ST:TNG Season Three, Episode Fifteen "Yesterday's Enterprise"

ST:TNG Season Three, Episode Fifteen "Yesterday's Enterprise"
Production Order: 15
Air Order: 15
Stardate: 43625.2
Original Air Date: February 19, 1990

Okay, sorry for the hiccup. That would be one trip to the ER (friend Gimli is fine), one bad experience with socialized feral kittens (both kittens and I are fine), and an angry, frustrated cry and admission at blog deadline time that no, one cannot do all of these things and still write 1667 words per day for NaNoWriMo.

*******

Worf is sitting at a table in Ten Forward when Guinan sits down with two glasses and tells him to drink what she's offering. He's suspicious, but does so. He actually really enjoys it, and she tells him that it's prune juice. She then says that she's noticed that he always drinks alone, and that maybe he should be looking for some companionship.
Oh, Lord. This isn't OkKlingon, Guinan. Let the man find his own dates.
He tells her delicately that he'd need a Klingon woman for that, because human females are too fragile.
"You don't know that," she prods. "There are some human females here who might find you tame."
He laughs.

His response to her goading him into trying is that he will never know.
"Coward," she teases.
Sassy Worf Moment: "I was merely concerned for the safety of my crewmates."
Sassy Guinan Moment: "Drink your prune juice."
They glance out the front window, and there's some kind of mysterious thing outside.
Worf gets paged to the bridge.
He leaves and she goes to the window. Clearly, she knows something.
"That's not right."

Worf enters the bridge, where Picard is asking Data for information.
"It's like... a wormhole thing? But it has no center or edge? It's weird. I've never seen anything like it."
Dude. Data's pretty much a walking Encyclopedia Britannica. If he encounters something he's never seen before, they're kind of screwed.
Wes' two-cents: "Yeah, it's weird."
The wormhole thing phases, and a ship starts to come out of it.
Then there's a strange visual effect that's supposed to represent some kind of shift.

The uniforms on the bridge crew are slightly different. The bridge is dark, like a car driving down the highway at night, and the only lights are coming from the dashboard display.
"What ship is that?" asks Picard. "Enemy ship, Lieutenant?"
He turns around.
Whoa, nelly.

"Dunno," says Yar.

Guinan turns away from the window. Ten Forward is now awash in people, while the PA system calls out assignments overhead. Not knowing what else to do, and maybe because the act is comforting in a jarring situation, she scoops up the nearest abandoned plate and cup and starts looking around while walking toward the bar.
"Not right," she repeats.

"The ship is getting clearer," says Yar, watching her instruments. "I can see the call numbers now. It's NCC 1701... C. It's the Enterprise."
Zoom-in on Picard!

Dramatic music! Opening credits!

Military Log (military log?!), Combat-Date 43625.2: "Whoa. Checking out some kind of anomaly, and out of the mist comes the Enterprise-C, predecessor of this battleship."

We're on the bridge, but not the bridge? There's a dais with just the captain's chair, and some stations behind Data and Wes, and whoa, Wes is a full ensign now! Noice!

He and Data talk about how the E-C was supposed to have been lost 20 years earlier with all hands near the Klingon outpost of Narendra III.
Picard postures that it may he been adrift all this time, and Data puts forward the hypothesis that the weird wormhole thing it came out of was a temporal rift. Picard thinks that theory is interesting.
"Yeah (science) means it might collapse at any time. Not stable," adds Data.
Yar suddenly announces that she's getting some life signs from the other ship. Riker immediately calls Crusher to request medical personnel to help out with the E-C, but Picard stops him. They get into an argument. Apparently, this Picard and this Riker are not bros.
Anyway, Picard's point here is that they could fuck up all of the temporal shit by interfering with the E-C. A distress signal comes in.
"Hey, this is Captain Garrett from the Enterprise. Got into a bad fight with some Romulans, and lost warp drive and most of our life support. Looking for some help."
"Uh, there's no record of that ship ever having gotten into it with Roms," Riker points out.
Yar says the live distress signal is gone, and she's just getting the automated one.
Picard decides to act after all. He calls the E-C and tells them he's from "...a Federation starship..." and that he's sending emergency medical teams to them.
"Get them up and running again and tend to their wounded," he tells Riker, "but don't talk too much. Butterfly effect and all that."
Riker takes Yar and they leave. Wes says Starfleet is reporting Klingon cruisers nearby.

