SCRIPT REVIEW: “Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever,“ Part II: The Original Teleplay (1995)

Yesterday we reviewed Harlan Ellison’s awkwardly titled 1995 tome, “Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever, The Original Screenplay that Became the Classic Star Trek Episode, With an Expanded Introductory Essay by Harlan Ellison.” There were essentially *two* issues going on in that book - on the one hand we had the struggle between the Artist par excellence, and The Man Who Would Be God; and then you also had this script thing tossed in there.

I’m being glib, of course. The script is what the book was all about, it’s what caused all the fuss after all, and yet it’s merely an opening salvo in the much larger war between Roddenberry and Ellison, and as such it’s almost insignificant on some levels. By comparison, the American Civil War was inevitable, and even if somehow the shooting managed to be avoided at Fort Sumter, it *would* have happened a day or a week or a month later somewhere else over basically the same issues. Likwise, had Lee prevailed at Ghettysburg, he would have been defeated at some unsought battle history managed to avoid, at Harrisburg, or Baltimore, or wherever. With issues that big and fundamental, it’s certain that the bowling ball will begin to roll eventually, and once it gets going, perhaps you can brush it to one side or the other a little bit, but it is certainly not going to stop until it reaches the end of the lane. The fundamental conflict at hand between Roddenberry and Ellison was clearly like this, and in such a setting the actual triggering event can get lost in the fuss.

Which is a shame, because in this case the actual trigger - the script for “The City on the Edge of Forever” is a fine, fine story that really deserves to be seen an enjoyed.

This is not the best script ever written - hell, it isn’t even the best thing Ellison’s ever done - but it is really really good, and far above average, and it would have been a fine addition to the Trek cannon, had it been done as written.

Ellison gives us a lot of overlapping material to sift through here - two treatments, a complete original script, and an entire section of his first rewrite. For some this might be daunting or simply annoyingly repetitive, since it is basically the *same* story over and over, but personally I found it fascinating since it allowed us to watch the evolution of the tale *in* Harlan’s own mind.

The overall story is superficially pretty close to the episode everyone already knows: Enterprise discovers a planet with a time portal, a crewmember freaks out and travels back in time, thus creating a paradox and screwing up everything for everyone everywhere. Kirk and Spock travel back in time to fix the problem, there’s a love story involving a missionary lady who is fated to die, history is repaired, and everyone lives happily ever after…excepting the dead lady, of course. The details make the difference, however, and they’re all that separate the filmed version of “City” (Re-written by DC Fontana) from the vastly superior original version by Ellison.

In the first treatment, the Enterprise is tooling around doing whatever it is they do when the cameras aren’t rolling on them. There’s