 years ago.

     All speak in and through the time portal/library as intermediary junction for all time zones where no man may cross without dying.

The result is an identity crisis for each individual as time past jars with time present. In almost Darwinian fashion, the

individual's physical chemistry, psychical chemistry, and memory begin to be affected by natural selection as the biological urge to

survive supersedes all directives of the Enterprise, which has suddenly become time future, a sensibility that fades as time

                                                                                                                              96.


past erodes time present and time future

     One result is the loss of identity, the Camuean existential motif of l'etranger,  the stranger. When one undergoes change

too quickly, the ego structure fragments and the libido becomes dominant as the dominance of the past makes man its slave.

Human free will becomes secondary to mere biological urge as regression supersedes progression:

          Zarabeth: What are you called? I've
                          never seen anyone who looks
                          like you. (Spock) Why are
                          you here? Are you prisoners too?
           Spock: We were sent here by mistake...I
                        am firmly convinced that I do
                        exist. I am substantial.
                        You are not imagining this.

Kirk is experiencing the stranger/identity crisis as the episode shifts from near past to far past. The fast camera shifts between

the split landing party and it intensifies the lack of connection, symbolizing disjunctive and imbalance in a sort of psychical “worm effect”

in time. The effect is that of cinematic staccato that dramatizes two disconnected worlds:

          Kirk: I'm a stranger.
          Prosecutor: Where are you from?
          Kirk: An island.
          Prosecutor: Where is this island
          Kirk: It's called earth.
          Prosecutor: I know no island earth.... 

          Zarabeth: I am Zarabeth
          Spock: If I remain here, no one of our party
                      will be able to aid Captain Kirk...If
                      I leave him, there is a chance he may
                      never regain the ship. We'll be marooned
                      in this time period. But he's no longer
                      in danger of death (McCoy). So my primary
                     duty to him has been dispatched.
           Zarabeth: You make it sound like an equation.
            Spock: It should be like an equation. I should
                        be able to resolve this problem logically
                        .....We must return to Mr. Atoz and the
                       atavron ...

                                                                                                                                    97.

                 Zarabeth:  I can't go through the portal
                                again. If I do, I will die...
                                None of us can go back...
                                You can't go back. If you go
                                through the portal again, you will
                                die before you reach the other side.

The very dialogue between Spock and Zarabeth is disjointed. Spock is having an existential identity crisis, an Arnoldian dialogue

of the mind with itself. Both are discussing issues foreign to the other. The result is non-communication. Spock's immediate concern

is for others. Zarabeth's concern is for herself: (lust).  "My crime was in choosing my kinsmen unwisely” as she discusses Zorcon

the Great. This discussion parallels that of Kirk and Atos: two divergent interests with no common connection. While Spock is

fighting with equations, slowly losing his Vulcan logic, Zarabeth is able to assert clearly "I am Zarabeth." One fracturing psyche confronts

a restructured psyche that has adjusted and has been "prepared" for her existence in the Sarpeidon Ice Age. Upon awakening from

his frostbitten condition, McCoy's first remark, unlike Zarabeth's positive assertion, is another question: "Where are we?" And

another: "Why aren't you looking for Jim?" Spock readily ceases to act in accordance with his own time present as he unconsciously

succumbs to a time in which he does not belong, in a place that makes him the stranger who came into the snow and ice. The

flame-lighted world of a Puritan seventeenth century warmth contrasts with the ice and snow of an frozen age; however, Kirk's

dungeon cell has an uncanny physical and psychological parallel to Zarabeth's, Spock's, and McCoy's cave where the

subterranean warm springs give a sense of deceptive calm. Both are prisons, death-rows in time past. A dialectic becomes

evident between those who have been

                                                                                                                               98.

changed by the atavacron and those who have not been changed. If man is not adapted by faith, by heredity, and by natural evolution

to a given time, only a machine can prepare him physically to exist in another time period. In either case, the individual must master

time by his free will or living becomes mere existence. The atavacron has a minimal effect on adjusting, on "preparing" the human psyche

for change. They very word "library" brings terror into the face of the Prosecutor because he knows that psychic isolation is one

penalty for his escape into the past. Zarabeth too suffers negative psychical effects:

          Zarabeth: There are many luxuries around here.
                          Zarcon only left me what was necessary
                         to survive ... everything I needed except
                         companionship. To send me here alone.
                         If that is not death, what is?
           Spock:    Insensitive to send such a beautiful
                          woman into exile...the cold must have
                          affected me more than I realized...
                          I'm not myself.

Zarabeth, while wooing Spock, has also stated a key theme of the story--that alienation, being a stranger, is death. Division,

fragmentation, dialectics constitute hell because the health of the wholism found in the human solidarity of one's natural time period

has been lost. Zarabeth has stated very clearly a unifying theme of this time portal episode, i.e., that exclusive domination of the

human psyche purely by the past is death because Zarabeth has been reduced to a mere libidinal level of biological survival

and impulse. All the marooned inhabitants of Sarpeidon are dead because they no longer engage in a creative human sense.

They have ceased to be fully human, and that is the death that precludes any physical death.
 

                                                    99.

