People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
--Albert Einstein
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
--Stephen Hawking
If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.
--Carl Sagan
What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History as we know it would be impossible. It would cease to exist.
--Michio Kaku
I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?
--William Shatner
If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring.
--Carl Sagan
What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History as we know it would be impossible. It would cease to exist.
--Michio Kaku
I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?
--William Shatner
In the original Star Trek, Kirk and Spock returned to Earth's past three
times: "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "The City on the Edge of Forever", and
"Assignment: Earth" ("All Our Yesterdays" is also a time travel story but on another planet, not Earth, which is why I'm choosing to skip it, even though it does have some cool musketeers.) "The
City on the Edge of Forever" is considered among many to be the best
episode of the entire series, so let's start there. As you'll see, I have a lot to say about it.
Written (the first draft, anyway) by an up-and-coming science-fiction writer named Harlan Ellison, "The City on the Edge of Forever" begins with the Enterprise taking a beating from temporal disturbances emanating from a heretofore unknown planet. Sulu is seriously injured during one such disturbance, and Dr. McCoy is called to the bridge to administer first aid in the form of a "Cordrazine" injection, a remedy of the future that can perk a wounded patient right up if done right. If done wrong, as James T. Kirk says, it's "tricky stuff." Fortunately, it's done right for Sulu and he indeed perks up. Unfortunately, there's another disturbance, the bridge again shakes violently, and McCoy accidentally inject himself with way too much of the wonder drug. Crazed out of his mind, the good doctor runs from the bridge, into the transporter room, and beams himself down to the planet below. Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Uhura and a few nondescript crew members beam right on down after him, and find themselves amidst ancient ruins. Ancient, however, doesn't necessarily mean backward. One of the ruins appears to be a stone cavity, big enough for an adult to walk through, that both glows and talks! The cavity haughtily explains that it is the Guardian of Forever, a working time machine left behind by the planet's natives who otherwise couldn't survive their own civilization's upkeep. The Guardian plays back Earth's past as if the cavity was a particularly wide TV screen and images of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, the Crusades, the American Revolution, etc, are fleetingly glimpsed. Spock belatedly begins recording all this on his tricorder, when McCoy appears out of nowhere, jumps into the cavity, and disappears as fleetingly as the images themselves. At that point, Uhura realizes they no longer have contact with the Enterprise and, as the Guardian matter-of-factly explains, it's because there is no Enterprise, that McCoy has somehow changed the past, and everything that they once knew is now no more. Well, they still have their memories, I guess. Kirk wants more than that so asks the Guardian to replay Earth's past right up to the point of McCoy's leap into history. Kirk and Spock jump through and find themselves in New York City during the Great Depression. Trying to avoid conspicuousness, the two steal some clothes from a clothesline only to be confronted by a cop. Kirk tries to explain the most conspicuous part of Spock's anatomy by claiming he'd gotten his head stuck in a mechanical rice picker as a child. The cop wants to arrest them anyway, but Spock gets the drop on him in a form of a Vulcan nerve pinch. The two then flee the scene, and take refuge in a cellar, where they encounter pretty Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), who runs the 31st Street Mission. Kirk tells her at least part of the truth--that they're wanted clothes-nappers--and she takes pity on the two, telling them they can stay there, as long as they perform chores around the place. Once in their own room, Spock sets about building a computer so as to replay the images locked in his tricorder, not an easy task in that "zinc-plated vacuum-tubed culture." Since he's not going to be building anything, Kirk spends his free time getting to know Edith better. Turns out she's a fascinating woman, who can foresee a time when space travel is routine. So could the guys who drew the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips, but Kirk is impressed anyway. In fact, he's smitten. Meanwhile, Spock manages to build a crude computer, and finds he's recorded two contradictory images, both newspaper headlines. One has Edith meeting the President of the United States six years in the future. The other, an obituary, has her getting hit by a truck long before that, in fact, in just a few days! Before Spock can figure the discrepancy out, the computer short-circuits. Back to work. Once he gets it working again, he figures out exactly what happened, or will happen, or can happen. The Guardian of Forever doesn't just show any old history, but "focal points", history's most malleable moments, where the outcome--the future--is most at stake. What's at stake here is nothing less than World War II. Edith Keeler may be an unknown proprietor of a soup kitchen now, but in six years she'll be the head of a peace movement so immense that Franklin Delano Roosevelt will have no other choice but to negotiate rather than take up arms against Adolf Hitler, giving the wily Nazi just enough time to develop the V2 rocket and the atomic bomb, and thus mastery of the world. Unless Edith gets hit by a truck first. McCoy apparently prevented that from happening during his first travel through time, so all Kirk and Spock have to do now is prevent McCoy's prevention. Except Kirk's now in love with Edith, so there's that to deal with. That night or close to that night, McCoy finally makes his 1930s debut. Scaring the hell out of a milkman, the still-mad doctor, looking above at the constellations, realizing he's on Earth but an Earth before his time, rants about barbaric doctors cutting open bodies and sticking their hands inside before passing out. An opportunistic homeless guy goes through the unconsious McCoy's clothes and finds his phaser. It's the last thing he'll ever find as he accidentally vaporizes himself. The next morning McCoy staggers into the 31st Street Mission where Edith Keeler takes mercy and gives him a room, both of them leaving the dining area a mere moment before Spock enters. That night Edith checks up on McCoy. The Cordrazine has worn off by now, but with no immediate explanation as to why he's in New York City during the Great Depression, the doctor decides the drug must still be active within him, and thus everything par for the delusional course. Except Keeler herself, whom he's convinced is real. Introducing himself, he offers to do chores around the place. They'll talk about it later she replies; a man is taking her to a Clark Gable movie. McCoy never heard of the guy. Outside the mission, Edith again mentions Clark Gable, this time to Kirk, who's never heard of him either.
