Season 1 Episode 29 ('The City On the Edge of Forever')

Back in the saddle again! I'm not gonna lie, it is hard to get motivated to re-watch these episodes that I had too many shots for to write about, a few months ago. But I'm doing it! I have the work ethic of a drunken mule. This one is probably my favorite in this season.

The Enterprise runs into some weird time-distorting thing that is messing up physical reality, and causing the whole ship to shake and rock like it always does whenever anything bad happens. In the course of treating Tsulu after a particularly jarring shock, Bones jabs himself with a drug that makes him crazy, beats everybody up and ends up transporting down to the center of the time-disturbance.

To make a long story short and avoid any spoilers (I know, that's silly, the show's been out for 40 years, I don't care; writing about entertainment shouldn't just be describing the plot, dammit... ), Shatner and Spock end up following Bones to 1930s Earth, so the episode mostly takes place during the Depression, and it also plays with time-travel in a way that could have been interesting. Time-travel stories always involve trying to undo changes to time that wreak havoc.

This one is, sadly, no different. There could have been a dichotomy between a change that erases the future, but creates a better future, or maintaining the status quo but making the future suck. This episode was written by Harlan Ellison, who is the most negative fucker to ever write anything, and doesn't believe in the possibility of better futures, only shitty ones. So they didn't go that route, and instead made it a choice between personal preference and duty. Just more of the same, but still, more complicated/emotional than most of the episodes in this initial season of Star Trek.

Took the Cold War thing to a whole new level, tho. That was interesting. I mean, this show has mostly been a paranoid, xenophobic, reflection of Post-War culture. This one actually dealt with The War head-on, in a way. Not in a philosophically interesting way or anything, but it was nice to see the stuff that had been subtext pop up in the overt-text.

Great episode, relatively speaking. I'm not sure how great it is in comparison to other episodes of other television shows (or even other seasons) but it totally stands out in this season of Star Trek as an emotionally complicated (for 60s TV) and intellectually interesting story.