The City on the Edge of Forever (TOS episode)
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"The City on the Edge of Forever" is a first season episode of . It is episode #28, first broadcast on April 6, 1967. It was repeated on August 31, 1967 and marked the last time NBC aired the series on Thursday nights. It was written by D. C. Fontana, based on an original script by science-fiction author Harlan Ellison, and directed by Joseph Pevney. It guest-stars Joan Collins as Edith Keeler.
Quick Overview: The crew of the Enterprise discovers a portal through space and time, which leads to McCoy accidentally altering history.
On stardate 3134.0, the Starship USS Enterprise, under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, investigates temporal disturbances centered around a nearby planet. During the investigation, a burst of energy hits the ship, and Mr. Sulu is injured when the helm controls explode. The jolt causes him cardiac arrest and Dr. McCoy injects him with cordrazine, a powerful drug that instantly revives Sulu. However, the Enterprise is battered by another wave of energy and Dr. McCoy accidentally injects himself with an overdose of the drug, causing him to become violently paranoid.
Delusional, McCoy flees from the bridge, knocks a transporter technician unconscious, takes his phaser, then escapes the ship "of murderers and assassins" by beaming down to the planet. Kirk forms a landing party, along with Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, Lt. Uhura and several security personnel, to chase after McCoy. They arrive at his coordinates and discover ancient ruins centered around a large stargate-like portal made of a glowing stone-like material. This portal seems to be the source of emanation of the time distortions. The gateway begins to speak when Kirk asks Spock, "What is it?," and it identifies itself as the "Guardian of Forever", explaining that it is a doorway to any time and place.
The Guardian's portal creates a cloud of mist and inside images form. It begins to play a loop of moving scenes from all eras of mankind. The Guardian indicates all one has to do is step through and they will be transported to the era that is currently playing. Spock begins to record as much of the images with his tricorder as he can while history rapidly passes. Enthralled, Kirk even asks the Guardian to "slow down", but it says it can only play events at one speed.
The landing party finally locates the crazed Dr. McCoy and subdues him, however McCoy manages to escape and leaps through the Guardian portal before anyone can stop him. Suddenly, everything seems to shift and the landing party loses contact with the Enterprise. The Guardian then informs the landing party that history has just been altered. The ship disappeared because the timeline has changed and the ship no longer exists.
Kirk believes that McCoy somehow altered the past; erasing all the history that they knew. Without the Enterprise, the landing party would be stranded forever on this desolate planet. Kirk asks the Guardian to loop the history images again, which it does. As the events pass by, Kirk and Spock get ready to jump through to a time just before where McCoy entered and attempt to undo whatever altering he has done to the past. Kirk informs Scotty that if they do not return, the landing party will have to jump through the portal to an era of their choosing to survive. When the era McCoy jumped to comes up, Kirk and Spock leap through.
The two materialize in New York City, back on Earth, during the 1930s Great Depression era. The appearance of their uniforms, and Spock's ears, shock some passersby. Kirk decides to steal some clothes he spots hanging on a fire escape, but as he does so, they are approached by a policeman. Kirk tries to explain that Spock is Chinese, and that Spock's ears are the result of an accident he suffered in a "mechanical rice...picker" as a child. The cop goes to arrest them, but the two manage to slip away, running into the basement of a nearby building.
There they meet a woman named Edith Keeler, who identifies herself as a social worker of the 21st Street Mission. They apologize for their trespassing, and offer to work for Edith. Her kindness wins over and she allows them to stay. In the meantime, Spock needs to analyze the data from his tricorder, but without assistance from the Enterprise computers, it will be nearly impossible. He begins to construct a processor interface, jury-rigged with 1930s-era vacuum tubes and electronics and uses it to figure out what parts of history Dr. McCoy altered.
Kirk already begins to fall in love with the beautiful Edith and leaves to get to know his host a little better. He finds her to be a remarkable visionary with a positive outlook about what the future holds for mankind, where one day everyone will be free to explore the universe, without war, hunger, or poverty. Kirk wonders, "If only Edith knew how right she will be."
Unknown to Kirk and Spock, McCoy now materializes from his leap into the portal. He shows up in an alley, still delusional, and shouting about killers and assassins. He accosts a man on the street, asking him what planet this is, and if it's all just an illusion. McCoy muses and rants about what the primitive medical technology must be like, and then falls unconscious. The bewildered man finds McCoy's phaser and accidentally vaporizes himself.
Dr. McCoy wakes up, and stumbles his way into the 21st Street Mission, asking for coffee. Edith sees him in line and rushes to his aid. McCoy still looks terrible, and Edith takes him to lie down. Just as he leaves the room Spock appears, just having missed him.
Spock finally finishes his jury-rigged interface, and as Kirk observes, he analyzes the tricorder data. The information it reveals is shocking. They discover Edith will die soon in a traffic accident, but somehow McCoy's actions save her from that fate. They look at the results of the incident and see that she forms a pacifist movement that gains in popularity during the beginnings of World War II. She even ends up meeting with the President of the United States. This meeting causes a chain of events that delays the United States entry into the war. The delay gives Nazi Germany time to develop a nuclear bomb and the edge they need to take over the world.
Kirk, not wishing to see Edith killed, is repulsed by the fact that if Edith doesn't die as she is supposed to, history will be altered for the worse.
