City on the Edge of...uh oh

[EnsignHarper]

One has to assume that this 'menomic memory circuit' Spock is talking about would be like a flash card reader today. Either that it is just his version of a joke.....

There never is any exact amount of time given as far as how long before McCoy arrives that K&S get there, but considering Spock has time to build his extracting circuit, watch it burn, and then rebuild it, one HAS to assume they were there a month at least. This would lend credence to the idea that Kirk has time to really fall for Edith. And Edith actually WOULD be a perfect woman for Kirk: intelligent....imaginative...strong moral base...a leader...in fact, in many ways, a female James T Kirk.

Another interesting thing is that somehow the tricorder somehow picked up fragments of BOTH time streams - another quirk of the Guardian? Or perhaps when McCoy broke the 'current' time line, both times lines existed for that nanosecond. Another thing to quibble about!

 

[Christopher]

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....

In other words, they handled Ellison's script exactly like every freelance script is treated by every television show. It's the nature of the beast that it's a collaborative process. If you're contributing to a series created by someone else, it should go without saying that they have the final say in keeping it consistent with their continuity and characterizations. And if you're writing for television, it should doubly go without saying that it has to be affordable and logistically achievable. And if the freelancer is unable to meet those requirements in a timely fashion, then the only options are to have a staffer rewrite it or to cancel it altogether.

And the producers of TOS waited a remarkably long time before taking over the rewriting process. They were incredibly patient with Ellison, bending over backward on his behalf because he was such a big deal. It was only when he consistently failed to turn his brilliant, insightful story into a filmable Star Trek episode that they did what they would've done months earlier if it had been any other writer and did the revisions themselves. Yet nonetheless they were generous enough to grant Ellison 100 percent of the credit and thus 100 percent of the money for the episode.

So they did nothing that any experienced television writer wouldn't take for granted as normal and reasonable practice, and indeed they were exceptionally obliging toward Ellison, and his response to that has been to throw a 40-year-long temper tantrum and scream incessantly about how horribly he was treated. Which is truly, deeply pathetic. Perhaps no one in the history of science fiction has had a greater need or a greater inability to get the hell over himself.

Particularly since the Roddenberry/Fontana version of the story is a stronger episode. The person lost in time is a main character, someone we and the heroes are invested in finding and saving, rather than some guest star of the week. And the final decision to save Edith is made by Kirk rather than Spock, making it far more wrenching and dramatic. Ellison's version may have had cooler ideas, but the final version had stronger character drama.

Another interesting thing is that somehow the tricorder somehow picked up fragments of BOTH time streams - another quirk of the Guardian? Or perhaps when McCoy broke the 'current' time line, both times lines existed for that nanosecond. Another thing to quibble about!

Spock was scanning the Guardian's playback of the original history just before McCoy jumped; he then took a second scan of the altered history in order to compute the right date. Given that the playback was accelerated to an immense degree, there would've probably been enough "blur" at the moment of McCoy's entry into the Guardian to allow Spock to extract information from a certain length of time after the moment of historical divergence.

 

[A beaker full of death]

This is the Star Trek IV loophole. Anyone can come up with a reason why it wouldn't work, a la Zarabeth. What's important is that for the story to work dramatically, keeler had to die. So she did.

 

[Maurice]

^^^That Ellison "failed" to deliver a filmable script is the party line, but not necessarily the truth. We've hashed this over repeatedly in various threads on this episode. Until someone actually sees what Ellison's last submitted draft looks like, there's no way to ascertain the veracity of this statement.

 

[Trevacious]

Edith's death made the newspapers as well. That little detail may well be just as important as her living on to found a peace movement in the other sequence of events. If they just swept her away into the future, there would be no obituary, just an unsolved missing person case -- which might again domino into bad news in the 23rd century.

 

[Christopher]

^^^That Ellison "failed" to deliver a filmable script is the party line, but not necessarily the truth. We've hashed this over repeatedly in various threads on this episode. Until someone actually sees what Ellison's last submitted draft looks like, there's no way to ascertain the veracity of this statement.

Oh, come on, it's not an insult or a personal attack. Only Ellison's ego made him twist it into that. Prose and television are very different media, and few authors are able to master both. If anything, it's a testament to Ellison's wild, epic imagination that he was unable to scale his vision down to a modest enough level to be filmable on a 1967 Desilu budget. Heck, at least he got his story filmed in some form. A. E. van Vogt was hired to write a TOS episode, but he was completely unable to produce something filmable, because prose and script forms are very different disciplines, the latter being subject to far tighter strictures that can be difficult to adjust to.

