Trivia / Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E15 "Yesterday's Enterprise"

• Author's Saving Throw: The writing team despised Tasha Yar's arbitrary death and used this story as an excuse to give her a better sendoff.
  Ron Moore: We brought Denise back to kill off Tasha Yar a second time. It was a great opportunity to send the character off in a big heroic sacrifice because nobody was really happy with the way she left the series in the first season. Nobody on the show really liked it, the fans didn't like it, I'm not sure even she really liked it. So "Yesterday's Enterprise" was a chance to kill her right.
• Blooper: The final scene set in the "correct" universe features Geordi wearing the alternate-timeline-style uniform. His black cuffs are prominently shown as he picks up his beverage.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • Denise Crosby cited this as her favourite episode, commenting, "It was a fantastic script and it really took me by surprise and I didn't see it coming!"
  • Rick Berman cites this episode along with "The Measure of a Man" as one of his favorites.
  • Michael Piller remarked:
    That was a classic episode. I never met Denise Crosby in person, but I am sure an admirer. She did a great job for us. That's just about as neat a show as we could do. It was as entertaining and unique a time travel show as you'll ever see. I don't know that there was a better episode third season. Hell, Picard sends 500 [sic] people back to their death on the word of the bartender. Come on, that's hard. I was very happy with it and, frankly, I give the credit to the director and the cast and the people who post-produced it. The script was not one of the best scripts we wrote that season. Conceptually, it was marvelous, coming out of the heads of some people here... There are little holes in the episode that we couldn't fix. It was such a complicated and fascinating premise, but it was ultimately the character material that really made everybody proud.
  • Composer Dennis McCarthy cited the score for this episode as his favorite score. Much of the score was performed by a contemporary orchestra with electronics sparingly used to speak for the time vortex.
• Promoted Fanboy: Both Christopher McDonald and Tricia O'Neil were Star Trek fans before appearing in this episode.
• Prop Recycling: The uniforms used by the crew of the Enterprise-C were those employed by the original series movies, sans the collared undershirts and the Starfleet insignia belts. This version of the uniform would be reused with Jack Crusher in "Family". The insignia pins now doubled as combadges, and the type 2 phaser from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was used as the standard sidearm.
• What Could Have Been:
  • This was originally conceived as two separate episodes, one fittingly enough also titled "Yesterday's Enterprise" and the other unnamed. In the original "Yesterday's Enterprise," the Enterprise-C also accidentally comes forward in time. However it causes no changes in the timeline when discovered by the Enterprise-D, and the entire episode would have centered around Picard having to make a decision to send it back and preserve the timeline, where they would lose a hopeless battle, or risk altering time by keeping them in the present. The other episode would have involved Sarek and a group of Vulcans revisiting the Guardian of Forever to go back to Vulcan pre-history. They would have fucked up the timeline and accidentally killed Surak, creating a timeline where a violent Vulcan race had arisen. They would have eventually discovered and merged with the Romulans to form a Vulcan-Romulan Empire and would have rampaged across the galaxy, exterminating the Klingons and fighting the Federation (who formed without them) in a bitter war the Federation was losing. The episode would have even featured the alternate-universe Vulcans planning to use the Guardian of Forever to alter Earth's history and prevent the Federation from ever forming, which sounds a lot like Star Trek: First Contact (which even the writers Trent Christopher Ganin and Eric A. Stillwell have pointed out). Sarek would remain unaffected, be captured by the Enterprise-D, and after a mind meld with Picard, be allowed to return through the Guardian of Forever and take the place of Surak to preserve the timeline. Both episode pitches were received well, but Michael Piller suggested merging the ideas together, and Ronald D. Moore ended up changing the Vulcans into Klingons and using the episode to explain how the Klingons and the Federation became allies (which funnily enough is contradicted a year later with the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which eventually had to be reconciled with this episode).
  • Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D Moore wanted to feature more gruesome deaths for several characters, including Data being electrocuted and having Wesley graphically decapitated by debris! Riker's on-screen death was also supposed to be more gruesome, with his throat slit and spurting blood. To make things even darker, the Klingon commanding the ships doing all this damage would have been Worf! So he would have been brutally murdering his friends. Moore and Behr were disappointed this wasn't filmed, which they claim was because the producers didn't want to depress audiences, though it was also likely cut due to the graphic nature of the violence.
  • The main reason that Worf doesn't appear in the bad timeline was that the producers were afraid that it would ruin the tone of the scene, by having the audience amused by the cameo rather than stricken by the irony of the crew being slaughtered by their would-be friend.
  • The Enterprise-C is based on a model originally conceived as a regular "guest" Starfleet ship type that had been planned to be made for the pilot. It was also somewhat simplified from the original design for cost reasons, originally being sleeker.

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