Meanwhile Edith nurses McCoy, who is slowly coming to his senses but still thinks everything is an illusionary side effect of the cordrazine overdose. He tells her who he is and where he is from. Edith does not believe his fantastic story, but tells him that he would fit in nicely with her new eccentric boyfriend (Kirk) whom she announces she will be meeting later.
On his way to see a Clark Gable movie with Edith, Kirk learns McCoy is at the shelter when she unexpectedly mentions him by name when commenting on Kirk's ignorance of Clark Gable. Kirk is excited to learn that Bones is alive and well, but fearful as it means that Edith's death must come soon. Warning Edith to "stay right here," he dashes across the street to Spock, who is sweeping the sidewalk in front of the mission. As he reaches Spock, McCoy exits the mission right in front of them. The three comrades enjoy an enthusiastic but somewhat tense reunion. Edith watches the curious trio of friends from the street corner, and slowly crosses the street to join them, oblivious to a fast moving truck that is approaching her position.
McCoy sees Edith's danger and turns to move past Kirk into the street. Despite his love for the woman, Kirk holds McCoy back. The truck hits Edith and she is killed. The shocked and bewildered McCoy is furious with Kirk, exclaiming "Do you know what you've done!?", but Kirk is speechless with his own agony, so Spock responds: "He knows, Doctor, he knows...."
History is thus reverted to normal and Kirk, Spock and McCoy are returned to the Guardian's planet. The rest of the landing team still waits, and Scotty indicates that the three had only been gone for a few moments, not the several days that Kirk and Spock experienced in 1930s New York. The Guardian then politely asks if anyone else would like to journey through time, but Kirk responds: "Let's get the hell out of here." (This marks the first and only time in the original Star Trek series in which profanity of any kind was used).
Trivia
- Harlan Ellison's original script was altered in D. C. Fontana's shooting script, for which Ellison is still annoyed and bitter to this day. His original script (along with two story outlines and the Teaser and Act One of the Second Revised Final Draft of the script) is now available in book form. In the original script, Lieutenant Richard Beckwith, a drug dealer selling the illegal "Jewels of Sound," kills Lieutenant LeBeque after he threatens to expose Beckwith's activities. After escaping to the planet's surface, with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Yeoman Rand and six security guards close on his heels, he enters a Time Vortex, watched over by the Guardians of Forever, to escape. The time changes he effects cause the Enterprise to become a pirate vessel.
The rest of the show is roughly the same (with Keeler being the focus of the time travel, Kirk's growing love for her), but with more emphasis on Kirk and Spock spying on Keeler, waiting for Beckwith to find her.
The ending has Beckwith being captured, and Edith Keeler being hit by a truck in a fatal vehicle accident. But in this version, Beckwith attempts to save Edith, and Spock must tackle and stop him. Captain Kirk, knowing she must die, but wanting her to live, as he has fallen completely in love with her, is frozen in indecision and does nothing.
With the timeline set right, Beckwith attempts to escape again, but the Guardians of Forever have set a trap for him—he finds himself in an exploding supernova, and just before he dies a fiery death, is pulled backwards in time and forced to relive his agonizing death again and again for all eternity.
The Second Revised Final Draft had McCoy bitten by a toxic animal, which caused him to go insane and beam down to the Guardian's planet.
Ellison's original story outline had the action set in Chicago instead of New York, and the Slum Angel's name was Sister Edith Koestler, not Keeler.
The final draft as seen on television was mostly rewritten by D.C. Fontana.
- "The City on the Edge of Forever" is considered the best episode of the original series by many critics. TV Guide ranked it #68 in their 100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History feature in its July 1, 1995 edition, and also featured it in another issue on the 100 greatest TV episodes of all time. It is one of the most widely acclaimed episodes of the original series of Star Trek. It was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation at that year's World Science Fiction Convention. It would be twenty-five years before another television program would receive that honor; the next recipient being the episode "The Inner Light".
- Ellison's original version won a Writers Guild of America award for best dramatic hour-long script.
- The ancient ruins were the result of someone mis-reading Ellison's description in the script of the city as "covered with runes."
- The final words of the Guardian in this episode were "Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway". This line clearly indicated the intention that future stories may be written about adventures in time via the Guardian. Although there have been no further appearances of the Guardian in TOS or any subsequent movies or live action series, the portal is revisited in the episode "Yesteryear", and numerous books, including Peter David's novel Imzadi.
- The gateway returns in the first episode, [In Harm's Way]. This episode so impressed D. C. Fontana, that she joined the New Voyages project as a screenwriter.
- In her autobiography, Joan Collins incorrectly recalls the part of Edith Keeler as being a fascist sympathizer, one who was in love with Adolf Hitler.
- With the exception of some stock footage of New York City used on this episode, all the exterior shots were filmed on "the back forty", Desilu Studios' film backlot in Culver City, California. Previous episodes that shot there were Miri and The Return of the Archons. The 21st Street Mission was part of the back forty set known as Main Street and was referred to originally on The Andy Griffith Show as the Grand Theatre.
- It was actor Eddie Paskey who drove the truck that killed Edith.
External links
- This site hosts [an in-depth review] of Harlan Ellison's book The City on the Edge of Forever, which contains the various scripts and a length essay about their writing and revisions.
- #redirect
- ["The City on the Edge of Forever"] at [The Internet Movie Database]
- [Five-Minute The City on the Edge of Forever] — Parody version
| Last produced: "Errand of Mercy" | | Next produced: "" |
| Last transmitted: "The Alternative Factor" | Next transmitted: "" |
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