Is there a major contradiction in "The City on the Edge of Forever"?

[Adam La Forge]

The TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" is often considered as one of the best - if not the single best - Star Trek episode. However, I find a crucial element of the episode not convincing and am wondering whether it is simply a contradiction that should not be there.

Throughout the episode, it is quite clearly suggested that Edith Keeler was "supposed" to die before World War II -- i.e., that she would die before WWII if no one from the 23rd century did intervene -- and that McCoy saved her, which lead to a disaster in WWII. Therefore, Kirk and Spock had to prevent him from doing so. But what actually happens then is that the car accident that kills Edith Keeler apparently only happens because of the presence of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (Keeler crosses the street again only because she sees them). Therefore, without the presence of anyone from the 23rd century, she would probably not have died in that accident. This apparently contradicts what had been suggested throughout the previous course of the episode.

Is there any convincing solution that is in line with the story of the episode?

 

[M'Sharak]

Is there any convincing solution that is in line with the story of the episode?

As I see it, the premise is that McCoy, having without warning entered the time-stream then being displayed by the Guardian, acted to disrupt That Which Was. Kirk and Spock were forced to act to prevent / undo the damage to the time-stream caused by McCoy's presence and to retrieve him.

I don't think there's a contradiction.

1. Time-stream exists
2. Out-of-place element introduced to time-stream, disrupting it.
3. Heroes enter time-stream in advance of the disruption and prevent it from occurring, restoring time-stream to The Way It Should Be.
4. Time-stream continues to exist.

A number of Star Trek stories followed a similar formula.

 

[blssdwlf]

We can only assume that in the first version of the timeline Edith crossed the street (it doesn't matter why) and was killed in a car accident.
When McCoy went back in time he must have done something to prevent her from being hit by the car (like distracting her from entering the street or rushing in to push her out the way).
When Kirk and Spock go back in time they prevent McCoy from saving Edith although it would appear their presence caused Edith to cross the street.
So Edith crossing the street at that key point in time (regardless of the reason) determined the fate of the timeline.

 

[shapeshifter]

Predestination. They were always meant to be the reason for her demise. Spock even says he read that her death was some kind of traffic accident before the paper changed.

 

[Timewalker]

The TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" is often considered as one of the best - if not the single best - Star Trek episode. However, I find a crucial element of the episode not convincing and am wondering whether it is simply a contradiction that should not be there.

Throughout the episode, it is quite clearly suggested that Edith Keeler was "supposed" to die before World War II -- i.e., that she would die before WWII if no one from the 23rd century did intervene -- and that McCoy saved her, which lead to a disaster in WWII. Therefore, Kirk and Spock had to prevent him from doing so. But what actually happens then is that the car accident that kills Edith Keeler apparently only happens because of the presence of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy (Keeler crosses the street again only because she sees them). Therefore, without the presence of anyone from the 23rd century, she would probably not have died in that accident. This apparently contradicts what had been suggested throughout the previous course of the episode.

Is there any convincing solution that is in line with the story of the episode?

Back in 2006 there was a terrific Trek novel published that dealt with the issue of "what would have happened if Edith Keeler had lived".

Crucible: McCoy: The Provenance Of Shadows relates what happens when Kirk and Spock fail to rescue McCoy from the past, and therefore fail to ensure that Edith dies in the accident. The result is that McCoy is stranded, and experiences a life very different from the one he would have otherwise.

This is one of my favorite Star Trek time travel novels. I can't recommend it enough.

 

[BillJ]

Is there any convincing solution that is in line with the story of the episode?

It simply always happened that way. Effect came before cause. Or, timey-wimey, as Doctor Who fans say.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Or perhaps it appeared as a traffic accident, when in reality, the man who picked McCoy's pockets and immolated himself with the phaser would have killed her. Later, a car would have run over her body to the point where one (using 1930s medicine) might not be able to tell that she hadn't been killed by the car instead.

That she turns out to actually be hit by a car as a result of her movie date with Kirk may be irony.

Was there ever anything to suggest she and Kirk might have spent a night together, and at the time of her death, she would be carrying his child?

 

[Kor]

Causal loop/predestination paradox, perhaps. I think it's similar to Spock actually being his own older cousin he remembered as a child, in "Yesteryear." If his older self hadn't been there in the past, his younger self would have died. But waitaminute, how--?

