BOOK REVIEW: “Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever, The Original Teleplay That Became The Classic Star Trek Episode

I totally agree. Of all the Ellision-talking-about-the-industry books and stories I've read - up to and including the "Glass Teat" books - this one is far and away my favorite. Granted, I'm somewhat invested in my increasing dislike of Trek, and my longstanding loathing of Herr Roddenberry, so I'm unquestionably disposed to like a book that furthers my preconceptions.

Even still, the book is a hoot. By degrees exciting, sad, outraged, and introspective. I really did love it, and I'd strongly reccomend others to check it out. Particularly obsessive Trekies.

Um, guys? Let's get back on topic, which is Harlan's book. The main point being: this is the funniest, most entertaining, craziest read I've ever encountered. ("Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most . . . hilarious!")

Everyone must go right now and get a copy of this book! Now! Do it! You won't regret it. Ellison and Roddenberry butting heads is like the greatest cage match ever conceived.

One of the early elements of the show, which quickly got dropped, was Anti-Vulcanism. Vulcans (Or "Vulcanians" as they were called in the early first season) were mistrusted and looked down on for no reasons ever explained. Functionally, Spock was like the indian guide that led the Wagon Train, someone the pioneers may not like or trust, but whom they need. This was intended as a way to show people getting over their biases in actual practce - "I don't trust you, but I'll work with you" - but Roddenberry quickly soured on the idea, and removed it. By the time of the Kirk/Finney trial, it's gone.

The only bit of it that remained was McCoy's continual sniping at Spock (And occasional vice-versa). Southerners are irretrievably Racist, after all, we're told that again and again and again by people from California. There are indications that Roddenberry didn't like this, but it worked and so he was kind of stuck with it, but it quickly shifted tones from racial dislike to merely a war between the head and the heart, with McCoy arguing that feeling is better than thinking. It was also repeatedly shown in the later years to be mostly bluster. McCoy actually *liked* Spock, but was too curmudgeonly to admit it.

Every politico and flag officer from starfleet was a useless ass. You're right. IF we follow Ellison's reasoning from this book through - and I think we have to - then it becomes a case of Kirk being a surrogate for Roddenberry himself, and only Gene knows what's right! Therefore, Kirk/Gene must always save the day despite interference from any knownothing layabout that outranks him, or those damn studio execs that tell me how to run my show.

You mostly answered my questions, and I don't think I've ever seen "Mudd's Woman." (It sounds like something my parents would have turned off if I was around.) Again, I'm working mostly from memory and the occasional AV Club Star Trek review.

Wasn't McCoy anti-Vulcan? I admit that I don't believe any of the crew ever expressed any anti-black or asian views, but is that so far-fetched, really? Couldn't skin color and eye-shape be treated the same as hair and eye color several hundred years from now? I would hope so, anyway.

And I thought one of the least believable things about Star Trek-- (Well, no. Strike that.) I thought it was fairly unbelievable that every single Starfleet officer they encountered was an ass. Starfleet always showed that they didn't value individual lives and always wanted to abandon various crew members to their deaths for the sake of the mission. At least that's how I remember it.

But Mike he did have drug pushers and even prostitution on the show see the episode Mudd's Woman. It was just he seemed to want Star Fleet to be a bunch of saints. Now I was in the Navy and I bet that spaceman will act a lot like seaman they will have the same sort of stress and psychological strains.
Now the show does get some points for the few anti war episodes they did and that the network pointedly never reran. And I know he had to fight to even have blacks and Asians on the show but that does not change the candy coated idea of the Federation as being always good and right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, it will be as true in the future as it is now.

Ok, firstly: Ellison means "Perfect" in the sense that no member of the crew would ever exhibit a non-PC value. Every single member of the crew is entirely tolerant of race, color, creed, heritage, whatever. (Though they are sexist as hell). No member of the crew would ever lie, cheat, nor steal to get ahead. Why? Well because in the utopian fantasy world of the federation, there's no need since everyone has everything they want and need. Oooooookay....what about people who just lie, cheat, and steal because they enjoy it. 'in that instance, such malcontents will be geneticly weeded out of our society'

I made that last bit up, but the point as Ellison was explaining it is that no crewmember of the Enterprise will *ever* be allowed to behave less than angelic on the show. Humans are perfected, and negative qualities can only be exhibited by the aliens on the show, who function mostly as surrogates for third world nations and peoples in the show anyway.

So you can't have Crewman Johnson be a dick just because Crewman Johnson is a dick: It's either because (A) Crewman Johnson is sick, (B) Crewman Johnson is secretly an alien who hasn't embraced the Roddenberrian concepts of universal non-dickishness, (C) Crewman Johnson is secretly yet another annoying godlike entity or (D) Crewman Johnson will not be on the show at all. There were even memos to this effect - all conflict will be us vs. them, never never never will we have someone make fun of Checkov because he hangs out with that gay dude all the time...

