Yesterday's Enterprise
When a battered Enterprise-C appears through a temporal rift, Captain Picard must decide whether to send it back to its doomed past to avert a catastrophic Federation–Klingon war—forcing sacrifices that will rewrite history and cost lives.
A jagged tear in space drops a beaten, unfamiliar starship into the Enterprise-D's viewscreen: the U.S.S. Enterprise-C (NCC-1701‑C), presumed destroyed twenty-two years earlier. The bridge hardens into a military posture, uniforms and attitudes shift, and a chill runs through the ship. Sensors confirm the impossible: a temporal rift with no definable center, a Kerr-loop–like structure that briefly bridges past and future. Commander Riker leads an away team to stabilize the battered cruiser and evacuate casualties; they find Captain Rachel Garrett critically wounded and most of her bridge crew dead. Tactical Lieutenant Richard Castillo survives to become the last senior officer aboard; 125 survivors remain of seven hundred.
The central dilemma arrives bruising and immediate. Doctor Crusher and Commander Riker push to rescue and integrate the Enterprise-C's personnel into the present; Data analyzes the rift and warns it might be symmetrical: if the Enterprise-C returns through the anomaly, it will re-emerge in its own time at the instant it left—right into the battle with four Romulan warbirds near the Klingon outpost on Narendra Three. Picard confronts a moral calculus: sending the ship back almost certainly condemns its crew to death, but their survival in the past could alter a chain of events that produced the brutal Federation–Klingon war that now defines the present. Guinan, who experiences time differently, insists with visceral certainty that the Enterprise-C must return: "This is a mistake. Every cell in my body knows this is a mistake."
Picard wrestles with faith and responsibility. He reluctantly accepts Guinan's judgment, weighing her intuition against the cold logic of casualty counts and temporal risk. Captain Garrett, lucid and duty-driven, confronts the revelation that her arrival in the future may be the very turning point that created the war. She chooses honor over self-preservation: instead of staying to enjoy life in the future, she orders her crew to prepare to go back and finish their mission—to fight for the Klingon outpost. The decision fractures the crew emotionally but crystallizes purpose.
Tasha Yar receives the most personal, shattering truth: Guinan tells her plainly, "You're not supposed to be here... Dead." Rather than shrink from that fatal prophecy, Yar elects agency. She requests transfer to the Enterprise-C to man tactical—believing that if she must die, it will count for something. Picard grants her permission; she becomes a volunteer to restore history. A tender, urgent rapport surfaces between Yar and Castillo; their brief, human moments—handshakes, a farewell kiss, the provisioning of tactical knowledge—heighten the stakes of what follows.
The climax detonates in a pitched, cinematic defense. Klingon K'vort battlecruisers appear and hammer the Enterprise-D as it shields the Enterprise-C. Geordi fights engineering failures and a coolant leak threatening a warp-core breach while Wesley and Data manage maneuvers and phaser volleys. Picard holds his ship between the Klingons and the crippled cruiser, ordering continual fire and refusing to abandon the smaller vessel. As systems fail and casualties mount, the Enterprise-C times its entry: the rift is symmetrical, and a shimmering effect engulfs the Klingon attacker and then the Enterprise-C as it slips back into its past. Captain Garrett dies in the melee; Yar dies as Guinan foretold. The Enterprise-D endures extreme damage and near-catastrophe but emerges to find the rift collapsing into nothing.
Resolution arrives with quiet, bitter clarity. The bridge, uniforms, and people snap back to their familiar selves; the militarized present evaporates as if it had been a fever dream. Picard orders a sensor probe left behind to monitor the rift's final closure and plots a course for Archer Four. Guinan, wounded by cost even as she is vindicated, slips into Ten-Forward and asks Geordi to "tell me about Tasha Yar," a small, tragic request that acknowledges a life given to restore a larger future. The story detonates its themes—sacrifice, honor, the ethics of altering history, and the human cost of righting a wrong—forcing characters to choose between preserving the present and restoring what ought to have been. Picard's command becomes an act of moral leadership: he trusts Guinan's inscrutable wisdom, accepts painful loss, and lets a past ship run its course so that the future may be unmade and remade by those brave enough to go back.
