Fans of Star Trek: The Original Series will remember the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Fans of Harlan Ellison will probably remember that he wrote the teleplay, which was then altered by several writers. In 2014, IDW published a five-issue version of Ellison’s teleplay, adapted by Scott and David Tipton and with art by J.K. Woodward. My lucky find at this year’s San Diego’s Comic Con was a hardback graphic novel that collects all five issues, with forward and afterward by Ellison. This is an author who gives praise sparingly, so you know he means it when he says he’s “over the moon” with the adaptation.
I re-watched “The City on the Edge of Forever” so I could compare the TV version with the graphic novel. The episode is an amazing adventure, full of time-travel hijinks and romance and tragedy, definitely worthy of winning the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1968.
I think Harlan’s original teleplay is better.
The first thing to review is the artwork: it’s dazzling. Creating illustrations based on a TV show can be tricky. Comic-book drawings that show motion and life may not look enough like the characters that we’re all familiar with; drawings that try to capture the actors’ likenesses too closely can look static, more like a series of portraits than something that tells a story. Artists usually need to walk a careful line between too cartoony and too realistic, except for J.K. Woodward, who seems to have taken the line and thrown it out the window. Every frame of this book is beautiful, hand-painted and almost photorealistic, but still expressive enough to capture the emotion in a wistful smile by Kirk, or a look of foreboding sadness from Spock.
As for the story, if you haven’t read Ellison’s book The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay That Became the Classic Star Trek Episode, then you’re missing out. No one can convey a long-simmering grudge the way Ellison can. There are parts of that book were you can just feel him losing his temper as he relives having his script picked apart and changed, either by bean-counting producers or ego-tripping celebrities (Line-counting? Really, Shatner?) The end result tells an excellent story, but there’s so much of it that would have worked better if it had stuck closer to Ellison’s draft.
For instance, the person who ends up changing history in the graphic novel is Lieutenant Beckwith, a drug-dealing member of the Enterprise who kills another crew member when they threatened to expose his illegal activities. It makes a more believable storyline than McCoy accidentally injecting himself with a magical drug that makes him too crazy to remember his friends, but still sane enough to operate a transporter. Beckwith’s ending is pretty satisfying too, although more brutal and disturbing than anything ever aired on Star Trek.
In this version there’s more immediate peril for Spock and Kirk than just their histories being re-written. In the graphic novel, the landing party tries to beam back to the Enterprise after history has been changed, only to arrive on a different (and very unfriendly) ship. Kirk and Spock aren’t just stranded in this new timeline, they have to successfully change time back in order to save Yeoman Rand and the six other redshirts who are trying to hold the transporter room against several hundred renegades who have replaced the Enterprise’s crew.
It’s possible that there just wasn’t enough room in an hour-long show for some of the nuances in the original script, but I would have liked to see more elements kept in the episode, like the kindly shopkeeper who’s generosity balances out some of Spock’s opinion that 1930’s Earth is completely barbaric. Or the war veteran Trooper, a pitiful character who mattered enough to save the day, but not enough for his death to make the least bit of difference to history.
There were some parts of the episode that (apologies to Ellison) I liked more than the book. Having Spock pull the alternate history from a recording he made on his Tricorder worked better than the Guardians (yes, there were several of them in the book) making vague statements about seeking “that which must die” and “blue as the sky of old Earth and clear as truth”. There were some enjoyable bits of humor in the episode that weren’t in the book; the “mechanical rice-picker” explanation for Spock’s ears will always be funny. Plus, having a deranged McCoy rambling on despairingly about twentieth century hospitals was nicely chilling: “…needles and sutures…sew people like garments…”
“You don’t understand. You’re not…”
“I am not a what, Captain? A human, subject to the pains and pleasures of love? No, that is true. I am merely part human; and I am merely concerned with saving the lives of the ones who trusted us to save them.”
I imagine one of the most controversial elements of Ellison’s script was Spock. He’s…well, not bloodthirsty. He’s colder. He knows that Edith has to die, not just to save the crew members on the enemy ship, but to save the whole universe. Kirk even realizes at one point that the phaser Spock has hidden in his jacket isn’t for Beckwith, it’s for Edith, in case Kirk himself does something to save her. Then when the moment of her death arrives (and oh, that panel Woodward drew of Edith, smiling at Kirk just before she sees the truck bearing down on her) Kirk freezes, and it’s Spock who has to make sure history is fixed.
And yet Spock shows a much greater perception of human emotions than I think we see in the TV series, about something that would never ever been filmed about the great starship captain who could do no wrong. Kirk loved Edith – an Edith who was kinder and smarter and even more intelligent than the version that made it to the screen – and it was Spock who understood the full depth of that love, that Kirk might have sacrificed the whole universe. For her.