The City on the Edge of Forever is Star Trek‘s most poignant time travel story. Yet the technology of the Guardian of Forever’s Time Portal is not made explicit. Specification of the Time Vortex’s technoscience would have detracted from the emotion and meaning of Kirk’s fateful choice between his love for Edith Keeler and preservation of the galactic timeline. The classic science fiction tale was written by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Harlan Ellison. It was cited by TV Guide in its July 1995 Special Issue as the 68th “most memorable moment in TV history.” Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock pass through the Time Portal on an unnamed planet whose sun has expired, arriving instantaneously in the year 1930 in a New York City in the throes of the Great Depression. They must undo an aberrational, yet unidentifiable, incident which has catastrophically altered the timeline, and caused the twenty-third century Enterprise and the United Federation of Planets to cease to exist. All that Kirk and Spock know is that the decisive transformation of the past has somehow been ignited by an action of the accidentally drug-overdosed Dr. McCoy. Standing on the bridge treating an injured Lt. Sulu, the Chief Medical Officer was thrown off balance when a “time distortion wave” overtook and jolted the starship. Losing his grip on a hypospray full of cordrazine, McCoy inadvertently injected himself with a hundred times as much of the stimulant as is normally considered safe for an individual. In a state of frightened delirium, he beamed down alone to the dead planet orbited by the Enterprise, leapt through the Time Vortex, and changed “what was.”
A landing part of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Lt. Commander Scott, Lt. Uhura, and two security guards follow Dr. McCoy to the surface of the uncharted planet the starship had approached to investigate “ripples in time” detected from Deep Space. In the midst of the ancient ruins of a massive city uninhabited for at least a million years that stretches beyond the horizon, sits the mysterious untarnished object which is the origin of the temporal turbulence phenomenon noticed by the Starfleet officers.
Mr. Spock expresses his perplexity regarding the nature of the dazzling artifice and the source of its power. He doubts that the temporal displacement phenomenon with the framed, nebulous “screen” is a machine “as we understand mechanics” or “by any science I understand.” To which Captain Kirk rhetorically replies “then what is it?” A resonant electronic voice begins to speak. It emanates from a dusty cube sitting next to the large, irregularly shaped, enigmatic annulus. “A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space, and before your race was born, I have awaited a question. I am the Guardian of Forever.” Kirk asks the Guardian if it is a machine or a living being. “I am both and neither. I am my own beginning, my own ending.” The magisterial entity explains that it is a time portal. Like the Sarpeids of All Our Yesterdays, the “great race” that once lived on this planet escaped the apocalyptic event of the death of its sun by time traveling to the past. The Guardian cannot offer the annals of the alien planet to Kirk and Spock, but it presents them with the unfolding of Old Earth history. “Behold!”
With his tricorder, Mr. Spock records the amazing images as they flash by on the wall-sized viewport. The Guardian of Forever reruns the chronicle of the world, showing the formation of the solar system, the building of the pyramids, the Roman Empire, the Crusades, eighteenth-century British artillery, a covered wagon train, the Republican Party convention nominating Lincoln for President, the American Civil War, a nineteenth-century steam locomotive, the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and a ticker-tape parade on VE Day.
Dr. McCoy, who was hiding among the scattered archeological remains, is discovered and recaptured by the security men. He briefly collapses, then awakens, breaks free, and runs into the misty, torus-like Vortex. He disappears, and the images go blank. An exasperated Captain Kirk asks the Guardian where his ship’s surgeon has gone. “He has passed into what was,” replies the super-advanced sentient techno-apparatus. Activating his communicator, Kirk alarmingly discovers that contact with the Enterprise is no longer possible.
“Your vessel, your beginning, all that you knew is gone,” announces the Guardian. The Doctor has altered the course of history. The landing party is stranded and totally alone, without past or future. Kirk and Spock will have to go back in time themselves “to set right whatever it was that McCoy changed.”
