Episode of the Week : The City on the Edge of Forever
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Simply stated, this was Star Trek's finest hour. 10 out of 10.
Can't disagree with that. 10 also.
Ah, give me The Alternative Factor any day.
(just kidding, for variety's sake: I suspect much praise will follow!
)
(just kidding, for variety's sake: I suspect much praise will follow!
)
10/10
Best episode ever.
Best episode ever.
Most TOS fans think of this as the best TOS episode ever. I loved it when I was in my teens, but when I rewatched it at 55, I was less impressed. I think it's good, don't get me wrong, but I didn't really believe that Kirk could fall in love with Edith Keeler, and if Kirk isn't in love with her, then gosh, it's an awful shame that they have to let such a nice woman die, but it's not the great tragedy that it would otherwise be.
It's not that I think Ms. Keeler isn't loveable; of course she is. She's kind and smart and progressive (and gorgeous), and that all seems great. What I didn't buy was Kirk -- I didn't think Kirk had the emotional ROOM to fall in love with anyone, no matter how wonderful.
While Kirk is stuck in the past, he's frantically trying to keep history from unraveling. The entire future rides on Kirk's and Spock's shoulders, and everyone they have ever loved and all that they have ever known will cease to exist unless they can right things. Furthermore, Kirk is stuck in the past with a Vulcan. If the wrong person sees Spock without his cap, they'll take him away to question ... or to dissect.
Kirk has lost his ship, his co-workers, his family, his world, and he's in danger of losing the one person he's brought with him. With all that on his mind, I don't care how nice Edith Keeler is, it just seems as if his attention and his emotions would both be fully occupied elsewhere.
I realize that this is a minority point of view. :-) It wasn't one that I held in my teens, but my middle-aged self has a different perspective. It's still a good episode, even if one doesn't believe in Kirk's love for Edith, but it's no longer grand tragedy, so it doesn't quite achieve best-ever status. To me, the best episode of TOS is "Amok Time."
So I give this episode an 8.
It's not that I think Ms. Keeler isn't loveable; of course she is. She's kind and smart and progressive (and gorgeous), and that all seems great. What I didn't buy was Kirk -- I didn't think Kirk had the emotional ROOM to fall in love with anyone, no matter how wonderful.
While Kirk is stuck in the past, he's frantically trying to keep history from unraveling. The entire future rides on Kirk's and Spock's shoulders, and everyone they have ever loved and all that they have ever known will cease to exist unless they can right things. Furthermore, Kirk is stuck in the past with a Vulcan. If the wrong person sees Spock without his cap, they'll take him away to question ... or to dissect.
Kirk has lost his ship, his co-workers, his family, his world, and he's in danger of losing the one person he's brought with him. With all that on his mind, I don't care how nice Edith Keeler is, it just seems as if his attention and his emotions would both be fully occupied elsewhere.
I realize that this is a minority point of view. :-) It wasn't one that I held in my teens, but my middle-aged self has a different perspective. It's still a good episode, even if one doesn't believe in Kirk's love for Edith, but it's no longer grand tragedy, so it doesn't quite achieve best-ever status. To me, the best episode of TOS is "Amok Time."
So I give this episode an 8.
Quick, McCoy, inject me with 10cc of Cordrazine! I want to jump through the Portal, go back in time and see Joan Collins in her prime. Kirk, you lucky dog!
One of ST's best written, directed and produced episodes, IMO.
One of ST's best written, directed and produced episodes, IMO.
McCoy's story might have been the more interesting one, if he had arrived a month before Kirk and Spock. I can see him recovering from his delusion, and believing himself stranded in the past, actually falling in love with Edith.
But as Corylea says, it seems out of character for Kirk. This is the man who told the Enterprise, "Never lose you." It seems unlikely this same man would be so caught up in the past that he would lose sight of the mission at hand. McCoy, yes, because he would think his life aboard ship is gone forever. He would easily adapt. But not Kirk.
But as Corylea says, it seems out of character for Kirk. This is the man who told the Enterprise, "Never lose you." It seems unlikely this same man would be so caught up in the past that he would lose sight of the mission at hand. McCoy, yes, because he would think his life aboard ship is gone forever. He would easily adapt. But not Kirk.
