By 
Title: Return To Tomorrow
Airdate: 2/9/1968
Plot Summary
In Return To Tomorrow the Enterprise investigates an odd signal to a dead planet where they are greeted by Sargon, a disembodied remnant of a civilization long since dead.
Sargon, his wife, and the leader of the opposing faction that destroyed the world are all that’s left of their world. Pure energy lying in spheres, they are nonetheless quite powerful, able to use their mental abilities to reach out to the Enterprise.
Sargon begs the crew to allow them to use their bodies to create android bodies so they may live among them and help them with their advanced technology. But will they be too tempted by having flesh bodies and will they give them back to Kirk, Spock, and Dr Anne Mulhall?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk makes the speech that I use to title his section. It’s really great, but in a ho-hum episode. I’m giving an extra star just for how good it is and how well Shatner delivers it.
Other than that, Kirk doesn’t do much in this episode as he has Sargon taking over his body for most of it.
Logical
Spock is quite fascinated by Sargon and his abilities. He gives his body over to Henoch where he smiles, makes a mild pass at Chapel, leans against doorways a lot, and is just obviously evil.
Spock will share a brain with an Enterprise medical professional for the first time. It won’t be the last.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones is pretty wary of doing all this and turns out to be at least partly right.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu is back, tracking Sargon’s signal and doing his pilot thing.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is absent this time around.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura does a good job tracking the signal, even though it’s not exactly a transmission. She also gets a hard cut to screaming thanks to Henoch making an example of her.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty is not sure about any of this as far as letting the command crew loan their bodies out but really gets on board when he has a chance to find out about engines the size of walnuts.
Canon Maker
Class M planets are identified for the first time. Kirk correctly identifies it as “Earth like.”
Canon Breaker
BUT it should not have read as a Class-M since the atmosphere was burnt away and the planet was dead. Maybe a former class-M but no longer. Not sure how that is classified but usually something like Mars would not be considered Class-M.
Kirk mentions that we survived our nuclear age, giving the impression that we avoided nuclear war. However that will turn out to not be true as we did have a big war in 2053 which ended in a Nuclear holocaust. Perhaps he really meant “survive” in the literal sense.
Mulhall is an astro-biologist, I would’ve thought she would’ve been a blue-skirt. However maybe in order to do her work on the Enterprise, she needed to take a position in operations.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
Kirk dies! Sort of? Well his body does. In any case, he gets better.
Technobabble
We establish the transporter cannot beam through that much solid rock without Sargon’s assistance. This will pretty much remain consistent throughout Trek.
In Wrath Of Khan, they do beam into the planet but the coordinates are only referred to as “deep inside Regulus” and it’s really not clear how deep. Here it’s 150 miles down so I would guess less.
I Know That Guy:
Sargon is voiced by none other than James Doohan. Doohan gets a lot flak for his Scottish accent, something I always felt was a bit unfair. Doohan was able to a lot of voices and he is unrecognizable as Sargon. So let’s give the man his due.
But the big guest star is Diana Muldaur as Dr. Ann Mulhall. She would return to Trek in the third season episode Is There No Truth in Beauty? Of course she’s most known to Trek fans as Doctor Kate Pulaski to replace Gates McFadden for season 2.
It didn’t take, but I don’t think through any fault of hers, it was just a different dynamic in that show. Here it’s clear she used to be quite the looker. She also brings a bit of elegance to play Thalassa.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Return To Tomorrow is an average episode. It has some interesting ideas but the nature of if means the main characters mostly get sidelined for half the episode. So it’s hard to get as invested as you’d like as it’s obvious everything will return to status-quo, even in 1968.
One the one hand, the mission statement of the show is to seek out new lifeforms and this certainly fits the bill. McCoy dismissively calling Sargon “an alien” seems really out of step with the whole idea of the show. After all Spock is standing right there.
I know its pretty in line with McCoy as a character but it does feel a little out of step with the whole idea of the show, and this episode in particular.
McCoy’s fears are not unreasonable though, as Henoch showed us. He immediately tries to kill Sargon and steal Spock’s body without even a hint of soul searching. That really made him uninteresting, no matter how much Nimoy gives him some personality.
The conference on making the decision on how to move forward with this results in Kirk’s “risk” speech and quite frankly it’s fantastic. Shatner does a great job and there’s no hint of silliness. He leans into it and damn if I wouldn’t follow Kirk into hell too.
Then the rest of the episode happens and Kirk is pretty much sidelined the rest of the episode, along with Spock and Mulhall. It’s hard to get too invested in their characters as you are simply wanting for Kirk and Spock to be themselves again. Mulhall is even worse off as we only meet her in this episode.
This would’ve been better if they used Chapel or Uhura. Mind you, Muldaur does a great job playing both parts but it loses gravitas using a guest star.
Overall, I can’t find anything particularly wrong with this episode but after it’s all said and done, what changed? Were they at least able to get any information from this civilization? Did Sargon and Thalasa and Henoch simply die or something else?
Well this is one thing wrong, it’s established the consciousnesses switch and the receptacles keep their conscious. But then Sargon can be in the ship and Spock can be in with Chapel.
Then finally for one last moment, Sargon and Thalassa take over Kirk and Mulhall for a moment to have a good-bye. Where the hell did Kirk and Mulhall go? As it went on the rules of storing people went out the window.
I suppose the idea is that sometimes a civilization stays dead and you can’t go home again but really they didn’t dig into those ideas very well. Too bad, I think there’s something there. “Don’t do what we did and preserve your civilization, we realize now our time is past.” Something like that but it didn’t come across very well.
I suppose I really did like the set up and the acting is pretty darn good for all three playing two different characters. It keeps you engaged but you just feel at the end, you end up thinking “was that it?”
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