Appreciation: "City on the Edge of Forever"

Just caught this Star Trek gem on one of the antenna stations. I had't seen it in years, and I knew it was good (probably the best episode of any Star Trek ever), I just forgot how nearly perfect it is.

Economy of words: There is not an ounce of fat in this episode. Every line, every scene moves the story forward. They don't waste  a second. Watch the sequence where Spock sees a guy working with intricate tools, he cracks a safe and steals them, Edith Keeler confronts Kirk and Spock about the theft. This all happens in the space of two minutes.

McCoy's recovery scene: We learn more about McCoy in this tiny, well-written exchange with Keeler than we will in the whole series. He's not just a cranky Spock antagonist. He's realizing he's somehow on earth in 1930 and instead of freaking out, he sees it as another day working for Starfleet.  When Keeler sympathetically says, "We've all drank from the wrong bottle at one point." He just laughs at the analogy. "Not like the bottle I drank from." Then he offers to help out. The viewer imagines he's going to make the best of things by practicing medicine just in a  different time.

McCoy's back alley scene: What a great monologue, "people sewn like garments!" He's mad, but he's right. In the future, we won't be sewing people like garments, and it's barbaric to him even in his demented state.

Kirk/Spock interplay: "Sometimes I expect too much of you." Spock has a genius intellect yet Kirk is still able to play him. This answers the question, if Spock is so smart, why isn't he the captain? Because Kirk knows all the angles you'd never read in a book (previously this was done with Kirk routinely beating Spock in chess).

Heartbreaking ending: It's all wrapped up in a minute, there's no epilogue to explain everything, there's no moment where they're back on the bridge for a laugh/freeze frame. Just heartbreak.

It's like a two hour episode packed into 60 minutes. If it were made today the story would have been spread out over the whole season. Not too crazy an idea. Think about Kirk telling the Red Shirts (who *don't* die!) to follow him into the time portal if they think he'd been gone too long. Imagine what those subplots could be had they listened to him.

My only question is why they didn't use the Guardian of Forever again? They used different means to time travel, it might have been better if they stuck with this one.

Harlan Ellison wrote a book about the making of this episode, and it includes the original script. It also recounts some shady maneuvering from Shatner and Roddenberry. If you can find it get it.

Great stuff

50-year overdue review: Star Trek: What Little Girls Are Made Of

This episode was on one of the antenna channels tonight, and boy does it hold up.

It has the ingredients of the best episodes of the old show:

Introduce a scientific concept.

Debate the wisdom/dangers of the scientific concept.

And the icing on the cake: a cool fistfight/spaceship battle, and scantily-clad alien women.

This is what set Star Trek apart from other shows on back then. It was written by and for smart people.

Let's look at the scientific concept: They're talking about artificial intelligence 30 years before the term was even coined! Bonanza never did that!

And the only Star Trek film to discuss theoretical science was "Wrath of Khan" with the Genesis device.

Scientific concept, debate wisdom of scientific concept, cool spaceship battle, Kirstie Alley at her hottest. And not so coincidentally, it's still the best film.

Another thing interesting about this episode was the introduction of Nurse Chapel.

Some backstory. It gets a little complicated: Gene Roddenberry wanted to give his girlfriend, Majel Barrett, a job.

Oh, wait, that wasn't complicated at all.

The story was Nurse Chapel joined Starfleet to hopefully find her one-time lover Roger Korby who went missing.

They find him, but he turns out to be a robot, so the search continues.


Only it didn't. Her whole backstory was forgotten. They set up a starting point which could have lead to two or three episodes and they totally dropped it. The only thing she had to do after this was have a crush on Spock.

And if she weren't superfluous enough, in the first film, she's a doctor. So the ship has two doctors.

One final point to go over: Holy crap, that jumpsuit on Sherry Jackson!

Lost Trek Lore

If you can find it, try to get Bill Planer’s “Lost Voyages of Star Trek.” It includes synopses of Star Trek scripts that were never filmed.

In the mid-70s, Paramount was going to start a “fourth television network” and its flagship show was to be “Star Trek: Phase II.” The adventures of the Enterprise’s second five-year journey.

Scripts were commissioned, the actors were going to reprise their roles, except for Leonard Nimoy.

New characters were drawn up: Decker, a headstrong, young first officer; Ilya, a psychic, and onetime lover of Decker’s, and Xon, a vulcan who, unlike Spock, actually enjoyed working on a ship with humans and wanted to be more like them. (These three characters might sound familiar.)

Then something big happened: Star Wars. 

Paramount executives who had spent every morning climbing over a new pile of mail from Star Trek fans begging for a Star Trek movie started asking themselves: Do we own any properties that have spaceships in them?

Plans for the fourth network and Phase II were scrapped. (Barry Diller, the Paramount executive spearheading this concept, would take it to Fox. You might have heard of this.)

Roddenberry was ordered: Make us a movie.

Then came an astonishing series of bad decisions, one understandable, the rest bewildering.

