City on the Edge of...uh oh

From a discussion about Edith Keeler in another thread, I think I just accidentally demolished one of Star Trek's best episodes, at least in my own mind.

I love the tragic ending of this episode, and we all know that for the sake of the future, Edith Keeler had to die, so that she would not have been present to have such a detrimental effect on history.

But wouldn't her absence from the 1930's have served as well as her death?

In other words, once Spock had determined Edith's effect on history, and once Edith had displayed an optimistic and intuitive sense of how man would go to the stars, why not sit her down and tell her everything, find McCoy and go home with Edith in tow? "Excuse me, Guardian, transportation for four people, please. "

I know, it would have destroyed a beautiful and bitter ending and given Kirk a permanent love interest from week to week. But now it's always going to bother me that Kirk didn't figure this out. Dammit.

 

You're not the first person to think of this. But the Guardian's abilities are not made clear in the episode, and we don't know if it can pull items from other times or merely retrieve ones it has sent back.

It should be noted that in Ellison's original script the exact manner of her death and its repercussions weren't made plain. Spock merely hypothesized on how she might change history, but he didn't actually know. She had to die because there was no way to know how her living would affect history. That Spock could effectively read the newspaper (via tricorder) is just one instance of how the aired episode was dumbed down.

 

Yeah, Spock used 1930's technology to tie somehow into the ship's computer, right? Except there was no ship! That's an impressive bit of technological savvy!

I didn't think I had broken some new ground, by the way. The episode was broadcast before I was even born, and is part of an endlessly pored over cultural phenomenon. I was only referring to my own contemplation of the episode.

 

Other way around. What he needed was to analyze his tricorder scans of the Guardian's historical playbacks, in order to extract the relevant information he needed from the mass of data he'd recorded.

So without the ship's computers to "unlock" that buried information, he needed to construct a primitive equivalent that would allow him to access and interpret the tricorder data in the same way that the ship's computers would, though with cruder results.

 

You have a very good point but I guess at the end of the day it comes down to effective story-telling in the sense that having them just take Edith would've cheapened the story.
Kind of like the idea of terminators just killing Sarah Connor when she was a baby. It makes more sense but wouldn't be as satisfying.

 

Spock seemed to be using 1930s tech to read the contents of his own tricorder. Probably a trivially easy task in the 23rd century - but in the 20th, the blasted thing might have gotten stuck in some annoying "Wireless Network Not Found" loop that could only be solved by replacing the left cursor key with a roomful of vacuum tubes...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Part of Kirk's fascination with Edith could well have been the result of the unusual circumstances. We can often love something deep inside we know we can never have. And finding someone like her in the midst of the dire situation they were in could also fuel the fascination.

Often we can't help the way we feel, but ideally Kirk should have kept her at arms length for her and his own good. But he is human and humans often don't do the ideal thing.

But even if he had brought her forward in time who is to say it would have worked out? She would have been totally out of her element with little to no familiar frame of reference. And what of her friends and family even though we never saw them? She'd lose them all. And then Edith would likely run smack into Kirk's first real love: the Enterprise and his career. He certainly couldn't drag her all over the galaxy with him.

 

Agree that it wouldn't have had a tenth of the resonance it has if she were not killed (and killed by Kirk's own omission at that).

I always accepted the Guardian's own word that if they were successful, all would be as it was, and assumed that as soon as the deed was done, they all were summarily ejected back onto the planet where their friends were waiting. In other words, for them to succeed at all, Edith must remain dead in the 1930s and the three of them must be back on the Guardian planet; no other options.

In this episode, it wasn't really like other time travels in TOS where they were technologically in charge of the event. They were at the mercy of the Guardian.

Thinking about it this way, I just realized maybe the dead bum was put back the way he was also before McCoy's phaser killed him. Never thought of that before, but I like it. I'm going to believe that from now on. I like having that loose thread tied off.

 

It wouldn't have.

 

Well she had to die so she could ascend to the Q continuum and appear on Dynasty

 

Spock's construction of a primitive computer using “stone knives and bearskins” provides some humor and delays Kirk's finding out about Edith's impending death and what it means to future history, giving him time to fall in love with her. The inconsistency is that, in every other episode in which a tricorder was used, it was established as a stand-alone device, capable of analyzing, recording, and displaying data without having to be connected to the ship's computers or anything else.

This minor plot hole could have been fixed with a single line of dialogue. All Spock had to say was, “Unfortunately, my tricorder's playback circuits were fried by the mumbo-jumbo energy field when we passed through the giant time bagel.”

 

I wonder that if Edith was brought forward if that would satisfy the historical part of the timeline since there were newspaper reports of her death. If she went missing, it would've spawned a different timeline outcome, IMHO.

 

Watch this episode today with my freind wot a great episode I told him it's one of the best of the TOS series he agrees and he could not beleave that Joan Collins was in it.

