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The way I understand it, the universe became different around them, but they were unaffected because Carl is a zone of stability. It exists in all times and realities, at once.
I don't see a functional difference between "universe" and "timeline," really. They're both groupings of events from "cause" to "effect" viewed in three dimensions of space and one of time. The ordering of events changed when Keeler was saved, and therefore the universe around the landing party was different than the ordering of events from which they came.
I agree with you, but I was being diplomatic, because it doesn't always have to be a fight to the death and name calling.
Timelines to me implies a multiverse, a network of possibly infinite coexisting but disconnected parallel universes. Whether those time lines are created by random choice, or by time travel is up to the author.
It took me forever to admit to myself that Timeless the TV show not the Voyager Episode was one universe that was changing rather than than that they were creating new time line lines every time they changed something in the past, but Kennedy was running around in present day, and when it looked like he was almost about to die, a commemorative coin with President Kennedy's likeness on it transformed into a Nixon coin before our eyes, yet our heroes were aware of the changed to the universe because as time travelers, their brains were tempered and resilient to change... Not that explain it at all.
Wait?
Oswald killed Nixon in '63 and the only thing that changes was a coin?
I agree with you, but I was being diplomatic, because it doesn't always have to be a fight to the death and name calling.
Timelines to me implies a multiverse, a network of possibly infinite coexisting but disconnected parallel universes. Whether those time lines are created by random choice, or by time travel is up to the author.
It took me forever to admit to myself that Timeless the TV show not the Voyager Episode was one universe that was changing rather than than that they were creating new time line lines every time they changed something in the past, but Kennedy was running around in present day, and when it looked like he was almost about to die, a commemorative coin with President Kennedy's likeness on it transformed into a Nixon coin before our eyes, yet our heroes were aware of the changed to the universe because as time travelers, their brains were tempered and resilient to change... Not that explain it at all.
Wait?
Oswald killed Nixon in '63 and the only thing that changes was a coin?
I like David Mack's attempt to explain the events involving timelines changing around people.
From Forgotten History:
“So it may have appeared to you. But your interpretation requires a physical impossibility. Any event that occurs is part of the wave equation of the universe. It cannot cease to have occurred. Any two alternative versions of a single segment of time are merely distinct quantum states of the universe in a coherent super-position. One does not replace the other; they coexist. What you perceived as the transformation of a single measurement history—‘timeline,’ if you prefer—must in fact have been your own displacement from one to the other."
It took me forever to admit to myself that Timeless the TV show not the Voyager Episode was one universe that was changing rather than than that they were creating new time line lines every time they changed something in the past, but Kennedy was running around in present day, and when it looked like he was almost about to die, a commemorative coin with President Kennedy's likeness on it transformed into a Nixon coin before our eyes, yet our heroes were aware of the changed to the universe because as time travelers, their brains were tempered and resilient to change... Not that explain it at all.
Wait?
Oswald killed Nixon in '63 and the only thing that changes was a coin?
I remember doing, for a school term paper, some research on the U.S. Presidential election of 1960. I was surprised to find that National Review (even by then well-established as a conservative journal) did not endorse Richard Nixon in that race. but rather suggested that the reader decide upon who was the lesser evil. Apparently, NR felt that Dwight Eisenhower was too moderate as a president, and that Nixon was running towards the left. NR was waiting for Barry Goldwater to make the race, which he would do four years later.
I don't think that the American Left was entirely enthusiastic about Kennedy. Thus, there was some significant opinion that JFK versus Nixon was not all that much of a choice.
I don't see how the Guardian could possibly have any "goals", as such. It may be sentient, but it is also a device that can be used at will by whoever jumps through it. So what "goals" could it possibly have? It has no control over its own fate, it's just "there".
And I definitely don't see any reason why the Guardian would lie or be intentionally evasive. It said that it answered questions "as much as your limited understanding makes possible". It's not intentionally being a dick, it's just so far above humans as to make it difficult to even talk clearly to them.
I don't see how the Guardian could possibly have any "goals", as such. It may be sentient, but it is also a device that can be used at will by whoever jumps through it. So what "goals" could it possibly have? It has no control over its own fate, it's just "there".
And I definitely don't see any reason why the Guardian would lie or be intentionally evasive. It said that it answered questions "as much as your limited understanding makes possible". It's not intentionally being a dick, it's just so far above humans as to make it difficult to even talk clearly to them.
