Jammer's Reviews

Commodore Robert April, the first captain of the Enterprise, facing mandatory retirement from his ambassador role at age 75, is aboard the Enterprise with his wife, Sarah, to be transported to an event in his honor. While observing a supernova, the Enterprise detects an alien ship traveling at extreme speed ("warp 36"), far beyond any known ship's capability, heading straight for the supernova. Hoping to save the ship from certain doom, the Enterprise locks on a tractor beam.

The ship's captain, named Karla Five, speaks an unknown language, but the universal translator deciphers the language and determines it's simply being spoken backward. By reversing the recording, Uhura is able to hear the captain's message, which tells the Enterprise her intended course is the supernova and they need to release the tractor beam. Furthermore, the Enterprise is being pulled into the supernova with her ship. The Enterprise releases the beam, but is carried into the supernova anyway. Instead of being incinerated, the Enterprise finds itself in an alternate universe where space is white, stars are black, and time runs backward instead of forward. And every control on the ship now has to be operated in reverse.

First things first: You have to set aside everything you know about science — even Trek science — to accept anything that happens in "The Counter-Clock Incident." To say this story takes great liberty with the rules of space and time is putting it mildly. (Even, say, the massive amount of time available to alter course after the release of the tractor beam — at double-digit warp, no less — makes no sense.) That being said, if you take the story on its own science-fantasy terms, this is actually the best, most fascinating, and most interesting sci-fi procedural in the entire run of TAS. This manages to do everything it needs to do to shepherd us through to a willful suspension of disbelief.

In this universe, people are born old, get younger as they (de)age, until they are babies at the end of their lives. The flower that Sarah was wearing — which was wilting and dying before traveling through the supernova/anomaly — is now coming back to life. Upon arriving at Karla Five's version of Earth, called Arret, the crew studies the situation in earnest and realizes the only way to return home is to find a spot where a supernova is occurring in both universes (backward in this universe, forward in ours) at the same point where they converge like a mirror, just as in the scenario that brought them here. In studying the galactic maps to find a proper alignment, they learn there are no coinciding supernovas in both universes at the same vertex, so the crew has to find a location where a supernova exists in our universe and then engineer one here.

There's only one other problem: Everyone is de-aging at an accelerated rate (and losing their knowledge as they get younger), and if they don't travel through the supernova in time they will all be children and incapable of running the ship (and then presumably cease to exist). And this is actually what starts happening, so it's up to April, the oldest person aboard, to finish the mission as everyone else turns into children around him. This story manages to be an allegory on the value of age and experience, on top of everything else.

Watching "The Counter-Clock Incident," I realized there was a certain brilliant purity to its backward logic and the simplistic way it presented itself, while casting aside all other questions. The scene where Karla Five introduces her father (a baby) and her son (an old man), is an example of demonstrating the backward passage of time through the decades using the simplest storytelling means possible — while at the same time sidestepping all the mind-bending complexities of what this would mean if you were to reason it all the way through (like where old people come from and whether babies die by shrinking down until they're a zygote that splits into a sperm and egg; at a certain point, "backward" doesn't really mean anything useful, because the rules of the universe wouldn't apply at any level).

Such questions are outside the scope of the story, of course, but by keeping such things so far out of mind, the story concentrates on what's here with a straightforward examination that doesn't waste a single minute. The way the characters figure things out and work the problem would be right at home in a TNG episode. And after becoming children, how is everyone restored? By the transporter, of course, which has a stored pattern of everyone as adults. (This naturally raises the question of why anything — including death — can't be cured by restoring a person's backup from the transporter, but let's not open that can of worms.)

The plot holes in this story are numerous and large if you look for them, but this story reminded me that we don't always need to look for them. On its own terms, this is a very well-told sci-fi yarn — urgent and involving in a way I wish more of TAS had been. Robert and Sarah April choose not to remain young — even though they could — because they've already lived a fulfilling life that they're satisfied with. It's a touching sentiment ... even though I'd take the rewind and try to live a fulfilling life all over again.

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