But first some background on why I just read a book about one of the most beloved epsiodes of television of all time, why there's an incredible controversy about it, and why it fits appropriately as a post in my movie blog.
You may recall I told you last year that I wanted to read more about films. Sure, reading is a time I cherish for specifically not doing movie-related things. But reading about films is also part of deepening your love for/knowledge of the movies. So last year I vowed, at least in the short run, to read a book about movies or filmmaking as every second book I read, starting with Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, which I read in November and December and wrote about several times on the blog.
So after reading Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles in January, I turned my attentions in February to a project I'd been putting off.
Last year, an old friend sent me the book you see above, as well as a graphic novel depiction of the same controversial Harlan Ellison episode of the original Star Trek series, "The City on the Edge of Forever." He also sent me a Red Sox t-shirt that is in my regular rotation, since he's a lot more Star Trek than Red Sox.
All three items were appreciated, but the two Star Trek ones seemed like they could cause me a headache.
See, a few months ago I started to read the book you see above, and it starts with Ellison basically in the middle of a diatribe whose beginning I had not heard. Ellison, you see, was not only a legendary science fiction writer, but he was also legendary for his belligerance and argumentatitve nature. This did not just make him a boor; it appears that his friends cherished him, and he had many professional relationships that were cordial. But he didn't suffer fools and he rarely kept quiet about something that bothered him, or at least, not "forever." (He was sitting on his "City on the Edge of Forever" gripes for something like 30 years before spewing them all here.) Anyway, the tone of the rage-filled rant, which eviscerates people like Gene Roddenberry and which had not (initially) provided me the sort of background context I'm trying to provide you here, caused me to set down the book and save it for another day.
The basic background here is that Ellison submitted a script for the 28th episode of the first season of Star Trek that, according to Gene Roddenberry, could not be filmed. Having read the teleplay, I'm inclined to agree. There's so much plot in this one episode that it was better suited to being a feature film, not a single 48-minute episode of television.
Did Roddenberry et al make gutless decisions in rewriting the teleplay so it would fit into their standard allotment of screen minutes and their standard budget? I'm sure they did. And I'm sure everyone who took a pass at the script -- which seems to have been about 13 people -- was a less talented writer than Ellison. But then they took more credit for it than Ellison thought they should, especially as they sprinkled their discourse about it with disparaging comments about him.
Well, the episode was a success in two very specific ways, or three, if you consider its legacy. In the moment, the episode won an award both for the televised version, and the teleplay that Ellison submitted for consideration -- even though those two things were quite different. Its legacy? "The City on the Edge of Forever" edges out "The Trouble with Tribbles" to be considered the favorite episode of the original series, any time a vote is taken about this sort of thing.
The plot? I'll give you that as well. Kirk and Spock must go back in time to the U.S. of 1930, following a troubled Enterprise crewman who is escaping the rest of the crew and whose presence in 1930 is going to alter the course of the future beyond all recognition. While there, Kirk falls in love with a woman who, in space-time terms, is a focal point of this point in history, and who must die in order for the future to proceed as it has. Ironically, it's the troubled crewman who is trying to save this woman, while Kirk must let her die.
Heady stuff. Much headier in Ellison's script than the pallid facsimile we get in the TV show, though of course, this also became the favorite episode of the entire series, so they had to be doing something right. They couldn't have known, at the time, how much better the episode would have been with more of Ellison's original ideas intact, but then again, that would have been twice the length. (When the graphic novel version of it was made, it was made into five separate comic books, which tells you a little something about its length.)
I'm writing this post for two reasons: 1) I need to get something up on my blog after leaving you with a rant about racism at the movies three days ago, and 2) I want my friend to read this as my reaction to reading the book and the graphic novel, and then finishing it off with my first-ever viewing of "The City on the Edge of Tomorrow," which I did last night after buying it on AppleTV. So I may at this point shift to not clarifying everything I'm talking about as I address my comments more to him, though we'll see how that goes. The journalist in me demands to provide context at every juncture.
So yes, it's quite clear that Ellison wrote a very thoughtful treatment in which the bad seed on the episode is a drug-dealing Enterprise crewman (not a poisoned Dr. McCoy, as he turned out to be on TV) and there's a lot more of interest in the scenes of Earth of 1930, which take place in an unspecified American city. His vision of the planet with the time portal, which gives the episode its title, is undeniably more grand, but that's where the budgetary restrictions of a show with a weekly production schedule come more into play. In any case, the graphic novel is a glorious realization of Ellison's every hope for the episode, and on this occasion he is inclined to offer plenty of praise, as he says he was "over the moon" for how they conceived of his words in the artwork.