Bottom line, there's no controversy here except in Ellison's ego-fueled imagination. Nothing happened to him that isn't entirely routine and normal in a collaborative industry like television. Honestly, it's his own fault. If he didn't want his precious words altered, why the hell did he agree to participate in a collaborative process in the first place?! Anyone else who writes for television knows going in that their words will be rewritten. That's just the way it works. If you aren't willing too accept that, then don't write for television in the first damn place! Ellison's reaction here is like that of someone who's invited to a steak dinner, who accepts the invitation with the full knowledge that it's a steak dinner, who participates in the cooking of the meat, and then spends the rest of his life damning his hosts for not giving him the vegetarian meal he was expecting. It's just plain hypocritical.

 

[EnsignHarper]

How about the time travel aspect of COTEOF? Remember, the very first thing the Guardian intones after Kirk, Spock and McCoy return is : "ALL IS AS IT WAS", which means.....The 'current' TOS timeline could not have existed in its current state UNTIL the entire events of COTEOF happen!! Predestination? Luck? Or is the Guardian more than a gateway? Perhaps it is LITERALLY the Guardian of all timelines....with a vested interest in maintaining a relatively 'stable' timeline. Or perhaps time itself helps heal itself. At least in the Trek universe it does!

Example: "Yesterdays Enterprise" form TNG What if the incursion into the future of the Enterprise C was NOT a mistake - but a necessary part of time? By some dumb luck, the E-C ends up right where the only ship with a being who can sense something is wrong happens to be? If the E-C just blown up in battle, would that have been enough to impress the Klingons? Or would it fighting longer and harder for those (as Tasha says) extra five/ten minutes REALLY impressed the Klingons?

Remember the exchange at the end of Assignment Earth, where Gary Seven comments to K/S how 'despite your interference....etc', to which Spock quietly notes to him that events happened EXACTLY LIKE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO.

One suspects that in COTEOF, the Guardian is manipulating things all along - down to the 'time rings' luring the Enterprise to the planet. It knows PRECISELY what needs to be done to maintain the 'present' timeline - down to causing Sulu's console to overload JUST enough.....

 

[Christopher]

^Huh? If the Enterprise hadn't been there, McCoy wouldn't have gone back and Edith would've been killed as the original history dictated. The events of "City" involved the original timeline being thrown off track and then restored to what it was "supposed" to be. Unless you're suggesting that Rodent the bum was destined to create the Mirror Universe or something if he hadn't been phasered out of existence, then there's no reason why the events of this episode would've been necessary to bring about the TOS timeline.

"All is as it was" does not mean "This is the way it was supposed to happen." It means "Things are back to the way they were in the first place, before your drugged-up doctor screwed up the timeline."

 

[FormerLurker]

Having read Harlan Ellison's script, as it exists in the book he released with his "post GR's death" rant in front of it(which I won't read, as the parts of it I have read are egregiously self-serving), I must observe that as a script it makes an excellent novella or short story. Dorothy Fontana in an afterword stated that as an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits it would have been made pretty much unaltered, and I agree. Unfortunately for HE, that means his captain would ultimately have been perceived as weak for the pansy way he failed to stop the bad guy from doing the good deed. There's a lot of emotion and pathos to the climax of the script that doesn't come across because it's all in the descriptions of action, and not in the dialog.

And it would have been atrociously expensive, much more so than the version we got.

And finally, HE still today, long after GR's death, complains about GR saying he had Scotty dealing drugs on the Enterprise. While explicitly literally true, I would be willing to believe GR knew someone at NBC would have insisted the guest bad guy, Beckwith, be replaced with Scotty so the network could cut their budget, and GR simply went that next step without explanation when asked about it.

 

[scotpens]

“All is as it was” does not mean “This is the way it was supposed to happen.” It means “Things are back to the way they were in the first place, before your drugged-up doctor screwed up the timeline.”

Right. A predestination paradox is an altogether different kettle of fish. Like when Spock has to go back in time to save his younger self in the TAS episode “Yesteryear.”

 

[jtkirk]

why not sit her down and tell her everything, find McCoy and go home with Edith in tow?

Sitting her down & telling her everything may have fixed things, but who is to say that her remaining alive wouldn't alter the future in some other significant way? Taking her back with them through the guardian? I don't see the harm since Kirk did it later with that other chick from Star Trek IV.

 

[Timo]

...But really, why should our heroes be taking chances? They are on a quest here, a quest to restore themselves and their own world into existing again. Everybody they interact with in the past is dead already, and probably less than dust. If Spock came up with the idea that a city had to be nuked in order to restore the timeline, would our heroes really hesitate?