Events in This Episode
The narrative beats that drive the story
The narrative opens in Ten-Forward, where Worf and Guinan engage in a casual, character-establishing exchange, grounding the audience in the familiar, peaceful reality of the Enterprise-D. This tranquility shatters as the ship abruptly drops out of warp, revealing a jagged temporal rift tearing through space. Guinan immediately senses a profound wrongness, her usually placid demeanor replaced by confusion and dread. On the bridge, the crew struggles to understand the anomaly, with Data reporting unprecedented gravimetric fluctuations and a 'time displacement' without a definable center. A battered starship materializes within the rift, its identity initially obscured. As the image clears, the Enterprise-D's bridge undergoes a chilling, subtle transformation: uniforms shift, the atmosphere hardens into a militaristic posture, and Tasha Yar, who was not present moments before, appears at Tactical. The mysterious vessel is then identified as the U.S.S. Enterprise-C, a ship presumed destroyed twenty-two years prior, signaling a catastrophic alteration of history and setting a dark, urgent tone for the unfolding drama. This abrupt shift plunges the audience into an immediate, unsettling reality where the familiar has been violently rewritten.
In a quiet Ten-Forward beat, Guinan sidles up to Worf with a simple, homespun offering—prune juice—and uses the intimacy of the moment to gently needle the stoic Klingon about loneliness …
A quiet, character-building moment in Ten-Forward—Guinan coaxing the guarded Worf into tasting prune juice and teasing him about companionship—shatters when the ship abruptly drops out of warp. A jagged temporal …
On the Enterprise-D bridge Picard orders a technical readout and Data delivers unsettling uncertainty: gravimetric and time‑displacement readings that defy classification. Wesley's navigation cannot lock coordinates and Data reports the …
Sensors and calm procedure collapse into urgent bewilderment when an impossible temporal phenomenon begins to resolve into a battered starship. Data's clinical inability to classify the rift — "yes... and …
An alarm jolts the altered bridge as Picard snaps the crew to attention and demands answers: a battered starship has materialized in a jagged temporal rift. The ship’s arrival hardens …
A battered, earlier‑design starship slides through a jagged temporal rift and blooms on the main viewer: the U.S.S. Enterprise‑C, scarred and battle‑torn. At the same instant the Enterprise‑D itself has …
A battered U.S.S. Enterprise‑C materializes through a jagged temporal rift, forcing the Enterprise‑D bridge into an immediate ethical and tactical crisis. Data confirms the ship's identity and Wesley reminds everyone …
A battered Enterprise‑C appears through a temporal rift, and a strained distress call from Captain Garrett abruptly interrupts Picard and Riker's debate about altering history. Tactical scans reveal survivors and …
The altered reality of a brutal Federation-Klingon war immediately grips the Enterprise-D. Captain Picard's military log establishes the ship's new, hardened identity as a 'battleship.' Data confirms the impossible: the Enterprise-C, presumed lost two decades prior, has indeed traveled through a temporal rift. Picard grapples with the profound implications of this temporal displacement, initially hesitant to interfere with history's flow. However, the Enterprise-C's desperate, strained distress call from its critically wounded Captain Rachel Garrett, pleading for aid against Romulan warbirds, forces Picard's hand. He dispatches Commander Riker, Doctor Crusher, and Tasha Yar on an away mission to the ravaged Enterprise-C. They discover a scene of utter devastation: most of the bridge crew dead, Captain Garrett severely injured, and only 125 survivors remaining from a crew of seven hundred. Lieutenant Richard Castillo emerges as the last senior officer. Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise-D, the militarized Ten-Forward underscores the grim present, and Guinan, deeply disturbed, confronts Picard, her visceral certainty declaring, 'It's all wrong, Captain. This is not the way it's supposed to be.' This act solidifies the dire stakes and introduces the central moral conflict: the immediate need to aid the Enterprise-C versus the unknown, potentially catastrophic, implications of its presence.
Riker, Geordi, Beverly and Tasha beam onto the shattered bridge of the battered Enterprise‑C and confront the immediate human cost: smoking consoles, dead crewmembers, and a critically wounded Captain Rachel …
Riker, Tasha, Beverly and Geordi board the ravaged Enterprise‑C bridge: Garrett is gravely wounded and immediately beamed to the Enterprise‑D sickbay, Geordi triages failing systems, and Beverly confirms most of …
The away-team report arrives: Riker stands on the battered Enterprise‑C bridge, La Forge is patching power, and only 125 of 700 survive. Picard hears the scale of the damage, weighs …
On the Enterprise‑D bridge Picard receives the away‑team report: the Enterprise‑C is a wreck with only 125 survivors and La Forge racing to restore power. Picard sets a wrenching deadline—nine …
Captain Rachel Garrett wakes on an unfamiliar sickbay, disoriented by advanced medical technology and strange uniforms. Picard enters and, while deflecting her immediate questions about where he came from, carefully …
In Sickbay a groggy Captain Rachel Garrett awakens to unfamiliar technology and learns from Picard that she and her crew have been pulled twenty‑two years into the future aboard the …
The profound mystery of the altered timeline deepens as Guinan struggles to articulate the pervasive 'wrongness' she senses, unable to provide concrete proof but insisting on the absence of children and the Enterprise-D's fundamental shift from a ship of peace to a vessel of war. Her conviction that the Enterprise-C 'was not supposed to come here' and 'has got to go back' weighs heavily on Picard. Simultaneously, Picard faces the arduous task of revealing the devastating truth to Captain Garrett in Sickbay: she has been propelled twenty-two years into the future, and her ship's original mission, a desperate defense of a Klingon outpost against Romulans, was never recorded as a success. Picard grimly connects this failure to the ensuing two decades of devastating Federation-Klingon war, suggesting her arrival *caused* the conflict. On the Enterprise-C, Castillo and Tasha, amidst frantic repairs, confront the personal tragedy of their temporal displacement, grappling with the loss of their pasts and the grim reality of a future defined by war. Data's chilling analysis confirms the temporal rift's symmetry: if the Enterprise-C returns, it will re-emerge at the exact moment it left, directly into its doomed battle with four Romulan warbirds. Picard confronts the agonizing moral calculus: sending them back means condemning 125 souls to certain death, a decision he finds almost impossible to justify, yet the alternative is a continued, devastating war.