Riker and Yar beam over with Geordi and Crusher. Everything on the E-C bridge is a mess, with actual burning fires in places. They find the captain, who is in bad shape, and Crusher takes a scan.
"Fractures and internal damage," she announces. "I need to beam her back to the sick bay on the Enterprise."
Dammit Doctor, you had one job!
"Where?" asks Garrett.
Riker tries to brush her off, but she insists. He gets away with a "tell you later" before she and Crusher beam out.
The rest of the bridge crew is dead, but Yar unearths the helmsman, Lt Castillo.
The crew of the E-C are all wearing Wrath of Khan uniforms, which is a nice continuity touch.

Riker calls Picard to say that life support on the E-C is back up, but it'll take time for Geordi to fix things right with the warp drive. He reports 125 survivors, and mentions that he'd hate to have to scrap the ship, because they're at war and need everything that flies on their side. Picard agrees and gives Geordi nine hours to fix it. If that works, they'll take it to the nearest starbase. If not, they'll take the survivors, and blow up the E-C.
"Understood, sir," barks Riker.
Dude, he and this other Picard hate each other or something.
Guinan enters the bridge and looks around, nonplussed. She goes straight to Picard.
"Everything is wrong, and we need to talk."

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

Picard and Guinan go into the ready room, which now features a lighted map on the wall showing locations that either belong to the Klingons or the Federation.
"So what's wrong?" he asks.
"You. The bridge, the uniforms, everything."
"It's the same bridge."
"Yes and no? Also, families. There should be kids on this ship."
Picard is appalled. "This is a war ship! We're at war!"
"But we shouldn't be. The Enterprise is a ship of peace. Everything went wrong when the E-C came out of that wormhole thing."

Picard goes to sick bay to see Rachel Garrett.
Once she finds out how her ship is doing, and the status of her crew, she gets down to business.
"Okay, where the hell am I? Who are you guys, and what ship is this?"
Picard tries to brush her off like Riker did, but she isn't having any of it.
"Okay, so... this is the Enterprise D, and you're 22 years into the future. We think you came through a temporal vortex."
"You're shitting me."
"Nope. What do you remember right before you got here?"
"So we got this distress signal from a Klingon outpost, Narendra III," she begins. "And we go to defend it, but four fucking Romulan warbirds come out of nowhere, and that's absolutely not a fair fight. But we're in it anyway, and there are all these phaser volleys, and bright flashes, then we end up here."
"That sucks," he sighs. "If a Starfleet ship was seen helping a Klingon outpost, it might have prevented twenty years of war. I bet the temporal rift opened with help from the phaser fight."
(Okay: that's a weird theory. How exactly would a bunch of phasers open a temporal rift? Did they cross the streams? And if that happened every time the Roms got into a firefight, wouldn't they know they could secretly open temporal rifts? And maybe use it as a really inaccurate weapon?
"Tactical, we're outnumbered, so signal to the other warbirds that we're going to cross the streams and send this ship into a temporal rift. They can deal with the future."
"Where and when in the future, sir?"
"Eh, how should I know? Just do it."
Or is it just a question of crossing the streams near some piece of space that's ripe for temporal rifting?)

We go back to the E-C, where Yar and Riker are heading up the repairs with Geordi. Castillo is trying to talk himself around into this "being in the future" business and having limited success.
"My family is probably dead," he laments.
"Dude, it's only 22 years. They're most likely alive," Yar reasons.
She continues trying to fix the ship while he ruminates aloud.
"What's different in the future?" he finally asks.
"A lot of stuff. Long-ass war with the Klingons. We lost half of Starfleet to them already."
"Oh, we were working on a peace treaty with them in my time."
"Some crap has gone down since." She's still plugging away at the consoles, trying to make things work.
"...if we get a break, could you tell me about those changes?"

