City on the Edge of...uh oh

[Timo]

Or made Japan forget all about attacking Pearl Harbor, because a pacifist US would have fit their plans much better than a bellicose US - as long as said US let Japan have the southwest Pacific and its resources to themselves.

I don't really see how the US staying out of the war would have had the effect suggested in the episode. Hitler wasn't likely to conquer England even if Churchill had less supplies flowing to the island, not before the madman would launch the campaign to conquer the USSR. And that campaign would be the end of Nazi Germany, again even without US aid to the Soviet Union. Atomic bombs riding on V-2 missiles would be of no use in Russia, where all targets would be either rural or out of range. Japan would stay out of the mess, because their test of strength against Stalin happened quite regardless of the US, and ended in them keeping their distance in 1939 already.

I mean, Europe would certainly look quite different if Stalin alone crushed Germany. But a scenario where the Nazis would prevail is not plausible as such, atomic bombs or no atomic bombs.

Perhaps Spock meant that Germany captured the western world (Europe and European Russia plus parts of Africa and South America, and with the fall of Great Britain "technically" also Canada but not in practice) for two months before falling to ruin?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

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

Yes, the first draft would have been more expensive, but so are a lot of first drafts. As I said, we've never seen the final version he submitted, so it's impossible to say how much that version would have cost.

A while back I did aroughbreakdown of Ellison's City 1st Draft, comparing it to the aired episode, and my homework indicates that the astronomically high costs touted for it are overinflated. When you look at the number of cast members, sets, costumes, etc., it's not on orders of magnitude bigger than what we got.

 

[scotpens]

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 . . .

And just how were two men, possessing no advantage over any other mortal human being other than advance knowledge of the future, supposed to accomplish that? It's a standard rule of time-travel stories: Anyone who goes back in time and tries to warn people of an impending disaster or calamity is immediately dismissed as a lunatic. Which, of course, is exactly what would happen in real life.

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.

Well, every war is pretty nasty. There aren't any pleasant wars.

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 . . .

We don't know that they had read only a single newspaper; Spock's tricorder could have been showing images of dozens of newspapers and newsreels from around the world, all confirming the same alternate timeline that would follow had Edith Keeler not died. For all we know, Kirk and Spock may have seen a 1960s "NAZI-TV Global News" broadcast!

Sure, she was the only major alteration related to their current Chicago where- and whenabouts . . .

Actually the city is never mentioned by name in the episode, though many fans assume it's New York.

 

[Neutral Zone]

Even though this not thought of then. It sort of worked in the ST IV: Voyage Home. The marine biologist atgged on to Kirk, helped save the Wales and the World. So, this idea was thought of, pity it was some 20 years later.

However, if they had thought of the idea back then, you can garuntee that Kirk would have forgotten all about Edith and been busy turning on the charm to another woman and not necessrily from our planet.

 

[JoeD80]

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.

Inexperience? Ellison had written among others for Route 66, The Outer Limits, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and The Man From UNCLE before writing for Star Trek. He had plenty of episodic TV scriptwriting experience.

 

[Dusty Ayres]

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.

All that it would've spawned is a missing persons mystery similar to that of Joseph Force Crater and Amelia Earhart, and not much else. Since she was going to die anyway, it might also have been just a part of history enough for her to be able to come through the Guardian as well.

 

[Silvercrest]

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.

The time travel in Star Trek IV was careless. They had no way of knowing if removing either Gillian or the whales from the present would alter the timeline. The reason that wasn't mentioned is because it wasn't that kind of movie.

Or made Japan forget all about attacking Pearl Harbor, because a pacifist US would have fit their plans much better than a bellicose US - as long as said US let Japan have the southwest Pacific and its resources to themselves.

I don't really see how the US staying out of the war would have had the effect suggested in the episode. Hitler wasn't likely to conquer England even if Churchill had less supplies flowing to the island, not before the madman would launch the campaign to conquer the USSR. And that campaign would be the end of Nazi Germany, again even without US aid to the Soviet Union. Atomic bombs riding on V-2 missiles would be of no use in Russia, where all targets would be either rural or out of range. Japan would stay out of the mess, because their test of strength against Stalin happened quite regardless of the US, and ended in them keeping their distance in 1939 already.

I mean, Europe would certainly look quite different if Stalin alone crushed Germany. But a scenario where the Nazis would prevail is not plausible as such, atomic bombs or no atomic bombs.