On the battered Enterprise‑C bridge the crew conducts rapid technical triage while grief and duty collide. Riker calls out failing impulse systems as La Forge reports engine control processors offline …
On the battered Enterprise‑C bridge Castillo reels at the idea that twenty‑two years have slipped past his life — families, homes and a vanished future — while Tasha Yar remains …
In the observation lounge, converted into a tense war room, Picard confronts Guinan over whether to send the battered Enterprise‑C back into its doomed past. Data is absent as proof; …
In the Observation Lounge converted into a war-room, Guinan abandons argument for an urgent, personal appeal: she cannot prove the timeline is wrong, but every instinct screams that the Enterprise‑C …
The narrative intensifies as the moral and emotional stakes skyrocket. Captain Garrett, now fully aware of the catastrophic war her ship's disappearance precipitated, rises from her sickbed, driven by an unwavering sense of duty and honor. She rejects the possibility of remaining in the future, choosing instead to order her crew to prepare to return to their doomed battle, determined to 'make it one for the history books.' Picard, wrestling with the immense responsibility of this decision, is ultimately swayed by Guinan's unshakeable, almost evangelical conviction that this timeline is a 'mistake' that must be corrected, even at the cost of lives. He reveals the dire state of the Federation, facing inevitable defeat, underscoring the potential, albeit unprovable, impact of the Enterprise-C's sacrifice. Amidst this high-stakes calculus, a tender, human connection blossoms between Tasha Yar and Richard Castillo, their brief, poignant moments of shared vulnerability and budding affection highlighting the profound personal cost of the impending mission. Their exchange at the bar, and Tasha's quiet acknowledgment of a feeling she's 'never had an easy time with,' grounds the abstract temporal dilemma in immediate, relatable emotion. The Klingons then launch a sudden, brutal attack, forcing the Enterprise-D to defend the Enterprise-C. In the chaos, Captain Garrett is tragically killed, leaving Castillo, a young helmsman, thrust into command, further amplifying the impossible burden on the Enterprise-C's crew.
In Ten‑Forward a rare, vulnerable beat occurs: Tasha Yar lets down her guard while tutoring young helmsman Castillo, who shyly asks her to call him 'Richard.' The exchange briefly humanizes …
In Ten‑Forward a fragile intimacy blooms between Tasha Yar and Richard Castillo, but Guinan's subtle recoil fractures the moment. Guinan, sensing a grave disruption in the timeline, deliberately avoids eye …
On the battered bridge of the Enterprise‑C, Picard lays out the unbearable calculus: their appearance here may have altered history and a single ship twenty‑two years ago could have prevented …
Picard lays out the grim strategic consequence of the Enterprise-C's presence, prompting Captain Garrett to order her ship back into a doomed past. In a quiet, charged moment Tasha Yar …
The act of profound sacrifice begins to unfold, driven by individual agency and a desperate hope for a better future. Lieutenant Castillo, now the last senior officer, stands before Picard, his youthful resolve hardened by loss. Despite the overwhelming odds and the certainty of his ship's destruction, he bravely commits to leading the Enterprise-C back into the temporal rift, earning Picard's deep admiration. Their shared, tough salute underscores the gravity of the mission and the respect forged in crisis. A poignant farewell between Castillo and Tasha in the Transporter Room, culminating in a tender, unspoken kiss, encapsulates the love and connection that might have been, intensifying the emotional weight of their impending separation. The emotional core of this act detonates when Guinan delivers a shattering personal truth to Tasha Yar: she is 'not supposed to be here... Dead,' and her original death was 'empty' and 'without purpose.' This revelation, rather than paralyzing Tasha, ignites a fierce determination. She confronts Picard, requesting a transfer to the Enterprise-C, choosing to face certain death if it means her sacrifice will 'count for something.' Picard, recognizing the immense courage and moral clarity in her decision, grants her permission. Tasha then reports for duty on the Enterprise-C, her resolve unyielding, accepting her fate with a fierce dedication to ensuring the mission's success, cementing her role as a volunteer to restore history, and adding a deeply personal layer to the grand temporal gamble.