On the E-D, Data and Picard are discussing the temporal rift at the science station.
"Can we send the E-C back through that thing?" asks Picard.
"We could," says Data. "But it would put them right back where they started from."
So, in the middle of an unfair fight with four warbirds.
"They have no chance of surviving," Data replies.
"It's a death sentence," Picard agrees.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

I guess they've decided to skip being careful, because the butterfly was already out of the bag, and now they'll go whole-hog and just show the E-C crew everything, because they're either staying here in the future, or going back to die instantly, sooo...
Yar and Castillo are walking through the E-D corridors, which are hideously crowded because, as Yar tells Castillo, the E-D can move 6000 soldiers. She tells him that she's been on the E-D since she graduated from the Academy. She says she was lucky to get the assignment on the Enterprise.
"Me too," says Castillo. "Well, I mean, my Enterprise."
She smiles at him.
They go into sick bay to talk to Garrett.
Garrett makes Castillo her liaison to the E-D, as he is currently the senior-most bridge officer on the E-C. And she wants him to focus on tactical because Picard has told her that they need help in this timeline with the Klingons. She gets out of bed, and is immediately stopped by Crusher.
"My crew needs me," Garrett argues.
"You need 24 more hours in sick bay to heal," Crusher responds. "Why do captains always insist on pushing it?"
"Why do doctors always try to baby captains?" Garrett counters.
Really, Crusher has the authority to keep Garrett, but she decides to just let it go.

Guinan is summoned to the Obs Lounge to talk to Picard. All the little Enterprise models are gone, replaced by tactical maps and shit. And that long, black, shiny table with the office chairs? The chairs are gone, and the table is now standing-height.
"I need more info," says Picard.
"Wish I had more," she replies.
"You say they need to go back, but as soon as they get back, they'll all die. I can't just do that. There needs to be justification."
Guinan gets angry. "Dude, what do you want me to say? Not only do I not have info on why this is wrong, I can't even prove it, or prove why they shouldn't be here. All I know is that all the shit is fucked up. That's it. Have you ever known me to just screw with stuff? To tell you to change your plans based on a whim?"
"No. But it's still bullshit that they should die."

Castillo and Yar have ended up in Ten Forward, talking about deflector shields.
Guinan returns to Ten Forward and is immediately put off by Tasha Yar at the bar. She stares at Yar for a while, then takes their order. Apparently, in this timeline all energy is needed for war stuff, so no food replicators are in use. Everyone eats food prepared in Ten Forward. Yar orders rations for herself and Castillo after introducing him to Guinan. When Guinan leaves, Yar says she's never seen Guinan so put off.
Well no, Tasha. You and Guinan shouldn't exist on the ship at the same time. Interesting that Guinan knows enough about you to just go with it.
Castillo asks if he can call Yar Tasha, and she agrees. He says everyone calls him Castillo, and his mother calls him Richard.
"Okay, Castillo."
"...on second thought, call me Richard."
Picard pages the senior officers to the ready room. Yar and Guinan share one more uneasy meeting of the eyes as Yar and Castillo leave.

In the ready room, Picard announces that he's going to send the E-C back through the temporal rift. The others question his decision, seeing as how the crew of that ship have survived, just to be sent to their deaths. Riker is especially vocal.
"Look," says Picard. "You're not gonna change my mind. Why does Guinan think everything is wrong? Dunno. She doesn't either. No one is really sure why she noticed a change and none of the rest of us did. We don't know anything about her species, they may not see time as linear as we do. But she thinks this timeline shouldn't exist, and that sending the E-C back could fix that, could make this war non-existent."
"It's possible that in the other timeline, the Enterprise C was destroyed defending that Klingon outpost," reasons Data."That would have been viewed favorably by the Klingons, who would have seen their deaths as honorable. It could have kept us out of a war 22 years ago."
This is an interesting thought to the others, and when Picard dismisses them, they all get up talking to one another.