They would not. After all, they did exactly that. Twice over, to be sure.

Remember that these guys here are trying to get WWII started. They do their very best to kill at least 50 million people, probably more, and to plunge the planet into more or less global misery for a decade or three. I don't think they would really seriously consider being excessively nice to a single woman or man. Kirk in his weaker moments, yes. For a few seconds at a time, yes. But not when he stopped to think it through. They were on a mission of mass murder, and they better accept the dirtier parts of it or they would be on a mission of hypocritical mass murder.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kibbin]

I think somebody has already mentioned up thread that maybe Edith had to die. Maybe if she had simply vanished it would have been a missing person case, perhaps foul play would have been suspected by her opposition, perhaps her opposition would have won over a few voters with a touching piece at her funeral. Maybe, just maybe Edith had to die.

 

[Timo]

Our heroes wouldn't know. And they probably shouldn't care. But the thing is, they came up with the idea of killing Keeler all by themselves, without explicit prodding from the Guardian. They could never have been sure that this idea was correct, that it would restore the future. It was just their best guess. Just as possibly, it could have been that they needed to save the life of that bum, or turn a soup plate thirty degrees clockwise in Keeler's kitchen where it has been fatefully misplaced because she was feeding McCoy who shouldn't have been there.

I could easily understand our heroes killing Keeler if they were convinced this was the right thing to do - if this were the quest they had been sent on by the Guardian. But I could also understand them rebelling against the Guardian in such a situation. They'd probably be less likely to rebel against themselves... If they were the ones to come up with the idea of killing Keeler, I guess they'd be more likely to find excuses to proceed with the action (or inaction).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kibbin]

IMO, like youy said about the soup dish, it's all about the butterfly paradox and thus Kirk and Spock have to set everything back that McCoy messed up. This means that Edith died and must die again. They don't know if it's her not being there or her funeral that will set things on the right track, hell maybe her hearse holding up traffic for thouse few seconds which is all that mattered to the timeline. Fact is Kirk and Spock knew that had a timelimit to get things back to normal and didn't have time to work out all the ins and outs.

 

[Timo]

But that logic doesn't really hold as such: our heroes did not restore everything. They merely made sure that Keeler died, but they didn't remove butterfly effects. They didn't turn that plate, they didn't even save the bum.

Killing Keeler thus cannot be justified by saying that it would remove the influence our heroes had on the past. Rather, it has to be justified by saying that it negates the one bit of significant influence they had, while leaving other bits as is. Yet how can they know that Keeler's life is more important than that of the bum? By reading a single newspaper. Not even an entire newspaper at that, but an obituary page.

There really seem to be just three basic possibilities here:

1) Keeler's life or death was important, and our heroes found out about this because the Guardian deliberately showed them the obituary - Spock could never have found it or divined its significance unless assisted by a higher force.

2) Keeler's life or death was meaningless, and our heroes restored the future on random, perhaps simply by getting McCoy back.

3) Keeler's life or death was meaningless, and our heroes restored the future by doing the Guardian's bidding. It was all an elaborate play staged by the Guardian, without meaningful elements of causality.

All of these sort of blend together in the end. Without the Guardian guiding our heroes somehow, history could never have been restored. Whether the Guardian helped them play the odds and navigate the very real causality jungle, or merely toyed with them in some sort of a fantasy world of its own devising... Now that's ultimately impossible to tell.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kibbin]

It's possible that those other things simply did not have any meaningful effect, every butterfly flap does not a hurricane produce.
The guardian was showing them significant portions of Earth's history, it is at that moment that McCoy went through, thus getting caught up in one of those significant moments. Edith's life was deemed significant and was integral to the timeline as we and our heroes know it, we had just never heard of her before now because it is only her absence that makes her life significant. If you see what I mean.
As I said before, our heroes are against the clock and know that McCoy is going to do something to mess up time. They look at the significant stuff the Guardian was showing them and put the two together. Of course there is still an element of luck and playing the odds to it, but it is all they have to go on. The fact that the guardian, while showing them what it deemed important moments in history showed them that paper, makes them assume that is one of the important things that is soon to happen. It never showed them the bum or the plate, because in the grand scheme of things those are trivial details that have no meaningful impact upon history.

