The City on the Edge of Forever

As a rule I don’t care for the time travel plots. However, this one works thanks to a solid plot and some good writing.

The story gets underway with a double bit of bad luck. First, McCoy accidentally injects himself with an overdose of cordrazine, which gives him a bad case of the crazies. If they’d managed to corral him and find him someplace quiet to sleep it off, everything would have been back to normal in a day or two. Unfortunately he manages to sneak into a transporter and beam down to the planet the Enterprise is investigating.

And that’s when the trouble really starts, because the disturbances in the time-space continuum emanating from the planet are being caused by a time travel portal. In his delusional state McCoy leaps into Earth’s past, and suddenly everything changes. The Enterprise no longer exists, and our heroes find themselves alone in the universe. Their only hope is to use the portal to travel back to a point just before McCoy’s arrival, figure out what he does that screws up the future and prevent him from doing it.

Kirk and Spock are the first to give it a try. They end up in New York City in the 1930s, where they are befriended by a missionary worker named Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). While the captain tries to spark a romance with her, Spock busies himself with jury-rigging a tricorder to see if it can provide them with some details about whatever butterfly-effect change they need to prevent. Good news: his ever-growing “radio” set somehow fails to get the duo flagged as German spies.

Bad news: McCoy will save Keeler from being run over by a truck, which will set off a chain of events that keeps the United States out of World War Two until it’s too late to prevent the Nazis from taking over the planet. This leaves Kirk with the bittersweet task of monitoring the woman he loves in order to make sure she dies (a job he isn’t sure he can see through to the end).

Eventually McCoy shows up, and as he’s still stark raving mad he gets dumped at the doorstep of Keeler’s mission. As she nurses him back to health, her kindness impresses him. So he too may be falling in love with her when the fateful moment occurs. Despite his anguish, Kirk manages to hold onto McCoy as Keeler steps into the street and meets her fate. Sadder and wiser men, our heroes return to the balance-properly-restored future.

He Who May Not Be Named wrote this episode. He’s an excellent writer but also an extreme jerk (seriously, who trademarks his own name?). According to The Star Trek Compendium, Roddenberry did a significant rewrite before the episode was shot. The original script apparently included some material about drug abuse that was too controversial for television at the time.

Episode rating:

Stardate: 3134.0

Episode type: Time travel

Written by: He Who May Not Be Named

Original air date: April 6, 1967

The Alternative Factor / Operation - Annihilate!

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