Kor

 

[blssdwlf]

Or perhaps it appeared as a traffic accident, when in reality, the man who picked McCoy's pockets and immolated himself with the phaser would have killed her. Later, a car would have run over her body to the point where one (using 1930s medicine) might not be able to tell that she hadn't been killed by the car instead.

That she turns out to actually be hit by a car as a result of her movie date with Kirk may be irony.

I do like this option better as it also accounts for the guy who ran into McCoy and phasered himself. That guy in the original timeline could have been the reason she was hit by the car or appeared to be hit by a car (perhaps both were killed at the same time).

 

[aridas sofia]

In the original scenario without 23rd century visitors, Keeler goes to the movie by herself and gets killed by the truck because nobody is there to stop her or save her. With only McCoy there, he steps in and saves her, perhaps dying in the process.

The problem with Ellison’s thinking is that it reflects a linear view of the complex and non-linear process of human interaction over time. That man who incinerated himself might not on his own have meant anything, but might have now bumped a Nazi eugenicist attending a worldwide eugenics conference in New York and otherwise pushed Hitler to engage in the kind of war criminality he did in our history.

Or it might be even less obvious- somebody takes a different path across a room because either Kirk, Spock, or McCoy is standing there. It slows them a step. They get home a minute later from work and don’t hear something that would lead them to be somewhere later that would have gotten them sick with a flu, which would now be spread and eventually get to Congressman Fiorello La Guardia’s wife, who would die and whose absence would lead in a roundabout path to La Guardia becoming FDR’s vice president in 1944, and thus becoming president upon FDR’s death in 1945.

And all because of a single step.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

People like to believe that they make a difference in the world, that it's somehow better because they were there.

Moreover, they'd like to believe that the way in which they change the world is some deed they did that people can realize the significance of, now and later, not some random choice that anyone else could have done and that nobody will ever truly be able to point to as the thing that made all the difference.

 

[Pauln6]

You are right - it is silly. Trek has been inconsistent with how time travel works. The past is the past and someone who travels from the present to the past doesn't suddenly pop up in the past in real time - they were either there or they weren't because the past has already happened. This is a front line example of many worlds theory where people in close proximity to the Guardian move tracks into the same parallel timeline as McCoy, so it appears to them that everything changes when, in fact, there could be duplicates of themselves from that timeline running around perfectly normally.

The death of the vagrant possibly had a number of effects, none of which had any noticeable impact on our heroes.

So that begs the question if they changed history, why aren't they in a universe where there are other pre-existing duplicates that were there all along? There are two possible answers:
1) they were always from the timeline where they always went back and left Edith to die. Twelve Monkeys (the movie) is a more accurate depiction of this and it was only the Guardian that dragged them into a parallel timeline where an alternate version of McCoy went back and changed history because there was no intervention;
2) they were dragged to a timeline where their McCoy went back and returned to a different parallel timeline where alternative versions of them went also back but also returned to a different parallel timeline, leaving space for our versions to return to a similar but different version of the Enterprise with a similar but different McCoy. In this rather strange version, the original timeline carried on without Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, and the security team. We can only guess the fates of the original redshirts who were under orders to try themselves and would have ended up in a different parallel past, returning to a different parallel present, still with no guarantee of an Enterprise in Orbit.

 

[Timewalker]

Or perhaps it appeared as a traffic accident, when in reality, the man who picked McCoy's pockets and immolated himself with the phaser would have killed her. Later, a car would have run over her body to the point where one (using 1930s medicine) might not be able to tell that she hadn't been killed by the car instead.

That she turns out to actually be hit by a car as a result of her movie date with Kirk may be irony.

Was there ever anything to suggest she and Kirk might have spent a night together, and at the time of her death, she would be carrying his child?

What possible difference could it make whether or not Edith and Kirk had sex and she got pregnant?

There was no mention of Edith being pregnant either in Ellison's script (it was later published in the anthology Six Science Fiction Plays) or in the one tweaked by Roddenberry et. al (whoever among the production team might have contributed to changing it). I don't see why it would be relevant even if she were pregnant. The future Spock saw from the data the Guardian provided hinges on Edith living or dying, not any offspring's potential influence.