     Kirk and McCoy never lose the fighter instinct to "get back,”while Spock reverts to his barbarous Vulcan past.

As in "This Side of Paradise," Spock becomes human as his ego structure splits and an internal dialectic ensues:

          Spock: I've behaved disgracefully.
                     I've eaten animal flesh and I've enjoyed
                     it. What's wrong with me? I tell
                     you (Zarabeth) you're beautiful. But
                     you are beautiful. Is it so wrong to
                     tell you so?

It is McCoy, in a brilliantly acted scene, who must return Spock's sense of his proper time by admonishing Spock for "dishonesty" and

for loss of creative motivation:

          Spock: I've given you the facts, doctor.
          McCoy: The facts as you knew them or did
                       you just accept Zarabeth's word because  
                       it was what you wanted to believe? ..
                       Zarabeth is a woman condemned to a
                       terrible life of loneliness. She
                       would do anything to anybody to change
                       that ... you said we can't get back.
                       The truth is you (Zarabeth) can't get
                       back....she would do anything to prevent
                       that life of loneliness. She would lie.
                       She would cheat. She would even murder
                       me, the Captain, the entire crew of the
                       Enterprise to keep you here with her
                       ...go ahead, Zarabeth, tell the truth...."

Spock's emotions flare and he chokes McCoy with murder in his eyes.

          McCoy: Are you trying to kill me, Spock? Is that
                        what you really want? Think! What are you
                        feeling? Rage? Jealousy? Have you ever
                        had those feelings before?
          Spock: This is impossible ... impossible. I 'm a Vulcan.
          McCoy: The Vulcan you knew won’t exist for another
                        5000 years. Think man! What’s happening on
                        your planet now, at this very moment?
          Spock: My ancestors are barbarous...Warlike barbarians.
          McCoy: Who nearly killed themselves off with their
                        own passions. So, you're reverting to your
                        ancestors 5,000 years before you were born.
          Spock: I've lost myself. I do not know who I am.

                                                                                                                                                                  100.

The above lines are a dialectic between two time consciousnesses: a then and a now that McCoy vehemently retains:

                 McCoy: I know I'm gonna try, Spock, because
                              my life is back there, and I want that
                              life.                     

As McCoy goes out into the cold, he would rather die than quit his identity and the sphere of time for which he was

and is naturally prepared. Spock embodies the theme of the evil of past dominance to the exclusion of the present

and of the future. McCoy revives Spock, almost pugilistically (again a scene from "This Side of Paradise" where

Kirk literally knocks the spores out of  Spock's psyche) to his proper time sphere for which he too is naturally

prepared. For Roddenberry, time is not simply a matter of chronology, but it is also a state of mind needed for

psychic wholism. “Can't get back" is a taboo in Roddenberry's sense of the human will in its steady war with time.

Spock tells McCoy what can't get back means:

          Spock: Then I'll repeat it for you. Get
                      this through your head. We can't get back.
                      That means we are trapped as
                      we are, and we'll stay here for the
                     rest of our lives.
           McCoy: I don't believe it, Spock. It's just
                        not like you to give up trying.

“Can’t” is simply not in the Roddenberry vocabulary.  “Try” is a minimal must. "Do" is the driving ideal. Getting back,

for McCoy and Spock, is a study in human solidarity and in human wholism.  Because they both passed through

the time portal together into the past, they must go as one, together, back through the portal in order to restore

the balance of time present in its proper relationship to time past

                                                                                                                     101.                                       

and to time future. One of the tragic notes of this time portal episode is that nothing is really accomplished in time present

and that time as future does not exist for man. A lesson is learned from 600 and 5,000 years in the past, i.e., that human

solidarity is restored, both between individuals (ex. McCoy and Spock) and within each psyche (Spock is one again). Man

becomes one with his fellow man via the Enterprise--the restoration of the temporal threshold. But there is no future for

man in “All Our Yesterdays” :

          Spock: There’s no further need to observe
                       me, doctor. As you can see, I‘ve
                       returned to the present in every
                       sense.
                 McCoy: But it did happen, Spock.
                 Spock: Yes, it happened. But that was 5,000
                             years ago and she (Zarabeth) is dead now,
                             dead and buried long ago.

“Hurry up please. It's time!"

                                                                                                                                   102.

                                                                               “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”                                                                  

     The Star Trek episodes where time is explicitly denoted in the episodes' titles form a rhapsody or variation on a theme of time.
Each episode presents a different variation in contrapunctal fashion with a consistent line or figure holding together the toccatas
or variations. Time is a wholistic entity whose parts or fragmentations can only be understood in terms of an integrated, wholistic time.
Time must exist through an open interaction between past and future. In the episodes "The City on The Edge of Forever" and "All Our
Yesterdays," one experiences a disintegration of time where time past, present, and future have lost their vital equilibrium. When
man finds himself in an imbalanced situation where time is in extremis, he faces moral calcification, fragmentation, and an unproductive
dialectic one of whose parts (ex.,the past) dominates and/or excludes the organic wholism of integral time. As seen so far, the
above episodes preclude the future almost entirely. Such a negation of the future for man results in a slavery and a self-imprisonment
whereby man is unable to do what is necessary for wholism, i.e., to act in order to create a future for himself. The man who stands in
stasis has ceased to affirm and to recreate his very humanity; he has stopped growing and is, in essence, inert and dead. As the
philosopher F. Kümmel notes, "No act of man is possible with reference solely to the past or solely to the future, but is always
dependent on their interaction.^" (Friedrich Kümmel, "Time as Succession and the Problem of Duration,"  Voice of Time, Ed. J.T. Fraser
 (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 50). Man must always act with a future in mind or else no progression, normally produced by the
 interaction of past and future, is produced. Stasis based on inability or unwillingness to act is the primarily cultural disease of man in an
industrial society.