Mr. Spock synchronizes his handheld sensor and computing device to just out of elapsed phase with the chronometric moment when Dr. McCoy jumped into the doorway to the past. Captain Kirk requests that the Guardian of Forever replay Earth’s hyper-accelerated history a second time. With the help of the previously recorded visual data, Spock “times” his and the Captain’s vault back to twentieth-century North America so they arrive a few weeks prior to McCoy’s “landing.” They bunker down in Manhattan, preparing to intercept McCoy before the good doctor wreaks his havoc on the fabric of time.
Since they do not know how long it will be before McCoy shows up, Kirk and Spock have to blend in with their period piece surroundings. They must also avoid the misstep of going native, or becoming personally involved with any consequential aspect of the local culture. They steal two sets of ordinary clothing from a clothesline in a back alley. They change out of their conspicuous Starfleet uniforms into the plain, tattered garb of the hard times era. Mr. Spock wears a wool stocking-cap to hide his pointed Vulcan ears. To draw attention away from his non-white (greenish-yellow) skin, he passes himself off as someone of Chinese-American ethnicity. The two Federation officers from the future do odd jobs for fifteen cents an hour at a Salvation Army-like mission that is also a Work Projects facility and emergency food commissary for the homeless and unemployed. They sweep floors, wash dishes, and do minor repairs.
Kirk and Spock move into a small, dreary room in a brownstone tenement house. Kirk visits the greengrocer several times a week to purchase provisions of cabbage and asparagus for his vegetarian half-Vulcan First Officer.
Captain Kirk falls deeply in love with the resplendent Edith Keeler, played by Joan Collins. Keeler is a supervisory social worker who runs the church-sponsored center for the needy. She makes exceptionally inspiring speeches to the downtrodden men who take their meals at the mission’s soup kitchen. Harlan Ellison based the character of Edith Keeler on Depression-era Pentecostal radio preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. Kirk is unaware that Keeler is the focal point of the momentous time travel quandary of the two alternative historical chronologies. Mr. Spock has already logically reasoned that some person they will meet in the past is likely to be the key to the predicament. He strongly admonishes his Captain to avoid emotional engagement with individuals in the visited time period. The Science Officer’s advice goes unheeded. Kirk’s affection towards Keeler is soon reciprocated, and the two lovers enjoy several days of bliss together. The depiction of Edith Keeler as an independent-minded, strong-willed, woman of character is unusual for early Star Trek. The Original Series notoriously tended to portray female characters through the lens of a sexist and patriarchal perspective. Kirk’s typically superficial romantic liaisons accentuated the Captain’s swaggering, ultramasculine sexuality and the stereotypical submissiveness and delicate femininity of his conquered “babes.” But James Tiberius Kirk’s relationship with Edith Keeler is surprisingly deep. For his part, it is grounded mainly in his recognition and appreciation of her inner qualities. Edith is an unselfish, compassionate, profoundly hopeful, and nearly visionary woman with acute moral and philosophical insights. According to Spock, her embracing and articulation of an ethics refusing all hatred and akin to the later revival – on Earth, Vulcan, and Cestus III – of the Hippocratic principle first, do no harm is two hundred years ahead of its time. Keeler’s feelings for Kirk are grounded in her perceptions of “who he really is” as an individual rather than his status. She does not know that he is a starship Captain.
The highly intelligent Edith Keeler suspects that Kirk and Spock are from someplace far away, and are preoccupied with a serious problem they do not wish to talk about. “Whatever it is,” she says to Captain Kirk before their becoming intimate, “let me help.” Resisting the desire to kiss her, Kirk takes her hand and echoes her words “let me help.” “A hundred years or so from now,” he muses, “a novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over ‘I love you.’” “Where does he come from?” wonders Keeler. “Where will he come from?” Kirk points towards a celestial body in the night sky, and they look up together. “A planet circling that far left star in Orion’s belt,” he says. They kiss for the first time.