Sorry to break up the narrative here, but I really feel I have to perform a public service for the pop culture-deprived citizens of the 23rd century. Clark Gable. Major film star of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Among his career highlights: A Free Soul (1931; though he played a secondary character, and a murderous gangster to boot, this one made him a star), Red Dust (1932), Strange Interlude (1932, first time he wore a mustache onscreen), No Man of Her Own (1932; only film with future wife Carole Lombard), Dancing Lady (1933; only film with The Three Stooges, none of which he married), It Happened One Night (1934; made him an even bigger star and brought the undershirt industry to its knees after he appeared on screen bare-chested), Manhattan Melodrama (1934; last film John Dillinger ever saw), The Call of the Wild (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), San Francisco (1936), Saratoga (1937; costar Jean Harlow's final film) Gone With the Wind (1939; played Rhett Butler, his most famous role) Boom Town (1940), The Hucksters (1947), Homecoming (1948), Mogambo (1953; remake of Red Dust with him playing the same character), Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), The Misfits (1960; his final film--Marilyn Monroe's, too.)
As I said before, "The City on the Edge of Forever" is today considered the single best episode of the original Star Trek series. Though ratings-wise the episode came and went, the accolades started early. In 1968, Harlan Ellison's original teleplay (which differed from what was eventually shown on TV) won the Writers Guild of America Award for best dramatic hour-long script. Perhaps more impressive, as at the time TV was given short shrift by the science-fiction establishment, it was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. It was another 25 years before the prestigious sci-fi honor was given to another TV show, this time for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. More recently TV Guide ranked it #68 on their 100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History, then #92 on the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, so according to the venerable periodical, it's slightly more memorable than great, but maybe that's preferable. No sense in being great if no one remembers you. The popular entertainment website The A.V. Club gives the episode an A, calling it a "justly revered classic". Both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy have listed the episode as one of their favorites, with the latter calling it "good tragedy."
Why, there's even a T-shirt. Can you think of any higher accolade than that?
You may have detected by my tone that I'm not quite as enamored of this episode as everybody else. I don't dislike it, but do think it's overrated. With your open-minded permission (just in case you're wearing one of those T-shirts while reading this) I'd like to share my misgivings with you.
Now, if you read some of the quotes at the top of this page, yes, time-travel is theoretically possible. So is eliminating the world of war and poverty. OK, that may not be a good comparison, as time-travel may strike most of you as much more likely than eliminating the world of war and poverty. Also, time-travel into the future has actually occurred. Real-life astronauts have taken clocks into space and returned to Earth to find that said clocks are now a millisecond slow, meaning the spacemen themselves have arrived a millisecond into the future (far short of the thousands of years achieved by the hero of H. G. Wells 1895 novel The Time Machine.) Or else they're just crappily made clocks bought from a dollar store. Anyway, we're already traveling into the future. If you're hair's a little grayer or you've got a few more liver spots on your forehead once you get there, well, deal with it. As for time traveling into the past, you can warp-time space, as Stephen Hawkings notes, but what do you warp-time it with? Faster-than-light rocket ships are the most likely way. Except that faster-than-light rocket ships are unlikely, meaning that it's theoretically possible to travel into the past in a machine that's theoretically impossible. Sigh. There are always strings attached. Which reminds me. String theory is another possibility when it comes to time travel. Just unravel the strings connecting space, time, gravity, electromagnetism and the fifth dimension and we all go back in time. Either that or the fabric of reality disappears and we all vanish into nothingness. Antimatter to antimatter and dust to dust. Before you get too depressed, wormholes are another possibility. You just need the theoretically impossible (or at least improbable) faster-than-light rocket ship as there are no wormholes in Earth's immediate neighborhood. Or black holes, another time-travel possibility. However, even if you could get close enough to a black hole to travel backwards in time, the gravity would be so great you'd be crushed to death first, possibly ending up as dandruff in some poor caveman's hair. In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the title character falls backwards in time after getting hit in the head with a crowbar. As much as I admire Twain, I have to admit that's not very realistic, as "backwards" (as well as "forwards") is relative. Speaking of relativity, it's Albert Einstein that got us into this mess with those damn theories of his. Except even he didn't believe in time-travel, as he found it disruptive of cause-and-effect (you know, that old saw about what happens if you invent a time machine and kill your grandfather before you you were born and thus can't invent a time machine in the first place, though I suppose it would be a good way to beat a murder rap.) Einstein insisted there must be something in physics that would prevent time-travel, but died without discovering exactly what that would be. He never figured out that Unified Field Theory, either. The theoretical underpinnings of the atomic bomb--that he figured out.
A recent example of the cautionary time-travel story is Stephen King's best-selling novel 11/22/63. In 2011 a 35-year old divorced GED instructor by the name of Jake Epping living, like most King characters, in a small town in Maine, is told by Al, the owner of a local diner, that in his pantry is a time portal to 1958, to which he's been visiting for years to pick up fresh hamburger meat for his establishment at 50 year old prices. Epping would normally not be inclined to believe any of this except that Al looks a lot older than he did just two days earlier. Seems in his last visit to 1958, Al decided to stick around for a while--all the way to 1963 so as to the thwart the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He didn't succeed, and as he's now dying from lung cancer, wants Epping to do it for him. Epping balks at this, so Al commits suicide. Realizing the portal might soon be lost to him forever, Epping indeed returns to 1958, makes his way to Texas, where he stalks and spies on Lee Harvey Oswald, depicted here as a wife-beating lout (as are several other characters in this book.) Epping succeeds in foiling the assassination, and returns to 2011 to see if the world has improved any. It hasn't. Nuclear wars are commonplace, as are nuclear accidents such as the one that has wiped out most of New England including Maine, now a province of Canada. Epping further learns that Kennedy failed to get any civil rights legislation passed, Martin Luther King was killed not in Memphis but Chicago and the blacks there retaliated by burning the city down and establishing a fiefdom, George Wallace succeeded Kennedy and dropped an atomic bomb on Hanoi, a decision met with resounding approval by the American people with the exception of Arthur Bremer, who shoots and kills Wallace, who's than succeeded by former Air Force General and firebomb innovator Curtis LeMay, who in turn is succeeded by Hubert Humphrey, who serves just one term and is succeeded by Ronald Reagan. Several administrations go unmentioned but we find out Hilary Clinton is now president (Bill having succumbed to a coronary), and has had to deal with such problems a earthquakes, an increase in suicides, and Miami going up in a mushroom cloud. If all that wasn't bad enough, Paul McCartney was blinded during a concert. Seeing how he's fucked everything up, Epping returns to 1958, which sets everything right again.
