Nearly 60 years later, “The City on the Edge of Forever” remains the blueprint for making Star Trek’s biggest temporal stakes deeply personal.
Some television episodes eventually become bigger than the shows they’re a part of. “The City on the Edge of Forever” isn't quite bigger than Star Trek, but nearly 60 years after it first aired, it remains one of the franchise's most celebrated hours.
There's also a timely reason to revisit it. On Oct. 13, IDW Publishing will release Star Trek: The Edges of the Final Frontier: IDW Classic Collection, which includes a reprint of a 2015 comic adaptation of Harlan Ellison's original screenplay. That version differed considerably from the episode that ultimately made it to television.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” begins with an accidentally drugged Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) leaping through the mysterious Guardian of Forever and changing Earth's history. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) follow him into Depression-era New York, hoping to figure out exactly what McCoy changed and how they can fix it.
There, Kirk falls in love with Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), only for Spock to discover that she was supposed to die in a traffic accident. If she survives, history changes and the future Kirk and Spock know disappears. Restoring it requires Kirk to do something much harder than defeating an alien or saving the Enterprise: He has to let Edith die.
It's a devastating choice that gave Star Trek one of Kirk's most memorable relationships while helping establish a time-travel formula the franchise would return to for decades.
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