The City on the Edge of Forever

He transports himself down to a mysterious planet while not in his right mind and is pursued by a rescue party led by Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who soon come across the Guardian of Forever, a sentient time portal.

On the planet's surface, they come across an ancient glowing ring which turns out to be a sentient object called the "Guardian of Forever", a portal capable of sending them to any time and place.

The Guardian offers to send them back to Earth's past and plays a series of images of historical times which Spock records on his tricorder for research purposes.

Spock completes his work and discovers that Keeler was supposed to die in a traffic collision but was somehow saved by the arrival of McCoy, creating an altered timeline in which she founded a pacifist movement on the eve of World War II.

[3][4] Ellison had read a biography of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and thought that it would be an interesting idea to have Kirk travel back in time and fall in love with a similar woman of good intent, but someone who must die in order to preserve the future.

The first version introduced Lieutenant Richard Beckwith, who is sentenced to death after he kills a fellow crewman when he is threatened with the exposure of his involvement in the illegal drug trade.

Despite this, Roddenberry asked Ellison to turn it into a shooting script and set aside a desk for him in the assistant director's room, expecting him to attend the office every day until he finished it.

Justman wrote a memo immediately to fellow producer Gene L. Coon, saying that after five months, Ellison had failed to reduce the budget requirements for the episode to something that could be filmed.

The actor later appeared onscreen in the episode "Bread and Circuses", and provided further voiceover work in "The Gamesters of Triskelion", "Patterns of Force" and "The Savage Curtain".

Another work of Steiner's that was rejected for "The City on the Edge of Forever" was an alternative main title track using saxophone and celesta, which he had hoped would set the episode in the tone of the 1930s.

[50] A high-definition remastering of "The City on the Edge of Forever", which introduced new special effects and starship exteriors as well as enhanced music and audio, was shown for the first time on October 7, 2006, in broadcast syndication in the United States.

[55] In his 1995 book, I Am Spock, Nimoy said that episodes such as "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "Amok Time" were "just as powerful and meaningful to today's audiences as they were to viewers back in the 1960s".

"[53] Karl Urban, who plays McCoy in the 2009 Star Trek and the sequels, said that "The City on the Edge of Forever" was one of his favorite episodes along with "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Amok Time" and "Arena".

[58][59] In a preview of the episode in the Albuquerque Journal, it was said to be a "surprise variation of the 'time tunnel' theme" and was described as "an absorbing tale, a bit hard to take at times, but imaginative nonetheless".

[60] After Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in which time travel was an integral part of the plot, was released in 1986, Luis Aguilar of The Washington Post said that "The City on the Edge of Forever" was superior to the film, calling it a "brilliant, beautifully executed story".

"[72] In the Radio Times, David Brown listed it as the second best episode for non-Star Trek fans to watch on Netflix in 2016, calling it a "tragic Back to the Future" and that "seeing as the bulk of the drama takes place during the depression of the 1930s, there's not much in the way of sci-fi gubbins to confuse a newcomer".

[75] Specific elements of the episode led to other rankings, such as Comic Book Resources (CBR) placing it as the tenth-best romantic relationship of the Star Trek franchise up to that time, between Kirk and Edith Keeler.

Justman later said that the submission of the original unfilmed version was out of spite,[85] and Roddenberry said in response to the victory "many people would get prizes if they wrote scripts that budgeted out to three times the show's cost.

Herbert Franklin Solow later recalled that this elation turned to horror when Ellison began talking about the interference of studio executives in the writing process, before holding aloft a copy of the original script and yelling "Remember, never let them rewrite you!"

[89] A further claim was made by writer Don Ingalls, who said that Ellison had admitted in a drunken stupor to him late one night in a bar that he had tidied up and improved the script further prior to submitting it; this was then published in Justman and Solow's Inside Star Trek: The Real Story.

Rossi explained that they sought to tie the purple cloth backdrop used in the original version into the redesign, but was concerned that the "giant purplish desert flats" as seen from space were instead misconstrued as oceans.

In response, Ellison agreed with other science fiction writers, including Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon and Frank Herbert to form "The Committee".

[117] Two issues later, writer Alan Brennert wrote into the letters page of Video Review asserting that Scotty had never sold drugs in any version of the script.

[125] The Guardian of Forever, the time portal portrayed in the original series episode, is an irregular ring (or torus) shaped structure around 3 metres (9.8 ft) wide.

[131] After the success of the book, Crispin was asked to write a sequel, Time for Yesterday in 1988, in which the Guardian is malfunctioning and the Enterprise crew must seek the help of Zar to communicate and repair it.

[132] Peter David decided to base his 1992 novel Imzadi on the same premise as the end of Ellison's version of "The City on the Edge of Forever", except in this case it was William Riker who went back in time using the Guardian deliberately to save the life of Deanna Troi.

Chief Creative Officer and Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall said "Presenting Harlan Ellison's brilliant original script for 'City on the Edge' has been a goal of ours since IDW first began publishing Star Trek comics in 2007".

[142] When a Star Trek film was being developed in the late 1970s, one of the ideas proposed by Roddenberry was to have the crew travel back to the 1960s and prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

[146] A reference to "The City on the Edge of Forever" was included in the two-part Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Past Tense", with a boxing poster appearing in a scene set in the 1930s featuring Kid McCook and Mike Mason.

There was a similar poster advertising a match at Madison Square Garden in "The City on the Edge of Forever", while the one in "Past Tense" stated that it was a rematch in San Francisco.