"This is so messed up," Crusher remarks as she and Geordi go into the corridor. "Who's to even say which of us is dead or alive in that other timeline?"
Yeah, guess who's standing behind them when Crusher says that?

Yar and Data get into the lift, and he correctly guesses that she's preoccupied with something bad.
She confesses that she's been working with an officer from E-C, and she's worried about what will happen to him.
"We'll never know," Data points out. "If we send them back, and switch over to the other timeline, none of this will have happened."

Back on the E-C, repairs are under way. Garrett is back on the bridge.
"So your bartender says we have to sacrifice ourselves?" she asks in disbelief.
"Yeah, I don't know what the deal is with her species, but they have this intuition, and she's never lead me astray."
"We kind of don't have a chance in hell of surviving," Garrett muses. (Guess Picard never mentioned Data's theory about Klingons and honor.) "Maybe if you came back with your advanced weaponry..."
"You know we can't."
"Yeah, it was a long shot." She pauses. "A lot of my crew have said they want to go back, either because they don't like living without loved ones, or because they dislike leaving in the middle of a fight. But I told them that if we stay here, you need us to fight the Klingons."
"Yeah, here's the thing... " he lowers his voice "...we're hella losing this war. Like, within six months, we'll have to surrender. One more ship fighting now... meh. But if you go back, you could stop this war in your time."
Garrett tells Castillo to tell the rest of the crew that they're going back through the rift.

Picard is ready to leave, but Yar requests a moment more, o he beams off without her.
"Good luck," she says to Castillo.
He looks at her like she just said "good luck with dying and all," because she really did.
"I'll... try to put your tactical advice to good use," he says in reply.
She attempts to reason with him about how his ship has better maneuverability that their Romulan counterparts, but then trails off.
He suggests that maybe someday they'll both make it back to Earth, and they briefly entertain the thought before the ship is rocked suddenly.
Oops, the Klingons have shown up. Yar and Castillo dash to the conn centers, and the E-D reports one Klingon cruiser.

The E-C takes another hit, and Garrett tumbles out of her chair amid some debris.
The cruiser re-cloaks, and Picard calls Garrett for a report.
"Um, this is Yar. Captain Garrett is dead."
Oh, fuck you, Star Trek. You had that cruiser come out of nowhere just to take out Garrett, then had it go away for no reason.

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

Castillo goes back to the E-D Obs Lounge, where he tells Picard that he's perfectly willing to take the ship back, the way it was planned.
Riker is unusually combative, arguing vehemently against it, as the ship was never meant to be commanded by a lieutenant.
Dude, this is war, Riker. Sometimes shit happens and the senior-most officer is like an ensign or something. Deal with it.
"We can make repairs for the shit that was broken in this last firefight, and then I can take it back through and fix all this," Castillo says stubbornly.
"Either way, that cruiser is now reporting where we are to Klingon High Command, and they'll be back with reinforcements," Yar points out. "We have to get the hell out of here."
"Repair the ship. We'll cover you," Picard tells Castillo.

Yar takes Castillo back to the transporter room.
"We keep saying goodbye," he jokes.
"Wish we had more time."
"I think we've had all the time we can handle."
They make out in the transporter room. Good for her. Tasha Yar has had a pretty shit life, and she deserves to have a nice, normal.... never mind.
Castillo gets back on the transporter pad and beams back to his ship.

Yar goes to Ten Forward, which is surprisingly empty. She cuts right to the chase.
"What happens to me in the other timeline?"
"I don't really know," admits Guinan. "It's all kind of fuzzy for me. But I know that you shouldn't be here."
"Where should I be?"
"Dead. I know you, but I shouldn't. And I hate to break it to you, but your death sucked. Like, no meaning in it whatsoever."
Yar considers this, then leaves without another word.

