The starship Enterprise shows up at a planet about to be destroyed by a supernova in order to save its inhabitants. Problem is, everyone is already gone except for a librarian who apparently is in charge of facilitating everyone being saved. Now, he used the word “safe”, but it still brings to mind a certain picture-perfect heartbreaker episode of Doctor Who with David Tennant & Catherine Tate.
Truth is, everyone went to the library to research what period in their planet’s history in which they were most interested in living out the rest of their days. It’s a time-travel-capable library. Kirk gets into a fight, is nearly burned as a witch, and then has to do more fighting. Filler fluff, if you will.
What’s really interesting is Spock and McCoy getting trapped in the planet’s ice age, devoid of human life save for a single attractive woman who was sent back to this barren time as capital punishment for her having the wrong friends at the wrong time. McCoy flirts with her, but Spock is victor. Why?
Apparently using the library’s time-travel device without being properly prepared means you will revert physically and mentally to whatever your species was like all those years ago and the process will kill you. So, Spock — having traveled back 5000 years — starts to get emotional and willing to eat meat and fight with McCoy over a woman he can’t help but adore now that his feelings are all activated? and there is some suggestive lifting and kissing that goes along with that.
Unfortunately, they are forced to return to their own time where this woman has long since been dead. However, Spock refers to her as “dead and buried”. With no one to bury her — and 5000 years being too short a time for human life to suddenly rise up out of the primordial muck and create a time-travel library — does he know something we don’t? Is it possible Spock impregnated that woman and got the ball rolling on the birth of the planet’s civilization? Does he know that all of his progeny have lived and died full lives on a world he can never fully explore? For his short-term bride to be “dead and buried” the answer can only be yes.
Sonnet 41
Thrown out of place and out of time,
alone and without dignity,
for nearness to another’s crime
regardless of affinity,
who’d brave the wastes without dire need?
Who’d live to see such passion seed?
What hope is there that without sight
of one more dawn to follow night?
Your logic says all things must pass;
there is nought which springs eternal,
winter shall replace the vernal.
Yet, you see not how all things pass;
the birthing of a history,
near-boundless as a mystery.
All my suppositions hinging on a closed-loop theory of time, of course.