Unless the comedy is Back to the Future. Actually, the main storyline is indeed your typical altered-past-gone-wrong, though this time nothing of a historical nature. However, once everything is righted, there's another change to the past, but, finally, one with a positive outcome. Marty McFly returns to the present in a time machine-DeLorean and is pleasantly surprised to discover that he now has a vastly improved, as well as more upwardly-mobile, family life. However, what's good for McFly may be a bit frustrating for some in the audience, and here we come to the real reason so many time travel stories take the negative route. As we're not characters in a movie or otherwise made-up story, we can't simply erase our troubles by getting behind the wheel of a DeLorean (in fact, the DeLorean wasn't all that good for DeLorean, as in John, whose company went bankrupt.) It's sort of like when you hear someone say "If I had to do it all over again, I'd do everything exactly the same." Easy to say when it's a pretty good bet you never will have to do it all over again. And just as easy to say you shouldn't change the past. Meanwhile, what happened to Marty McFly's original family, the one with all the flaws, the one that had an entirely different set of experiences, as well as memories of those experiences, the first time around? Did they just disintegrate? Egads!
And what of this choice?
"The City on the Edge of Forever" is a good example of the "sadistic
choice" story. This is where the hero is faced with two choices, each
of which
will have some kind of negative consequence. It's a pretty common plot
device. For instance, there's a
1950s Superman story where Lex Luther, apparently for no other reason
than to piss the Man of Steel off, has Lana Lang and Lois Lane in some
kind of contraption where if either one is rescued, the other dies. Moving ahead to the 1970s and a different superhero, the Green Goblin threatens to throw Spider-Man's girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, off New York City's George Washington Bridge unless the web-slinger kills himself first. Moving ahead to the 21st century and a movie version of a comic book superhero, the Joker rigs up two ferries with explosives. One ferry has law-abiding citizens, the other convicts with guards watching over them. Each ferry has a detonator that can blow the other up, and the Joker has a detonator that can blow up both ferries, which he'll do if one doesn't blow the other by midnight. Got all that? Good, because I now want to leave superheroes behind altogether and go backwards to 1964 for my final example, the movie Fail-Safe. A Pentagon computer malfunctions and orders an all-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The President of the United States (Henry Fonda) does manage, through various maneuvers, to prevent most of the warplanes from arriving at their targets. Except for the one headed toward Moscow. The fellow flying that particular aircraft is determined to drop the Bomb no matter what. The U.S.S.R is sure to retaliate. Nothing the President can do about that, except he'll soon have to decide whether to retaliate against the retaliation.
So what are the outcomes of all these sadistic choices? Superman wakes up from his dream (the waking-up-from-a-dream is another common plot device going all the way back to Alice in Wonderland.) Spider-Man decides to try to save Gwen without dying in the process, so she ends up dying in the process instead. The people on both ferries first decide to detonate, then decide not to, and Batman shows up before midnight, thus preventing the Joker from using his detonator. The President decides to drop the Bomb on New York City before the Russians can, in the hope that the nuclear tit-for-tat will end any further escalation. 
Of all these sadistic choice stories, I suppose Spider-Man's is the most realistic. No, not that a man in one scary costume would do battle with a man in another scary costume on top of the George Washington Bridge, causing all kinds of traffic jams as some motorists stop and crane their necks upward to see what the hell is going on. Just that denying a sadistic choice is a sadistic choice seems to me the most likely human response. Actually, maybe Superman's dream sequence is the most realistic. For the most part, our waking hours aren't filled with sadistic choices. They're filled with hard choices. Should I take my old job or keep my new one? Should I replace the antifreeze in my car, or just hope that The Old
Farmer's Almanac is right and we have a mild winter this year? Should I tell my fiancee about the time I got drunk and tried to make out with that statue in the town square, or just hope none of my so-called friends ever post the pictures on Facebook? Things like that. I never bought The Dark Knight. Those two ferries would have gone up in flames while Bruce Wayne was still buckling up his utility belt. Nor, as much as I like the film and the man who plays the President, do I find the ending of Fail-Safe very convincing. Henry Fonda was a lifelong Democrat. Nuke New York and you lose a major constituency.The one thing all these sadistic choice stories have in common is there's a degree of uncertainty to the proceedings. Superman is so indecisive he wakes up. Spider-Man can't be too sure that the Green Goblins is holding all the cards, as well as Gwen Stacy, or he wouldn't have attempted to save her in the first place. None of the people on the ferry knows what the people on the other ferry is going to do, and vice-versa. Until almost the very end, President Fonda hopes the mere offer of radiating the Big Apple is enough to appease the soon-to-be Moscow-less Soviets.