Precise information about the crucial deed that Dr. McCoy did in the past, and how it resulted in a catastrophic deviation of the galactic timeline, is locked away in Mr. Spock’s partially damaged tricorder. Spock regrets that it is not possible to interface the instrument to the Enterprise‘s computer even for a few moments. Captain Kirk uses most of the money that he and Spock earn at their mission jobs to buy vacuum tubes, radio parts, coils, pieces of wire, and other “primitive equipment” to assist Spock in constructing a makeshift mneumonic circuit auxiliary computing device to work in conjunction with the tricorder. The elaborate contraption is reminiscent of the Rube Goldberg inventions of director Terry Gilliam in films like Brazil. With the ingenious feat of hardware engineering completed, Kirk and Spock are finally able to view a drastically slowed-down version of the image sequence which Spock recorded from the Guardian of Forever Time Vortex, output to the tricorder’s small screen.
Kirk and Spock examine New York City newspaper headlines and articles in the two parallel timelines. In one of the two possible timestreams, stories in the press from the late 1930s indicate that Edith Keeler went on to lead a nationally influential humanitarian and pacifist movement called World Peaceways. She became a trusted advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is a newspaper article reporting on Keeler’s first meeting with Roosevelt on February 22, 1936, under the headline F.D.R. CONFERS WITH SLUM AREA “ANGEL.” Above the headline is a picture of Edith Keeler. Unbeknownst to Keeler, her benevolently-intended movement was infiltrated by German Nazi agents. The idealistic organization’s historical impact was to delay the United States government’s decision to enter World War II. Due to this retardation, Hitler’s Germany had sufficient time “to complete its heavy-water experiments” and become the first country to develop the atomic bomb. The Nazis won the War. The course of world history was radically changed. Societies on all continents descended into barbarism. Manned spaceflight was never achieved. There was no courageous astrophysicist named Zefram Cochrane to invent warp speed in 2063. There was no globally unified Earth to join the Vulcans and others in founding the United Federation of Planets in the late twenty-second century. It is the end of the world as we know it.
The secret of Dr. McCoy’s unknown action that decisively altered history is brought step by step to light. In an image belonging to the other possible alternative timeline – the one leading to Federation history as we know it – Mr. Spock sees Edith Keeler’s death notice. The obituary is printed in a 1930 New York City newspaper dated just a few days hence. In the “restored” timeline, Keeler is killed in “some sort of traffic accident.” After a few hours of anxious uncertainty caused by burnout of the jerry-rigged device’s electrical lines, Kirk and Spock are able to deduce that McCoy’s crucial intervention in the past is that he somehow prevents Edith Keeler’s death. It is a critical conjuncture in the time-flow with two possible event outcomes and follow-up consequences for “forever.” It all depends upon what McCoy does, or what Kirk and Spock do to restrain him.
Due to his love for Edith Keeler, Captain Kirk is thrown into confusion. He wonders out loud about the option of choosing to not stop Dr. McCoy. Edith is real, and the history that will be saved is abstract. Mr. Spock knows what has to be done. If Kirk and Spock do not succeed in stopping McCoy from impeding Keeler’s (un)timely demise, then, as the Science Officer puts it, “millions will die who did not die before.” For Spock, the logical course of action is clear. For the “normal” timeline to be reestablished, “Edith Keeler must die!”
Enjoying the short time they will have together, the two lovers emerge onto the sidewalk and the cool night air. Their tall male friend is discreetly walking on the other side of the street. “If we hurry,” Edith says, “maybe we can catch the Clark Gable movie at the Orpheum.” “What?” replies Jim lazily. “Dr. McCoy said the same thing,” responds Edith. Kirk is startled to hear the name of his close friend and ship’s doctor. McCoy arrived a few days ago. He is staying in a small room above the mission. He was sick and in a frenzied state, but has been nursed back to health by Edith. “Leonard McCoy?” Jim Kirk asks Edith Keeler. Telling his female companion to wait for him, Kirk runs across the street towards the mission to look for McCoy. Just at this moment, the Doctor comes out of the mission front door, and is met by Spock. Kirk joins hisEnterprise associates. It is a happy reunion. McCoy is overjoyed to see his fellow Starfleet officers.
