TOS S01E28 – The City on the Edge of Forever
Dir. Joseph Pevney, Wri. Harlan Ellison
The Summary: Bones goes crazy from an overdose and leaps through a time portal, somehow destroying the future. Kirk and Spock must follow him into the past in order to fix whatever calamity he caused.
The Good: Crazy Bones gives DeForest Kelley a chance to really chew the scenery. He’s a great actor and gets to be delightfully over-the-top for his brief scenes in this episode. The Guardian of Forever, despite just being a disembodied voice, actually gets a bit of character, even throwing some shade at Spock and Vulcans, which is an interesting choice. The stakes are established very early, are very high, and feel earned throughout the episode. This is also the rare Trek episode that feels like it actually has some decent production design and budget. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a far sight away from some of the shoddier episodes. Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) is absolutely one of the best single-episode characters from the entire series, managing to be a dreamer without ever grating. The buildup to McCoy’s arrival (the duo have arrived in the past before him) is tense and exciting. This is one of Shatner’s best performances in the entire series; the ending is high tragedy and he sells it brilliantly.
The Bad: There’s very little to put here. Some of the comedy is a bit dated. For me, it still works, but I can easily see someone finding it to be a little too corny or old-sitcom-y. The episode does require some suspension of disbelief with Bones’ escape. He basically spends the whole time hiding (badly) behind rocks, and that somehow works to elude some of the galaxy’s best trained and brightest minds. He has to actually get back to the past for the plot to happen, though, so he does. It’s a sign of slightly lazy writing on Ellison’s part, I think (although I feel bad even saying it about so hallowed a figure in sci-fi). In the end, I still don’t think this is a very big detriment since it so clearly isn’t really the focus of the plot.
The Review: Popular opinion holds this as absolutely one of the best episodes of The Original Series ever made, and I really have nothing to say to call that assumption into question. This is actually the episode I had in mind when conceiving my star rating system for these episodes. I try to reserve four star scores for episodes that transcend even being good episodes of Trek and are just excellent sci-fi stories in their own right. They benefit from the broader character work, but don’t really require it. You could show this episode to anyone who loved science fiction with no context and I think it would still hold up as an excellent story on its own. The concept alone speaks to the pedigree of its screenwriter: a time-travelling madman destroys the future, an elite team is sent back to stop him but arrives too early, and a member of the team begins to fall for a time-local, resulting in a horrible choice between the sanctity of the timeline and personal happiness. It’s fertile ground for high drama, and the episode doesn’t disappoint. Trek attempts tragedy or at least melancholy quite frequently, but this is absolutely its greatest success in that register of emotion. I’ve probably seen it a half dozen times, and the ending still gets me every single one of them. If you have a free hour and access to one of the various streaming services where Trek is available, watch it for the first time or for the twentieth. It’s like reading a good story; it will have something for you to appreciate regardless of your experience with it. If you don’t enjoy this episode, then Star Trek just probably isn’t for you, because this is the show at its peak.
The Score: 