Studies Of The World If Hitler Had Won The War Harlan Ellison / James Blish – Star Trek – City On The Edge Of Forever

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Made in 1967, this award winning episode still stands as the best classic Star Trek story for most fans of the series though its writing and production generated some controversy. Plot-wise, it features the discovery of a living portal called The Guardian Of Time that can allow its users to observe and even step into any point of space and time. Kirk (William Shatner) goes through into the early 1930’s in pursuit of Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) who is suffering from side effects after accidentally taking medication intended for one of his patients. Forgetting the Prime Directive not to interfere in the lives of peoples and species encountered, McCoy saves a young pedestrian woman (played by Joan Collins) from being run over in a traffic accident. All of history is now instantly changed. The Enterprise and all of Kirk’s crew not on the planet housing the time portal, cease to exist. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) learns that in surviving the car crash, Edith (Collins) has become an influential pacifist, who has delayed the American entry into the Second World War, giving the Nazis time to develop nuclear weapons they have used to secure victory over the World. Kirk now faces an awful choice. He can accept the new reality or go back through the portal to the moment of the car-accident to ensure that Edith, who he has come to love, still dies. It’s a surprisingly bleak and gloomy episode. The story faced many revisions, not all welcomed by Ellison. The original draft had the changes in history engineered by a convict fleeing through the portal to escape a death sentence, with the pursuing heroes fixing the history he has interfered with. Various other drafts allow the Enterprise to survive the time change but to now be manned by an evil pirate crew. In some drafts, Yeoman Rand is part of the away crew as well as Kirk, Spock & McCoy. A writer called Steve Carabotsos revised the script to have Edith lynched to death by a mob, but his version was ultimately ignored. Much of the controversy was due to Ellison expecting inclusion of scenes way beyond the episode’s budget and it was ambitious to fit everything he envisaged into a single fifty minute episode. Edith’s pacifism was also much more prominent in Ellison’s script, but the producers were nervous about that with the Vietnam War in full progress. The final killing of Edith to make the war happen again is overstated for Ellison, himself very anti-militaristic, as it presents the misleading moral message that the need for military conflict justifies the means. Here, an alternative history of one war was subjected to various alterations itself, largely because of another war. None of the versions directly depict the Nazis. It is a before and after study. We see New York in the pre-war Depression years and two versions of the 23rd century, but nothing in between. The TV version itself should perhaps best seen as the definitive version. Since the episode aired, Ellison has published his various editions of the script as he created it. In 1968, acclaimed SF author James Blish started writing literary adaptations of every aired classic Star Trek adventure, with three or four stories in each of twelve volumes. City On The Edge Of Forever, which appears in book two, presented him with some difficulty as he was aware (and knew fans were also tuned into the story) on the controversies relating to the Ellison script, so he tried valiantly to edit his text to incorporate elements from various versions of the work as presented by Ellison. It is a good compromise in an alternate history itself presented in many alternatives. The Youtube is a very funny Star Trek – Monty Python And The Holy Grail cross-over sketch Arthur Chappell