City on the Edge of Forever - 45th Anniversary

This week marks the 45th anniversary of the TOS "classic" episode "City on the Edge of Forever", which made its primetime debut on NBC on April 6, 1967.

"City" won a Hugo award in 1968. Harlan Ellison's original script (heavily re-written) also received an award by the Writer's Guild of America.

In every sense, this show is a timeless classic that still plays well today. The only two quirks in the show are minor ones: it's never clear how long Kirk and Spock are living in the past; the audience is more unsure of the timing of everything than the characters are. The only other issue that makes me scratch my head is that "stone knives and bear skins" silliness. I have no idea what Spock thinks he's doing with all that junk around his tricorder. It's a neat spectacle, but since the tricorder is obviously a computer itself, Spock should not need to build another one to extract his recording from it. The only in-universe explanation I could figure out was that the time portal had some weird effect on the electronics and he needed all that junk to repair the damage to his tricorder.

The use of old Paramount movies as "historical footage" was really clever. I love it every time I see it.

This show was obviously produced by people who lived through the Great Depression and we should be glad for it. Despite some minor errors in historical nitpicks ("Goodnight, Sweetheart" wasn't a hit until 1931; Clark Gable wasn't a star until years later) the episode manages to transport people from the last 45 years into the 1930's convincingly enough to make it a superior work. Joan Collins is unwittingly a real hoot. So is a brief appearance by Floyd's Barber Shop.

 

I would still one day like to see a better representation of the original Harlan Ellison draft. The rewrites basically turned Edith Keeler into a female 1930's version of Gene Roddenberry, when she at first conceived to be similar to the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. You can't help but understand Ellison's frustration over how it when, including Joan Collins apparent misunderstanding of the character, citing her as "Hitler's girlfriend." That combined with the Beckwith angle made an already poignant story stronger than what was filmed. I wonder if the on-going IDW comic book series could take a crack at it.

 

It would be interesting, say, if Ellison's Beckwith character could somehow be something other than a Starfleet officer. Maybe some rogue Cyrano Jones or Harry Mudd-type space traveller who gets picked up by the Enterprise and turns out to have problems of his own.

 

I wouldn't mind personally if it was a Starfleet officer. Nobody's totally perfect and I never really liked how Roddenberry always acted like everyone in Star Trek was. It allows for very little conflict and if you were to compare us to people from 200 years ago, you would see an improvement, but not total perfection. I think the same should be applied towards the future.

 

Ellison's first draft is one of the most brilliant first drafts I've ever seen. Yes, it has structural problems, but they're all fixable. I'd love to get to read any subsequent draft Eillison did, but I suspect they might be lost to the ages. The final script feels like a pastiche of Ellison, Fontana, Coon and Roddenberry, and I disagree with many of the changes made...especially turning Edith Keeler into a Junior Roddenberry.

 

Is Ellison's early draft available for reading on the web?

 

That always bugged me as well. The tricorder had been established as a stand-alone unit. In no other episode did a tricorder have to be plugged into the ship’s computers to play back what it had recorded. As you suggested, all that was needed was a throwaway line from Spock: “Captain, the temporal displacement field in the Lopsided Time Bagel damaged my tricorder, yada yada.”

Of course, Spock having to build a serviceable computer from electronic parts available in 1930 was a device to stretch out the story long enough for Kirk to fall in love with Edith Keeler. How long was that in story time? A month, perhaps? Seems a pretty short time to fall in love with someone, but hey, it happens.

A bigger problem is the premise that, had she lived, Edith would have started a peace movement so powerful it would have delayed America’s entry into World War II. America entered the war as a direct response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But this whole topic has been thoroughly hashed out on other threads.

 

The original script has no such tricorder problem. The Guardian gives them a cryptic clue how to spot the focal point of the time stream (Edith) and Spock recognizes her from this hint.

 

In the scene where Spock is recording "history" as presented by the Guardian, he says something like "I am a fool. My tricorder is capable of recording events even at this great speed."

To me, this indicates that while the tricorder can certainly record at high speed, in this unique situation it requires something like an "external hard drive" (found on the ship) in order to access the recordings or slow them down enough to pick through them and extract precise events.

 

What i would like to know is - with all the scrap and ancient tools that Spock had to use could have ever made anythng work the way he wanted?

As to the episode, it is one of the best, I never tire of watching it, as for the little bits not making much sense, does it really matter?

 

It's my favorite episode and it first aired exactly two weeks before I was born.

For the most part, with a few exceptions, Harlan's original script was better.