Now compare all that to "The City on the Edge of Forever". I said throughout these series of posts that the Unknown is a major theme of Star Trek. Well, there's not too much that's unknown in this particular episode. Once Spock gets that computer working, he lays it all on the line: EDITH KEELER LIVES = NAZI DOMINATION. The only real question is whether James T. Kirk is man enough, selfless enough, confident enough, assertive enough, courageous enough, gallant enough, attentive enough, conscientiousness enough, compassionate enough, diligent enough, benevolent enough, considerate enough, altruistic enough, committed enough, dependable enough, courteous enough, flexible enough, determined enough, honorable enough, fair enough, inventive enough, helpful enough, impartial enough, merciful enough, forthright enough, respectful enough, mindful enough, responsible enough, noble enough, resilient enough, sane enough, prudent enough, trustworthy enough, sincere enough, thoughtful enough, reasonable enough, tenacious enough, sensitive enough, tactful enough, wise enough, bold enough, and, finally, virtuous enough to do everything in his power to make sure that a nice young woman who never hurt anyone is hit and killed by a truck.Turns out he is.
I googled "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "controversy" to see if anyone has a problem with Kirk's good deed. I could find none. Everybody on every web site seems to think Kirk had no other choice. Don't expect any dissension from me. If I were Kirk--and I'm not despite his last name being the same as my first--I might have done the same thing. So what's the problem?
The problem is that it's not a problem. The whole thing is cleverly designed so that the viewer can take sadistic satisfaction from Kirk's sadistic solution to his sadistic problem, as the T-shirt I showed you earlier will attest. Also simplistic satisfaction from a simplistic solution to a simplistic problem. And a contrived solution to a contrived problem (notice I didn't say the satisfaction was contrived; I'm giving people the benefit of a doubt.) I don't find this episode to be particularly profound. It offers no great insight on the human condition other then that, like Edith Keeler, we tend to go through life utterly clueless about what fate has in store for us. Nimoy said it was good tragedy. Not as the Ancient Greeks defined tragedy, which has some fatal flaw leading an otherwise decent person to their ruin, unless you consider Edith's inability to look both ways before crossing the street a fatal flaw. Of course, you can argue that it's not really Edith that suffers here but Kirk. Well, what's his fatal flaw? That he's a sucker for a pretty face? In that case, Donald Trump is a tragic hero. Nor is this tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, where a great person is brought low. After all, Kirk gets to leave the Great Depression behind and go back to his cool state-of-the-art starship. There are also American tragedies, such as Theodore Dreiser's aptly named 1925 novel An American Tragedy. There an act of criminal desperation sends an ambitious but impoverished young man to his doom. Whereas Kirk desperately wants not to commit an act that sends an impoverished young woman to her doom, and when he does anyway, we can all agree it wasn't an act of criminal negligence--right?--though a jury might have saw it differently had he bothered to stick around the 1930s and stand trial. Arthur Miller's 1949 play Death of a Salesman is often described as a tragedy. There an ordinary man exhausts every option to improve his lot in life but still ends up crushed by overwhelming fate. James Kirk is far from ordinary, and he ends up aiding and abetting overwhelming fate, albeit reluctantly. Actually, now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm not so sure Kirk (or Spock) really did exhaust every option. Edith may have been destined to die, but couldn't the two Starfleet officers at least clued her in about what was going on. Who knows? Maybe she would have put that peace movement on the back-burner. To be fair "The City on the Edge of Forever" does have two traditional features of dramatic or literary tragedy: emotion and catharsis. Lets start with emotion. Kirk falls in love with Edith and goes through heartbreak when he has to watch (and let) her die. But as she's totally clueless as to her role as a focal point in history and spends much of her time doing good, you'd think Kirk might have found her demise rather unsettling anyway even if he'd never had any strong feelings towards her. Not that he should have had strong feelings in the first place. Since Kirk knows going in that all of history now depends on him, you'd think he would have steeled himself against any emotional involvement. So why is the bar set so romantically high in this episode? Maybe, just maybe, the producers were in fact a bit concerned that viewers might balk at this young woman's death and Kirk's role in it, even if it did guarantee a Nazi-less future. So in order to put the whole thing over, it was decided Kirk indeed needed to suffer, to pay, for his utterly selfless, unavoidable, perfectly understandable, and unambiguously non-controversial course of action. And here we come to the catharsis. The audience gets to suffer right along with him, not too much but just enough not to get caught up in any moral second-guessing.
25 to 27 years before Star Trek first went on the air.
Those of you who have some familiarity with World War II may wonder why I would say "The City on the Edge of Tomorrow" is not historically accurate. If she lives, Edith Keeler is destined to lead a major peace movement. Well, there was a major peace movement in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. More properly called the Isolationist Movement, it was made up of elements of both the Left and the Right. Many on the Left felt the ongoing war in Europe in the late '30s and early '40s was just a replay of the one that went on in the 1910s, which was in retrospect all about making the world safe for imperialism. Many on the Right felt that the U.S.S.R was the true enemy, and maybe if we're nice to Hitler he'll go conquer it for us. So, if there really was a major peace movement back then, and Edith Keeler is said to have been destined to start one, shouldn't that have led a certain creditability to this episode? No, because Edith is fictional, and even if she wasn't, and was hit and killed by a truck, there would have been a major peace movement anyway. OK, then, maybe she was meant more as a symbol or a metaphor for a major peace movement that was in fact a historical fact. That should lend a certain creditability to this episode, symbolically and metaphorically speaking. Well, Edith Keeler's fictional major peace movement keeps America out of the war long enough for Hitler to win it. The real-life major peace movement did no such thing. Oh, it looked like it might at times. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who everyone knew favored intervention even though he always stopped short of saying he favored intervention, won reelection to a third term by a much smaller margin than in his previous two victories, but still, he won (against Liberal Republican Wendell Wilkie who didn't much care for isolationists himself, but couldn't say so because he needed their votes.) A bill in Congress to renew the draft was passed by a single vote in 1941, but still, it passed. And so on and so forth until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor (an event "The City on the Edge of Forever" ignores.) OK, you say, but that's because Edith wasn't there, maybe if she had been...Oh, so this soup kitchen proprietor was suppose to succeed where Charles Lindbergh, Joe Kennedy, Norman Thomas, Henry Ford, Senator Burton Wheeler (D, Montana), Senator Gerald P. Nye (R, North Dakota), The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, the Hearst newspaper chain, the Sears, Roebuck and Company, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, H.L. Menckin, Walt Disney, and Father Coughlin couldn't? What was her secret? Well, Joan Collins was very easy on the eyes in 1967 when this episode first aired. Maybe all the isolationist movement needed to put it over was a bit of sex appeal.