Edith Keeler regards the celebrating friends from a distance with great curiosity. She waves to them. Forgetting Kirk’s entreaty that she stay put, Edith starts to cross the street. A delivery van is approaching. As focused as she is on the three men, she does not notice it. McCoy sees the vehicle barreling towards her, and starts to move to rescue her. Kirk grabs hold of him with both arms, and prevents him from running out to save her. Brakes screech and Edith Keeler screams. Kirk has allowed the accident to occur, killing the woman he loves.
“You deliberately stopped me, Jim,” Dr. McCoy exclaims to Kirk with accusatory anger. “I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?” Kirk’s clenched fist and contorted face reveal his total anguish and despair. “He knows, Doctor,” says Spock quietly. “He knows.”
The three senior Starfleet officers are returned through the Time Portal by the Guardian to the City on the Edge of Forever. For Scotty, Uhura, and the rest of the landing party, only a few seconds have gone by. “Time has resumed its shape,” states the Guardian of Forever authoritatively. “All is as it was before.” The timeline, history, and the Enterprise are restored. Captain Kirk is devastated from the experience.
But the Guardian of Forever is not finished. “Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway.” “Let’s get the hell out of here,” says Kirk with indignation.
Ellison Challenges Roddenberry
In The City on the Edge of Forever, time travel frames a narrative emphasizing existential freedom as the core of human history. In physics terms, the future does not “already exist.” Sent back to 1930s New York City by the Guardian of Forever, Captain Kirk falls deeply in love with Edith Keeler. Technology devised by Mr. Spock reveals that Keeler must die in a pedestrian traffic accident to not delay U.S. entry into World War II and protect the integrity of the timeline. But Kirk is genuinely unsure whether to choose the universe or the woman he loves. The painful choice is not decidable in advance. Although history appears in retrospect to be an informational accumulation of facts and dates which must take place, real events are anything but inevitable and determined when actually lived. Human historical agents engage in actions which are existentially free decisions and choices. The scene of the event is the realm of contingency. In spite of all our erudite knowledge of the chronology, if we really “put ourselves in the shoes” of past actors, what must be recognized is that we cannot know whether the event will or will not take place. Overlooked in our stereotypical view of history is the truth that actors could have acted otherwise. It is not irresistibly the case that “Edith Keeler must die.”
The City on the Edge of Forever is a story of great imagination and literary qualities. It is Star Trek‘s most artistically sublime episode. It demonstrates the reality of existential freedom precisely in a circumstance of utmost historical importance and necessity. In a Chaos Theory Butterfly Effect, the seemingly insignificant event of a woman getting run over by a van has major consequences for the complex nonlinear system of the unfolding of time and the real.
The City on the Edge of Forever is also the locus of one of the most monumental controversies surrounding the “century’s most enduring TV show.” The dispute between teleplay writer Harlan Ellison and Star TrekExecutive Producer Gene Roddenberry is a battleground for bragging rights to the title of the creative genius who originated this dazzling crown jewel of prime Star Trek cultural property. Science fiction great Ellison’s “critique” of Roddenberry and the Star Trek industry, as articulated most recently in the 1996 “Expanded Introductory Essay” to the now-available Original Script of The City on the Edge of Forever, is both right and wrong. Ellison’s diatribe is best read metaphorically as a piercing analysis of the general commercialization and commodification of Star Trek. On this point, Ellison was indeed prophetic, sensing that largely future development already in the 1960s. His essay has been a major inspiration for the present study.
Where Harlan Ellison is ironically wrong is on the specific and literal level of claiming that the many rewrites of the original teleplay ordered by Roddenberry resulted in an emasculated final aesthetic product. The excellence of seminal Star Trek episodes points to the possibility of an exalted art form that is singular to television. The City on the Edge of Forever attains its beauty through a “collaborative effort” between Ellison and Roddenberry (in spite of their mutual animosity), between the literary illumination and production-oriented changes made for the medium of Marshall McLuhan’s “participatory” television that make it even better. The critical dividing line between creativity and commodification (or seduction and simulation) is not found at the border between written literary science fictional story and revised TV production, as Ellison or many “literati” would have it. It is situated at the boundary between the charismatically original SF television episode (of which The City on the Edge of Forever is a magnificent example) and the neutralizing formulaic codes of recombinant techno-culture. The seminal Star Trek episode is amply influenced by, yet is more than, the written story.
