Star Trek Anniversary - John's Top 20: "City on the Edge of Forever" (#11)

At #11 on my list is "City on the Edge of Forever," the ultimate Captain Kirk love story.  This is a deeply affecting tale of his star-crossed love with Edith Keeler, a social worker during America's Great Depression.  

The episode tells a strong fish-out-of-water story, too, with Kirk and Spock contending with a baffling primitive culture.


Stardate: Unknown

While the Enterprise charts dangerous time distortions around an unexplored planet, an accident occurs on the bridge. While treating Mr. Sulu (George Takei) for a minor injury, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) accidentally injects himself with a hypo full of Cordrazine, a dangerous drug.

In a state of complete panic and paranoia, McCoy flees the starship to the barren planet surface, and a landing party led by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) pursues. There, on the planet, they encounter a device -- or perhaps entity -- called the Guardian of Forever.  It operates, essentially, as a time portal.

While the Guardian displays imagery of Earth’s past, McCoy jumps through the doorway and disappears. Immediately afterwards, the landing party loses touch with the orbiting starship. As Kirk soon learns, the United Federation of Planets, Starfleet Command, and the Enterprise no longer exist because McCoy has altered history.  He realizes that he and Spock must travel through the Guardian to the past to correct those changes and re-set the timeline as it should be.

Kirk and Spock travel to the year 1930, to New York City of the Great Depression. There, they find work with Sister Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) while waiting for McCoy to be swept by the same time currents to their location. 

While Spock struggles to power his tricorder with 1930s technology, Kirk falls in love with Edith Keeler.  Alas, she is the focal point in the time-line.  All of the future depends on her life…or death.

Widely considered the finest episode of Star Trek (1966-1969), “The City on the Edge of Forever” is also a contentious entry, owing to its troubled and very well-documented creative woes. 

Long story short: author Harlan Ellison was heavily rewritten, to his displeasure, and his original teleplay proved an award winner, despite its apparent deviations from established Trek lore. 

In Ellison’s version, there is a drug dealer aboard the Enterprise, named Beckwith, and he faces a terrible fate for his crimes.

The aired episode -- while not Ellison’s vision by a long shot -- is undeniably brilliant and beautifully. Basically, this Trek installment puts Kirk on the hot seat. He can choose personal happiness and contentment at Edith’s side, while sacrificing his friends, his future, and all of Earth itself.  Or he can choose duty and responsibility, and Kirk is always a creature of duty and responsibility.  Choosing this course requires him not just to lose Edith, but to essentially sacrifice her.

Hauntingly, Kirk chooses the well-being of the universe, a pure embodiment of Star Trek’s “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one” ethos. 

Kirk's final line in the episode, “Let’s get the Hell out of here,” captures well his anger and hurt at having been manipulated into such a position, into such a “no win” scenario. Forever time-crossed, Kirk and Edith can never be together, a fact which points in some way to a sadistic universe. Why would the Guardian bring these two together, only to tear them apart?  Why is Kirk made to suffer so grievously?

This tale humanizes Kirk significantly. Every day, he makes choices about who lives and who must die on the Enterprise and during its missions. But now, in this situation, he is made to feel the full impact of such a death.  He feels the loss -- because of his command decision -- more personally than ever before.

Captain Kirk has many lovers in Star Trek lore but Edith is likely his one, true, real, love.  She is no dalliance. No mere eye candy. Rather, one can see why she is a perfect partner for Kirk.  

To wit, Edith is an inspiration in a time of darkness, the Great Depression, reminding her suffering wards on a daily basis that the days ahead are worth living for.  She is also oddly insightful, able to forecast with pinpoint accuracy what mankind can one day become, if it outgrows war and hatred.  

Finally, she’s not merely curious...but tough and resilient. Edith is no pushover. She is compassionate and kind, committed to good work, and she is also a fighter.  She has a joy about herself and her purpose.

All these qualities make her appealing to Kirk, and to the audience too. Edith Keeler is a beacon of light in a dark world. Alone and lonely, Kirk is drawn to that beacon, quite naturally, though the two inhabit entirely different worlds.