KIRK: But she was right. Peace was the way.
SPOCK: She was right, but at the wrong time.
Associate producer Robert Justman admitted as much when, 25 years after it aired, he was asked if "The City on the Edge of Forever" was meant as a potshot at the then-burgeoning anti-Vietnam War movement. "Of course it was."
If Justman could answer with such certainty in 1992, imagine just how certain those feelings must have been in the 1960s. Many of the leading creative lights of Star Trek (though not all) looked at one set of protesters and saw that they were as hopelessly deluded as the American Firsters during World War II. Try to tell them that west of the Caucasus Mountains, Germany in the 1930s was the most populous country in Europe, and the fourth largest in area, whereas on a map of Asia, Vietnam was an emaciated seahorse in the lower right hand corner. It did and still does have a lot of people, but in the '60s they were mostly poor, mostly rural village people without access to electricity or running water, whereas Germany was a major scientific, technological, and industrial center in the 1930s with a rapidly rising standard of living (thanks to increased military spending.) This should have made the Vietnam of the 1960s a much smaller military threat compared to Germany of the '30s. In some ways, however, Vietnam was a bigger military threat, or it at least gave the United States a much harder time of it. I should note here that there were two Vietnams, North and South (so take everything I just said and divided it in half.) The U.S. supported the capitalist South and opposed the communist North. However, the folks to whom the U.S. opposed the most belonged to a group in the South that was supported by the North: the Viet Cong. As fearsome as the Nazis were, they fought their war in a largely predictable fashion, with columns of soldiers and tanks, and planes over head. You could see them coming. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, had no planes or tanks. In fact, they didn't even seem to have soldiers. Just bullets that came out of nowhere. The Nazis wanted to conquer territory, whereas the Viet Cong stood by quietly and let the U.S. conquer territory, and then, and only then, did they start shooting. The U.S. and Nazis tried to force the other to retreat. The Viet Cong retreated before the battle began, and only showed up after it was over. If you haven't guessed by now, I'm talking guerrilla warfare. That's why they were so hard to fight, but only on their own soil. Unlike Nazi Germany, there was zero chance of the Viet Cong ever invading the United States. To be fair, the Vietnam War was part of a larger chess game going on between the United States and the Soviet Union. But that wasn't much like World War II, either. Nuclear annihilation was always a possibility in the 1960s, which is why we squabbled over Vietnam instead. It was relatively safer. Nuclear weapons weren't used in WW II until the very end, and by that time Germany had already surrendered. But all those differences didn't much bother the establishment. And it still doesn't. Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein, it's always Hitler we're fighting, and if you say otherwise you're an isolationist.
...or worse.
Star Trek was off the air by then, but I'm sure many supporters of the war looked at the above picture and thought to themselves, sad that it had to happen, but really, it was the only logical outcome. Now is the wrong time for peace. This should shut those hippies up [which it did to a degree.] They were interfering with history, with destiny, with the future. Now is the time to set things right.
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
--David Bowie
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So those are some of my misgivings about "The City on the Edge of Forever". I didn't have these misgivings immediately. The first time I watched it, I, too, thought it was the greatest thing since the mechanical rice picker. It was with repeated viewings that I started having second thoughts. Edith Keeler can get hit by a truck only so many times before I want to jump in and save her myself.
However, even if I can't accept it as a whole, I do like a lot of the parts that makes up "The City on the Edge of Forever". The acting, for instance. It may just be William Shatner's greatest moment as James T. Kirk. Yes, I'm skeptical Kirk would allow himself to fall in love with Edith with so much at stake, and then, after falling in love, he would stand by and let her die. But Shatner has him do both convincingly, as his character agonizingly answers the call of duty. On paper, Spock should be the same callous realist he was in the second Star Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" but Leonard Nimoy refuses to play him that way, and the episode is better for it. He really does not want to see Kirk get hurt, so the call of duty may cause him just as much agony, which, as a good Vulcan, he of course suppresses. When, after being prevented from saving Edith, a confused McCoy shouts at Kirk, "Do you know what you just did?" it's a wise and empathetic Spock who answers, "He knows, Doctor, he knows." As for McCoy, I didn't think it was possible, but DeForest Kelley manages to make him even more intense. In a reminiscent rant about 20th century medical procedures to a clueless homeless guy, the good doctor exclaims, "They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures. Oh, the terrible pain!" (remind me to cancel that eye lift.) And Joan Collins as Edith Keeler is a long way from Alexis Carrington on Dynasty. Attractive, intelligent, and caring, you can see why Kirk would fall in love with her. Had the truck arrived 15 minutes later, maybe even Spock would have tried to save her.
I also like the whole film noir feeling of the thing. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have visited a lot of eerie worlds, but none so eerie as New York City during the Great Depression. A lot of great set pieces. Kirk and Spock's comical encounter with the cop. Edith's pontifications to a roomful of disinterested homeless men, leaving only Kirk impressed. Kirk's and Edith's nighttime stroll (the glue that holds all the sadism together.) Spock's sometimes dramatic, sometimes comical attempts to get his makeshift computer to work amid one blown fuze after another. McCoy's sudden appearance on a dark lonely street, and the unfortunate milkman who witnesses it. The homeless man inadvertently vaporizing himself with McCoy's phaser (a scene not shown in syndication for many years.) And the very ending, as an emotionally spent Kirk says, "Let's get the hell out of here," while the Guardian of Forever, like some sort of apocalyptic carnival barker, continues his pitch, "Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway."
