Rewatching Star Trek TOS: “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”

I rewatched Star Trek: The Original Series S1E19 episode “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” recently, and something curious struck me. The Enterprise travels two centuries into the past—to the 1960s—but watching it in 2025, I felt the opposite. The fictional future of the Enterprise looked and felt more real and closer to our world than the so-called “present day” of the 1960s shown in the episode.

The contrast is fascinating. Inside the Enterprise, you see flat screens, voice-controlled computers, wireless communicators, and calm, purposeful officers working together. None of that feels like science fiction anymore. Today, we speak casually to our phones and smart speakers, ask AI to draft our emails, and video call across continents without thinking twice. The sleek hum of the ship’s bridge now feels like an early version of our own digital lives.

Then the episode cuts to the 1960s Earth scenes—rotary phones, bulky cameras, paper files, and chemical photo labs. The technology feels so alien that it might as well belong to another planet. Even the Air Force officers, puzzled and suspicious of the Enterprise crew, seem frozen in a mindset from a bygone world. Watching them side by side with Kirk and Spock, it’s the 23rd-century crew that appears more modern, more relatable.

This reversal is what makes rewatching classic Star Trek so interesting today. What was once a bold projection of the future now reads like a documentary of our present. Gene Roddenberry’s imagined world of cooperation, calm logic, and advanced tools feels aspirational still—but not unreachable. Meanwhile, the “real” 1960s, with its thick computers and Cold War paranoia, has aged into a kind of charming science fiction of its own.

Maybe that’s part of Star Trek’s enduring magic—it keeps catching up with us. Its future never really stays ahead for long.

Have you felt this shift while rewatching classic Star Trek or any older show—the imagined future feeling more familiar than the real past it was filmed in?

 Disclaimer: All screenshots from Star Trek: The Original Series used in this post are the property of Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios. They are reproduced here under fair use for the purposes of commentary, criticism, and review. This blog is a non-commercial, personal site with no intention of infringing upon any copyrights.