Yar heads straight for the ready room.
"I wanna transfer to the E-C."
He frowns."What the fuck for?"
"They need a tactical officer."
That's true.
"And?"
"I'm not supposed to be here. I should be dead."
And he knows who she has been talking to. He's pretty pissed at Guinan. "Why did she think it was appropriate to tell you that?"
"I guessed, and asked her. She said it was true."
"The E-C could totally fail."
"Yeah, I know."
"But it could succeed, and you could stay here and live a long life," he says.
"I know that it's important for the E-C to succeed, which is why I want to go. They need me there. It's kind of logical."
"Bullshit, that's not logical!" He pauses."They'll probably fail."
"Probably. But I could give them a fighting chance, even if it's a few seconds. Guinan says I died a senseless death in the other timeline. If I'm going to die in a Starfleet uniform, I want it to count for something."
He considers her. "Permission granted."

Castillo is on the bridge of the E-C, handing out assignments when Yar approaches and reports for tactical. He pulls her aside.
"What are you doing? This is a suicide mission."
"I put in for transfer."
"I don't want you here." He's clearly torn between being glad to see her again, and not wanting her to die.
"I'm the best person for the job, and you need me here."
"...okay. Report to tactical."

Dramatic music! Commercial break!

Military Log, supplemental: "Tasha Yar has transferred over to the E-C. Klingon cruisers on long-range, headed straight for us."

Three Klingon ships are headed their way, not even cloaked. Bold as brass.
Picard climbs on the PA system. "Okay, we could totally outrun the Klingons, but we need to stay and cover the E-C as she goes back through the temporal rift. We need to make sure that happens."
The Klingons come out, guns ablazin'. The E-D fires back as the E-C turns toward the rift. Two cruisers attempt to draw the E-D off the E-C, while the third goes for the E-C. Damage reports coming in, Geordi is having some trouble with the power couplings, and Riker makes a quick remark about losing anti-matter containment. More hits taken, and they blow up a cruiser.

"Bridge, we have a warp core breach in two minutes!" yells Geordi.
He starts evacuating Engineering.
"Fifty-two more seconds until the E-C enters the rift!" calls Data.
Shit starts failing on the bridge. More hits. There's an explosion, and Riker goes flying.
Damn.

Picard vaults over the partition and heads up tactical himself.
"Federation ship, surrender so we can board you," comes a Klingon call.
"Fuck right off," mutters Picard.
A fire has started on the E-D bridge.
Both cruisers are now firing on the E-D while the E-C slips unnoticed into the rift.

Picard in a regular slip-collar uniform says, "Lieutenant, wtf was that?"
He turns.
Hello.

"Like, a ship came out of that wormhole thing for a split-second, then went back in? I don't really know," says Worf. "Space weirdness."
"The wormhole thing is closing in on itself," reports Data.
"Maybe we should send a probe in," shrugs Picard. He looks at Wes. "Set course for (location where temporal-shift Riker claims they kicked some Klingon ass)."

The comm channel opens. It's Guinan.
"Hey, Picard. Everything okay up there?"
Picard glances at Riker, and they both shrug. "Yeah, should it not be?"
"Naw, we're good." Down in Ten Forward, she gestures at a waiter to bring a drink, and she sits at a table with Geordi. "Tell me about... Tasha Yar."

Oops, they forgot to switch out Geordi's uniform.