“The City on the Edge of Forever” succeeds on the basis of the tragic love story, but also its unswerving ability to nail the characters with perfect, descriptive lines. 

for instance, Edith notes of Spock that he belongs as Kirk’s “side,” and says that he has “always been there, and always will.”  

That is just about the best (and most beautiful) description of the Mr. Spock character ever featured in any Star Trek episode. He is a fiercely loyal friend to Kirk. 

And once he is out of his drug-induced stupor, McCoy is his charming Southern self, concerned about all life, not merely his own.  We get a sense of just how charming and social the good doctor is during his moments with Edith.

It is a testament to the episode’s effectiveness that viewers are willing to gloss over certain practical questions here.  

Like: how does the Guardian determine which line of history is correct, and which isn’t? 

Similarly, the Guardian states that Kirk and Spock will be returned when things are set right, but there doesn’t appear to be a portal for them to jump back through.  

Does the portal just appear at their location, following Edith’s death in the street?

Some of this could be handled a little more clearly.

Most significantly, perhaps, it seems that a device or entity that has existed since before our “sun burned hot” in the heavens would possess some kind of safeguards so McCoy or other personalities of unstable behavior or hostile intent could not access it.  The Guardian, in a sense, is the greatest weapon in the universe.  It could easily be plundered or manipulated, and if it has any sense of self-awareness, wouldn't it understand that fact?

“The City on the Edge of Forever” is also remarkable, I would submit, for being representative of what I term Star Trek’s “pragmatic” brand of optimism. 

Specifically, Edith encourages a peace movement in America at the very time Hitler grows powerful in Europe, and threatens free people the globe over.  The episode stresses that Edith’s brand of peace is the right way, but that her movement comes “at the wrong time,” and Nazis take over the world because of it.

I call this “pragmatic optimism” because Star Trek always concerns peace as an ideal and goal, but also notes often that it is often necessary to root out and confront -- or fight -- evil. 

Overcoming violence is valuable and necessary in man’s evolution, yes (see: “Arena,” and “A Taste of Armageddon”), but the trick is also knowing that peace sometimes must be backed-up by a willingness to fight for your ideals, for your beliefs.  

Sometimes, though fighting is violent, it is also about defending the weak, or the defense of a principle.  Sometimes it is about stopping or preventing an injustice.  Real and lasting peace comes after these battles are waged. And there is often a real price for peace, in blood and treasure.

This idea recurs in the series. “A Private Little War” is a validation, essentially, of American involvement in the Vietnam War. It notes, with appropriate sadness and sobriety, that weak powers should not be destroyed by strong ones, but balanced with them…so that both survive.

Here, Edith’s peace movement “at the wrong time” is a warning to the real life peace movement of the Vietnam Era that though its goals were laudable, a retreat from the world would also carry an impact, and possibly a negative one.  There are consequences for action, it is true.

There are also, however, consequences for inaction.

In short, Star Trek acknowledges that there is almost universally a “battle for peace” that must be fought if that goal is to be achieved. 

Sure, it’s a rebuke of the late-1960s youth, or counter-culture, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. One cannot simply use peace as an opportunity to sit back and “tune out” from the injustices of the world.

Is “The City on the Edge of Forever” the best episode of Star Trek? 

I certainly understand why so many fans and critics think so. It is a moving, haunting episode. It is well-performed, inventive, and at times quite humorous. The fish-out-of-water premise seen here would recur as a favorite Trekkian theme in installments such as "A Piece of the Action" and The Voyage Home (1986).

In terms of my personal taste, however, I prefer “This Side of Paradise” -- an episode about how one character (Spock) has trapped himself in a “self-made purgatory” in which he cannot give nor accept love -- to this story of fate keeping Kirk from achieving any sort of personal happiness.

"City” is great, for certain, but there are s many great original episodes to choose from in the catalog.  I can’t honestly I declare that "City" is better than “Amok Time,” “Mirror, Mirror, the aforementioned “This Side of Paradise,” “Devil in the Dark,” “The Doomsday Machine,” or “The Corbomite Maneuver.”