Girls in Space

City on the Edge of Forever begins, excitingly enough, with a Red Alert. Everything shakes as the Enterprise passes through ripples in time. It all seems like fun until an explosion sends Sulu to the floor. Luckily Dr McCoy is at hand with a booster full of his home brew Cortrozine, which rapidly sorts him out. However, the good times are short lived when 100 times the dosage is accidentally pumped into McCoy himself. This is not recommended and causes McCoy to go completely bonkers and run off.  Security alert.

McCoy assaults an engineer and beams down to the planet’s surface to the source of the time ripples. Kirk follows with a landing party, for once making the excellent choice of taking Uhura along as well as Spock, Scotty and two random red shirt wearing crewman.

It transpires that the cause of the time disturbances is a large stone circle which acts as a portal to another dimension. It’s a bit like Stargate. Unlike Stargate, however, Star Trek’s portal can talk! It’s the guardian of forever.  In your face, Stargate.

While McCoy runs around, demented, the stone cheerio displays images from Earth’s past and claims it to be a gateway to history. Just as Kirk considers what he could go back and do, barmy old Bones jumps through the hole. Uh-oh.

Imediately, the landing party are told that the Enterprise, the crew, the Earth as they knew it – have gone. McCoy changed the past, deleting the days from that point onwards. This means that landing party have no choice but to go back, find McCoy and stop him breaking time.

Kirk and Spock jump back a month or so before McCoy arrives, finding themselves in America during the great depression. The general public stare at their crazy futuristic outfits as if they’ve never seen two grown men in Starfleet uniforms. Don’t these people watch Star Trek?! One swift outfit change (and a hilarious scene with a police officer) later and they blend in perfectly.  As hobos.

They are spotted by, of all people, Joan Collins! Okay, okay she’s playing the part of Edith Keiller: hobo helper! That’s right, kids, she runs a mission for hobos! Kirk and Spock offer to work for her in order to get some cash to buy radio equipment. Meanwhile, Joan talks to random hobos about the future, space travel and atomic power.  Coincidentally, three things they’ll never get to experience.

Spock builds a piece of equipment which displays the future!  Handy!  It identifies the point in time at which history changed and reveals two possible futures. Kirk discovers that either Edith Keiller will either become president in 6 years, or will die this year. They can’t both happen. There’s a chance that in order to set things straight, she must die.

McCoy then materialises out of thin air, ranting about assassins and other wacky shenanigans. Even the craziest of hobos finds him a bit too mad. So while McCoy has a little cry and a sleep, a hobo steals his phaser and vaporises himself.  That’s certainly one way to resolve the city’s homeless problem.

The next day McCoy stumbles into Edith’s kitchen, but Spock is too busy focusing on his soup-dishing duties to spot him. It’s soup, Jim, but not as we know it.

Soon, Spock discovers how Edith will destroy his future. She will lead a peace movement which effectively lets the Nazis win the second world war. Somehow, McCoy prevented her death. Kirk announces that he is in love with Edith. In the 23rd century, this will be referred to as ‘crazy talk’.

The fresh 1930′s air has done wonders for McCoy’s condition. He wakes up and seems to be back to his old self. Hooray, the drugs didn’t do any permanent damage! As least, none that we can see. For all the viewer knows, McCoy’s nipples may now dispense custard.

In a powerful scene, Kirk and Spock are reunited with McCoy, but as Edith runs across the road to join them, a car hits her and she, dramatically, becomes road pizza.

They go back through the stone circle to find that normal history has resumed, although nobody seems very happy about it.

Overall, this is a wonderful episode of Star Trek. One of the problems with Star Trek’s numerous time travel tales is that they didn’t have a consistent method of achieving time travel, so there’s a lot of ‘wasted’ episode given over to establishing the time travel mechanism for this particular tale. In this case, the way of travelling through time is more than a little bizarre: a talking stone circle? Really? That’s the best you could come up with? However, that said, the story is really excellent and genuinely presents the main characters with a proper problem.  Kirk puts the future before his own feelings and before the life of Edith. He makes a choice that kills her. This episode doesn’t pull any punches and remains as one of the best written episodes ever made. Each character is well-realised and given great dialogue. City on the Edge of Forever proves the versatility and quality of the show.

Cast & Creative Staff

Cast:
William Shatner as James T. Kirk
Leonard Nimoy as Spock
DeForest Kelley as Leonard H. McCoy
James Doohan as Montgomery Scott
Nichelle Nichols as Uhura
George Takei as Hikaru Sulu

Guest cast:
Joan Collins as Edith Keeler

Creative Staff:
Director:  Joseph Pevney
Written By: Harlan Ellison

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