About a week ago, I finished a book including Harlan Ellison's script of The City on the Edge of Forever. There was a ton of content in the book in addition to the script. It included a lengthy essay by Ellison, which I loved reading as much because I love his writing voice as the content, multiple versions of the script and treatments, and a series of afterwords. I grabbed my copy from the good folks at HarlanEllisonBooks.com.
The essay delved into a conflict between Ellison and Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, which I hadn't previously been aware of. I was never much of a Trekkie back in the day and, though I appreciate and enjoy the content today, I am a little put off by some of the same things that bothered Ellison. There's an assumption of a realized utopia navigating a universe of mostly external threats. But, I believe, even if the human race were to advance to the point that we could travel the stars, there would still be bad actors, politics, drugs, and all manner of other shortcomings. It's how this thing we call reality works. Anyway, if you accept Star Trek isn't meant to be realistic at all, it's enjoyable and fun. Roddenberry wasn't a failure at all - his vision was just what it was, and it has resonated with audiences for decades now.
The treatments and the original script for the teleplay that would become episode twenty-eight of Star Trek's first season, and, to this day, one of the most loved episodes by Star Trek fans read well. They read extremely well. I was a little surprised - I don't generally read scripts, but really wanted to experience what Ellison had wanted to create and then to contrast it with what the episode ended up being. There are quite a few differences, but the spirit is actually the same.
I do wish that the original teleplay had been leveraged more in the creation of the episode, but that's the way it goes sometimes. I'm glad that Ellison won a well-earned Hugo for the original teleplay. He deserved it.
The story told is one of time traveling, in which Captain Kirk and Spock are forced to travel back to the 1930's in Earth to correct something that had been mistakenly altered, which caused the path of time to get radically skewed. In doing so, Kirk falls in love with Ms. Edith Keeling from the 1930's and almost sacrifices the opportunity to correct the path of time to save her life. It's a wonderful, well-told story.
After reading the book, I dropped three bucks to buy the episode on Amazon and did enjoy it. I think I enjoyed it somewhat less having read the original script, which was superior, first, but that is fine. It was still cool to see what the ideas had become.
It's unfortunate that Ellison's creative vision was apparently incompatible with Roddenberry's, which resulted in Ellison not further contributing to Star Trek, but there's plenty of Ellison to read and plenty of Star Trek to read and to watch, so I suppose it worked out fine in the end.
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