"All Our Yesterdays" (season three, episode twenty-three; production code: 078; 14 March 1969): Wikipedia-link.
Commentary: "All Our Yesterdays" presents a unique take on time travel, one not repeated through the rest of the Star Trek franchise. The sun around which the M-class planet Sarpeidon orbits is about to go nova, which will destroy Sarpeidon. Sarpeidon lacks space travel; so, the humanoids there have escaped into their own planet's past using a time machine called the atavachron. "All Our Yesterdays" makes the claim that time travelers have to be biologically "prepared" to exist in another time period, a preparation not necessary in any other Star Trek story, plenty of which feature accidental time travel for which there was no preparation (e.g., "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" [season one, episode nineteen]). As a result of this modification, no Sarpeidonian can return to her original time frame; she would perish during the transition.
Additionally, time travelers are mysteriously conformed to the period to which they have traveled: Mr. Spock, five thouand years in the past in Sarpeidon's ice age, begins to revert to the violent emotionalism of pre-logical Vulcans, such as existed five thousand years ago, before Surak, before logic. This phenomenon is not observed in any other Star Trek time-travel story. It's an interesting reversal, Spock acting emotionally while McCoy embodies dispassionate reason, the mechanism by which that reversal is effected just doesn't make sense.
No mention is made of the potential for the insertion of millions of Sarpeidonians into Sarpeidon's history via the atavachron to alter that history in such a way, or in thousands or millions of ways, that the atavachron might never be invented, a common concern in other Star Trek time-travel stories (the aforementioned "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," or "The City on the Edge of Forever" [season one, episode twenty-eight]). In each of those episodes, the actions of a single individual out of his own time & the resulting presence or absence of a single individual from the subjective past has the potential to alter the whole of Earth's history. With millions of persons seeded throughout Sarpeidon's history, it is almost impossible to image that they wouldn't alter their own planet's history, very well significantly enough to prevent the atavachron's existance & thus create a temporal paradox. Not discussed at all.
Lastly, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, & Dr. McCoy beam into Sarpeidon's library & encounter the planet's last lingering denizen, the librarian, Mr. Atoz. Mr. Atoz presumes the trio—even the Vulcan Spock—are Sarpeidonians who have tarried & not yet selected to where in the past they wish the atavachron to transport them. Kirk, Spock, & McCoy never introduce themselves, never explain who they are to Atoz. It's very much out of character for our heroes.
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