This episode is fantastic. Rough-going, but good all the same.
I'm not a huge fan of time-travel stories (with some exceptions) because they tend to get very convoluted very fast, but this one managed to keep each strand separated and clear so that the audience doesn't have to struggle to keep up with where or when the story takes place. I always appreciate that.
Guinan being the only person that recognizes that something is wrong worked really well here. Her species (she's an El-Aurian, but we won't hear that name for quite some time) being mysterious and having powers not readily talked about works here. She doesn't have set boundaries to work within, and when time shifts, it somehow seems believable that she would move between the two realities (at least, more believable than a human crew member). This is also helpful as she's particularly trusted by Picard - would he honestly trust anyone else's opinion to possibly kill two ships' worth of Starfleet personnel? (This further explains Troi's absence, story-wise: she might have also felt the shift, even if she had not shifted the way Guinan did, and one person arguing for the sacrifice of a ship adds a bit more tension than two. This explains why she is ostensibly missing from the ship. I do wonder where she ended up in the alternate timeline, though - where did Betazed fall in this war?)
Some changes that I liked that marked the difference between the two timelines:
- The uniforms were similar, but not terribly different.
- Wes was made a full ensign. He was probably rushed through the Academy to get him into the field quicker. However, this does make him more likely to die in battle. (Written but unfilmed: Wes' death in the final battle scene by decapitation. Really glad that didn't make it in.)
- Guinan understanding who Tasha Yar is, but also not knowing her. In this period, they are shipmates, and the time shift seems to have given her information about her own timeline, as well as the alternate, as though she's watching both timelines overlapping on the same television screen at once.  Fully returned, she retains the knowledge she had, but requests more from Geordi.
- Alternate timeline Picard and Riker do not like each other. Alternate Riker seemed more tightly wound, probably a product of coming of age in the middle of a war. If his mother still died when he was an infant, and his father still abandoned him at fifteen, then Riker's survival of the fittest young adulthood would have been much bloodier. Picard, being older, has spent much of his life in relative peace compared to Riker, and I thought it was interesting to see where this difference cropped up. However, despite having a slightly harder edge, Picard has not much changed.
- The sets and lighting are marvelous. The bridge, ready room, Engineering and Obs Lounge all feature darker, duller blue lighting that has a more ominous feeling, while Ten Forward was brightened to accommodate a busier feeling, rather than a relaxed one. The bridge has a dais for Picard's chair and more work stations. With the command chairs missing from either side of the captain's chair, Riker was relegated to the station next to tactical, further separating him from Picard. The corridors bustle with people, to prove Yar's explanation that the E-D can carry up to 6000 troops.

It feels like, in some cases, the backstory and behind the scenes circumstances are important to an episode, and this episode fits well into that category. With "Yesterday's Enterprise," this seems very much like it. This episode actually originated as two scripts. The first, a spec script written by Trent Christopher Ganino, was only about the E-D encountering a ship that had slipped into their time, making no changes to the future, and Picard's dilemma as to whether or not to tell the other ship's crew about their fate before sending them back. The second script (written by Eric Stillwell) involved the Vulcans, Sarek (father of Spock) replacing Surak (father of Vulcan philosophy) in one timeline, and Tasha Yar. It relied heavily on time travel and alternate timelines. Stillwell had met Denise Crosby at a convention and mentioned how much he disliked Yar's death in the first season. They discussed bringing her back to kill her off properly. Michael Piller, having heard Stillwell's idea, suggested that he combine the "characters taking the place of other characters in other timelines" story with Ganino's time-swapped ships. Everyone was on board with killing Yar in a better manner via talking oil slick.

So what changes here? The E-C moves through the temporal rift into a time 22 years into the future, changing that future. In the past, the E-C coming to the rescue of Narendra III sort of sealed the deal between the Federation and the Klingons, despite being lost with all hands (or in this case, probably because of it). The sacrifice do not go unnoticed by the Klingons, who Castillo claims were in peace talks with the Federation. The destruction of the E-C told the Klingons "Got your back, bro." When the E-C disappears into the rift, either it remained a mystery as to what happened and the peace talks broke down, or the Klingons viewed this as the E-C taking off and abandoning the colony, allowing it to be destroyed by the Romulans, and causing the Klingons to start a war with the Federation. By sending the E-C back to it's own time to die defending the colony, they stopped the alternate timeline from happening, and stopped the war with the Klingons. In the regular timeline, Yar has died. In the alternate timeline, she is alive and well, and might have continued to live a long time. Her getting on the E-C sealed her fate there, ensuring she would die in the past with her adopted crew. Had she stayed behind, she might have died on the E-D, helping to ensure that the E-C get back through the time rift. But when the E-C goes back through the rift, it changes the alternate timeline back to the regular one, and the alternate E-D no longer exists. Yar escapes from a non-existence to a certain death. And that's the change: Yar gets a better death.
Had this episode been a bad one, the roller coaster they put us through might not have been worth it. But given that the writers, cast, Denise Crosby, and the pretty much the entire fandom hated Yar's death to begin with, the ride and the wait were worth it.