                                                                                                                                     103.

It is the Prufrockian syndrome of inaction based on der angst. Regression, seeing the past as a rationalized refuge or as an
antagonist, eclipses the present. This is one form of the tyranny of time and, when self-imposed, man becomes his own slave.
as has been seen, as neurosis and a diseased sensibility.
      However, in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," Gene Roddenberry endeavors to restore man's domination of time, in an episode brightly be-
spangled with errant good humor and witty comedy. The title of the episode posits an equation-identification; however, the human
situations propose the need for an autonomous past and an autonomous future--­both linked to a kinetic present. The dark veil of time's
tyranny is briefly lifted and man helps to create a more healthy human condition for himself. Our yesterday is a formative and residual
part of our tomorrow. In this episode, the earth of the late 1960's meets and becomes one with the earth of the twentieth century.
Hence, while Captain Christopher is aboard the Enterprise--the past is in the future; while the plot stresses the similarities in character
between Captain Kirk and Captain Christopher; Captain Christopher is, in a sense, Captain Kirk's yesterday, and Captain Kirk is,
in the same sense, Captain Christopher's tomorrow--hence the wording of the episode's title. However, at the end of the episode,
when the Enterprise is restored from its earth of yesterday to its Starfleet of tomorrow, Blue Jay 4 is restored from its earth of
tomorrow to its proper yesterday, and the future once again becomes the future and the past once again becomes the past;
therefore, the autonomy of both past (yesterday) and future (tomorrow) is

                                                                                                                                      104.

restored. This reaction of autonomy is essential to avoid the tyranny of time through undue dominance of one part of time to
the exclusion or diminution of the other. The equilibrium or balance is restored after the temporary unity of the two opposites.
The result is progression based on a tensional meeting of dialectical elements--all with one space/time locus, the earth itself.
Although, for Captain Christopher, nothing ever would have happened, for Captain Kirk the future is better and stronger based on
an educational confrontation with its own past. In a sense, by having to live past events, by having to see itself as the past would have
seen it (example, as a UFO), the Enterprise and all she represents become more solidified and self-integrated. Without a tomorrow,
there is no yesterday; without a yesterday, there is no tomorrow. Sean Jeffrey Christopher will be born and will lead the first
Earth-Saturn probe, thereby making space exploration, and eventually the Enterprise, a true reality. Captain Christopher and
Captain Kirk--both captains, both leaders, both the same age--are identical in terms of their functions, yet are both different
and separated: one yesterday, one tomorrow. We understand ourselves better and more fully when we have an experiential knowledge
of our history. Hence, history is restored to its proper perspective as living knowledge to be acted upon with an eye toward the
future, thus ensuring a more wise and more sapient man of tomorrow. The episode insists on the natural evolution of man in time
which is reinforced, not thwarted, by the advanced in technology such as the time-warp.
 

                                                                                                                                      105.

Technology in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is man's servant, not his master; in “Tomorrow is Yesterday,”  time is man’s servant and natural

context, not his master and mechanized context. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Sulu will be better and will evolve because of tomorrow's

confrontation with yesterday. We know ourselves better by knowing what we were or could have been in another time. The future is

restored, but the past is not forgotten nor is it dead. There is something to be gained both by going where no man has gone before

and by going where men have gone before. Such is the nature of living history in Star Trek, and so it should be in all man's

tomorrows, because “Without Contraries is No Progression.^"

     Stardate 3113.2 and the presence of Captain Christopher aboard the "Enterprise" presents a definite problem for time and

for history. Captain Christopher, as he learns more about the future, presents an innocently-appearing destructivity. In this episode,

Spock (unlike Kirk who is ineptly unaware of the historical repercussions) grasps the problem immediately:

          Spock: We cannot return him to earth, Captain.
                      He already knows too much about us and
                      is learning more .... Suppose an unscrupulous
                      man were to gain certain knowledge of
                      man's future. Such a man could manipulate
                      key industries, stocks, and even nations,
                      and in so doing, change what must be. And
                      if it is changed...you and I and all that
                      we know might not even exist.
          Kirk: Your logic can be most...annoying .

                                                                                                                                106.

What is and what must be can be destroyed by what was which now is aboard the Enterprise. Roddenberry, in this episode,

stresses that man must be concerned with and disturbed by the destructive potential of time disruption and time imbalance

created by unwarranted human intervention in the natural, evolutionary process of time^'s succession and duration. Thus,

the thesis of "Tomorrow is Yesterday" takes the form of a warning about the potential misuse of technology in intervening

in the process of time.