Perhaps Spock meant that Germany captured the western world (Europe and European Russia plus parts of Africa and South America, and with the fall of Great Britain "technically" also Canada but not in practice) for two months before falling to ruin?

Timo Saloniemi

I believe the Blish adaptation altered it to say that Germany won, but then the world ripped itself apart in rebellion. That's no more plausible, and it would have been a lot harder for Kirk and Spock to extrapolate, but it got me thinking. Perhaps if Stalin crushed Germany and overran Europe, it would have accelerated tensions with the U.S.? Skipped the Cold War and jumped straight into World War III, perhaps.

As someone stated upthread, we don't know that Spock just read a single newspaper-- in fact, do we even know what he learned? I mean, he apparently learned that the U.S. entered the war late, but do we know if the rest of it is fact or conjecture?

It probably doesn't matter. If Keeler allowed Germany to "capture the world" (whatever that means), or if a delayed U.S. entry merely altered the dynamics of the war, or led straight to WWIII, the results are the same for Our Heroes. The rest of the 20th century is drastically different, and the 21st, and the 22nd, and the Federation doesn't get formed. As long as they're clued in on the significance of Keeler's death, that's all they need to know to restore the 23rd century.

It may be considered selfish to let the war happen in order to restore the 23rd century as it was -- but apparently the Guardian was okay with that too. There must have been some reason that was preferable. I doubt the Guardian cared about the Federation or the characters per se. But since the characters were anomalies in the new timeline, perhaps it was less disruptive to restore the old one.

 

[FormerLurker]

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

Yes, the first draft would have been more expensive, but so are a lot of first drafts. As I said, we've never seen the final version he submitted, so it's impossible to say how much that version would have cost.

A while back I did aroughbreakdown of Ellison's City 1st Draft, comparing it to the aired episode, and my homework indicates that the astronomically high costs touted for it are overinflated. When you look at the number of cast members, sets, costumes, etc., it's not on orders of magnitude bigger than what we got.

I have to call 'Fail' here. I have just finished reading the entire final version of Harlan Ellison's first draft script, as detailed in the book I mentioned, that you edited out of your quote of my last post. That version is the exact version that won the Writer's Guild award, and is in all ways complete.

Your rough breakdown doesn't mention HE's demands for filming techniques, nor his demands for radical alterations of standing sets on the Enterprise to be able to tell the story as HE wanted it. Nor does it mention the radical, untried effects that HE wanted used for the Guardians, the Time Vortex, and the never seen before effect on the environment of a phaser disintegration.

What it does mention is a second draft that HE, while he put it in his book, has stated he didn't write. He wanted an example of "the thrice-damned bastardization of my work" to show how GR had b*******ed him.

Harlan Ellison is and always has been a very testy, unilaterally rude and callous person, with a superlative talent for storytelling. His greatest failing is his unwillingness to have others edit or build upon his work. When Marvel comics asked him to adapt "Soldier" to an issue of The Incredible Hulk back in the '80's, he was happy to do it. When they followed it up the next issue with an extrapolation of a side-story, he screamed and hollered 'Foul!' again and again. The same when he wrote an original story for Daredevil during the same time period. The same can and should be said of his unwillingness to admit that writing a script for a show with an ongoing cast will without fail call for rewrites, even if the original author refuses to do them. Which is the point here.

 

[Dusty Ayres]

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

As stated in the novel Fatherland.

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

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.

Or made Japan forget all about attacking Pearl Harbor, because a pacifist US would have fit their plans much better than a bellicose US - as long as said US let Japan have the southwest Pacific and its resources to themselves.

I don't really see how the US staying out of the war would have had the effect suggested in the episode. Hitler wasn't likely to conquer England even if Churchill had less supplies flowing to the island, not before the madman would launch the campaign to conquer the USSR. And that campaign would be the end of Nazi Germany, again even without US aid to the Soviet Union. Atomic bombs riding on V-2 missiles would be of no use in Russia, where all targets would be either rural or out of range. Japan would stay out of the mess, because their test of strength against Stalin happened quite regardless of the US, and ended in them keeping their distance in 1939 already.

I mean, Europe would certainly look quite different if Stalin alone crushed Germany. But a scenario where the Nazis would prevail is not plausible as such, atomic bombs or no atomic bombs.

Perhaps Spock meant that Germany captured the western world (Europe and European Russia plus parts of Africa and South America, and with the fall of Great Britain "technically" also Canada but not in practice) for two months before falling to ruin?