Ellisons's reaction to this was that it's next to impossible to write drama in utopia, since utopia is a place where - by definition - dramatic things don't happen, and that it if you've ever been on a ship or in the navy, it's extremely unlikely there wouldn't be at least a few bad eggs on a ship the size of the Enterprise anyway.

Second question: Wasn't Roddenberry within his rights to say he didn't want that on his show?

Absolutely. Yes. Totally. That's cool. And when he pointed that out to Harlan, once Harlan got done complaining, he sat down and re-wrote the entire script to get rid of the drug useage. He did it free of charge. Then he did it at least twice more, free of charge, but by then they were just jerking him around and everyone on the staff was having a turn at re-writing it, ultimately with Roddenberry himself taking credit for it. (He lied. He didn't write it. It was DC Fontanna who did the final rewrite, Roddenberry only contributed a few lines - mostly Edith's speech about the future). Then he spent the next 30 years lying about it, deliberately slandering Ellison's good name, and insisting that Ellison refused to do something that in fact he'd done at least three times already, maybe more.

I'm not a big Star Trek fan, but it seems to me that when you're talking about the original series, only Kirk was "perfect." Now, I don't think that makes for an interesting character, so I'm not saying that's a good thing, but is it true that every member of Starfleet, or even of the Enterprise, was portrayed as perfect? I think that claim goes much too far.

And on 1960s television, were gritty dramas all that feasible, especially in what seems to be intended as a family show? I can understand why Ellison would be embittered by Rodenberry's lies, but isn't Rodenberry allowed to say, "I really don't want drug users and pushers on my show." I'm not sure why that's considered a moral failing on his part, rather than simply a morally neutral choice.

Yeah, long road to Andromeda hitting the air. Basically, it started out as an exact copy of Star Trek. Basically Trek in a new fictional universe, with a few minor changes - the "Spock" character was replaced by an android female ("Gynoid") named Andromeda who was an extention of the ship of the same name. This got shot down fairly quick, but it got dusted off a few times. When Paramount expressed interest in TNG in the mid-80s, they were initially working on yet another attempt to launch "Andromeda," and then it eventually changed in to TNG.

The actual "Andromeda" show, when it finally hit the air, was almost entirely the product of Robert Wolf Hewett, and though it was very low budget and had a lot of inherent problems, I do have to give it some props for consistently doing things I didn't see coming. Then, in the middle of the 2nd season, RWH was fired and the show was screaming crap from then on. It was never great, but it had some potential.

And of course Lexa Doig is smokin' hot.

Andromeda now their was a show that after the first two episodes I knew I never wanted to see it again. I would have rather that they had picked up Genesis II in the 70's but I was a kid then. I hated Earth Final Conflict to, I think Gene had one good idea and sort of got stuck after that.
Since this started out about Harlan Ellison I would like to state that in the mid 70's the nerd group I ran with discovered Dangerous Visions and Ellison became the hip stuff to read for a time.

Yeah, all true, all true. Thing is, there never really was much of a 'cannon' to Trek. When they were making TOS, Roddenberry could not have given less of a rat's damn about whether episode 8 contradicted episode 6 or not. Dorothy Fontanna was the one who actually sat down and took notes and tried to impose some consistency on it. After the show was done, Roddenberry insisted TAS counted, then when they started making the movies he insisted TAS didn't, and there were several episodes of TOS that he didn't consider canonical. TNG didn't even start out as Trek, it was originally a new show called "Andromeda," and then Paramount said "shoehorn it in to the Trek Universe, or else it won't sell," so he did, but *most* of the people working on TNG had no real knowledge of the original show, so it conflicts all the time with TOS. DS9 was worse, but then just to be annoying some of the writers worked in references to TAS, so even though TAS isn't canon, it *is* cannon, at least partially. And of course Roddenberry insisted that several of the movies weren't canon either.

So in addition to being a Science Fiction show that generally lacked both Science *AND* Fiction, and in addition to being didactic and boring as hell, in addition to its weird desire to show the "White Man's Burden" in space, in addition to all that, it was internally inconsistent as all get out.

Just a hell of a bad way to run a railroad, brother!

When I was a kid I loved Star Trek, I even got to see some of the third season first run when I could con my way into staying up that late. In my tween years in the early 70's I remember all the kids running home to watch Trek at 5pm in Rochester NY. But now as someone in my late 40's there are a hand full of episodes I can still watch, the majority of the rest are just unwatchable now. Watching TNG I keep expecting to see a scene where a crew member went to their quarters and the computer would remind them that it was time to take their mood pills like in THX 1138.
Star Trek is some alternate California future where nothing really unpleasant happens and the government always knows the right thing to do. They even retcon their own back story to make it nicer, Star Trek Enterprise should have been about the Earth Romulan war but now it did not happen. The movie Star Trek First Contact should have shown the aftermath of the Eugenics wars but now it seems it did not happen the way it was first told. I have to thank god or the great spirit or something that I discovered Heinlein and other authors in my early teens or I might have ended up a Democrat.