Bad decision one: Choosing the director. This is the understandable bad decision. We’re talking Robert Wise. “West Side Story,” “The Sound of Music,” Blockbusters both. But most important to Roddenberry: “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Possibly the most cerebral science fiction drama up to that time, and probably to this day. (Call me what you must, 2001 a Space Odyssey was a pretentious overlong boring indulge-o-fest)

Rodddenberry didn’t want spaceships blowing each other up, he wanted a movie just like “The Day the Earth Stood Still”: men in military uniforms sitting around discussing what to do about the alien threat ... if it is a threat.

The problem is, after Star Wars, no one else wanted that. We wanted fast ships and explosions. Instead we got long long talky meetings, and interminable inspections of the outer hull of the Enterprise

Now the baffling decisions: Roddenberry went to the stack of scripts written for Phase II and found “In Thy Image,” a story about an Earth space probe that becomes self-aware and returns to meet its makers. 

Two problems with this script. A) it had been done before as an episode of Star Trek, B) the concept really doesn’t lend itself to a big budget motion picture experience. There are no villains! Now after “Wrath of Khan” I can’t argue that going back to the source material is a bad idea, but Khan was a sequel, building on the original. And if you’re going to spend $20 million (then a lot of money for a movie) to remake an episode of Star Trek, do “The Doomsday Machine” That episode just begs for the big-screen treatment. (Check out the CGI-improved version, you’ll see I’m right).

Baffling decision 2: “Let’s shave Persis Khambatta’s head!” 

Baffling decision 3: Upon finding out the revived Star Trek would be a movie, Leonard Nimoy was suddenly interested. At this point, Roddenberry thought, wow, I can keep Decker and Ilia, but I’ll have to kill off Xon. 

Kill off Xon? 

Roddenberry somehow was thinking that not only were the Star Trek Phase II episodes filmed, they were aired, and the fans would want an explanation on why Xon wasn’t in the movie.

How else to explain his role in the film as the quickly introduced, quickly dispatched Vulcan, making a movie that was a half hour too long even longer?

The film was released, became a hit, but was quickly nicknamed Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. 

So, Roddenbery went into exile and Paramount would never release another Star Trek film without phasers being fired and things blowing up.

When Roddenberry returned from exile, they let him produce an ambitious little TV program called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Once again, he raided the box o’ scripts from Phase II. Only wherever it said Kirk, he crossed it out and wrote Picard. Decker became Riker; Ilia became Troi, and Xon became Data.

This man was the master of recycling.

As  pointed out in a Cracked article, Roddenberry’s talents were somewhat overrated in favor of people who worked for him. Cracked cites Gene Coon, but I would add DC Fontana and David Gerrold to the mix. When they left Next Generation things quickly went to crap. Interesting thought-provoking scripts were replaced with tropes that were moldy in the ‘60s. Evil twins, unambiguously-good good guys. A captain who surrendered seemingly every episode, the psychic who provided no insight that wasn’t always obvious, the boy genius for whom every episode had to stop in its tracks so someone could explain the plot to him, and a Klingon who got knocked on his ass in every fight.

Star Trek: Phase II could have been the best Star Trek series of them all. Roddenberry was always somehow Star Trek’s greatest champion and worst enemy.

Web film review "Star Trek: Of Gods and Men

Back in the 70s, Star Trek fan fiction was spread around by mimeograph sheets (ask your grandparents). Now, the fans make $100,000 semi-pro movies with actual cast members, all funded by internet donations. It's crazy! And often very good.

I inadvertently stumbled upon the fan film "Gods and Men," and after a clunky beginning, it got better. It's an alternate timeline story, the type of which we've seen before, and it has the dream mash-up of (spoiler) Charlie X and Gary Mitchell beating each other up! A fan's dream come true. It also features the destruction of Vulcan two years before the rebooted Star Trek film did it.

Trek veterans Walter Keonig, Nichelle Nichols, Garrett Wang, Alan Ruck, Grace Lee Whitney, Tim Russ (and a few red shirt-types) all reprise their roles. Charlie X and Gary Mitchell are played by character actors who both do exceptional jobs.

In the alternate timeline, Chekov is leading rebels in a takeover of the Enterprise now led by an evil Starfleet. It's Mirror Mirror, mixed with Space Seed, Wrath of Khan, and a bunch of other episodes. At the end there's a colossal spaceship battle which is awfully cool. Definitely a fan fantasy.

The drawbacks: The aforementioned clunky beginning. Clunky dialogue, clunky acting, clunky setup. (stick with it though). We need a 20 year moratorium on time travel, and the phrase "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Both have been way overused. (That being said, it was good to see the Time Guardian again). Also a major character has an unexplained change of heart which shifts everything.

I thought Charlie X had been retconned to be a member of the Q continuity. No difference, but Roddenberry did have a frequent reliance on god-like omnipotent characters.

The web pages of the creators say they're trying to make a pilot, I say CBS should pick it up, and make Alan Ruck the captain.