A sudden, devastating explosion rips through the Enterprise‑C bridge, hurling Captain Garrett to the deck under flying debris and shattering the chain of command. As the Enterprise‑D fires a desperate …
The Enterprise‑D pours a heavy barrage at the Klingon bird‑of‑prey; a shimmering effect seems to swallow the enemy ship — then the moment fractures. Data's cold report that the Klingon …
Against the backdrop of a widening temporal rift—now showing increased instability likely caused by the Klingon attack—Lieutenant Castillo volunteers to pilot the battered Enterprise‑C back through time to restore the …
When the battered Enterprise‑C emerges through the rift, young Lieutenant Castillo steps forward and offers to lead the crippled ship back into its doomed past — invoking Captain Garrett’s wishes …
In Ten-Forward Guinan delivers a cold, existential revelation: when she reads the alternate timeline Tasha Yar should not exist—her original fate was death, and a death that carried no meaning. …
In Ten-Forward Guinan coldly tells Tasha that in the alternate timeline she 'wasn't supposed to be here' — that her original fate is to be dead, and worse, that the …
The climax explodes with visceral intensity, a desperate, pitched battle for the fate of history. Tasha Yar, having made her choice, bids a quiet farewell to her Enterprise-D crewmates, a silent acknowledgment of the profound sacrifice she is about to make. On the Enterprise-C, she assumes tactical command, ready to face the inevitable. Three Klingon K'vort battlecruisers materialize, launching a relentless assault on the Enterprise-D. Captain Picard, embodying unwavering moral leadership, defiantly positions his ship as a shield for the crippled Enterprise-C, declaring, 'We may not survive... but we must succeed.' The Enterprise-D endures catastrophic damage, its systems failing, its hull buckling under continuous fire. Geordi battles a critical coolant leak in Engineering, facing an imminent warp core breach, while Picard personally mans Tactical, refusing to yield. Amidst the chaos and mounting casualties, the Enterprise-C, guided by Castillo and Yar, times its entry perfectly, shimmering and then vanishing into the temporal rift, fulfilling its doomed mission. The Enterprise-D, battered and near destruction, emerges from the collapsing rift to find history instantly reset. The militarized bridge, the hardened crew, and the war itself evaporate, replaced by the familiar, peaceful reality. Guinan, though vindicated by the restoration of the proper timeline, bears the profound emotional cost. In Ten-Forward, she asks Geordi to 'tell me about Tasha Yar,' a poignant, tragic request that acknowledges the life given to mend the fabric of time, sealing the themes of sacrifice, honor, and the human price of righting a cosmic wrong.
Wesley detects Klingon K'vort battlecruisers closing fast; the sensors read an intercept in just over fourteen minutes. Picard immediately orders Red Alert and the bridge snaps from intimate tension into …
Tasha Yar confirms the successful transfer of critical converters and, in a brief, emotionally loaded exchange, prepares to leave the Enterprise‑D. Before she can speak privately with Picard or Wesley, …
Bridge sensors pick up three uncloaked Klingon K'vort battlecruisers converging on the crippled Enterprise-C. Picard reads the tactical picture, recognizes that the only way to guarantee the Enterprise‑C can reach …
Faced with three uncloaked Klingon K'vort battlecruisers, Picard makes a grim, tactical decision: the crippled Enterprise‑D will hold position as a sacrificial shield to buy the battered Enterprise‑C time to …
Under a crushing Klingon assault, Picard deliberately maneuvers the crippled Enterprise‑D to physically shield the battered Enterprise‑C so the latter can reach a temporal rift and restore the true timeline. …
In Main Engineering Geordi discovers a catastrophic coolant leak and warns of an imminent warp‑core breach, creating a literal countdown beneath the bridge's desperate defense. Picard learns the Enterprise‑C will …
Under the roar of failing systems and smoke-choked consoles, Engineering reports a coolant leak and an imminent warp-core breach while the bridge is pummeled by Klingon fire. With Riker down …
After the battered Enterprise‑C vanishes, the bridge snaps back into disciplined routine as Picard demands a status and the officers report uncertain, fleeting readings. Data warns the temporal rift is …
After the bridge snaps back into procedural order—Worf reports a vanished contact, Data warns the temporal rift is closing, and Picard issues routine orders—Guinan's unexpected com cuts through the business-as-usual …