Last night I discovered this 5-issue comics adaptation of "City on the Edge of Forever".
https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/St...dge-of-Forever-Teleplay/Issue-1?id=92715I'm sure virtually everyone reading this already knows, the 1967 episode that aired is credited to Harlan Ellison, but is in fact vastly different from the screenplay Ellison wrote. The aired episode was re-written by Gene Roddenberry (and possibly others) to focus on Dr. McCoy as the one who changed time, who Kirk and Spock had to travel through time to 1930 to eliminate the changes to Earth history that McCoy caused. Roddenberry in particular changed the episode's ending.
But even so, it is ranked by most as the best episode of the series.
This new comic version
presents the story as Ellison originally wrote it, WITHOUT the changes made in the televised episode. Ellison also had complaints about the appearance of the ruins and city of the time-Guardians, he called the time portal a "donut". I actually thought it was really cool. And the Guardians not having faces made them more compellingly mysterious to me. What Ellison envisioned was considered way too expensive to create, and would have taken the show way over budget, and stretched the production time.
As I recall, it was the screenplay by Ellison that won the award for
Best Teleplay from the Screen Actors' Guild for 1967, and not the televised version. And that gave Ellison quite a bit of satisfaction. Ellison severed his ties with the Star Trek series in a big blow-up in 1967 for changing his teleplay, possibly without his consent. I first read Ellison's original script version in a mid-1970's book titled
Six Science Fiction Plays. But it has been published in one or two other books since then.
This 5-issue series finally presents Ellison's unused screenplay in a visual narrative form that is comparable to watching the 1967 aired episode, allowing you to fully compare the two.
I like both (the original aired episode, and this 5 issue adaptation of the unused screenplay), but have a preference for the aired episode. But there are aspects of this screenplay adaptation that are superior, I think. Such as the more full development of Kirk and Edith Keeler's love for each other, and the intimate connection they have, that makes the loss in the final scene more impactful. Also, the art has remarkably good likenesses of all the characters, as contrasted with the often horrible likenesses in many other comics versions I've seen.
The banter in the televised episode between Kirk and Spock is much better in the aired episode. It is both funny, and develops both characters quite well, as Kirk pushes Spock's buttons.
For example:
SPOCK: Build a pnemonic memory circuit here?!? In this zinc plated vaccuum tube culture?!?
KIRK: Yes... it would present a rather difficult exercise in logic...
SPOCK: [ raises eyebrow in surprise and agitation]
KIRK: I'm sorry... I sometimes expect too much of you...
SPOCK: [ raises eyebrow in even deeper agitation ]
There are many scenes like that, more polished in the final aired episode. For me what makes the aired episode superior is its focus on the central characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. It eliminated other characters to focus on them. Also interesting is that Scotty and Uhura appear in the final aired version, but are absent from the screenplay version. Yeoman Janice Rand, conversely, was no longer a character on the show when the episode aired in 1967, written out of the series after the first dozen or so episodes (City on the Edge of Forever was episode 28, of 29 first-season episodes). Ellison in the text lets on that the series was still not fully developed when he wrote the screenplay for the episode. And you can see watching all the first season episodes the changes that occurred in Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Uhura, Janice Rand, and other characters that could have taken on greater roles but were eliminated.
This was published by IDW in 2014, and I'm amazed I never heard anything about it till now.
Enjoy.