After three initial “treatments” or story outlines (dated March 21, May 1, and May 13, 1966), Harlan Ellison handed in his “first-draft teleplay” of The City on the Edge of Forever to Desilu Studios on June 7, 1966. Gene Roddenberry and his colleagues, such as Production Vice President Herbert F. Solow and Associate Producer Robert H. Justman, were positively impressed by the brilliance of the “time travel to Old Earth” script. They also believed that the televised version would require major deviations from Ellison’s original text. It was the “best and most beautifully written screenplay” for a Star Trekepisode that the production team had ever received (and anticipated they ever would receive in the future). The executives, however, immediately reached the decision (according to their version of events) that substantial editing or “dilution” of Ellison’s creation would be necessary. To stay below the weekly episode budget ceiling, and to bring the story’s overall structure and message into line with the standard expectations of the Star Trek“intelligent science fiction” audience, modifications would have to be made.
The City on the Edge of Forever was redacted at least six times before becoming the “shooting script” on which the aired version, produced during February 1967, was based. Harlan Ellison did a “revised final-draft teleplay,” which arrived at Desilu Studios on August 15, 1966. Interim Story Editor Steve Carabatsos attempted to fashion an “improved” script, incorporating changes stipulated by his superiors, but his handiwork was soundly rejected by both Ellison and the show’s producers. Ellison wrote a “second revised final-draft teleplay,” for which he received no monetary compensation. It was completed in December 1966. Star Trek Producer, The Devil in the Dark author, and discoverer of the Klingon planet Qo’noS Gene L. Coon did the next rewrite, making “simplification” changes to the plot structure. This Side of Paradise author Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana had the most major go at revising the script. She added Hollywoodish romantic touches to the Captain Kirk-Edith Keeler relationship. She expanded the role of the tricorder-enhancing technological device that Mr. Spock assembles from spare parts. After the delivery of Fontana’s version on January 27, 1967 (there is also a version revised by Fontana in the UCLA Arts Library Star Trek archive dated January 23), Gene Roddenberry undertook one concluding round of scriptural amendments. According to his later pronouncements, the Great Bird of the Galaxy rendered the ultimately broadcasted episode “more Star Trek-like,” as only he was capable of doing. In reality, Roddenberry’s writerly contribution to The City on the Edge of Forever was a few last bits of superficial tinkering. The version attributed to him is dated only five days later than Fontana’s final variant.
Harlan Ellison considered the final product which issued from these myriad corrections to be a “fatally inept treatment” of his original vision. At the 1967 Writers Guild of America awards dinner, Ellison rose to the podium to accept the honors for “most outstanding teleplay for a dramatic television series.” He gave an impassioned speech denouncing the Star Trek Executive Producers who had “interfered with the writing process” and adulterated his artistic achievement. The version of The City on the Edge of Forever that won the Writers Guild Award was Ellison’s original script, not any of the sextupled Studio versions. In the early days of what would become an epic quarrel, Gene Roddenberry was not yet obsessed with stealing creative credits for the highly acclaimed time travel story. In a June 20, 1967 letter to Ellison, Roddenberry wrote: “Never outside [my office] and particularly nowhere in S.F. or television circles have I ever mentioned that the script was anything but entirely yours.” But as time went on, Roddenberry was no longer able to bear the thought that the universally estimated-to-be best episode of The Original Series had come into being due to the creative abilities of someone other than himself. He began to publicly spin an intricate web of lies about the episode script’s history. In many published interviews, Roddenberry repeats his claims that he was the originating mind-father and guardian spirit of The City on the Edge of Forever; that he based the character of Edith Keeler on memories of his own father; and that he rewrote and heroically salvaged Ellison’s unshootable and “hopelessly botched effort.” Typical of the rogue nature of Harlan Ellison’s original script was the fact that, according to theStar Trek Creator whose ashes were scattered to stardust by the Pegasus Rocket of Houston-based Celetus, Inc. on April 22, 1997, Ellison “had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs.” (interview with Roddenberry inVideo Review, March 1987) In fact, Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott does not figure at all in Ellison’s original teleplay. There is a “bad guy” character named Richard Beckwith who peddles an illegal “hallucinogenic narcotic” substance called the Jewels of Sound to a fellow Enterprise officer named LeBeque and other Starfleet and alien addicts. In Ellison’s original version, it is Beckwith, not Dr. McCoy, who illicitly beams down to the nameless planet, dives through the Guardian of Forever Time Portal into the past, and changes all of history through his actions. In Ellison’s script, there are several Guardians of Forever. The theme of existential freedom as the core of human history (that does not have to go the way it did in the history books) is brought out even more forcefully in the unrevised version. It is Spock who must kill Edith Keeler, because Kirk “cannot force himself to be Fate’s Triggerman.” (Peter David’s essay in the Harlan Ellison book)
Skepticism towards the interpretations of both sides in the dispute is warranted. Ironically shared in the attitudes of both parties is making too big an issue of “writer’s credits.” They overestimate the written story and underestimate the dramaturgical media technologies of television as significant components of the seminal sci-fi episode’s creativity. Gene Roddenberry was notorious for “using and taking credit for other people’s ideas.” He was “pathologically” fixated on grabbing writer’s credits, as is exhaustively documented in Joel Engel’s unauthorized investigative biography. (Gene Roddenberry: The Man and the Myth Behind Star Trek) Roddenberry was unable to relax and appreciate the importance of the creative contributions he made in other areas. For Harlan Ellison, the original script is simply equivalent to the original version of the episode. He cannot see that the archetypal “top 100” television episode, serving as the model for the subsequently reproduced and commodified series, is the outcome of an artistic process in its own right, with more than one consequential ingredient.
Harlan Ellison has suffered much verbal abuse over the years from principals of the Star Trek industry, and has dished it back. In his published reminiscences about the early days of the show, Co-Producer Robert Justman tries to portray Ellison as an oddball eccentric who pretended to lie asleep on the floor of Justman’s office while the latter conducted business meetings, pranced about atop Justman’s desk, ate raw plant leaves, and should have been carted off to the loony bin. On the other hand, Ellison was a major facilitator in establishing contacts between Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry and other well-known science fiction writers. He enlisted several high-quality scribes to write segments for the series. Ellison recruited Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote Shore Leave and Amok Time, and Norman Spinrad, who wrote The Doomsday Machine. When NBC threatened to cancel The Original Series towards the end of its first season on the air, due to mediocre A. C. Nielsen ratings, Ellison organized an advisory group of famous science fiction and fantasy writers (including Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Frank Herbert, and Poul Anderson) called the Committee. He sent out letters on its behalf to thousands of SF fans, urging them to participate in the “saveStar Trek” write-in campaign to NBC, its local affiliate stations, TV magazines, newspaper columnists, and Star Trek advertisers. In his recent “Expanded Introductory Essay” to the original script of The City on the Edge of Forever, Ellison asserts that he believes in retrospect that the alleged fact that NBC was getting ready to shelve Star Trek was a rumor invented and strategically put into circulation by Roddenberry.
Harlan Ellison’s acerbic general comments about the Star Trek culture industry are worth quoting at length. “If it weren’t for the money, for that overflowing Star Trek trough in which the pig-snouts are dipped every day, no one would give a rat’s-ass if the truth about Roddenberry and the show got told. But if you follow the money, you see that river of gold flowing straight off the Paramount lot in boring sequel-series after clone-show, and you see the merchandisers and the franchisers…” “Isn’t the reason for doing a Star Trek book of any kind – picayune biography, sharecropping derivative novel, moron quiz book, obsessional trivia book, adolescent episode guide – for the money?” Original ideas must be packaged to “penetrate the regimented thinking of network executives who ideate only in clone images of previous TV ‘successes.’”