'The City on the Edge of Forever'....51 years ago today
- Thread starter TrickyDickie
- Start date
I like it for what it is, but I miss the other characters for the bulk of the show; even McCoy pretty much gets sidelined between the beginning and the end, though he does great things with what he gets.
Which I guess is my way of saying that, for me, the greatest of the great episodes are the ones that utilize the entire ensemble.
Which I guess is my way of saying that, for me, the greatest of the great episodes are the ones that utilize the entire ensemble.
I think one of the best scenes in that episode is the final one when Kirk, Spock and McCoy return through the Gardian. The others in the landing party can see Kirk's face and his face tells them that something very disturbing has happened. Kirk's final words "Let's get the hell out of here" are the perfect punctuation. It was a very big deal to air that phrase in those days.
"Hell" was not that big a deal on TV in that era as the Trek-exceptionalists would have us believe.
To quote this thread... (LINK)
* In 1956, NBC's Ford Star Jubilee (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0047731/) presented a production of Noel Coward's comedy Blithe Spirit with the hells and damns intact.
The trouble we run into is Star Trek is one of a few shows which gets remembered, but hundreds of other largely forgotten series aired before it and we don't recall the ground they broke because we don't see them. This leads to idiocy like people believing Gerrold's "The Trouble With Flat Cats" to be the first instance of the word "pregnant" on a TV series. Rubbish.
To paraphrase, TV History is written by the fanboys.
To quote this thread... (LINK)
* In 1956, NBC's Ford Star Jubilee (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0047731/) presented a production of Noel Coward's comedy Blithe Spirit with the hells and damns intact.
The trouble we run into is Star Trek is one of a few shows which gets remembered, but hundreds of other largely forgotten series aired before it and we don't recall the ground they broke because we don't see them. This leads to idiocy like people believing Gerrold's "The Trouble With Flat Cats" to be the first instance of the word "pregnant" on a TV series. Rubbish.
To paraphrase, TV History is written by the fanboys.
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IIRC, Paramount let the rights to the 1931 song* "Goodnight Sweetheart" lapse, so the first home video release of COTEOF used a different song. Since the background score quoted melodic lines from that song, parts of that had to be replaced with alternate music as well.
Fortunately, Paramount re-acquired rights to the song and the original music was restored for the later DVD and Blu-Ray releases.
*Yet another anachronism in 1930, like the "Clark Gable movie."
Trekbbs, where you can be corrected even when you aren't wrong. Mr. Bastien simply said that saying "let's get the hell out of here" on air was a big deal at the time. The word "hell" was used on other occasions even in TOS, but not as the swear Kirk intended at the end of COTEOF.
Suggesting it was "Gene" who said it is akin to bringing up and then squashing the irrelevant suggestion - by no one in this thread - that the word "pregnant" was first used in TTWT (straw man argument).
People of a "certain age" would best be able to say how shocking it would have been to hear hell used in that way on TV back then.
People of a "certain age" would best be able to say how shocking it would have been to hear hell used in that way on TV back then.
Agreed. I think that's a big reason why both "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Trouble With Tribbles" are so popular -- everyone in the cast has something to do. (Not that I don't love COTEOF too, of course.)
It kind of was. The February 5, 1968 episode of The Monkees, "The Devil and Peter Tork," made a joke about how they weren't allowed to say "hell" on air, even though they were talking about the physical place. Mike, Davy, and Micky all clearly mouthed the word "hell," but it was dubbed over with a cuckoo sound effect.
INT. THE PAD
MIKE:
Ooh. So that’s uh, that’s what [cuckoo] is all about.
DAVY:
Yeah, [cuckoo] is pretty scary.
MICKY:
You know what’s even more scary?
PETER:
What?
MICKY:
You can’t say [cuckoo] on television.
(Relevant clip starts at 9:48.)
Using a stage play isn't the best example, as those usually have to be presented with all of the dialogue intact. In a 2001 live television movie version of On Golden Pond starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, one character (the teenage grandson) was allowed to say "he's bullshitting you" on CBS primetime.
I remember David Letterman making a bit out of the double standard of the CBS sensors on his show, as he was allowed to show the clip from On Golden Pond with the profanity intact, but whenever Letterman said the word himself, it had to be bleeped, even directly after the clip. Letterman said it wasn't right that this "young punk" was allowed to swear on CBS primetime but he, one of the network's stars, couldn't say the same word at 11:35 at night.
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I think it was a big deal in the mid to late 60s, but the term "big deal" is a relative one. In Star Trek it was obvious they tried to avoid saying "Hell". We can see that is true because they several times included "devil" in place of "hell" in many episodes. This shows that they did not want to anger parents (kids watched that show after all) or advertisers (they paid the bills after all) by using "damn" or "hell" frivolously. However in this episode it is clear that any substitution of "devil" or "heck" would ruin the scene. They had to push it as far as they could to make that scene work. I think they executed that scene perfectly. That's about as far as they could push it. In the "real world" a captain (Kirk or otherwise), in that situation, would have said "Let's get the f*** out of here". Obviously that could not be done then.
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I think "Let's get the f*** out of here" would probably be less effective than the aired line. If Kirk used the F word, that scene would become about the word. When he says "hell," you're still concentrating on what Kirk is feeling in the scene.
Who said that Kirk would not say "hell" in a real version of that situation or any of the other situations depicted? Kirk says "Hell" for real in two episodes (this one and Doomsday Machine). Those cases are serious enough that the writers did not want to water down the scene. It seems to me that in the other situations they preferred to use alternate words (blazes, devil etc.) and allow the audience to understand that the word "hell" is implied.
Bones is a bit less clear to me. Perhaps it is the same as with Kirk, or perhaps the writers wanted us to feel that the Southern Gentleman in McCoy pushed him to swear in more colorful and less crass ways. He was able to curse much more effectively when he cursed less severely. McCoy turned cursing into an art form.
A 1956 anthology show on NBC would have certainly been subject to the network's broadcast standards department, whether it was based on a play or not. No doubt the number of profanities used was the subject of back-and-forth negotiation with the network.
The example @Maurice gave was just one of many examples, however. See this 2014 post for more detail:
The six times that "hell" appears in TOS, according to chakoteya.net. Only number 3 would be profanity in my book...
- LAZARUS: Come! Come! It'll do you no good. I'll chase you to the very fires of hell! (Alternative Factor)
- KIRK: The statement Lucifer made when he fell into the pit. 'It is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.' (Space Seed)
- KIRK: Let's get the hell out of here. (CotEoF)
- DECKER: They say there's no devil, Jim, but there is. Right out of hell, I saw it. (Doomsday Machine)
- MCCOY: Tombstone. Hell for leather, right out of history. (Spectre of the Gun)
- KIRK: Yes, well, those pressures are everywhere in everyone, urging him to what you call savagery. The private hells, the inner needs and mysteries, the beast of instinct. As human beings, that is the way it is. To be human is to be complex. You can't avoid a little ugliness from within and from without. (Requiem for Methuselah)
OK, when I was saying how many times hell was said, I was implying only when cursing was the usage. I don't think there was ever any issue saying "Hell" to refer to hell as a noun, as opposed to a deliberate curse.
So, they missed the other case when Kirk said "Hell" as a curse. In "Doomsday Machine", when Kirk sees the enterprise getting sucked into the doomsday machine, he says something like, "what the hell is going on here".