Timo Saloniemi

After the victorious USA finishes off Japan, it would probably turn it's attention to Europe-most likely giving covert aid to the USSR to drive out Germany from that territory-but introducing future woes in the form of regional conflicts that would be waged constantly, eventually leading to nuclear war between Germany and the USA, thus dooming the world and bringing what Spock said to fruition.

 

[EnsignHarper]

I still say the Guardian fixed the whole thing - knowing for sure that the Enterprise HAD to be there, so the ENTIRE cycle could be completed - because if McCoy at first DOESN'T go back alone, so K/S can stop him......EDITH KEELER WOULD HAVE LIVED, and the entire timeline would have been disturbed! Spock was actually wrong about what caused the time changes - it was not McCoy going back and 'saving' Edith Keeler! Lets look very closely at the last act:

Kirk and Edith are walking across the street - going to a Clark Gable movie (even though in 1930, Gable was still a few years away from stardom - a small mistake on the writers part). Kirk goes "Clark who?", and Edith remarks that Dr McCoy happened to say the same thing.

Kirk whirls her around and says, "Dr McCoy?? LEONARD McCoy???" , tells her to stay there - running back across the street, yelling for Spock, and meeting both him and McCoy simultaneously. Much hand shaking and back slapping ensue (and notice how EMOTIONAL Spock is acting there - almost as bad as at the end of AMOK TIME)

THIS is what intrigues Edith to walk back across the street, so she gets hit by the truck.

So......in conclusion....logically, who killed Edith Keeler? ALL of them! Having McCoy, Kirk and Spock ALL there was necessary for the continuation of the known time line. If just McCoy goes back, the time line would have continued as Spock predicted - erroneously assuming it was McCoy who saved her from an accident that never would have happened.

 

[DonIago]

Of course, in the original timeline Edith could just as easily have been killed crossing the street under different circumstances.

 

[T'Mar]

Meanwhile, I'm just over here cracking up at the "giant time bagel" description from page 1.

Win.

 

[diankra]

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.

You could possibly add in that Spock is doing so without having reconfigured the tricorder to record at that rate - he turns it on in a panic (by his standards) after realising he's already missed immense amounts of unique historical information .
Perhaps if he'd time to calibrate the tricorder to the appropriate settings before hitting record, the data would have been more readily accessible using the tricorder, but as it was, he needed to create an additional system to isolate particular images that were 'overlaid' in the recording. (The VidFire process comes to mind here).

 

[scotpens]

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.

I see no contradiction. Spock said, “Captain, in three weeks at this rate, possibly a month, I might reach the first mnemonic memory circuits.” I assume he meant “reach” in the sense of “to attain or arrive at,” as in “to reach one's goal.”

. . . 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.

Perhaps if he'd time to calibrate the tricorder to the appropriate settings before hitting record, the data would have been more readily accessible using the tricorder, but as it was, he needed to create an additional system to isolate particular images that were 'overlaid' in the recording. (The VidFire process comes to mind here).

Of course, you're both thinking in analogues to late 20th/early 21st century computer technology. By the 23rd century, such concepts may be as antiquated and meaningless as saying “the needle's stuck in the groove” when referring to an MP3 glitch.

 

[Destructor]

So......in conclusion....logically, who killed Edith Keeler? ALL of them! Having McCoy, Kirk and Spock ALL there was necessary for the continuation of the known time line. If just McCoy goes back, the time line would have continued as Spock predicted - erroneously assuming it was McCoy who saved her from an accident that never would have happened.

That's a really good point and an interesting theory. Could that very moment in time be the moment that the mirror universe was created? Ooooh....

 

[Myasishchev]

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.

I'm sure that wouldn't run into any hard physical limits.

God, I hate CotEoF.

It's wrong on so many levels:

1)terrible time travel logic;
2)offensively jingoistic notions about America's contribution to WW2, questionable notions about the malleability of the public perception of WW2, and even factually incorrect notions about how America entered WW2 in the first place [discussed below];
3)bogus love interest;
4)a plot put in motion by woefully inept security, incapable dealing with a middle-aged man hopped up on space mescaline;
5)being boring;
6)finally, promising Space Nazis with starships and providing none.

I'd rather watch And The Children Shall Lead.

...Okay, maybe not.

Just to add to what Timo said:

The key fact about World War 2, that even Bluto knew, is that the Tripartite Pact attacked us.