                 Kirk: (to Captain Christopher) " ... it's not
                          the transporter. It is you. You know
                          what the future looks like. If anybody
                          else finds out, they could change the
                          course of it, destroy it.
                  Captain Christopher: Well then my disappearance
                                                   would change something too ... It's my
                                                   duty to repeat what I've seen. Well, what
                                                   would you do?
                    Kirk: I'd ... report if I could. We can't take
                             the risk.

In doing what he must do, Captain Christopher can change what must be. The strategic repetition of the word "must" throughout

the episode gives a verbal backing to the urgency and danger involved in the meeting of past and future.

     Besides the Captain Christopher problem, the "Enterprise" has its own problem to solve. It is no longer truly Stardate

3113.2, but date circa 1967. The Enterprise, because of the black star pull near Starbase 9, has been pulled out of time:

"...snapping like a rubber band, the breakaway sent us plunging through space, out of control to stop here, wherever we are.” 

The news from Uhura about the manned moonshot startles Kirk and McCoy into the knowledge of the

                                                                                                                                              107.

accidental intrusion into the past of earth's late 1960's:

          Kirk: Manned moonshot? But that was in the late 1960's."
          Spock: Apparently, Captain, so are we.
           Kirk: What?
           Spock: Whiplash propelled us into a timewarp,
                       Captain--backward.

Commander Scott sounds the verbal red alert about the "Enterprise's "time dilemma: “… the engines are being repaired, but we've no

place to go in this time ... if ya see what I mean." A structural and verbal dialectic now ensues between the alternatives of “can”

and “can’t.”  Once Gene Roddenberry establishes a good line, he keeps it.   This episode presents the motif of "can't get back" used

in "All Our Yesterdays," but "can't get back" assumes a creational position against "can get back^”  with a clear emphasis on man's need

to dominate time by creating a solution to the problem, and that solution is visible in the presence in the dialogue of the terms

“cant,” “do,” "must," "will,” and "get out"-- a clearly positive note that contrasts with the exclusive “can't get back^”  of "All

Our Yesterdays." Roddenberry makes it strikingly clear that, as William Hazlitt put it: "Where there's a will, there's a way." The

entire tone of this story insists that that a solution is always possible and feasible through the constructive application

of technological savoir-faire, even in the very early scenes when “can’t get out" is a major theme. Kirk asserts to Christopher

that we “cant take the risk.” Scotty notes that there is  "no place" in the past for the Enterprise. The negative theme of
 

                                                                                                                                      108.

time imprisonment applies both to Christopher and to the Enter­prise as Christopher (the patron saint of travelers) notes:
“You're as much a prisoner in time as I am." In sickbay, after Christopher's first escape attempt, McCoy compounds the
 theme: "Jim, what if we can't get back?... we certainly can’t go back to earth" because every crewmember is one chance of
"altering the future." Kirk further compounds the negative can't by noting that,  “If  we do get back where we belong, then he
(Christopher) won't belong."
     Roddenberry again asserts that every man has a place and a time in the space/time continuum which he calls "home," and there/then
 where he belongs--in his own present creating his own future. Christopher answers Kirk's suggestion to McCoy about retraining
Christopher to forget his family with a firm "No!”  To the future fact that he will have a son, Christopher uses the negative, “I don’t
have a son," to which McCoy smilingly adds, "You mean...yet!”    The positive or "can” side of the can't/can dialectic begins when
Kirk sees that Christopher must be returned to earth to engage in a simple biological effort to propagate and, therefore, to make
the Enterprise a must by having the as-yet born son, Sean Jeffrey Christopher. No Earth/Saturn probe means no "Enterprise," no
future that “must” be. The must-do becomes a necessary can-do, and Kirk begins the can do and reverses the can't-get-back
by a simple assertion of willed intent: "Well that's it, isn't it? We'll have to find some way." The time/deed factor is now clearly
focused on a solution to the problem, not on the negativity of an insolvable problem. Kirk immediately confronts

                                                                                                                                      109.

Spock with "Any ideas on how to get us back to our own time?" The don'ts and can'ts are forgotten in the intense preoccupation

with do's and can-do's. The plan, as Spock notes, is "a reverse application" of what happened in the first place. The "game"

of dialectics becomes one of push/pull (discussed earlier). To solve the problem of push, pull, to solve the problem of pull

(Black star), push!  This is a basic application of one of Einstein's theories of time, that speed toward and away from the

sun will change time, moving it backward and/or forward. Before the actual time warp theory is applied, one must "get back" the

audio and visual tapes of the "UFO" from the Omaha Air force Base. This requires "getting into" the base and "getting" the incriminating

evidence of the "UFO" in an effort to save the future from destruction by the past. The incidents of "stealth" into the

Statistical Services Division and into the photo lab of the 498th Airbase Group supports the affirmative “get”  and “do" behavioral

patterns of the "little green man from Alpha Centauri" who just "popped in out of thin air": McCoy to Spock in transporter room

awaiting word from landing party:

          McCoy: Shouldn't you be working on your
                       time-ways calculations, Mr. Spock?"
          Spock: "I am." (humorously!)

