The City on the Edge of Forever (33 page)

Curiously, this was also the moment in time when
Star Trek
began to assert its influence on the genre. In one respect at least, that influence has been a pernicious one: the allure of catching some of
Star Trek
’s fame and glory and wealth has caused too many good writers to lower not only their standards, but their goals as well. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed.

I suspect that only a small part of Harlan’s disdain for
Star Trek
is the result of his own experience with the steamroller of lies that follows in its wake; the larger part must surely come from realizing that
Star Trek
is also a series of broken promises and missed opportunities to expand the range of what is possible in the genre.

You see, Harlan Ellison is a writer.

I’m going to have to explain this.

I’m only a storyteller. Harlan Ellison is a writer.

I tell stories for a living. I write about people who have problems and what they do to solve those problems and what they learn in the process. I try to make the people and the situations interesting and understandable. I try to keep the language as clear as possible because I’m terrified of looking silly in print. Only occasionally do I succumb to temptation and try to get my prose airborne—usually, the next morning, my head hurts and I’m embarrassed by the stylistic excesses committed to paper.

But Harlan Ellison is a writer. And that’s a whole other kind of critter than a mere storyteller.

Language pours from his typewriter in a torrent of words. Visions explode like anger-filled hand grenades. Liquid images flow onto the pages, neon-streaked, high-voltage, screaming charges of emotion, vibrating with pain and horror and rage. Harlan writes with words as clean as surgical-grade stainless steel, as hard as lunar diamonds, as bright as a roaring solar flare, as precise as a neurosurgical laser, and as deadly as a monofilament wire tightening around your neck. At his very best—when his most exquisitely crafted work shatters through the bland oatmeal of your everyday existence into the pulsating wet heart of your conscious self—Harlan writes of emotions so rare and precious and altogether human that in the act of reading, the reader transcends his own limitations, and is expanded to a new level of receptivity to the universe around him.

Do you see what I mean about the difference between writers and storytellers?

Harlan Ellison is a passionate human being. He cares. He feels. He reacts. He acts. He writes. He demands the truth—from himself and from everybody who dares to enter his space. He’s not idealistic. He simply demands that the world live up to its own standards—or stop professing them. And he puts all of that passion into his work. Where better?

But even that is not sufficient for Harlan.

There is one area in Harlan’s life, in which he is so demanding that his behavior is punishingly brutal. It has destroyed four marriages and an uncountable number of friendships. There are people who cannot keep up with Harlan and who cannot tolerate his near-fanatical dedication for perfection in this single arena. In my entire life, I have never met any human being who has demanded so much of himself, who has challenged himself so consistently and with such persistence as Harlan Ellison. Whatever else Harlan Ellison may be—and the stories are legion—the one brutal drive that motivates this man is the need to do better.

He is self-educated on a scale that is nothing less than astonishing. His knowledge of music, literature, art, comics, science fiction, contemporary culture, history, and trivia is second to none. You may be surprised to read this, but his growth as a compassionate man is no less.

Look, I know that Harlan Ellison has a thermonuclear reputation, and yes, it’s fairly earned; but that’s merely the public perception of Harlan. The real Harlan is a little old Jewish man with the cutest little pot belly, who shlumps around the house in his bathrobe and slippers, muttering about finding a bottle of seltzer water. The real Harlan Ellison is a man who takes every death as a personal insult.

He can’t stand to see people suffering unnecessary pain. I am tempted to insert an artful tangent here, discussing Harlan’s perception of necessary pain—the art of revenge—but most of that is performance and perception. In practice, Harlan limits most of his revenge to simply telling his side of the story and letting you make up your own mind. This book, for example. The point is that the real Harlan Ellison is a very human being, a combination of both the best and the worst that a human can be; but his best is beyond simple description—and even his worst is still terrific.

When you have a couple of spare centuries, read through Harlan’s body of work in the order in which it was written. You will be able to watch a man grow, expand, transcend, challenge, renew, rededicate, and recommit himself over and over and over again. Reading his work is hard, painful work sometimes. Disturbing, annoying, frustrating—the nightmares and fantasies that he puts in your head are inescapable. He shoves timebombs down your throat; 15-kiloton time bombs that go off days, weeks, months later. I don’t know how history is going to judge Harlan; it may be that he is a special phenomenon unique to the twentieth century, but I hope not. Some of these screams of rage deserve to echo for a long, long time.

Gene Roddenberry, on the other hand, was a TV producer. (A TV producer is an ordinary human being who has made the mistake of falling asleep next to a big green pod filled with money. When he awakes again, he has been transformed into an alien thing that feeds on power, talent, and the blood of the innocent. Now, some people I know have argued with me about this, saying that a TV producer is nowhere near as bad as a lawyer, but TV producers are one of the leading causes of lawyers in Los Angeles. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.)

At his best, Gene Roddenberry was an inspiring speaker. He knew how to say all of the right things. He knew how to speak to a crowd or an individual with equal grace. He knew what you wanted to hear and that was what he told you. He made you want to believe again.

At his worst—well, he was a producer, the American version of a feudal lord. Despite whatever assertions for truth and justice a feudal lord might make, he’s still a lord. He might believe he’s acting justly, but the way the system is constituted encourages acts of abuse, if not by the lord himself, then certainly by those who act in his name. The lord doesn’t have to drive the steamroller; there are lots of peasants working in the fields who will happily do that job for him, without regard to whose home or livelihood they’re rumbling over.

The real issue here is not “The City on the Edge of Forever.” That’s just a side battle in a much larger war. The real issue is the challenge of
Star Trek
and the underlying commitment of the storyteller. It is clear from reading this script that Harlan Ellison wanted to do more than just another hour of forgettable television. He wanted to do something powerful and unique.

