In “The City on the Edge of Forever”, the crew of the Enterprise are faced with the task of intercepting a delusional Dr. McCoy from the war-bound, 1930’s America. By sending McCoy to the past, the concept of time travel is brought into question in the episode, and the method suggested by the show’s writers is highly questionable. When McCoy jumps through the portal, the future is instantly changed so that the Enterprise no longer exists. Therefore, in theory, the remaining voyagers from the Enterprise should have no longer been on the planet’s surface. One cannot clearly say whether or not the crew would exist in this altered future, but if there was no feasible way for them to have traveled to the planet, how could they have been there?
If this initial point is ignored and the episode continued unaltered, then Kirk and Spock would have traveled back in time to New York in the Great Depression. The pair would have arrived at a point a few days before McCoy’s arrival in order to intercept him, which is what happens in the episode. However, again in theory, this plan should have only worked if Spock and Kirk traveled in time and didn’t have any interactions with anyone or anything on Earth. This was obviously not the case in the episode and this duo had multiple interactions with several people. These interactions should have also altered the future just as McCoy saving Edith changed it. Therefore, even though the duo did catch McCoy and stop him from saving Edith, their presence should have had effects on people in New York: a homeless man ran off with one of McCoy’s devices that appeared to beam him somewhere, Spock and Kirk paid their tenant $2 a week for their room, and Jim Kirk’s relationship with Edith was actually the factor that inadvertently led to her death. Given all of these occurrences, why was it implied that the world returned to its original state? Shouldn’t at least one of the many changes affected someone’s life in a way that it wasn’t affected before and therefore changed Kirk’s present?
I’d suggest that this approach to time travel is slightly flawed, but highly convenient. By having a relatively simple solution to an unimaginably complex problem, “The City on the Edge of Forever” was able to create a conflict, show some rising action, climax at a dramatic point, and then allow a little bit of time for falling action without making any lasting changes to the franchise’s storyline. Did the writers create this scheme for time travel because they thought it to be the most logical or simply because it was the most convenient to squeeze into 50 minutes? While only they truly know, what do you think?
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February 1st, 2010 at 12:37 am
Kyle,
You bring up an interesting point about time travel in this post. One that I also thought about after viewing this episode. I found it very hard to believe that once McCoy went back in time the viewers still saw the future semi-changed. The Enterprise was gone but the people were still there? Not very realistic. I agree that this does not follow time travel “rules,” but I have an interesting idea about your second point. When Spock and Kirk go back in time to save McCoy they do have many encounters with the people of the 1930′s. I was thinking that possibly the reason the future did not change was because it was destiny for Spock and Kirk to go back and time and fix what McCoy changed. It was meant for Edith and Kirk to have a relationship that eventually ended in her death. It is possible to view time as ongoing so that even right now the 1930s are, in a sense, repeating themselves. The people who are in the 1930s now, however, think they are experiencing it for the first time. It is possible to view time in the sense that it is all happening at the exact same time. Therefore, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were always destined to go back to the 1930s and be a part of that culture for a couple of days. I am by no means a wiz kid at time travel, but I think maybe this can make some sense out why the future did not change once Kirk and Spock went back in time.
Cedric
Cedric
February 1st, 2010 at 5:35 am
I think you might enjoy the website Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies. I find the author’s theory of time travel pretty compelling as a way to make plots hang together sensibly (though not, sadly, as a way to actually travel through time). I’ve also grown accustomed to writers of time-travel plots totally ignoring the actual time-travel parts, and I think Star Trek is actually fairly infamous for the “everything reboots at the end of the episode, because” method of time travel.
I also think the time travel scheme was determined wholly by storytelling considerations, and doesn’t represent a particularly involved attempt to grapple with the paradoxes of time travel. In general, Star Trek seems more interested in the stories they want to tell than the settings they have placed these stories in. However, it can be interesting to work backwards from the story and ask, why did they want to set this story here? So, why is this kind of time travel suitable for this kind of story? I think it can be connected to the ideas of free will versus fate that were discussed in other students’ posts– regardless of what the characters themselves say, the consequence-free time travel suggests that fate may be beating out free will. I wonder if the writers intended that to be the subtext? Regardless, that’s what I got out of it.
Laura
February 1st, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Laura, I totally love that site.