A Brief Guide to Star Trek

view that the revised teleplay lacked ‘the beauty and mystery that was inherent in this screenplay as Harlan originally wrote it. It is very good
Star Trek
material, but has none of Harlan’s special magic.’ In response, Roddenberry had no choice but to take on the task himself, attempting to fuse the drafts from his staff with the original from Ellison, picking out the best from each while still resulting in a practical screenplay that the production could shoot.
    ‘It budgeted out at nearly $100,000 over what we had to spend on an episode’, wrote Roddenberry of Ellison’s first draft. ‘His use of our characters was not according to format. When he couldn’t do an acceptable rewrite job, I rewrote the script to bring it within budget and within line of our
Star Trek
format.’
    Even during filming of the episode in February 1967, Roddenberry continued to revise pages of the script. Ellison complained to the production, on the day shooting began, that he was not happy about the rewriting process. He requested that his traditional alias of dissatisfaction, ‘Cordwainer Bird’, be credited on screen. Roddenberry, however, saw great value in the Ellison name and fought to keep him attached. According to Justman, ‘After a lot of fussing and, according to Harlan, an “absolute threat” from Gene to keep him from ever working in Hollywood again, Cordwainer Bird was convinced to revert to being Harlan Ellison again, and his screen credit reflected the fact. Nevertheless, the uneasy truce that ensued between Harlan and Gene was never again remotely approaching comfortable.’
    The resulting episode saw Kirk and Spock pursue a drug-crazed McCoy through a newly discovered time portal known as The Guardian of Forever, to 1930s Earth. There Kirk falls in love with social campaigner Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), only for Spock to reveal that she must die to protect the timeline . . . Fantastic ideas, a great emotional dilemma and high stakes, as well as superb production design, all combined to make this one of
Star Trek
’s best-loved episodes. The original script (before the
Star Trek
staff rewrote it) went on to win Ellison the Writers GuildAward for most outstanding script for a dramatic television series, and he took the opportunity of his acceptance speech to berate studio ‘suits’ for ‘interfering with the writing process’. Ellison would go on to chronicle his side of the creation of the episode in a book-length study that included a lengthy essay and reprinted his original, award-winning screenplay.
    Towards the end of the episode, the dialogue from Edith Keeler does much to highlight the then-growing iconic status of the characters of Kirk and Spock. Noting how out of place Kirk and Spock are in 1930s America, Spock asks her where she thinks they belong. ‘You?’ she says to Spock. ‘At his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will.’ To Kirk, she says, ‘And you? You belong in another place, I don’t know where or how, but I’ll figure it out eventually.’ She notes Spock’s relationship with Kirk by completing his statement with the word ‘Captain. Even when he doesn’t say it, he does.’ With these few lines, this episode encapsulated the relationship between Spock and Kirk and did much to define their iconic natures.
    The first season of
Star Trek
ended on a creative high in April 1967 – ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ was followed by the final episode, ‘Operation: Annihilate!’ The show had come a long way from the two pilots, but Roddenberry and his team knew there were even more new worlds and new civilisations to be encountered.

    Season two of
Star Trek
was all about honing Gene Roddenberry’s vision, as well as providing enough action-adventure content to please the network (and younger viewers) and so hopefully win the series another year on air.
    The second year saw the introduction of a new character to the regular
Enterprise
crew. While Roddenberry had tried to balance ethnic and gender representations on the
Enterprise
, he’d given little thought to other nations. This was redressed with the addition of Russian Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), a mop-topped youth designed to appeal to young fans of The Monkees and The Beatles. The inclusion of a Russian characterwas meant to indicate that sources of then-current tension, such as the Cold War of the 1960s, would be long resolved by the time of
Star Trek
’s utopian future.
    Continuing mediocre