As science fiction,
Star Trek
ranges from pretty bland to pretty silly with occasional forays to pretty godawful. I do not say this as a blanket condemnation.
Star Trek
is a television show. It is a commercial enterprise (pun intended). When a camel flies, you don’t judge it by the same standards as an eagle. (The good news about
Star Trek
is that it has raised the standard of acceptable mediocrity. If this is the lowest common denominator, then maybe we’re not doing too badly. The
bad
news is that so many fans of the show never think to raise their sights any higher.)

To put it simply,
Star Trek
is the McDonald’s of science fiction; it’s fastfood storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time and you don’t really have to get involved. It’s all plastic.

This is why “The City on the Edge of Forever” is such an extraordinary episode. It is the one story in which the problem is never solved; the pain goes on forever. Whether you are reading Harlan’s script or watching the produced version, the impact of Edith Keeler’s death is a devastating blow. Kirk will never be the same. Neither will the audience. Kirk will age a century in a single moment; he can never again have the same adventurous innocence. The last scenes of “The City on the Edge of Forever” are a promise. “Don’t ever relax. Nothing is certain. Not in this universe—and not on this TV show.”

Unfortunately, it’s a broken promise. Never again did
Star Trek
startle its audience so brilliantly. When we came back again next week, here was Kirk, no different than before. Edith Keeler was never mentioned. She might never have existed.

This is the difference between Harlan Ellison’s view of writing and Gene Roddenberry’s. When Harlan tells a story, it’s about an important event in a person’s life; it assaults that person’s sensibilities, shatters him, forces him to reinvent himself, and ultimately leaves him forever transformed. A Harlan Ellison story is a challenge to festering complacency.

Gene Roddenberry’s view of the job seemed to be much less ambitious: get the Captain laid and clean up the mess before the last commercial. Nobody gets permanently hurt. Our people are the best and the brightest; our people are perfect; they don’t have problems. Everything is wonderful. Everybody is loyal. Nobody ever argues with the Captain.

The Captain is always right. Everybody stays in his place. And is happy. Forever.

I guess so, but if our people don’t have any problems to solve, they’re really not very interesting, are they? They certainly aren’t human. They’re just…nice to look at.

But that’s not storytelling. That’s cowardice. That’s a failure to use the tool. A television show like
Star Trek
is an opportunity to make a difference—to demonstrate that human beings can rise above adversity, that life as it is lived is not necessarily the way that life has to be, to evoke the best from ourselves and demonstrate that we as a species are committed to challenging ourselves against whatever horrors the universe can throw against us. A television show like
Star Trek
shouldn’t be polite. It should be unafraid and passionate. It should startle and disturb and leave your view of the universe shaken. It should expand your vision of what’s possible in the world.

Most of all, a show like
Star Trek
should be a writer’s dream assignment—it should be a place where a writer can come in and tell that story that he’s always wanted to tell, a place where he can take that thing that sticks in his craw and lay it out for all the world to see. When a writer cares, when he is committed to truth, and passionate about life, then he is willing to wrestle with the devil himself if the result will be a story that makes a difference.

It’s about keeping the promise.

Anything less is like having your imagination gummed to death by tribbles.

If there is only one reason to fault Gene Roddenberry, this is it—his failure to allow
Star Trek’s
writers to be the very best that they aspired to be.

The loss is
Star Trek’s
. And ours.

DeForest Kelley

I am certain, I have no doubt: most of you are familiar with
Star Trek
’s “The City on the Edge of Forever.” You should also know that it was my favorite episode, as well as the runaway favorite of
Star Trek
viewers, as noted in a poll conducted prior to a recent
Star Trek
marathon.

I had a feeling about that show. After you’ve done as many scripts as those of us who work steadily in film and tv have done, you can feel the electrical charge in the really top-notch ones. I knew it was going to be a winner, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. It’s one of the few times I wished that I had been playing Kirk’s role.

In fact, during the filming, I became convinced that McCoy should
also
fall for the lovely Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins). I felt it would add to the intrigue, should McCoy as well as Kirk come under the spell of her decency, humanity, and beauty—both inner and outer.

I suggested it to Joe Pevney, our director. I thought a good spot to indicate the attraction would be when Edith comes to McCoy’s room where he’s recuperating. McCoy, at this point, is up and feeling better. She’s on her way out, just prior to meeting Kirk—moments before her death.

As she goes to the door to leave, she turns and looks at McCoy and smiles. McCoy meets her look and returns her smile as he says, “You have the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen!” She pauses, looks at him, smiles, exits. Close on McCoy. He’s nuts for her. Pevney shot it. It was never seen.

Now…about my association with Harlan: I am not sure just when or where I first met this bundle of energy. Was it on
The Tomorrow Show
antagonizing Tom Snyder, our host, in brilliant verbal battle—or was it on a
Star Trek
convention stage, taking on the whole audience while projecting humor, charm, intelligence, and yes, always that in-dwelling anger that somehow manages to sneak past its security guard? I
am
sure when I first
saw
him. It was in the commissary of the old Desilu Studio during the first season of
Star Trek
while having lunch with a friend. My attention was drawn to a very animated, rather noisy conversation between a handsome young man and a lovely young girl. I asked my luncheon partner who they were. He glanced over to their table in the middle of the room and said, “Oh, that’s Harlan Ellison, the writer,” and went back to his lunch. I took another look—just in time to see him push a dish of ice cream in his date’s face. I said with disbelief, “Harlan Ellison just pushed a dish of ice cream in her face.” As my friend looked up, the lovely young woman very deliberately shoved
her
dish of ice cream into
his
face. My friend said: “That’s Ellison!”