(This episode left me with one burning question: what happened to Worf? Did Khitomer occur in the alternate universe? If so, did Worf die in the wreckage with his parents? Was he rescued by other Klingons?)

Fun Facts:

- Along with Riker and Wes, Data was also supposed to "die," by electrocution.
- In Ganino's original script, the captain of the E-C was Richard Garrett, named after a pizzaria in Ganino's hometown of San Jose.
- Guinan was brought in at the last minute during script writing, and because of scheduling conflicts between Whoopi Goldberg and Denise Crosby, filming was pushed forward, and the writers had to push to complete the script over Thanksgiving weekend in order to film in early December. The writers were not completely satisfied with the short schedule, but enjoyed being able to write a darker episode.

- The special effect in the beginning of the episode which marked the change of the timeline was forgotten at the end of the episode.
- The shrapnel that killed Capt Garrett was a wing from the VF-1 Valkyrie model kit from the anime "The Super Dimension Fortress Macross." Interestingly, parts from the same model kit were used to build Constellation-class models.
- Tricia O'Neil, who plays Capt Garrett, will show up again as a Klingon in season six, and as a Cardassian in DS9.
- Christopher McDonald, who plays Castillo, had auditioned for the part of Riker.
- This is the last episode to feature all of the original cast. Wil Wheaton and Denise Crosby will show up again in other episodes, but never together.
- Denise Crosby cited this as her favorite episode. Jonathan Frakes was never able to get a handle on it.
-This is the only episode to feature the encounter of two ships named Enterprise.
-The Enterprise-D from the alternate universe has been in service at least a year longer than the one we are familiar with. Yar tells Castillo that the E-D is the first Galaxy-class warship.
- Castillo tells Yar that the Federation is in peace talks with the Klingon Empire. However, the follow year (1991), Star Trek will establish a different canon, one where peace treaties with the Klingons were signed over 50 years earlier (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).
- The PAs on the E-D call for Lt Barrett (meaning Majel), and for Dr Selar.
- This episode won an Emmy for sound editing, and was nominated for sound mixing.
- The apocryphal novel "Q-Squared" set up that Troi did not exist in the alternate universe, as the Klingons had wiped out the Betazoids.




Red deaths: 0 (Alternative universe Riker technically never existed)
To date: 1

Gold deaths: 0
To date: 1

Blue deaths: 0
To date: 1
Unnamed color crew deaths: 126 (I couldn't find original numbers for the E-C)
To date: 127

Obnoxious Wes moments: 0

Legitimate Wes moments when he should have told someone to go fuck themselves: 0
To date: 0

Sassy Geordi moments: 0
To date: 9

Sassy Wes Moments: 0
To date: 0

Sassy Worf Moment: 1
To date: 5

Sassy Riker Moments: 0
To date: 10

Sassy Picard Moments: 0
To date: 8

Sassy NPC Moments: 0
To date: 0
Sassy Data Moments: 0
To date: 4
Sassy O'Brien Moments: 0
To date: 0
Sassy Crusher Moments: 0
To date: 2
Sassy Troi Moments: 0
To date: 4
Sassy Guinan Moments: 1
To date: 4
Sassy Guest Star Moments: 0
To date: 1

Number of times that it is mentioned that Data is an android: 0
To date: 13

Number of times that Troi reacts to someone else's feelings: 0
To date: 20

Number of times that Geordi "looks at something" with his VISOR: 0
To date: 4
Number of times when Data gives too much info and has to be told to shut up: 0
To date: 2
Picard Maneuvers: 1
To date: 21
Tea, Earl Grey: 0
To date: 2

Avery looks like a kitten calendar model