You can't knock this episode it got some great scenes and moments for all the crew especially kirk Spock and McCoy. My mate and I still find it funny when McCoy is goin crazy love wot he shouts ASSASSINS COSSACKS MURDERS !!!!! lol lol

 

It's not really a plot hole. You have to keep in mind that Spock's tricorder was recording the entire history of the planet Earth at greatly accelerated speed. That would be an incredibly dense flood of information. Extracting specific bits of data from that noise would be like trying to reconstruct a single conversation from an audio recording of Grand Central Station at rush hour, although about a gajillion times more difficult. You'd need tons of computing power to perform that kind of analysis, so it's perfectly reasonable that a tricorder couldn't do it by itself. The part that's hard to believe, considering, is that a makeshift computer built with 1930s electronic parts could have anywhere near the number-crunching power to pull it off.

 

It was a "mnemonic memory circuit," wasn't it? My guess would be it didn't have a processor at all. I'd say what Spock needed to do was something like defragmenting or repairing a harddrive- you can't do it if the computer's OS is running from it, you have to start up from a CD or external volume. He constructed the equivalent of a flash drive, just enough to hold a chunk of data that could then be processed by the tricorder.

 

It seems unlikely that the Guardian would really be putting out that much information. After all, we pretty much see what there is to be seen: several seconds of continuous visual material from one millennium, then several seconds from another... And a finite length for the loop that runs at least thrice while our heroes watch.

Possibly the Guardian was toying with our heroes, showing them exactly those bits of information that would make them complete that week's task on Big Brother Planet. Alternately, the Guardian was showing a limited number of time slots without design, evil or otherwise - and logically, McCoy's disruptive trip to the past and Spock's observation of the past both exploited such an existing slot, in this case a narrow window into the 1930s.

I'd thus think the tricorder could easily have recorded everything the Guardian showed, which wasn't much. It just happened that the handheld device wasn't equipped with some function that Spock needed and that was of almost trivial significance in general. Say, the ability to zoom and slow-forward at the same time. In the 23rd century, that was supposed to only be done after the material was downloaded onto a bigger computer and viewed through a suitably large desktop terminal viewer, so some teeny weeny bit of code was left out from the tricorder program... And the only way to insert it was by emulating something crucial (in this case, a mnemonic memory circuit) with 20th century technology.

What is a "mnemonic memory circuit"? Literally, as per the definition of "mnemonic", it probably should be a circuit that aids in memorizing or in handling memories. Not a circuit that would actually contain memories, so the vacuum tubes wouldn't have to store the entire history of Earth even if the Guardian had showed that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Actually the dialogue's a bit contradictory; first he said he was trying to "reach the first mnemonic memory circuits" (presumably meaning those within the tricorder), then he said he was trying to build one.

Uhh... yeah. That... thing.

 

OK....lets try to rehash this whole thing in less than a million words - you could write a book on it - and has been, so lets hit the highlights:


From the beginning of ST, Roddenberry made a point of trying to get real SF writers to do episodes of his baby. What he found out, was that, outside of a few (Bixby, Bloch, and perhaps Sturgeon), very few SF writers had little experience or knowledge of how to write for an episodic TV show - most had their experience with anthology shows like Outer Limits and TZ.

Getting Ellison for Trek was a real coup for Roddenberry, as he was to SF writing in the 60s, what The Beatles were to rock music - the guy who took it in new and very dangerous directions. Unfortunately, in getting Harlan Ellison, Roddenberry didn't realize he was getting....Harlan Ellison, of the big ego, stubbornness, and, again, inexperience in writing episodic TV. As such, while his initial COTEOF scripts WERE exciting.....dangerous....innovative...dramatic....and also almost totally undoable as an EPISODE of Star Trek. so, eventually, to make sure that the story fit more in to the series premise (as dictated by Roddenberry), to keep it RELATIVELY within a budget (even though it ended up the single most expensive TOS episode ever), Roddenberry HAD to take the script away from Ellison, and have, mostly Dorothy Fontana, somebody rewrite it to fit the format and available money.....to be continued....

 

Ellison might have screamed about it, but Gene R was doing what he thought best for HIS show.

Okay lets hit the continuity...story and tech issues...


This episode establishes, more or less, the idea that the Guardian is the nexus of some sort of (although the term is never used) time nexus. Apparently, if you are at the center of this nexus, i.e., at the Guardian itself, and it is running its spool of history, if someone enters the Guardian, and u are not there with them, history WILL be changed, and what ever decks of cards fall due to that, the result will be changed history. The is followed VERY faithfully in both TAS episode, Yesteryears and Peter David's novel, Imzadi. So...lets go to Spock's recording of the Guardians presentation. Spock himself remarks that he is 'a fool' for missing recording so much of the display. So when McCoy enters the vortex itself, the last thing Spock is recording is probably McCoy saving Edith's life, and again, probably the next 10 years of the altered history. He ALSO in likelihood recorded the fragment of the unaltered history - i.e., Edith's death in the street accident. - the Guardian apparently works on many levels, too. So when K&S get to 193x New York, all Spock really has to do is extract the last .1% of info he has 'locked in' his tricorder. Since in all likelihood his tricorder memory has been maxed out, he would definitely need a peripheral like the ship's computer to help sift through everything. more to follow...