After the sergeant/guard is accidently beamed up to the Enterprise,

Kirk relays to the Enterprise:

          Kirk: "As you can see ... we have another problem."
          Spock: (as sargeant is frozen with shock on
                      transporter platform) "Our guest seems
                      quite satisfied to remain where he is.
                      (more humor)

                                                                                                         110.

The fight for time becomes a serious/comical "game." The  melée in the photo lab is comic relief, and the interrogation by the

Air Force colonel has interesting, positive wording:

          Kirk: ... just me. Besides, could anyone get
                   out of here without you seeing them (Sulu) ?
          Colonel: Nobody should have been able to..

Again the interrogation continues in the CO's office:

          CO: Now look, Mr. You and I had better start
                 communicating. I want to know how you got
                 in here ....You seem to think this is some
                 kind of a game……and how did you get in-
                 ­side a top security installation, James T. Kirk?
           Kirk: I told you. You wouldn't believe me ...
                                The truth is I'm a little green man from
                               Alpha Centauri. Beautiful place: You
                               ought to see it. (humor)
          CO: I'm going to lock you up for 200 years.
          Kirk: That ought to be just about right. (humor)

A dialectical, contrapunctal cinematic movement ensues between quick jump shots (without transitions) between the airbase and the

Enterprise, an effect of the opposites of past and future is enhanced. Both opposites confront each other aboard the Enterprise,

but both times are united in a common effort to go home--In Kirk's words, "You'll go home, Christopher, but you'll do it our way.”

     "Our Way" is based on the physical theory of opposites, of contraries that breed progression. The Newtonian law of physics that for

every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction comes into play. In terms of basic human psychology, especially theories

based on Hegel vis-a-vis Blake, there must be a polarity of tensional opposites that recreate energy and entropy. In this

instance, movement forward in space/time is the solution to the
 

                                                                                                                                      111.

problem created by extreme movement backward in space/time. The slingshot effect is a basic tenet in the workings of the human

mind and of human behavior. A reversal motif begins as the solution to "get back" home in time.  The cure to the disease

is an antitoxin, a reverse approach of the initial process that utilizes that process to restore wholism and balance. On Star-

date 3113.2, Kirk notes in his log the problem and the action taken to counteract the problem:

          Kirk: on route to Starbase 9 for resupply ...
                   a black star of high gravitational
                   attraction began to drag us toward it.
                   It required all warp power in reverse
                   to pull us away…. "  

The result is a concept of history as, in part, accidental phenomena. Spock postulates a theory: a reverse application

of what happened .... ^“  In order to "get out," the Enterprise  must "get back" into the original slingshot effect in order to

counterbalance it:

          Kirk: We must make an attempt to break free
                  of this time or we and our reluctant
                  passenger will remain its prisoners.
                 All we have is a theory and a few facts .. "
          Spock: Mr. Sulu and I agree that the only
                      possible solution is a slingshot effect like
                      the one that put us here.

Thus, when man is psychically integrated or whole within himself, domination of time and restoration of continuous future and of

autonomous past is possible by the application of facts and theories through strong will and positive action. A graph may show

this:

                                                                                                                                                112.

          pull/push toward sun > whiplash = Time warp >
                                                                                reverse (backward) Time
          push/pull from sun > whiplash = Time warp >
                                                            reverse (forward) Time

As Spock explains:

            As we move faster and faster toward the sun,
            we'll move forward in time. We'll actually
            go back beyond yesterday, beyond the point
            when we first appeared in the sky. Then
            breaking free will shoot us forward in time
            and we'll transport you (Christopher) back
            before any of this happened.

All human progression through thoughtful action involves risk: this is a prime element in Roddenberry's theory of man in time. Risk,

risk is what it is all about. The name choice, Enterprise, denotes risk. Scotty notes the risks:

            If  I  can’t  stop it soon enough, we may overshoot
           our time. And if I stop the engines too early,
           the strain may tear us apart. Anyway we do it,
           it means a mighty rough ride.  

Key terms denote ego-control by man over his energies and over his technology. The chronometer runs backward

as the ship moves toward the sun…then, reversal and "chronometers moving forward again, Captain." As the careful, sequential

transporter energizations take place at exact seconds, the time warp enables time to move from "beyond" yesterday to each present

second; all men of the past are transported back into the precise moments in time whence they came. Captain Christopher

is transported back into Blue Jay 4; the sergeant, who likes chicken soup, is restored to his security rounds. In short,

the past is restored to
 

                                                                                                                                          113.

its present. We witness the restoration of what was to what is. The remaining pattern is restoring the future to its autonomy

in time, is placing the Enterprise into balance with its past and differentiated counterpart in time. The scene is dramatic and

terrifying:

          Spock: ...approaching our century. Breaking
                      should begin ... now.
          Kirk: Begin full breaking power.

In order to move forward in time to the precise future, breaking backward is the cure:

          Sulu: The engines!
          Scott: Engines are on full reverse and they are
                    buck1ing.

Uhura monitors and receives the news of man's triumph in and over time as Starfleet Control messages the Enterprise and Kirk, in

hyperdrive and in relief, says: "Starfleet Control, this is the Enterprise ... Starfleet Control ... the Enterprise  is home.