9.
Good points about the tragedy causing relationship. I see what you're saying, but weren't Kirk and Spock there for months? It's not a Rayna situation where he's madly in love in 4 hours or less, but a growing mutual attraction, as soon as she saw them in the basement she was interested in Jim. That's hard to resist. (Like we learned from Court Martial, feelings can be reflective.
) I don't think Jim would have been able to resist Edith for a month or longer, but it's certainly subjective and open to debate, I personally accept it as shown.
What I don't accept as shown is Spock's tricorder difficulties, or the source of most of the tension (rather than the tragedy) of the episode. I feel that, even though really well done, it seems like an artificial limitation that you can see what is recorded in your own tricorder without the ship. I mean the damn thing has a little screen, if Spock had to build a custom TV because the tricorder had no veiwscreen or something of that nature, I think it would have been better than long boards of wires and insulators to let the thing do what is seems to be designed to do already.
Good points about the tragedy causing relationship. I see what you're saying, but weren't Kirk and Spock there for months? It's not a Rayna situation where he's madly in love in 4 hours or less, but a growing mutual attraction, as soon as she saw them in the basement she was interested in Jim. That's hard to resist. (Like we learned from Court Martial, feelings can be reflective.
) I don't think Jim would have been able to resist Edith for a month or longer, but it's certainly subjective and open to debate, I personally accept it as shown. What I don't accept as shown is Spock's tricorder difficulties, or the source of most of the tension (rather than the tragedy) of the episode. I feel that, even though really well done, it seems like an artificial limitation that you can see what is recorded in your own tricorder without the ship. I mean the damn thing has a little screen, if Spock had to build a custom TV because the tricorder had no veiwscreen or something of that nature, I think it would have been better than long boards of wires and insulators to let the thing do what is seems to be designed to do already.
I see it more akin to a soldier being in a war zone thousands of miles from home. He may not see any of the things he loves ever again so he takes comfort in the things that are around him.
Yes, that minor plot hole always bugged me. We've seen that the tricorder is a stand-alone device capable of playing back the data it records, so why would Spock need to build a primitive mnemonic circuit using "stone knives and bearskins"? That could have been fixed with a single throwaway line from Spock -- something to the effect that the tricorder's playback circuits got fried by the temporal distortion field when they jumped through the Giant Time Bagel.
Of course, there's the major issue of the central story premise: Had she lived, Edith Keeler would lead a peace movement so influential it would have delayed America’s entry into World War II, giving Germany time to develop the atomic bomb first. The U.S. 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.
Have we ever seen it used as a playback device when the ship wasn't nearby though? The tricorder may have to bounce a signal off the ship that enables its playback capabilities. Could be the tricorder wasn't equipped with a codec to playback the video fed it by the Guardian?
Seems odd today, but in the 60's? Who knows?
I'm going to speculate that the images of past history that Spock recorded on his tricorder were somehow compressed before being recorded, and he needed a bit of hardware to be able to extract and reconstruct any given file or frame. It certainly must have been a huge amount of data, if the stream included individual newspaper pages and newsreel footage.
Hey, for an old tech guy and ham radio operator like myself, it is always great fun to see all of those old radio parts and tubes wired together on the wooden breadboards. The Jacob's ladder didn't make much sense, but the rows of tubes very well could have been shift registers and other logic circuits, not really much different in concept from some of the very first real-world computers that were constructed in the 1930's.
Hey, for an old tech guy and ham radio operator like myself, it is always great fun to see all of those old radio parts and tubes wired together on the wooden breadboards. The Jacob's ladder didn't make much sense, but the rows of tubes very well could have been shift registers and other logic circuits, not really much different in concept from some of the very first real-world computers that were constructed in the 1930's.
Solid, one of the few episodes I'd give a 10. The performances are all great, but Shatner is magnificent. Everything clicks. I don't care what Ellison says, this script is amazing. There are weaknesses and the ADR is just awful ("WHAT??" "You know Dr. McCoy said the same thing..."), but the pros far outweigh the Khans. Not my favorite episode, but a true classic and always one I recommend to anyone looking to sample the series.
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