A word about the set. While the episode convincingly evokes 1930s skid
row Manhattan, it was actually filmed in 1960s Hollywood. Or Mayberry,
North Carolina. You read that right. It was shot on the same set as The Andy Griffith Show,
another Desilu production. Mayberry was just dirtied up a bit, filmed
at different angles, with the conspicuous addition of sinister-looking
shadows. Barny Fife could get mugged in a place like this. Maybe Andy,
too.
All right. Enough with "The City on the Edge of Forever". There's some other periods of times I'd like to visit, all in the latter half of the 20th century.
A year and a half after Kirk and Spock visited the Great Depression, the Enterprise enters Earth orbit in 1968. They visit the past much more casually this time around. It's just another Starfleet mission, they're there to do historical research, trying to figure why human history didn't end in 1968. They soon find out. The Enterprise intercepts a transporter beam from a thousand light-years away, a technological feat unknown in Kirk's and Spock's time, much less the 20th century. The accidental visitor who beams aboard is a human (Robert Lansing) in a business suit holding a black cat. He tells Captain Kirk that his name is Gary Seven that though he's of Earth origin, he's been living on another planet, and is on a mission to save Earth from its destructive ways. Kirk finds the whole story kind of far-fetched (apparently more farfetched than taking a faster-than-light spaceship 300 years into the past) and orders Seven locked up. Seven scuffles with guards, easily shrugs off a Vulcan nerve pinch, and is about to escape when he's finally stunned by a phaser. But even that's not enough to hold him back as he eventually comes to and beams himself down to Earth. Speaking into a computer in a Manhattan office we learn his whole story. It's actually his ancestors that are from Earth. The never-seen aliens apparently abducted humans from way back when so as to raise a race of secret agents that could spy on the third planet from the sun. His particular mission now is to prevent the launching of orbiting nuclear platforms, which the unseen aliens consider to be rather dangerous. Now, wait just one second here! If we humans want to risk nuclear Armageddon, who exactly are these Buttinskis from another planet to tell us we can't? Where's their Prime Directive? Nevertheless, Seven wants to save us from ourselves, and, as always, it's the thought that counts. But first he needs to connect with his fellow secret agents, and at first mistakes Roberta Lincoln (a young Teri Garr) for one of them. In fact, she's just a clueless secretary hired by the missing agents, whom we soon learn were killed in a car accident. Seven convinces Roberta he's with the CIA, and has her type something up on a voice-activated typewriter while he steps out of the office for a bit. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock (speaking of Buttinskis) beam down to Earth, get themselves briefly arrested, beam back up to the Enterprise (along with some very surprised cops.) As for Seven, he sneaks on to an air base and sabotages the rocket that's to take the nuclear warhead into orbit. Back on the Enterprise, Kirk figures out Seven's location, and tries having him beamed upwards, except it's at the exact moment that a curious Roberta is examining a rather unusual computer. She pushes a button, and beams Seven back to the office before Kirk can beam him aboard the Enterprise. Now convinced that Seven's a spy, Roberta manages to get his ballpoint weapon off of him. She's threatening to turn him in when Kirk and Spock show up. She now decides they're the spies and holds the ballpoint on them! Eventually, everyone calls a truce, and Seven detonates the warhead in a high enough orbit where it can't do any harm, but can scare the nations of the world into pursuing arms control. Finally, the black cat briefly turns into a sexy woman in a dominatrix-like outfit. Apparently, even a secret agent from outer space needs an outlet. 
Speaking of Teri Garr...
I know, I know, she's had health issues lately. I'll back off, but first I'd like to at least provide a dissenting opinion:
To this day, people still want to talk about that episode ["City on the Edge of Forever"]Some
remember me for that more than anything else I've done. I am amazed at
the enduring popularity of Star Trek and particularly of that episode...At
the time none of us would have predicted the longevity of the show. I
couldn't be more pleased--or more honored--to be part of Star Trek history.--Joan Collins
Welcome to the swap meet, Joan!