And so the "can's," the "must’s," the "will's" the “am's," and the "get backs^”  have achieved the great victory of getting back "home!”

     "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is a testament to the will, the physical and psychical abilities of man which, when coupled with the

constructive utilization of technology and Einstein's law of relativity, can change time and restore what "must be." The archetypes of

push/pull, of forward/reverse, of Newtonian polarity, of Einsteinian space/time move man forward to new challenges. This episode is

another example of the Hegelian and Blakian principle of tensional dialectics achieving human progression in a world of adversities.

Tomorrow is tomorrow; yesterday is yesterday; history remains to be created again as man encounters the final frontier, creating his

future by conscious and controlled applications of facts, will, and shere guts to the present that lies before him.
 

                                                                                                                                                                114.

                                                                                  “Assignment—Earth”

     The logical thematic sequel to "Tomorrow is Yesterday” (episode {#2l) is "Assignment--Earth" (episode #55), the last episode
of Star Trek's second season. The episode has, as the essence of its plot, the question as to whether or not a sub­orbital nuclear device
will or will not be detonated above 100 miles of the earth's surface. However, this suspenseful element is just about the only element
holding the episode together. Whereas, D.C. Fontana's "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is an outstanding dramatic success, Roddenberry's
and Coon's "Assignment--Earth" has mediocre dialogue and almost no character depth. Only the few and occasional scenes involving
Roberta Lincoln and Gary Lansing provide excellent comic drama, but the comedy has no organic relation to a main and serious
tensional human crisis. Not one character in this episode has any metaphysical character dimension. Spock and Kirk stand by helplessly
as events pass before them with no transformational impact on the men whatsoever. Although the presence of the Enterprise
in time past is scientific in intent, the main characters lack depth, and the cause and effect relationships between characters and
between characters and history are fuzzy in terms of thematic and plot outcome. Robert Lansing's acting abilities are rarely tested
because seventy-five percent of the episode consists of NASA film footage (which Gene Roddenberry loved and coveted)
used as scenic filler that simply wastes time and space at the expense of Star Trek's strong point: close and integral character analysis.
Even Mr. Seven's bump on the head is crudely handled and is very unconvincing. Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln are reminiscent
of some bad George Burns and Gracie Allen skits.  "New York's finest" come off as Keystone
 

                                                                                                                           115.

cops. It is comedy, pure slapstick which has no foil. There is hardly one incisive character line uttered for human drama

is great; but this potentially dangerous intervention of Gary Seven and of the "Enterprise" into the year 1968 is

washed away by spurious NASA film footage. Even potential time- related symbols go unexplored and became feeble images

of ambiguous thematic intent. For example, Roberta Lincoln's last name denotes her patriotism in a time when scatter-brained

hippyism seems a threat to patriotism:

          Roberta: I know this world needs help...
                        that's why some of my generation
                        are kinda crazy and rebels, you
                        know. We wonder if we're going
                        to be alive when we’re thirty.   

She attacks Mr. Seven with a cigarette container, yet, seconds later, she defends Mr. Seven's intervention: "Please! He's telling

the truth." The dialogue (script) attributed to each character distracts the reader from nothing, making strong characters weak

in a potentially lethal moment in earth's history:

          Kirk: Spock, if you can't handle it, I'm
                   going to have to trust him."(Mr. Seven)
          Spock: It is difficult to know which is best,
                     Captain.

This feeble dialogue takes place with forty seconds to nuclear impact! One could give the episode the "willful suspension of

disbelief" that the poet Coleridge called for when a viewer first approaches a work of art by saying that Gene Roddenberry

and Gene Coon are out to show man's overwhelming impotency in the face of a vastly superior set of historical circumstances

that make man more the pawn and less the bishop in the game of history. If this is the case,
 

                                                                                                                         116.

"Assignment--Earth" is an overwhelrning success. The Beta-five computer, with its female personality,

has more effective dialogue and more historical impact than does man, who should be the creator, the

controller of the historical circumstances. One problem with the time theme lies in the fixed preconception

imposed on history before the story really unfolds, i.e., that the ending is a foregone conclusion, that Gary

Seven and the Enterprise are causes that were already supposed to be. Kirk's final decision to trust Gary

Seven and the Beta-five is a fearful "Go!" that is already "Gone!” After the detonation of the nuclear

warhead exactly one-hundred and four miles above the earth, Gary Seven dictates to the fingerless typewriter

(telepathically controlled, of course):

           Gary Seven: And in spite of the accidental interferences
                              with history by the earth ship from the future,
                              the mission was completed.
             Spock: Correction, Mr. Seven. It appears we
                         did not interfere. Rather, the Enterprise
                         was simply part of what was supposed to
                         happen on this day in 1968.
               Kirk: Yes, our record tapes show, although
                        never generally recorded, that on this date
                        a malfunctioning suborbital warhead was
                        exploded exactly 104 miles above the earth.
          Gary Seven: Everything happened exactly the
                              way it was supposed to.