And it's true that very little of that survives on the show. In fact, there are points where it feels like they could have used some of Ellison's original turns of phrase or other dialogue, because the stories are similar enough, but they deviated from those words more out of spite than actual necessity. So that gives credence to some of Ellison's charges that Roddenberry and others were acting in bad faith, though I suppose it also gives credence to the idea that Roddenberry and others bore a greater responsibility for what was actually on screen -- and this is the notion that perturbs Ellison the most.
I do think it's funny that there is such a controversy over this episode, because often controversies, especially those resulting from tampering with the creative process, are the result of something that failed spectacularly. "The City on the Edge of Forever" was a spectacular success, by any measure. So I think that's what initially struck me as obtuse about Ellison's complaints. Can't everyone just be happy that a really good Star Trek episode resulted from this? They all get dragged down by the "success has many fathers" nature of the controversy. Just be glad it was a success, I think.
But watching the episode, especially after already reading four treatments of Ellison's material across the two books, it does seem very puny by comparison to what Ellison wrote. Surely it needed to be streamlined, but within that, you can see the lack of courage in the decisions. Ellison wanted Kirk to approach doing the wrong thing, or actually not be able to do the right in the moment and need to be saved by Spock. In the completed version, Kirk does do the right thing, and we don't even really see any emotional aftermath of it.
The thing that I find really interesting about this whole thing, though, is that fans had to already love the episode to even get to this point of there being a controversy and there existing an unexpurgated version of this story. My friend introduced this to me as the episode that made him love Star Trek, which is funny, because I am coming at it from the angle that the episode is pretty weak compared to what Ellison wrote. Then again, this is just part of my theory that you like the first version of something you encounter the best, a theory that usually applies to songs. For example, if you hear the remixed version of a song first and fall in love with it, you will not like the original, even though without the original the remix would not exist.
I wonder if I would have felt differently about it if I'd watched the episode first, and maybe my friend assumed I was already familiar with it. Maybe then I would have been attached to the decisions on the show and found Ellison's choices perverse. Then again, I suspect most people who love Ellison's take had already seen (and loved) the televised version, yet still had a place in their heart for his original version. Me, I'm a Star Trek fan, have been since The Wrath of Khan. But interestingly, I've only seen a couple of the original episodes all the way through. I just didn't watch the show at the time -- obviously, I wasn't alive yet -- and never went back to it over the years, even though I love these characters and the movies they're in, and even though reruns were surely available on television stations I had access to as a kid.
Although I have a clear preference for Ellison's version, I do want to acknowledge something that I thought the episode got right that Ellison got wrong. And here we get into the stereotypical Trekkie complaints, the kind William Shatner lampooned when he was on Saturday Night Live, that get way too into the weeds. But they're weeds that I think Ellison would respect.
In Ellison's version of the story, the time disruption caused by the drug-dealing crewman Beckwith, when he goes back in time, results in significant changes to this version of the universe. But not so significant there is not still a ship sitting at the exact coordinates of where the Enterprise was when the crew beamed down to the planet, and is, in fact, actually the Enterprise itself -- just manned by a pirate crew. It would be reasonable to argue that if Beckwith had caused a permanent rift in time, not only would the Enterprise not be in that exact space at that exact time, it might not exist at all. (Ellison would probably have an explanation for this, maybe that the renegade crew/pirates constitute a visual representation of an altered universe, containing the ring of truth if not actual plausible scientific truth.)
In the TV show, the Enterprise is, in fact, gone. The crew that are with Kirk and Spock -- which includes Uhura, who utters the cringe-worthy line of dialogue "Captain, I'm scared" -- are stranded on the planet, rather than stranded on the Enterprise with a crew of renegades. At least the Trekkies who thrive on pushing their glasses up the bridges of their noses can appreciate this more believable outcome. (Of course, if we were going full Back to the Future, then probably they would all just vanish from existence -- but then you wouldn't have an episode.)
Because he didn't tell me, I'm not sure exactly why my friend was convinced of his love for Star Trek by "The City on the Edge of Forever," but I can tell you why it would have convinced me, even if I have to retrofit an explanation that might not have made sense if I'd first encountered the episode years ago. And here now we finally get to the two movies I referenced in the subject of this post.
"The City on the Edge of Forever" features primary components of both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, far and away the best of the original six Star Trek movies. And those two components nourish two different parts of the brain of the devoted Star Trek fan.
Let's start with the fun one.
There's a decent argument to suggest that without "City on the Edge of Forever," Star Trek IV would not exist, or not in its current form. Talk about time-related causalities.