More than a year before "Assignment: Earth" and a mere three months before "The City on the Edge of Forever", Star Trek made its first journey into Earth's past. In "Tomorrow is Yesterday" the U.S.S. Enterprise travels too close to a black star, what today we would call a black hole, and is thrown back into the late 1960s. We don't actually get to see any of that. Instead, the episode opens with the Enterprise sailing through the daylight sky, causing the United States Air Force to scramble it jets to see just what the hell is up there. One of those jets gets too close and is inadvertently destroyed by a "tractor beam". Fortunately for the pilot, he's beamed aboard the Enterprise before he, too, can be inadvertently destroyed. Now aboard the starship, USAF Captain John Christopher (John Perry) is amazed at both the advanced technology as well as the presence of women in orbit (Sally Ride's trip into space was still 16 years away.) Unfortunately, Spock has some bad news for Christopher. They can't let him go back home as he now knows too much about the future. Outside of Christopher's hearing, Kirk comes up with even worse prognosis. The future is so technologically advanced, the USAF captain would be like a caveman in an electonics store. OK, Kirk didn't actually put it that way but that's what he meant, possibly implying that as an anachronistic ignoramus, Christopher will have to be, I don't know, institutionalized or something. Actually, he won't. Spock does some further research and finds that Christopher does indeed belong on Earth, as a yet unborn son will someday be a history-making astronaut. Meanwhile, it's discovered that the jet had a wing camera that wasn't destroyed, meaning Kirk and Sulu (why Sulu? He's pretty much ignored in every other episode), as well as Christopher, who know the layout, have to go down to the air base and retrieve the film. Fun and games ensues as a guard is accidentally beamed aboard the Enterprise. Meanwhile, Kirk is interrogated by another officer and told he could rot in jail for 200 years, which the good captain replies would be just about the right amount of time (actually, that's a 100 years too soon, as it was later decided that Star Trek takes place in the 23rd, and not the 22nd, century.) Christopher briefly has a gun drawn on Kirk, insisting the film can't be destroyed, as it will back up his story on the starship Enterprise's existence, which the Air Force captain feels duty-bound to tell his superiors. Spock beams down behind Christopher and gets him with that nerve pinch. Once they're all back aboard the Enterprise, Scotty comes up with a solution that should solve everybody's problems. Slingshotting the Enterprise around the sun should bring it back to its own era, meanwhile (and somewhat contradictorily) Christopher and that other fellow can be beamed backwards in time, making them somehow forget what they've seen of the future (so why doesn't Kirk and Spock suffer a similar case of amnesia whenever they go back in time? Well, since the future is all they know, I suppose that would be a heck of a lot more memory to erase.)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Having spent a while on the planet Vulcan, James T. Kirk and the rest of the Enterprise crew decide to return to Earth and a probable court-martial for the nine Starfleet regulations they broke during the preceding film The Search for Spock. As for the man for whom they risked breaking all those regulations, Spock has just about regained all his formidable mental facilities, except there's just one question asked of him by a computer that he has no answer for: How do you feel? He's a Vulcan--he has no feelings! Ah, but as his mother Amanda (Jane Wyatt) reminds him (by her very presence if you think about it), he's only half-Vulcan. The computer wants to know how his human half feels. Of course, that's the half Spock regularly ignores, as he does now, though he will return to testify on his Earth friends behalf in their upcoming trial. One of the Starfleet regulations they broke was the starshipnapping of the Enterprise, stolen property that can no longer be returned as they let it auto-self destruct. So they're going to face up to their misdeeds in another stolen starship, the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, which they renamed the Bounty, after the naval vessel on which Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian had their little disagreement. Meanwhile, another starcraft, of neither Earth nor Klingon origin, is going to beat them to their home planet. A humongous space probe, the likes of which has never before been seen (if you don't count Star Trek: the Motion Picture and the original series episodes "The Cobermite Manuever" and "The Doomsday Machine"), it's now causing all sorts of havoc on Earth, turning off the lights, vaporizing the oceans, etc. As the best and brightest minds of the Federation and Starfleet run around like chickens with their heads phasered off, Kirk and Spock quite calmly figure out the problem and come up with a solution. The giant probe is speaking humpback whale. It's apparently visited Earth in the past, and wants to connect with some old friends. Unbeknownst to the probe, the old friends are now instinct. So Kirk has the Bounty slingshot around or off or against the sun (just as it did in "Tomorrow is Yesterday") and return to the 20th century where the aquatic mammals, though endangered, can still be found. Since everyone for a change gets to see Old Earth in this one, they can't just leave their ship in orbit without anyone to man it. So they park it in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It becomes clear in this film that cloaking devices are actually invisibility devices. All well and good, but isn't the Bird-of-Prey still a solid object? Can't some jogger or cyclist collide right into it? Kirk and co. don't have time to worry about that. After making a spectacle of themselves on the streets of San Francisco (no pun intended, all you 1970s TV fans out there), they decide to split up, dividing various responsibilities amongst themselves. It's up to Kirk and Spock to find the whale. So they take the bus. After nerve-pinching a punk rocker for playing his boom box too loud, Spock has a question:SPOCK: Your use of language has altered since our arrival. It is currently laced with...shall I say...more colorful metaphors. 'Double dumb ass on you', and so forth.
KIRK: You mean profanity. That's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays attention to you if you don't swear every other word. You'll find it in the literature of the period.
SPOCK: For example?
KIRK: Oh, the collective works of Jacqueline Susann. The Novels of Harold Robbins.
SPOCK: Ah, the Giants!
Eventually Kirk and Spock end up at the Cetacean Institute, a marine research center that just so happens to have two humpback whales in captivity named George and Gracie. Spock jumps into the tank and mind melds with one of the whales, much to the surprise of a tour group and institute employees. Spock learns that the whales are quite intelligent, maybe as intelligent as humans (though lacking opposable thumbs--humans can lock them up rather than the other way around.) Kirk, meanwhile, charms a pretty marine biologist by the name of Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks). The charm wears off over dinner at an Italian restaurant when he tells her he's from the future and needs the whales' tracking devices before they're released back into the ocean. She refuses, thinking he's either working undercover for the Pentagon or quite crazy. As for Scotty, McCoy, and Sulu, they may not come across as crazy but at least a bit eccentric to a manager of a pexiglass plant. Nevertheless, a deal is struck. Give them enough pexiglass to build a whale tank, and Scotty will provide the plant manager with the formula for transparent aluminum, a substance unknown in 1986. Afterwards, Scotty and McCoy discuss the serious ramifications of such a deal:MCCOY: You do realize, of course, if we give him the formula, we're altering the future.
SCOTTY: Why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing?
Take that, City on the Edge of Forever!