It's my belief that the GOF perpetuates time loops and is in fact dependent on one for its own existence, per one of its first statements to Kirk et al. Consequently, it does what it must to achieve that goal.
Otherwise, what is it a guardian of exactly? Certainly not the timestream, if history could otherwise be manipulated so easily!
It's my belief that the GOF perpetuates time loops and is in fact dependent on one for its own existence, per one of its first statements to Kirk et al. Consequently, it does what it must to achieve that goal.
Otherwise, what is it a guardian of exactly? Certainly not the timestream, if history could otherwise be manipulated so easily!
I don't think, going back to the "did Kirk and Edith or did they not" question, that they did, simply because women of that era were more selective about physical relationships due to lack of effective contraception. Oh, not to say that it didn't happen but there were expectations that if it did and a pregnancy resulted that wedding bells would follow shortly.
I also think that the mechanics of "changing the past" are not universal but rather are dependent on the means of time travel employed. Different for the GOF, the Atavichron, the warp speed breakaway technique, a DeLorean, etc, etc.
I don't think, going back to the "did Kirk and Edith or did they not" question, that they did, simply because women of that era were more selective about physical relationships due to lack of effective contraception.
And that's not even to mention the primitive state of treatment for STDs in 1930. Penicillin would not be practical and widely available for years. Catching syphilis or gonorrhea was a life-altering disaster in Edith Keeler's day, and that fact played into the decisions of intelligent women who had any self-control.
Then the success of penicillin created a widespread belief that STDs were a harmless nuisance, which in turn gave a lot of oxygen to the sexual revolution. That era peaked in the 1970s, also an era when people thought cocaine was harmless. Then AIDS reached the United States in 1981, and the culture turned again.
Today we're in an era when people think AIDS is just a lifelong nuisance requiring expensive pills, but they haven't yet caught onto the fact that syphilis and gonorrhea now have highly drug-resistant strains in circulation, and Edith Keeler's cautious morality— while it isn't coming back— doesn't look as quaint and silly as it seemed in the 1970s.
Back in 2006 there was a terrific Trek novel published that dealt with the issue of "what would have happened if Edith Keeler had lived".
Crucible: McCoy: The Provenance Of Shadows relates what happens when Kirk and Spock fail to rescue McCoy from the past, and therefore fail to ensure that Edith dies in the accident. The result is that McCoy is stranded, and experiences a life very different from the one he would have otherwise.
This is one of my favorite Star Trek time travel novels. I can't recommend it enough.
Seconded. The Provenance of Shadows is the definitive McCoy novel, IMO. It's basically "The Life Story of Dr. McCoy Times Two," as it tracks him through both the altered and the unaltered versions of the COTEOF timeline. David R. George III did a spectacular job writing it. Unfortunately, neither his subsequent Spock novel nor the Kirk novel quite lived up to the initial McCoy book, partly because they were rooted more in the continuity of the movies than TOS, and partly because it's a lot tougher to create original plots about those two characters because they'd been so well mined over the last 40 years.
But the McCoy book is a Top Five ST novel for sure.
I don't think that's so much a problem with Ellison's thinking as a limitation of time. You can only get so complex in a one hour episode. Best to keep the story simple and direct.
That man who incinerated himself might not on his own have meant anything, but might have now bumped a Nazi eugenicist attending a worldwide eugenics conference in New York and otherwise pushed Hitler to engage in the kind of war criminality he did in our history.
It wouldn't. The bum who accidentally disintegrates himself with McCoy's phaser was basically the equivalent of Ellison's character Trooper, a WWI vet who saves the lives of Kirk and Spock in Ellison's original teleplay. Kirk and Spock ask about him when they return to their present, and the Guardians reply that he did not matter in the greater flow of time.
So just as there are certain people like Edith Keeler whose existence is a focal point for the timestream (the Guardians in Ellison's teleplay actually refer to her as "the key" at one point), there are also people like Trooper, whose existence just doesn't matter in the grand flow of the timestream. It's a surprisingly dark and fatalistic message for Star Trek, but it's one in keeping with the Great Depression, where so many people just didn't seem to count in the grand scheme of things. But honestly, it makes total sense. If there are super important people like Edith Keeler, it stands to reason that the converse must also be true, and there are even more people where it literally doesn't matter if they live or die.
