Edges of Forever: Time Travel and the Stories That Might Have Been

The Nightshirt ^

[BenLurkin]

Trek nerds know what went down, at least in its rough outlines, and Marc Cushman gives all the sordid details in the first volume of his essential tome, These Are the Voyages. Ellison, already a respected writer of SF stories and screenplays for series like The Outer Limits, was commissioned by Roddenberry in 1966 to write an episode for the first season of his new space series. The treatment Ellison delivered contained the brilliant premise we all know and love—Kirk travels into the past and falls in love with an idealistic peace activist whom he must then allow to die … but it was also totally unfilmable as written, at least to fit within a single hour of network TV. Also, it contained dark elements that were way out of character with what Roddenberry envisioned for his still-unaired utopian show.

Ellison’s version opens with a drug deal. The ship’s navigator, hopelessly addicted to an alien narcotic called the Jewels of Sound, purchases some of the stuff from a shady officer named Beckwith. We fade to the bridge, where the navigator, now high as a kite, nearly destroys the ship and is relieved by an angry Mr. Spock. When the navigator, below decks, announces to Beckwith he’s going to go straight and turn the dealer in, Beckwith murders him. There follows a court martial that finds Beckwith guilty, and Kirk and Spock lead a landing party down to a desolate planet to execute Beckwith by firing squad. Their immediate punitive plans are interrupted when they spot an ancient city high in the distant mountains. Because Star Fleet protocols prohibit executing criminals on inhabited worlds, they need to investigate this city before executing Beckwith, a “creature not even worth calling a man.”

[schurmann]

“...Somebody made me laugh once, saying how is it, that everyone on all these other planets speak English.” [Dilbert San Diego, post 18]

“They had a universal translator for that.” [gymbeau, post 20]

As gymbeau pointed out, the original series imagined a “universal” translator. Spock had to tinker with the device in Episode 9 Season 2 (original series) to get it to function with the cloud-like being who kidnapped Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a UFP diplomat (played by Elinor Donahue) to assuage the loneliness and isolation of Zephram Cochrane (played by the late Glenn Corbett).

If memory serves, universal translation was briefly mentioned in an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation. The translation function was built into the crew’s “communications badges” and operated automatically when needed.

Doctor Who rarely addressed the communications dilemma. When the series was revived in 2005, the Doctor possessed a notepad of “psychoactive paper” (approximate trm) which caused anyone who looked at it to believe it was whatever was written on it. So when the Doctor wrote “police ID badge” on a slip and pinned it to his lapel, those who saw him and read the note believed he was a real police officer with valid ID.

Life is much easier when you simply imagine what you want, and it appears as if by magic. A hint, perhaps, as to why so many Hollywood types are so childish and so clueless: actors can be anyone they want to, at least within the confines of set and script. If you’re playing the role of Sir Isaac Newton, George Washington, Herr Doktor Albert Einstein, or Madame-Docteur Marie Skoldowska Curie you get used to thinking you really are as smart as those historical personages.

And the scriptwriters can simply posit the existence of any device or process that serves the purposes of the production. Shazam, there it is. Applies with greater force to silly utopian social organizations: “Socialism simply has to work, because we imagined it that way when we wrote the film script!”