(Please note I haven't seen the episode in a while, so I could be remembering it wrong)

 

[scotpens]

. . . Remember that these guys here are trying to get WWII started. They do their very best to kill at least 50 million people, probably more, and to plunge the planet into more or less global misery for a decade or three. I don't think they would really seriously consider being excessively nice to a single woman or man. Kirk in his weaker moments, yes. For a few seconds at a time, yes. But not when he stopped to think it through. They were on a mission of mass murder, and they better accept the dirtier parts of it or they would be on a mission of hypocritical mass murder.

They were on a mission to prevent Nazi Germany and the Axis powers from conquering the world. Calling it “a mission of mass murder” is a bit harsh, especially when you consider the alternative.

Our heroes wouldn't know. And they probably shouldn't care. But the thing is, they came up with the idea of killing Keeler all by themselves, without explicit prodding from the Guardian. They could never have been sure that this idea was correct, that it would restore the future. It was just their best guess.

It was way more than a “guess.” Kirk and Spock knew exactly what alternate history would take place if Edith didn't die.

SPOCK: . . . Captain, you may find this a bit distressing.
KIRK: Let's see what you have.
SPOCK: I've slowed down the recording we made from the time vortex.
KIRK: February 23rd, 1936. Six years from now.
(reading below the headline FDR CONFERS WITH SLUM AREA 'ANGEL')
The President and Edith Keeler conferred for some time today --
(Then the whole thing goes up in flames.)
KIRK: How bad?
SPOCK: Bad enough.
KIRK: The President and Edith Keeler.
SPOCK: It would seem unlikely, Jim. A few moments ago, I read a 1930 newspaper article.
KIRK: We know her future. Within six years from now, she'll become very important. Nationally famous.
SPOCK: Or Captain, Edith Keeler will die this year. I saw her obituary. Some sort of traffic accident.
KIRK: You must be mistaken. They both can't be true.​

Later, after Spock has repaired the, uh, thing:

SPOCK: This is how history went after McCoy changed it. Here, in the late 1930s. A growing pacifist movement whose influence delayed the United States’ entry into the Second World War. While peace negotiations dragged on, Germany had time to complete its heavy-water experiments.
KIRK: Germany. Fascism. Hitler. They won the Second World War.
SPOCK: Because all this lets them develop the A-bomb first. There's no mistake, Captain. Let me run it again. Edith Keeler. Founder of the peace movement.
KIRK: But she was right. Peace was the way.
SPOCK: She was right, but at the wrong time. With the A-bomb, and with their V2 rockets to carry them, Germany captured the world.
KIRK: No.
SPOCK: And all this because McCoy came back and somehow kept her from dying in a street accident as she was meant to.​

Never mind that America would have entered the war regardless because of a certain event in December 1941.

 

[Timo]

They were on a mission to prevent Nazi Germany and the Axis powers from conquering the world. Calling it “a mission of mass murder” is a bit harsh, especially when you consider the alternative.

Well, hardly. They didn't just want Germany stopped, they wanted WWII to happen. Had they really wanted to save 20th century lives, they could have either prevented WWII altogether or then arranged so that Germany was soundly defeated in, say, 1937 already - a militarily utterly trivial task once any of the surrounding nations set their hearts and minds to it. But that would probably have prevented the UFP from ever happening, and of course would have led into an unknown future; perhaps the concentration camps would have been set up in France, just before Stalin conquered Europe?

Really, it's rather horrible bias to think that the way WWII happened would somehow be preferable to any of the alternatives. Everything about that war was totally fucked up. Everything would have been better if happening the exact opposite way, sometimes drastically so. Even a different set of victors might have been vastly better than what we really got. Our heroes had no valid reason to hope for "our" version of WWII other than the single, selfish one: that this version would be necessary for bringing about their version of the 23rd century.

Kirk and Spock knew exactly what alternate history would take place if Edith didn't die.

But they had no idea what would happen if she did die. Again, they had only basically read a single newspaper and seen a changed world; what they knew for absolute certain was that they had the power to change history - to the worse, perhaps to the better - and that they were doing it already, without realizing what exactly they were doing.

A thousand other alterations in this timeline would no doubt have been equally important, a hundred others equally dependent on what happened to a single person at a single moment of time. That our heroes got a fix idée about Keeler specifically must have been the doing of the Guardian, or then an almost astronomical coincidence. Sure, she was the only major alteration related to their current Chicago where- and whenabouts, but that would not have been detectable by going through zillions of newspapers. It had to somehow be divined first, after which one could see the logical connection.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kkozoriz1]

Never mind that America would have entered the war regardless because of a certain event in December 1941.

Perhaps Edith's influence caused America to concentrate more on Japan that Germany.