I wonder, did Edith "Let the Holocaust Happen" Keeler change American policy in regard to war materiel shipments for the Japanese? Did her pacifism equate to a monstrously free trade with belligerents who were killing millions of Chinese a year? Because, frankly, that doesn't sound very pacifistic to me. Indeed, we organized the multi-state embargo, including British and Dutch sources, at least nominally because we were seeking a non-war resolution to the China situation. This pushed them into a situation where they either struck south (including the US Philippines) or gave up the war in China. And they weren't about to do that.

On the other hand, avoiding the Philippines is potentially viable if you have a fantastically, unbelievably isolationist US--but there's a reason they didn't avoid them in real life, when outside of some interest groups we were pretty nonchalant about the fate of Euro colonial holdings and the suffering in China. It's because the PI sit astride the lines of communications to the actual targets of Indonesia and Malaysia, were potentially impregnable, and simply could not be ignored in the opening days of the war when the American force there was essentially token. The major reason Pearl Harbor was ever attacked was because of the geography of our Spanish-American War spoils. Unless Edith "Let Nanking Bleed" Keeler had her own Guardian of Forever, there's really no way around the American presence in the Philippines.

Keeler went on to organize a peace movement that delayed the United States' entry into World War II – and Germany was able to complete its heavy water and rocket experiments. With atomic bombs, and rockets to carry them, the Nazis conquered the world.

Anyone who doesn't immediately see at least three or four things wrong with this probably thinks we fought the Ottoman Empire in World War 2.

 

[Timo]

The key fact about World War 2, that even Bluto knew, is that the Tripartite Pact attacked us.

Not really. Japan attacked, at which point Hitler felt obligated to chime in. And it's quite possible that a politically different 1930s US would result in Japan not attacking in 1941 - say, if the US didn't establish an oil and steel embargo in support of China (and possibly even more significantly, in support of French interests). Which to me sounds quite plausible, as there is ample evidence of earlier US noninterventionism.

As for the Philippines, the US would always have been happy to get rid of them, if a dignified way of doing so could have been arranged. Perhaps the Keelerized US found such a way? The islands could have been given their independence just in time to free the US of formal obligations to defend them against Japanese expansion - or then the independence would have removed Japanese interest in these resource-poor islands which were mainly significant in securing the routes to Indonesia and Indochina.

What still strikes me as implausible is that our heroes would have homed in on Keeler as the kingpin of change. Never mind that she alone cannot have been the sole reason why WWII went differently, so no news clippings would ever have conclusively led our heroes to her trail - our heroes have absolutely no proof that WWII going differently was the reason for the disappearance of the UFP from their present. It may sound like a big and important event, but why should that hold true in objective terms? Earth has always had big wars, and the grandchildren of the victors have always decided that the good guys won and the world was better off for that outcome. A Nazi victory would pass eventually, just as any other sort of victory.

The war would affect the near future of Earth. But it's more likely that the far future of Earth would be changed to a greater degree by, say, Einstein or Fermi or perhaps Gandhi dying or falling ill before the war. Or, in the case of the Trek universe, Azrael Cochrane III Jr. falling out of love with his Mindy and failing to produce the great-grandfather of Zephram.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

What still strikes me as implausible is that our heroes would have homed in on Keeler as the kingpin of change.

Since Spock had recorded both timestreams and basically did a compare between them it would make sense to identify the first difference as the point of change. As to the bum dying, it would appear that he either had no impact or that he was meant to die in the original timeline (and effectively taking away an errant phaser from the 23rd century so it wouldn't be lost in the 20th.)

Or put another way, if you were Spock and you had recorded the two timestreams what would you do?

 

[Gorn Captain]

The key fact about World War 2, that even Bluto knew, is that the Tripartite Pact attacked us.

Not really. Japan attacked, at which point Hitler felt obligated to chime in. And it's quite possible that a politically different 1930s US would result in Japan not attacking in 1941 - say, if the US didn't establish an oil and steel embargo in support of China (and possibly even more significantly, in support of French interests). Which to me sounds quite plausible, as there is ample evidence of earlier US noninterventionism.


Timo Saloniemi

As a historian, I am unable to let that one sentence pass. Call it OCD if you will. Adolf Hitler never did a single thing in his life because he felt obligated to do so. His observance of the Tripartite accord is essentially the only instance in which Nazi Germany met its treaty obligations with another nation. However, Hitler made this decision not on the principle of meeting obligations, but out of a complete lack of understanding of America's psychological makeup and industrial capacity.

 

[Myasishchev]

It would probably be better worded "at which point Hitler thought the Japanese might break their NAP with the USSR." Also, the U.S. was in an undeclared war with Germany by that point anyway, which I'm sure was partly behind Hitler's decision.