The Voyage Home involves a return by the Enterprise crew (though not the Enterprise itself) to present-day San Francisco of 1986, the year the film was released, in order to acquire a humpback whale to prevent future Earth from being desiccated by an alien craft trying to make contact with the (now extinct) whales. As notably the only movie in the series where "comedy" is an appropriate genre, the film relies heavily on the rapport between Kirk and Spock as they try to blend in with the San Franciscans, much of it very funny. The rest of the crew are there, on different missions and also blending in, but Kirk and Spock -- and a present-day love interest for Kirk -- are sequestered on their own mission.
That this features the essential fundamental dynamics from "City" is no accident, though it should be noted, the Voyage Home version of Kirk and Spock do not appear to remember their previous trip to 20th century America. I think we're meant to take this as similar to the James Bond movies, where we don't really believe that this James Bond has had all the experiences of the previous James Bonds -- though the fact that Kirk and Spock are played by the same actors does make this problematic.
For me, this movie came along at the perfect time, as I was still high off of wrestling with the time travel conundrums presented to us in Back to the Future the year before. And while there are not quite so many "if you change this, then this" moments in The Voyage Home -- no one is fading in and out of existence, for example -- it still delves deep into the problems of being in an earlier time period, including the fact that things you need to get back home haven't been invented yet. That's also a plot point in "City," I should mention, as well as Back to the Future. Although Ellison says The Voyage Home was one of about four Trek movies he was approached to write, he didn't write it -- though his fingerprints are all over it. This is certainly the more "Roddenberry accessible" version of a thing Ellison might have written, especially since it gives Kirk a happy ending with the girl.
And this is just the "fun" part of Star Trek. Sling-shotting around the sun in order to travel back in time. Building a tank on a Klingon vessel (remember, the Enterprise blew up in the last movie) in order to transport a whale. Scotty trying to talk into a mouse to address the computer. It's great stuff and I get a grin on my face just thinking about it.
But "City" also has the much more serious theme at the heart of The Wrath of Khan, not to mention its band of renegades, Khan's crew, who were first envisioned by Ellison in his version of the "City" teleplay.
I don't suppose I need to give a spoiler alert for The Wrath of Khan, seeing as how it turns 44 years old this year, and seeing as how I didn't avoid spoiling that Kirk gets the girl at the end of The Voyage Home. But here is your Star Trek II SPOILER ALERT anyway.
So you know that after a ripping yarn about a mano-a-mano space battle between Kirk and Khan, during which Kirk is also grappling with his own mortality and the surprise of being in close contact with his estranged son, we get the gut punch of the death of Spock. It's not a permanent death, of course -- you already know, because I've told you, that he was in Star Trek IV. We have the Genesis planet to thank for that, and now you see why I included that word in the subject of this post. A weapon of either ultimate creation or ultimate destruction gets fired at a nearby barren planet, which quickly becomes verdant and teeming with life -- and which is where Spock is ultimately "reborn," a saga that continues throughout Star Trek III, which is of course subtitled The Search for Spock. (And one of the reasons The Search for Spock conforms to the Trek rule of thumb that the odd-numbered movies are not so good, is that the regrowth of Spock into an adult is never not weird and is always wobbly in its execution.)
But at the time Khan came out, we couldn't know for sure that this was not the end of Spock. Maybe Leonard Nimoy wanted out of his contract or something.
Anyway, Spock must expose himself to untold amounts of radiation to help save the Enterprise crew, which he does, knowing it will be the end of him. His death scene, one of the more emotional out there, contains this famous line: "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many ... or the one."
Which is pretty much the thesis of the sacrifice of Edith Keeler in "City."
Kirk has the chance to save her, but he knows that it will mean either the loss of the Enterprise entirely (on TV) or the loss of the crew to a band of renegades (in the teleplay), which amount to the same thing, for all intents and purposes. And though in the show we don't know if this version of the universe is worse -- we just know the Enterprise is no longer there -- in the teleplay we know that renegades run amok in the galaxy, avoiding punishment and spreading evil.
And so yes, the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one. Outweighed the needs of Edith Keeler, but also outweighed the needs of James Kirk.
So yes I'm glad to have spent this time with "The City on the Edge of Forever," even if Harlan Ellison created a very difficult entry point at first with his spewing of bile at the already dead Gene Roddenberry. (And to be fair, he did castigate himself every time he did this because you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead.)
I am convinced that his version of the story is better, but both versions contribute wonderful things to our culture, and both versions helped make my friend a Star Trek fan. So I'm glad both versions exist.
And as a last comment, seeing the teleplay and then seeing the TV show give me a great glimpse into the creative process, which is what makes this another invaluable part of my project of reading about film. Any script undergoes great changes before it ends up on screen, whether it's a TV script or a movie script -- and this exercise gave me a greater appreciation of just how complicated that process can be.