So no, the bum wouldn't have gone on to kill Gene Roddenberry's father or encountered Hitler, or anything like that. He was just a loose strand in the grand tapestry, one that's plucked off and immediately forgotten about.
People forget that Edith and Kirk have to dodge a car crossing the street the first time. I tend to think that Edith dies then originally, crossing alone on the way to the movies.
I think that's likely. It's a nice subtle touch in the final episode, especially since Kirk motions to stop the car as he and Edith start crossing. You know he likely had a twinge of "...Was that the moment just now?" just before Edith mentions going to a Clark Gable movie.
In the depths of my hard drive there is a quickly abandoned ST prose story where Lt. Leslie is the fellow who hits Edith Keeler with the truck. My idea was to try & weave all of Eddie Paskey's TOS appearances into one cohesive plotline. (Paskey was the actual person behind the wheel of the truck in TCOTOF, in case you didn't know.) I gave up on it because it would've inevitably been overly convoluted and incredibly dumb. You can read as far as I got here in the FanFic Forum if you're curious.
Drug maddened McCoy Changed Time and the Enterprise in orbit of the Guardian disappeared. Kirk changed time back, and the Enterprise returned as if it had never left.
Reality past the eye of the storm, the Guardian itself, flickered about this way and that depending on what the time travelers were doing in the past.
It took me forever to admit to myself that Timeless the TV show not the Voyager Episode was one universe that was changing rather than than that they were creating new time line lines every time they changed something in the past, but Kennedy was running around in present day, and when it looked like he was almost about to die, a commemorative coin with President Kennedy's likeness on it transformed into a Nixon coin before our eyes, yet our heroes were aware of the changed to the universe because as time travelers, their brains were tempered and resilient to change... Not that explain it at all.
Wait?
Oswald killed Nixon in '63 and the only thing that changes was a coin?
Well, that was the only change that was immediately apparent. I'm sure they would've found other changes in the timeline.
That was one of the things I LOVED about Timeless. Most every other time travel TV show would just restore history to its natural state. Timeless actually changed the established history of the world as they went along. Two of my favorite changes that we learned of when Lucy, Wyatt, and Rufus returned to the present:
1) After sharing an adventure with a young Ian Fleming in WWII, they discovered that Fleming later turned their exploit into an extra James Bond novel, Weapon of Choice, and so the world got one additional Bond movie with 1964 Sean Connery!
2) Rufus convinces 1941 Hedy Lamarr to renew her patent for frequency hopping (which became the basis for Wi-Fi), so when the team returns to the present, Lamarr is now a tech guru billionaire who profited from the US Navy using her ideas in the 1960s.
Shades of Quantum Leap's "putting right what once went wrong"!
^My point wasn’t that the episode wasn’t nearly perfect just the way it was. The nearly 60 years of approbation it has received says that. My point is that time can be simultaneously linear and complex, like a Mandelbrot image, resulting in focal points like Edith Keeler, but also many universes created by even the most minor tweak. CotEoF seems to be saying there is only one universe, and if you mess it up, you’re stuck in the altered universe. But it could also be saying that there are many, and if you mess up yours, you are now stuck in a new, different universe. That isn’t what Ellison was saying- it’s a revision of how we might look at that episode that allows for another story that reveals that yes, Edith Keeler had to die, but if the bum lived, you got something like our universe. No Eugenics Wars, a much higher body count in WW2, a slower migration into space, etc. It was really the death of the bum that put the final spin on Keeler’s death to create the unique ST universe. Not directly and not by unintended consequences of his own planned actions as with Keeler - he had to simply fill a void that results in a butterfly flapping its wings that cascades through time to create a tsunami in the future.
Ellison is saying one thing about the preciousness of time, and this says something very different. I’m not saying anyone should write such an episode or if they did, that it would be in keeping with Ellison’s thinking. It wouldn’t. You’re right. The bum WAS Trooper, made to seem totally irrelevant in contrast with Keeler. But that doesn’t preclude a different, non-linear way of looking at it, that says we are all precious- though in many and varying ways- and nothing we can do can alter the fact that we are all part of an intricate and interrelated tapestry.