Causal loop/predestination paradox, perhaps. I think it's similar to Spock actually being his own older cousin he remembered as a child, in "Yesteryear." If his older self hadn't been there in the past, his younger self would have died. But waitaminute, how--?

Kor

Dunno what significance it might have, but in the original timeline's episode "Journey to Babel", Amanda mentions that Spock had a pet sehlat.

That sehlat was part of the "Yesteryear" story, and at the end of that episode it's made clear that I-Chaya died in "Yesteryear" when adult Spock was back in time, but not in the original timeline mentioned in TOS. The audience is left to assume that the sehlat Amanda was talking about likely died of old age or illness, and not because of a fight it had while trying to save child Spock.

In the original scenario without 23rd century visitors, Keeler goes to the movie by herself and gets killed by the truck because nobody is there to stop her or save her. With only McCoy there, he steps in and saves her, perhaps dying in the process.

The problem with Ellison’s thinking is that it reflects a linear view of the complex and non-linear process of human interaction over time. That man who incinerated himself might not on his own have meant anything, but might have now bumped a Nazi eugenicist attending a worldwide eugenics conference in New York and otherwise pushed Hitler to engage in the kind of war criminality he did in our history.

Or it might be even less obvious- somebody takes a different path across a room because either Kirk, Spock, or McCoy is standing there. It slows them a step. They get home a minute later from work and don’t hear something that would lead them to be somewhere later that would have gotten them sick with a flu, which would now be spread and eventually get to Congressman Fiorello La Guardia’s wife, who would die and whose absence would lead in a roundabout path to La Guardia becoming FDR’s vice president in 1944, and thus becoming president upon FDR’s death in 1945.

And all because of a single step.

Sometimes the Butterfly Effect is actually valid.

Then again, Ellison's script was very different from what we saw on TV. He saw the Guardian as a trio of Guardians, not as an AI time machine. His script veered into mystical territory that was honestly a bit ridiculous.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I was just curious. Not that it would make a difference, necessarily.

 

[blssdwlf]

You are right - it is silly. Trek has been inconsistent with how time travel works. The past is the past and someone who travels from the present to the past doesn't suddenly pop up in the past in real time - they were either there or they weren't because the past has already happened. This is a front line example of many worlds theory where people in close proximity to the Guardian move tracks into the same parallel timeline as McCoy, so it appears to them that everything changes when, in fact, there could be duplicates of themselves from that timeline running around perfectly normally.

The death of the vagrant possibly had a number of effects, none of which had any noticeable impact on our heroes.

So that begs the question if they changed history, why aren't they in a universe where there are other pre-existing duplicates that were there all along? There are two possible answers:
1) they were always from the timeline where they always went back and left Edith to die. Twelve Monkeys (the movie) is a more accurate depiction of this and it was only the Guardian that dragged them into a parallel timeline where an alternate version of McCoy went back and changed history because there was no intervention;
2) they were dragged to a timeline where their McCoy went back and returned to a different parallel timeline where alternative versions of them went also back but also returned to a different parallel timeline, leaving space for our versions to return to a similar but different version of the Enterprise with a similar but different McCoy. In this rather strange version, the original timeline carried on without Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, and the security team. We can only guess the fates of the original redshirts who were under orders to try themselves and would have ended up in a different parallel past, returning to a different parallel present, still with no guarantee of an Enterprise in Orbit.

It doesn't seem like the Guardian is capable of swapping or moving between timelines on its own. If it was capable of doing so then McCoy jumping into the timestream would've resulted in McCoy going into an alternate timeline. The timeline that Kirk and co would be unchanged as the past has already happened.

Instead we see the timeline change immediately with only the crew on the planet unaffected. So in this particular episode it would appear that the Guardian can be used to overwrite a timeline but it also has memory to know what the previous timeline is to pull Kirk, Spock and McCoy back once the major points of it has been changed back.

 

[Pauln6]

It doesn't seem like the Guardian is capable of swapping or moving between timelines on its own. If it was capable of doing so then McCoy jumping into the timestream would've resulted in McCoy going into an alternate timeline. The timeline that Kirk and co would be unchanged as the past has already happened.