The characters and their roles are inadvertent and ancillary to a history. Gary Seven's character is as ambiguous

as his history. He, in fact, accomplishes what he must do--explode the bomb--but as many questions remain

unanswered as are answered...is he an earth man of circa 1968? Is his function evil or altruistic? The story's
 

                                                                                                                           117.

plot is based on the theories of the popular Erick van Donnegan, whose Chariots of the Gods has presented

fascinating semi-scientific speculation that much of modern civilization and its technology may have

been the product of extraterrestial, alien interference into earth's history. Indeed, Gary Seven may have saved

earth from its own destruction on more than one occasion. Where did Einstein get those wild, but substantiated,

theories about space and time?

     The episode, unlike the earlier time stories, is not an accident, but is a natural extention of the time-warp

theory first used in "The Naked Time.”  The intrusion of the Enterprise into the past is a controller experiment

whose purpose is noted by Kirk: “Our mission: historical research," moreover to discover how earth "survived

desperate problems in the year 1968." The real theme of the episode is saving history from being altered because

history was altered to begin with. The time warp had already been established and controlled, but in

"Assignment--Earth" the writers seem at odds at just what to do with an already-established motif. The

theme of the earlier D.C. Fontana episode could have spanned an infinity of sub-plots based on the time

warp motif; instead, Gary Seven restates a crisis which has lost its spontaneity and novelty:

          Gary Seven: I am of this time period; you
                              are not. If you interfere with
                              me, with what I hope to do down
                              there, and you'll change history.
                              You'll destroy the earth, and
                               possibly yourselves too.
           Spock: If what he says is true, Captain, every
                       second we delay him could be dangerous.
           Kirk: … and if he's lying…?

                                                                                                      118.

     Little new is added to time/change themes in "Assignment--Earth ."  Even Isis the cat is a leftover from "Catspaw," but its symbolic
Egyptology is left unexplored. In this episode, one witnesses no character transformation and, for that matter, little historical change.
The story is an effect in search of a cause, an episode in search of its human characters. Too much of a good thing means unfulfilled
potential, and Star Trek and time are none the better for this cute, but vacuous tour-de-force.
 

                                                                                                                                                   119.

                                                                 "A Piece Of The Action"

     "A Piece of the Action" is a time story that occurs literally in time future, in Enterprise time. The piece is unique

because it is not a time portal story whereby man is transported via time warp technology into the past. The journey

into the past of the earth of the 1920's is done while never leaving the future. The past and the future exist and occur

simultaneously in two different space continuums that come together to form a unity of two futures--the world of Starfleet

and the world of Iotia. However, because the Iotian culture is based on Starfleet's past--the gangs of Chicago's 1920^'s--

the Enterprise experiences its earthly past in extraterrestrial space in its own existing present (earth's

future). Therefore time past and time future coalesce in time future. The meeting is of two distinctly different humanoid life

forms of two different cultures. The Iotians are the living embodiment of earth's 1920's past existing as a parallel culture

in time future. No time portal journey is necessary because the past is in the future. “A Piece of the Action" embodies Henri Berg-  

son's definition of time as temps vécu--time experienced. The landing crew does not merely view time past, but experiences

time past in its entirety. This unique episode is vécu because the landing party (at least Kirk and Spock) become the past

in language, in thought, in dress, and in action. The viewer observes a complete mergence of Kirk and Spock into and with the

Iotian culture. In effect, Kirk lives the criminal culture of Iotia right down to the last idiomatic expression: "Scotty, this is Koik...."  

It is this completely experiential at-oneness with the Iotian culture that permits Kirk to solve the
 

                                                           120.

Horizon's contamination by experiencing the contamination itself_,  therefore, creating a solution which does

not go by the computer book, but by "The Book!" In order to resolve a problem, man must live that problem, must

have corpuscular knowledge of that problem. Such experiental knowledge of the past by the future

ensures a solution that is both objective and subjective: the objectivity of Starfleet's science and the subjectivity of wearing

beaver hats, pin stripe double-breasted suits, of carrying "heaters."  The process followed resembles an inverted historical

acculturation whereby Starfleet acculturates Iotia and Iotia acculturates Starfleet. Both cultures partake of the other; however,

it is Starfleet that must make the most dramatic acculturation by becoming Iotians while still maintaining the prime directive.

 The word "coordinates^" can't be used, so Bela Oxmyx ("The Boss") makes beamdown possible by substituting "near a

yellow fire plug" for "coordinates" ;  phasers become "heaters.”  Kirk mentions:

          Kirk: The Iotians are extremely intelligent
                    and somewhat imitative.
          McCoy: So we're going down to recontaminate them.

Great lines and contagious wit! However, it is Kirk who is also extremely intelligent and who becomes very imitative in order to

effect an alteration of the contamination left by the Horizon. The best imitation is in language, a fact Kirk eventually sees as the key

to a solution. When in 1920 Chicago, do as the 1920 Chicagoans do (did) :

          Kalo: Don't give me those baby-blue eyes!...
                   don't go for that innocent routine.
          McCoy: That man is dead.
 

                                                                                                                                                                   121.

          Kalo:  We ain’t playing for peanuts.
                       Ain't you ever seen a hit be-
                       fore?

Kirk notes that the Horizon’s  crew we r e not "cold-blooded killers." Slowly, Kirk sees "What happened":

          McCoy: One book on the gangs of Chicago
                       did all this. It's amazing.
          Spock: They evidently zeroed upon that
                      one book as the blueprint of an
                      entire society, as the Bible.
           Kirk: Old Chicago's conventional govern-
                     ment almost broke down. The gangs
                     nearly took over.