I don't know if Ellison was trying to say anything about "the preciousness of time." That wasn't really the point of Ellison's story. The main idea behind Ellison's original version of COTEOF (which is very different than what the episode ultimately became) was that it was possible to have a love SO great that you would be willing to sacrifice all of history to be with them. That's why Kirk freezes with indecision at the climax of Ellison's script, and it's the logical Spock who is able to do what has to be done to preserve the timeline. And that's why the last line of Ellison's script is Spock telling Kirk, "No woman was ever loved more, because no woman was ever offered the universe for love." (A line I wish they could have kept.)
In the aired episode, Kirk DOES make the split second decision to sacrifice his beloved Edith for the greater good, which Ellison thought was bullshit. But the time travel stuff was just a backdrop for Ellison to tell a tragic love story featuring Kirk.
It's important to remember that despite the credits and the basic plot elements, the aired version of COTEOF isn't really Ellison's story at all. Ellison wanted to put his pseudonym "Cordwainer Bird" on it, but Roddenberry threatened to blackball him in the industry if he did. If you haven't read Ellison's original script, I highly recommend you do, or at least read the comic book adaptation of it that IDW did a number of years ago.
So no, the bum wouldn't have gone on to kill Gene Roddenberry's father or encountered Hitler, or anything like that. He was just a loose strand in the grand tapestry, one that's plucked off and immediately forgotten about.
There's an article in one of the Best of Trek anthologies called "The Disappearing Bum". It explores the reason why, in Star Trek IV, the Enterprise crew isn't mobbed by Star Trek fans who recognize them.
The author of that article speculated that the reason why there's no "Star Trek" in Star Trek is because Gene Roddenberry didn't live long enough to create it.
How this connects to City on the Edge of Forever (in this article, which is pure fannish speculation) is that the "disappearing bum" actually had a family to provide for. When he didn't come back one night - or ever again, of course - the family fell on even worse times than before. The bum is speculated to have had a teenage son who had to step up to care for the rest of the family.
This was difficult, of course, and the son turned to crime to make money. Crime became his way of life, and years later he killed an unimportant cop who'd had ideas of becoming a Hollywood writer/producer. This happened well before said cop had even begun to think up the early ideas for Star Trek - and so the show was never made and people and events that were influenced by it either weren't and events happened in some other way.
That's why nobody mobbed Kirk, et. al. To everyone around them, they were just weirdly-dressed people with odd ideas, not celebrities from a science fiction show.
I’m not saying Ellison himself would say his story was about the preciousness of time. I am making the judgement that the story, on its face, is about one single timeline. Mess that up and there are no other timelines. There is one “river, with currents, eddies, backwash”, not many rivers. That’s my judgement on the basis of his written script and the script as it was rewritten and produced. They both seem - to me - not to be flirting with the idea of a multiverse, but rather declaring adamantly that there is one, very precious timeline. Otherwise, the problem would not be to repair the timeline, but rather to get back to the original, unaltered one, that still exists, but that they are no longer a part of.
I am making the judgement that the story, on its face, is about one single timeline. Mess that up and there are no other timelines. There is one “river, with currents, eddies, backwash”, not many rivers. That’s my judgement on the basis of his written script and the script as it was rewritten and produced. They both seem - to me - not to be flirting with the idea of a multiverse, but rather declaring adamantly that there is one, very precious timeline. Otherwise, the problem would not be to repair the timeline, but rather to get back to the original, unaltered one, that still exists, but that they are no longer a part of.
...Yes? That is clearly what the episode shows. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make here.
Star Trek has told dozens of time travel stories throughout its 57 years of existence. There are no consistent rules running through them. Sometimes there's one true timeline, and sometimes there are multiple timelines that are independent of each other. They just do whatever is most convenient for the story they're telling that week. That's all they've ever done. It's best just to roll with it and enjoy.
Is your comment referring to my inability to make a point, or your inability to get the point? I would hope it would be obvious that when you commented about the bum’s death not having any impact, it begged an explanation of what impact it would have. And how that interpretation would jibe with Ellison’s inferred intent.
But you know what? Just forget it. Point made. All is well. aridas out.
We assumed The Guardian talked to Kirk and friends, like that, because his species was young, but it turns out after seeing him with Burnham, that Kirk is just a drunk idiot.
My idea was to try & weave all of Eddie Paskey's TOS appearances into one cohesive plotline. (Paskey was the actual person behind the wheel of the truck in TCOTOF, in case you didn't know.) I gave up on it because it would've inevitably been overly convoluted and incredibly dumb. You can read as far as I got 