Instead we see the timeline change immediately with only the crew on the planet unaffected. So in this particular episode it would appear that the Guardian can be used to overwrite a timeline but it also has memory to know what the previous timeline is to pull Kirk, Spock and McCoy back once the major points of it has been changed back.

Maybe the Implication is that the Guardian sits outside of time so anyone close by does too but reality outside that bubble depends on the timeline within the Gateway. On that basis Kirk would have got back to Scotty.

I think any appearance of overwritten timelines is just an appearance used for dramatic purposes. We know many worlds exist in Trek so you can't wipe one version out per se. Everything Everywhere All At Once is great by the way.

 

[mb22]

Was there ever anything to suggest she and Kirk might have spent a night together, and at the time of her death, she would be carrying his child?

Keeler doesn't seem the type to have premarital sex with someone she recently met. This was 1930 after all and many (perhaps most) women then were not likely to do so for social and or religious reasons. The 1983 book Yesterday's Child by A.C. Crispin does have Spock siring a son with Zarabeth back in the remote past on the planet Sarpeidon.

 

[M'Sharak]

It doesn't seem like the Guardian is capable of swapping or moving between timelines on its own. If it was capable of doing so then McCoy jumping into the timestream would've resulted in McCoy going into an alternate timeline. The timeline that Kirk and co would be unchanged as the past has already happened.

Instead we see the timeline change immediately with only the crew on the planet unaffected. So in this particular episode it would appear that the Guardian can be used to overwrite a timeline but it also has memory to know what the previous timeline is to pull Kirk, Spock and McCoy back once the major points of it has been changed back.

In the era during which the story was written, I believe the prevailing and generally-accepted view was that time moved in a single line, and in one direction only.

If, somehow, someone were able to travel to an earlier point on that timeline, they could theoretically alter anything / everything from that point onward. All time-travel stories from the Original Series followed this model -- you travel into past; you break something; you must fix it in order to restore the "past" and return to the "present".

While the idea of a multiverse with multiple / alternate timelines had been proposed on a number of occasions previously, it would not gain wider acceptance in either fiction or science until quite some time after the Original Series ceased production.

 

[blssdwlf]

In the era during which the story was written, I believe the prevailing and generally-accepted view was that time moved in a single line, and in one direction only.

If, somehow, someone were able to travel to an earlier point on that timeline, they could theoretically alter anything / everything from that point onward. All time-travel stories from the Original Series followed this model -- you travel into past; you break something; you must fix it in order to restore the "past" and return to the "present".

While the idea of a multiverse with multiple / alternate timelines had been proposed on a number of occasions previously, it would not gain wider acceptance in either fiction or science until quite some time after the Original Series ceased production.

Yeah, that appears to be the time-travel mechanism (a single timeline that you can change and restore) for "The City on the Edge of Forever". In "The Naked Time" it also appears to be able change their fate. "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Assignment Earth" doesn't tell us whether Starfleet winks out of existence or not when the Enterprise time-travels back to Earth in the 60s but does suggest the crew was worried about screwing up the timeline.

"All Our Yesterdays" does give us an interesting variation on time-travel. Beta Niobe sent it's entire population into its own past without affecting the escape building which I think is remarkable. It didn't seem to have any temporal protections like the Guardian yet no one sent into the past apparently altered their timeline (unless Atoz is an example of multiple timelines in action at once?)

As far as a multiverse we do have the alternate universes / alternate timelines of the antimatter universe in "The Alternate Factor" and the evil timeline or universe in "Mirror, Mirror" but yeah TOS doesn't have any examples where every decision spawned it's own universe that they could visit (we don't see that until TNG's "Parallels").

I think despite the era TOS was made they still had an amazing variety of time-travel and multiverse ideas.

 

[M'Sharak]

"All Our Yesterdays" does give us an interesting variation on time-travel. Beta Niobe sent it's entire population into its own past without affecting the escape building which I think is remarkable. It didn't seem to have any temporal protections like the Guardian yet no one sent into the past apparently altered their timeline (unless Atoz is an example of multiple timelines in action at once?)

That one is a bit different, but I think that everyone was supposed to be "prepared" by the Atavachron before being sent to their selected time was meant to be a hand-wavy kind of workaround.