Trek Thursdays: Trekking Towards Sixty #17 — “The City On The Edge Of Forever” And “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, And Tomorrow”

On September 8th, 1966, an intrepid crew of explorers boldly went where no one had ever gone before on television. At that moment, Star Trek was born. A series that launched a franchise that has kept a firm grip on audiences for decades.

As the sixtieth anniversary approaches, we here at Comicon are ready to celebrate one of the greatest science fiction franchises. While Star Trek has graced the silver screen, most of its life has been on our television screens. So, that’s where our focus shall remain.

Every week through September 8th, we’ll be spotlighting two Star Trek episodes, from any and every iteration, that we feel are some of the greatest. At this point there are over 950 episodes of Trek, so it goes without saying some favorites won’t make the cut for this list of 60.

Time travel. It’s a really tricky thing.

While still theoretical (as far as we know) in our reality, science fiction has done a ton with the concept. Star Trek is no stranger to tackling temporal mechanics. From the earliest series to the latest, Trek plays with timelines and the alternate realities that might come to pass when threads are pulled.

Today, we look at one of the first times the series played with time and fate — and one of the more recent endeavors, although it technically took place first. See, time is also wonky for us, because of prequels and expanded stories.

-RED ALERT: SPOILERS FOLLOW-

“The City On The Edge Of Forever”
Star Trek: The Original Series – Season 1, Episode 28 (04/06/1967)

Synopsis: Caught in orbit of a planet giving off ripples of time energy, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) find themselves going back in time to save Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) and their universe itself.

The episode where Doctor McCoy goes out of his mind on drugs.

That’s the thing that stuck out to me instantly as a kid. It made the episode feel so weird. Later, I realized there was more to it and what the episode was trying to tackle; those reasons leading to why it’s such a classic to this day.

A ton happens in this episode. Beyond the fact McCoy overdosing on a drug, we’re introduced for the first time to the Guardian of Forever — a time portal that is both a machine and a sentient being. While the Guardian hasn’t appeared that much in the television side of things (save for recent Star Trek: Discovery episodes and an Animated Series appearance in the 1970s), it had a huge presence in the expanded universe of Simon & Schuster novels. Of course, that was before the continuity ended so the publisher could make books more in line with Star Trek‘s post-2017 continuity.

Right away we get one of the first flirtations with time changing and altering everything. McCoy jumping through the gateway instantly erases the Enterprise and everything to do with the Trek universe as we knew it at that time. Leaving Kirk, Spock, Scotty (James Doohan), Uhura (Nichelle Nicols), and some requisite nameless red shirts as the only ones remaining from the ship and the timeline they knew.

This episode is also the only one noted writer and producer Harlan Ellison wrote for the series. A controversy arose over this and the treatment of the episode, leading to a feud with Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Ellison published his original script in his book many years later and was even turned into a comic by IDW Publishing.

And then there is the Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) of it all.

Sister Keeler is a social worker from 1930s New York City, and someone whose fate is irrevocably connected to the future ending up “correct.” She had big dreams and ideas centered on creating peace for the entire planet. She even dreamed that, one day, human beings would travel to space and live in a peaceful compassionate setting. Huh, that sounds kind of familiar…

Unfortunately, she was never meant to be part of anything that might come close to that dream. In Trek‘s established timeline, she is killed in a traffic accident, but with McCoy’s interference she survives and thus the future changes. Continuing to strive for her goals, Keeler founded one of the largest peace movements in the United States and met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to build a plan aiding the needy. Growing changes led to larger waves of pacisfism and delayed the United States entry into World War II.

Thus — as we’ve seen played out in copious alternate timeline stories — the Germans were the ones to complete the atomic bomb and, with V-2 rockets, were able to conquer the planet. Therefore, the seeds that one day would lead to the Federation and Starfleet were never planted, and the future that the Enterprise came from never happened.