The first acculturation is the card game of "fizbin,^"  which is a stupendous feat of illogic to test the Iotian's imitative

capacities. With its shralk, its royal fizbins: "Another Jack! How lucky you are! How wonderful for you!”  Kirk beats the card

sharks at their own game. Kirk's mimetic powers win the Iotian’s admiration while simultaneously fooling them on their own turf

with their own vocabulary. The solution becomes the need to "make a deal":

          Krako: Well I guess you want to know why I
                       brought you here.
          Kirk: You want to make a deal.
          Krako: Hey, I like that ! That's sharp ! ...
                       that's right.
          Kirk: A deal.

Krako suggests that the "Feds" be "cut in" for "a third." The "Feds" eventually cut themselves in for 40%. Technology and the

Enterprise computer provide no solutions, as Spock notes: “Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here." The episode

is hilarious because farcical illogic and Kirk’s "hunch" make "A Piece of the Action" Star Trek's most comical episode. The
 

                                                                                                                                                         122.

Comedy, by David Harmon and Gene Coon, is in the tradition of eighteenth century satire (ala Dryden

and Swift) whose function is to laugh man out of his follies and vices by hyperbole -- exaggeration of the foible for comic

effect. The key to this satire is classical mimesis. Kirk lives the contamination by satirizing it:

          McCoy: What are we going to do now, Jim?
          Kirk: Well, now that we have Bela, I'm
                    gonna put the bag on Krako ... nobody's
                    gonna put the bag on me anymore.

The satire continues into Star Trek's answer to extraterrestrial rent-a-car. Spock and Kirk leave the viewer in hopeless tears

of hilarity when Kirk, the efficient Starfleet commander cannot handle gears. Here, Henry Ford meets Albert Einstein. The

contrast is shattering:

          Kirk: Wheels, Mr. Spock.
          Spock: A flivver, Captain.
          Kirk: Where's the starter?
          Spock: Interesting .
          Kirk: Gears.
          Spock: Clutch, perhaps one of those pedals on the floor.
          Kirk: I kinda like this. I may get one myseIf."  
          Spock: Captain, you are an excellent starship
                      commander, but as a taxi-driver, you leave
                      much to be desired.
          Kirk: It was that bad?

Yes, it was that bad--never getting out of first gear. The kid is called a "Babe";  Spock is "Spocko;  "right? check";   Kirk is

"Koik." Kirk makes communication with the Iotians easier by using their vernacular and mannerisms. To Krako, Kirk says,

"We don't have time to show you how to build toys. Getting a cut of Krako's "deal" is "peanuts to an outfit like the Federation."

The selfishness of the Iotians is appealed to in a theory of "deals" that recall laissez faire economics of earlier centuries where

"enlightened self-interest
 

                                                            123.

prevailed," as Pope states, the public good and the private good were the same, but everyone got a piece of the action which

benefitted everyone and all in common.

          Kid: What's in it for me?
          Kirk: What do you want?
          Kid:  A piece of the action.
          Spock: What will we do?
          Kid: You'll know what to do.

In order to cure the social degeneration of lotia, the cure is based on the disease, on the contamination itself. The confronta-

tion between the two cultures in the same time zone must eliminate the Horizon's contamination. McCoy's quip about curing them by

"recontaminating^" them is exactly what takes place. The cure to the criminal code lies within the criminal code itself. The antitoxin

is always formed from the toxin itself. The Iotians understand their own lingo, and they accept quick wit and hits that overwhelm their

peanut heaters. The contamination is chaotic and fragmentary among the many bosses. In "hitting" each other in disparate in-fighting, the

Iotians have ceased to grow as a culture. The cure must give everyone a piece of the action, but the society as a whole must be the

priority; the good of the many cannot be sacrificed for the good of the few. In this confrontation between the ME and the NOT-ME,

both groups benefit from the interaction between opposites. The disease is chaos; therefore, the sought-after solution is one

opposite or heterogeneous elements, which is the function of the Romantic, human imagination:

          Spock: We may quarrel with Mr. Oxmyx' methods,
                      but his goal is essentially the correct
                      one. This society must become united or
                      it will degenerate into total anarchy.

Later on, Kirk sounds the same theme as Krako wants to give the "Feds" 30% of the action:

          Kirk: This planet has to become united ...
                   You know that. Bela knows that.
                   Let's sit down: you, me, Bela ...
                   discuss this whole matter, contact
                   the other bosses, and talk about it
                   like reasonable men ... (to Krako) I
                   don't think you're stupid. I just
                   think your behavior is arrested!

A great pun since Krako hardly wants to be arrested. The criminally-based culture has become arrested by arresting itself into a

condition that precludes any creative growth for that society. By being purely imitative, the Iotians' natural evolution has ceased

and its deeds are no longer indigenous and original. The famous billiard-table lecture:

          Kirk: The planet is being taken over by the
                   Federation, but we don't wanna come in
                   here and ... use our muscle. You know
                   what I mean? That ain't, uh, subtle!