Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The City on the Edge of Forever!

The 1967 episode of the original Star Trek TV series “The City on the Edge of Forever” comes up almost necessarily in any discussion of the franchise as a whole. Fans routinely rank it as one of the best episodes of the original series, and a smaller sub-set of those fans, myself included, maintain that it’s the best single Star Trek hour of them all.

In that episode, the Enterprise is investigating the source a series of violent disruptions in the very fabric of space-time. Captain Kirk and his crew are in orbit over a bleak, uninhabited planet that seems to be the nexus of it all when a sudden shock-wave causes Dr. McCoy to stumble and accidentally inject himself with an overdose of a powerful drug that temporarily deranges him. He uses the transporter to go down to the surface of the unnamed planet, and Kirk, Spock & co. chase after him. Once on the surface, they’re astonished to find in the midst of horizon-to-horizon ruins a great lopsided stone archway that, when they approach, speaks to them in a sonorous voice, introducing itself as the Guardian of Forever, a living gateway to the past. It’s showing Kirk scenes from the history of Earth when suddenly McCoy bursts from hiding and leaps through the Guardian, vanishing into the past.

And the result is immediate: no Enterprise up in orbit, and by extension no Federation – all reality altered. The answer is obvious: McCoy’s presence in the past has altered the future. In order to restore it, Kirk and Spock leapt through the Guardian to search for McCoy in what turns out to be 1930s New York. They don’t find him at first, but they do find a beautiful social worker named Edith Keeler, and two things happen: first, it becomes obvious that in order for history to resume its rightful shape, Edith Keeler must die, and second, Kirk falls in love with her.

The episode is full of some of the best character moments in the three seasons of the original show, and the hour’s dramatic climax is moving every time.

So naturally I was curious about IDW’s new comic book adaptation of “The City on the Edge of Forever” – and a whole lot less curious once I learned that the project wouldn’t be an adaptation of the TV episode that won a Hugo Award and the devotion of so many Star Trek fans. No, instead it’ll be something more interesting and more tiresome: an adaptation of one of the early versions of the final story – early versions written by Harlan Ellison, whose name is also on the final version.

Ellison is a tireless sore winner, and for forty years, he’s been carping gracelessly about how betrayed his original vision was, how adulterated, how degraded. That original vision – all six or seven drafts of it – is nothing less than dreadful. In the version IDW has chosen (with Ellison’s grudging cooperation), it’s not McCoy who hurries down to the time-vortex planet but rather an Enterprise crew member who’s been selling drugs on board the starship, and the Guardian of Forever has become the Guardians of Forever, a clutch of tale, pale, boringly stereotypical aliens who’ve been hanging around for hundreds of thousands of years for no particular reason and now offer to help Kirk chase his errant drug-dealing crewman. The whole mess of it has no coherence and no character-play – it’s not Star Trek except in the proper names, and although that fact didn’t bother Ellison for a second, it certainly bothered Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry. The “City on the Edge of Forever” that won the Hugo was heavily script-doctored by series stalwarts Gene Coon and Dorothy Fontana, who added almost all of the memorable or worthwhile stuff in the episode.

So the merits of the IDW production are a little tricky. The cover is the now-iconic poster by Juan Ortiz, and the interior artwork is by J. K. Woodward, and there’s definitely a slightly surreal interest in seeing these iconic characters working their way through an adventure they never, as it were, had. I’d much rather it be some other kind of adaptation. Maybe for the show’s 50^th anniversary year, we’ll get a full-length novelization by Diane Carey? I’ll try to hope for it, but in the meantime I’ll be skipping the rest of this IDW series, I think.