I will say that I would not have cared for 3 Guardians of Forever beings walking around. I think that the gateway was a better idea.

I don't think that the full original script is available online anywhere. If my remaining Trek stuff wasn't several hundred miles away from here in storage, I would be happy to scan the pages and post them, because I have all versions of the script, including the original outline.

Here is some material from Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_on_the_Edge_of_Forever#First_Draft.2C_June_3.2C_1966

 

So, how many complete drafts do you have that Ellison did?

 

45 years of bitching about the script.

 

Well, no one ever accused Mr. Ellison of lacking an ego.

 

Can't even remember right now, but I have a very thick pile of all of the various drafts in storage.

 

I remember well that day in 1967 when the STAR TREK episode "City On The Edge Of Forever" aired. It's the episode that essentially changed my mind about STAR TREK.

Back in those ancient three-or-four-channel days, with no VCRs, we were at the mercy of network schedulers. You liked a program, you watched when it was broadcast. That was it - no other choice. STAR TREK had the misfortune for me of airing at 8:30 PM on Thursday nights. I had no problem with the first half-hour, but the second half-hour ran smack-dab against one of my then-favorite sitcoms, BEWITCHED.

One of my other favorites that season on TV was the Friday night sci-fier, THE TIME TUNNEL. It didn't have the best of stories, the characterizations were weak at best, but the idea and the visual representation of the tunnel caught my imagination.

That day, I remember it clearly, I was sitting on the living room floor prepared for an evening of TV, and I grabbed THE EVENING BULLETIN (a Philadelphia newspaper) to look through the listings. There in the highlights section was a blurb about this STAR TREK show. Now as I said, the first half-hour of this show was no problem for me schedule-wise. Indeed, that season, being a sci-fi fan, I watched quite a few first-half-hours of STAR TREK, wondering what happened on Miri's planet, what happened to Charlie X, what happened on the Shore Leave planet, and so on.

This EVENING BULLETIN blurb, 45 years ago, said, and I still remember it, "Fans of THE TIME TUNNEL will want to watch tonight's STAR TREK as our heroes travel through time to save themselves and their shipmates." (Or something like that, it's not word for word.)

That perked up my interest, and I was willing to forego that evening's BEWITCHED. And once I did, the show hooked me bigtime. I was already familiar with the characters from those half-hours I'd watched before, so watching a full hour was a treat (though I still had a nagging feeling of disloyalty to BEWITCHED). The show was an intelligently written science-fiction story for television with a theme of time-travel and causality that truly captured my imagination.

From that moment on, I vowed to watch STAR TREK from that point on, through the summer reruns, following the show to Friday nights and beyond, into syndication.

I don't care how many scripts Ellison wrote or re-wrote - nothing can take away the magnificence of "City On The Edge Of Forever" as it aired 45 years ago.

Harry

 

Ellison's version is interesting, but I'm not crazy about the set-up. Not only is there an execution by firing squad (which seems both unnecessary given phaser technology, and awfully harsh considering what we've seen of Starfleet up to this point) but for some odd reason the Enterprise must find an uninhabited planet to conduct this savage ritual. The difficulty of finding a lifeless planet in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan strained credibility and it does so in Ellison's teleplay as well.

The final (heavily re-written by various parties) re-write improved upon this, but made things worse in many other areas.

 

That's a great post, Harry, and I'll tell you that Bewitched will always be close to my heart. A long time ago, my grandmother worked for Robert Montgomery for a while and my dad actually bounced little Elizabeth on his knee at the time. I can't even begin to describe how bad we all felt when she died of cancer.

 

Good story, HGN2001. I’ve only met one person who watched the show when it originally aired and she is a college professor. She too remembered seeing that episode when it first aired. I always wondered if it the purpose of rewriting Keeler with Roddenberry’s ideals was to help convey what type of show they were making, which was simply looked at as another space adventure show.

Yes, defiantly the firing squad bit was pretty harsh. I think it would have been interesting if the crewman who took the drugs, while under the influence, was the one who transports to the planet and goes back in time, which was how it happened with McCoy, by of course being accidental.

 

I guess us old folks are becoming somewhat of a rare breed!

I've also been blessed by the fact that though I've owned the episode on several different VHS tape issues, Laserdiscs and DVDs, I've never encountered, nor even heard, the replaced music score portions that so many have complained about over the years.

By the way, my avatar, for those who aren't aware, is the actual NBC-TV slide that they used on the weeks that STAR TREK was not presented because of a special program. It also appeared occasionally during a "technical difficulty" at the network while the show was on.

Harry