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television studios. MGM and CBS, for example, initially turned Star Trek down. NBC bought the show but had to pay for another pilot because the first one—“The Cage”—was “too cerebral.” They were also worried about Spock’s pointed ears, airbrushed out of the publicity stills to appease conservative network executives and potential advertisers. Thus was created a second pilot (another first in television history)—“Where No Man Has Gone Before”—which became a series classic. Finally, the first Star Trek episode aired on the night of my twelfth birthday, Thursday, September 8, 1966. The program was “The Man Trap,” ironically the sixth episode filmed and not nearly the same quality as the two pilots. “The Cage” was later made into a two-part episode (the only one of the original series) and included black-and-white footage and some of the original actors who never appeared in the regular series.

One of the best known and arguably the finest program of the seventy-nine episodes in the original series—“The City on the Edge of Forever”—was written by the highly acclaimed science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. In 1994, Entertainment Weekly ranked all seventy-nine episodes of the original Star Trek series—“The City on the Edge of Forever” was number 1. The next year, TV Guide published their “100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History,” for which “The City on the Edge of Forever” ranked number 68. The televised show won a Hugo Award, and Ellison’s original script—similar in its core but considerably different in details from what aired on television—won the Writers Guild of America Award for the Most Outstanding Teleplay for 1967-68. For $200 you can even purchase a pewter and porcelain desktop sculptured model of the famed time portal from the episode, produced by the Franklin Mint.

The history of “The City on the Edge of Forever” has become a point of gossipy controversy in Trek lore, so it bears brief synopsis. Most Star Trek histories and memoirs touch on the controversy, and most get the story wrong. To set the record straight, Harlan Ellison published an entire book on the subject in 1996, entitled (so you don’t miss it) Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay that Became the Classic Star Trek Episode. The book is backed by copious documentation in support of his version of this tiny slice of television minutia, along with an unstoppable logorrhea made tolerable by Ellison’s inimitable style. To wit, on Roddenberry’s tendency to take credit for other people’s work, Ellison writes:

The supreme, overwhelming egocentricity of Gene Roddenberry, that could not permit him to admit anyone else in his mad-god universe was capable of grandeur, of expertise, of rectitude. And his hordes of Trekkie believers, and his pig-snout associates who knew whence that river of gold flowed . . . they protected and buttressed him. For thirty years.

If you read all of this book, I have the faint and joyless hope that at last, after all this time, you will understand why I could not love that aired version, why I treasure the Writers Guild award for the original version as that year’s best episodic-dramatic teleplay, why I despise the mendacious fuckers who have twisted the story and retold it to the glory of someone who didn’t deserve it, at the expense of a writer who worked his ass off to create something original, and why it was necessary—after thirty years—to expend almost 30,000 words in self-serving justification of being the only person on the face of the Earth who won’t let Gene Roddenberry rest in peace.

To quote Captain Kirk from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: “Don’t mince words . . . what do you really think?”

Ellison submitted an initial treatment of the episode on March 21, 1966, and a revised treatment on May 13, 1966. The original script, touching on issues in the forefront in the 1960s, involved an Enterprise crew member dealing “infamous and illegal Jillkan dream-narcotics, the Jewels of Sound,” used (and abused) to handle the stress and boredom of long-term space flight. In addition,