As for Uhura and Chekov, their mission is to find a nuclear reactor. The trip back in time has de-crystalized the dilithium crystals used to power the starship they arrived in, and a hefty dose of radiation might reverse the process. And so the two of them ask people on the street where they can find a reactor. Most just walk away shaking their heads and whatnot, but eventually they learn there's one at the Alameda Naval Air Station (since closed), where the U.S.S. Enterprise is moored. Not the starship but the real-life nuclear submarine (deactivated, the first step toward being decommissioned, in 2013.) Uhura and Chekov sneak aboard the ship and use some sort of 23rd century gizmo to steal photons from the reactor. They're eventually discovered, but Uhura manages to beam back aboard the Bounty/Bird of Prey with the purloined photons. Unfortunately, there's not enough power to transport Chekov, and he's taken prisoner by some MPs, who assume him to be a Russian spy. Chekov tries to escape but falls, injures himself, and is rushed to the hospital (that all seems rather dire but it soon leads to some of the funniest scenes in the film.) Back at the Cetacean Institute, Gillian finds out George and Gracie are going to be released ahead of schedule, right during Japanese whale hunting season! Feeling she has nothing to lose, she goes to Golden State Park, finds the invisible starship, and begins banging on it, demanding to be let in. She tells Kirk she'll help him, but only if he gives her a lift to the future. First, though, they have to rescue Chekov from the hospital. After a series of escapades that sees Kirk dressed as a surgeon frantically wheeling the gurney-bound Russian down a hallway while McCoy wanders about the hospital curing gravely ill people simply by giving them tablets ("I grew a new kidney!"), they all make their way back to the Bounty, which takes off in a cloud of dust, much to the confusion of a couple of cyclists. In the deep, blue sea, George and Gracie look like they're done for as they're spotted by a Japanese whaling ship. Fortunately, the Bounty beams them up in time, much to the confusion of the Japanese. Now a slingshot back to the future, which again drains the starship of energy, causing it to crash-land in the San Francisco Bay of the 23rd century. The whales are released, and attempt to reason with the alien probe, perhaps saying something along the lines of, hey guys, you know you're causing Armageddon here? The probe goes back to where it came from and the Earth is saved. Kirk and the rest of the crew are put on trial for crimes committed in The Search for Spock, which now seem rather minor seeing that they've
just saved mankind. Kirk is demoted to captain and given a new starship
Enterprise, causing the various alien races in the courtroom to dance
with joy. As the newest human member of the 23rd century, Gillian Taylor is
tasked with helping repopulate the humpback whale. Spock tells his father Sarek (Mark Lenard) that he feels fine.
There you have it, an out-and-out comedy, right down to the whales being named George and Gracie (after Burns and Allen, a once-popular and, as they're well-represented on YouTube, still very funny husband-and-wife act.) Yet it's still undeniably Star Trek. Still a trip into the Unknown, except what's unknown to the Enterprise crew is simply what we call modernity, always kind of hard to figure out, even for those of us born into it. Kirk is still trying to hold it all together, except instead of evading Klingons and Romulans, it's hospital personnel. McCoy still crabs about everything, except instead of his usual complaints about 23rd century overachievement, it's what he considers the lack thereof in the 20th century that's now got him bugged. I swear, that man is never happy! This time around, though, and I admit it's a close call, the award for Outstanding Actor in a Comedy goes to Leonard Nimoy, his character the funniest he's been since the original series episode "Spock's Brain." Clad in a robe with this pointy ears hidden in a headband, he could pass for a San Francisco hippie, albeit one more reserved than most. Maybe I shouldn't say that. He does seem a bit trippy at times, no doubt the after-effects of dying and living to tell about it, or maybe he's just trying a bit too hard to fit into the 20th century:SPOCK: They like you very much, but they are not the hell "your" whales
GILLIAN: I suppose they told you that?
SPOCK: The hell they did.
As for Catherine Hicks as Gillian Taylor, well, as you can see, she makes a pretty good straight man to these cosmic comedians. Yet it's not all yuks, guffaws, and titters. The film has a point. Even as it's highly unlikely you'll ever get to change the past, you can still take what you need from it to improve the present.
And there's a touch of social significance as well.
Four years before Star Trek first went on the air.
Not that any of producers or writers noticed. The environmental movement that Carson's book helped jump-start is curiously missing from the original series. I say "curiously" because the original Star Trek never shied from criticizing technology. But just the psychological drawbacks of it. An over-reliance on machinery could turn people into dum-dums, as it does in "The Return of the Archons", "The Apple", and "Spock's Brain." That that same machinery might have a physical effect on the world that surrounds those dum-dums is never considered. And what about that other environmental culprit, overpopulation? That problem is exposed in "The Mark of Gideon", but merely for the inconvenience it may cause, what with people bunched so together that a planet could end up like Wal-Mart on Black Friday. But that so many people might create a lot of waste and cause a lot of destruction and deplete a lot of resources is barely noted. You never see Earth (except in the past) on the original Trek, so I guess you're just supposed to assume that the number of animal and plant species, as well as the undeveloped areas of the world is the same in the future as they are in 1969. That wasn't even true three years into the future, much less 300!
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was another monster hit, and so Paramount Pictures gave the good people on the starship Enterprise permission to visit another heavenly body. Maybe even the heavenly body.
NEXT: A Spiritual Quest, or: How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Wow you really time traveled a lot on this post !
ReplyDeleteDo you feel older or younger. Are your fingers still burning from all the typing ?
Gosh I remember many of these exposits, movies and books. I am so dense I just watch many of them as entertainment and not linked with what was happening at the time.
What fabulous writing to juggling all the stories in the air with out dropping any of them.
I remember City on the Edge of Forever... It has always stayed with me as did Assignment Eatrh.
Never saw the movie except for clips of The Voyage Home. The whole whale thing was just so hippy dippy silly for me. Plus Spocks outfit still makes me laugh. I thought the movies were running out of steam. But what do I know.
cheers, parsnip
parsnip, my fingers are falling off trying to fix all the typos.
ReplyDeleteRest the fingers, get one of the voice typist thingies.
DeleteTake care.
cheers, parsnip
Very "timely" (excuse the pun), considering the anniversary of Back to the Future.
ReplyDeletePuns are welcome here, Kass.
ReplyDeleteAs for Back to the Future II, I'm still waiting for Jaws 19 to come out