All that said, the main thrust of this story is how Kirk falls in love with Keeler. Adding more wrinkles of drama, her continued survival would mean his world never comes to exist and the Nazis would lay wast to Earth itself. We see how much Kirk has to wrestle with the fact that he must let Keeler die to fix everything. It demonstrated how the captain was willing to do what had to be done for the greater good, even at a personal cost, to prevent a calamitous future.

While it wasn’t uttered until decades later, it was a real case of Spock’s “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one” axiom.

The moment where Kirk holds McCoy back to let Keeler die is some heart-wrenching stuff. It’s immediately followed by McCoy screaming at Kirk, asking if he knows what he did. Then there’s Spock’s very steady “He knows Doctor … he knows…” proving how much Trek was able to go for the harder material, both emotionally and morally.

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow, And Tomorrow”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Season 2, Episode 3 (06/29/2023)

Synopsis: When an attack on 21st century Earth alters the timeline, security chief La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) and an altered-timeline James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) must do what they can to save her reality. Meanwhile, La’An must also face her own contentious legacy.

One of the things that Trek has been good at since the latter seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation is creating character-focused episodes. These plots still utilize the trappings of science fiction and the usual conceits of the series, but focusrs them around particular development flavorings. We saw a couple such episodes in the first season of Strange New Worlds focused on La’An, especially with her Gorn connection.

Here, we get to see more of her personal and emotional side. Giving her a special connection to lore and a lost chance at love allows Chong to really illustrate new sides of the character.

In a way, this acts as kind of a mirror to the season finale of the first season. Where Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) glimpses a new timeline where he avoided his accident-filled future. In that alternate timeline, we first met the Wesley version of Kirk, and our second time with him in the series is also an alternate version. Luckily, it wasn’t long after this that he finally played the “regular” timeline version of the iconic character.

Chong and Wesley have a great energy as they first interact on the altered Enterprise and then bounce through 2022 Toronto. It really plays with the idea that one doesn’t get to choose whether their “future” is the correct one so easily. Much like Kirk in the above TOS episode, La’An must save her future via a great personal cost. Trek handles this trope a lot, but more often than not, it is accomplished very well and it comes with the right emotional-string-pulls to land.

Tapping into Kirk’s chess playing as part of their hustle in 2022 was some inspired writing. Sure, we only saw him playing with Spock mostly in TOS, it still speaks to Kirk’s tactical kind of mind, which isn’t always clear in the way he’s been thought of by many people over the decades.

One of the surprising moments is near the end, when we learn that one of the things that changed history was the death of Khan Noonien-Singh (Ricardo Montalban, Desmond Sivan). The genetically modified superhuman utilized his genius intellect to become a brutal world-dominating tyrant. Eventually defeated, he was exiled off planet with his fellows on a cryo ship, and became a threat for Kirk and the Enterprise in the future.

Killing a brutal tyrant seems like something that would be a good thing, but time and fate are a wobbly set of threads. The dark ages that came from Khan’s brutal ways and the subsequent World War are part of what led to humanity’s eventual rise across the galaxy. As we saw during Star Trek: First Contact, Earth’s survival after World War III led to Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) creating warp drive and Vulcans making first contact with humanity.

Removing any of those dominoes would naturally destabilize the future La’An and we, the viewers, witnessed. Just like the first episode in this entry, certain events — no matter how terrible — have to happen for history to reach a more positive outcome.

Losing Kirk wasn’t the hard personal choice that La’An has to make here. It’s reckoning with her own legacy, one connected to her ancestor, Khan, and what it means for the future. She must protect a young boy who goes on to become a monster because it’s what has to happen for the timeline — not just for her existence, but everything that has to be in place for humanity to reach its best version of itself.

In the Original Series, we learn that Khan’s rise happened sometime in the 1990s. Here though, he’s just a boy in 2022. This speaks to not just the fact that we’re telling these stories decades later, but how time itself is both fluid and fixed at the same time. As things changed in the timeline in minor ways, major events such as Khan and the Eugenics Wars are still meant to happen. No matter what.

Come back next week as we dive into two more of Star Trek’s greatest episodes.