Star Trek Volume 14
featuring the episodes Errand Of Mercy and City On The Edge Of Forever
It’s hard to pinpoint when the original Star Trek really hit its stride, but man, if you’ve gotta have a benchmark, the last six or seven episodes of the first season aren’t a bad choice. In the space of the previous few episodes, we introduced Khan and Vulcan mind melds, and with this volume you can add the Klingons and the Guardian of Forever to the pantheon. Errand Of Mercy’s inspired invention of an evil empire to fight the Federation brings the reasonably peaceful Trek universe to the brink of a real war here, and the tension really does get ratcheted up. The Organian element comes across as either another inspired element, or a cop-out - it really depends on your point of view about their forced detente and the prediction that the two combatants will be allies “a hundred years in the future.”
Then there’s possibly the most talked-about episode in the entire run of the original series, City On The Edge Of Forever. Now, a whole book has been written about this by the episode’s author, Harlan Ellison, and others involved with the making of the show fired off a rebuttal in their own book. Whatever they may have to say about one another’s work ethics or the original script, City is an atypical and affecting episode of the show, one that many a novel and comic has followed up, but despite attempts (notably an unproduced Tracy Tormè script for Star Trek: The Next Generation’s second year) to follow it up on TV, it’s never been done. And you know, perhaps that’s best - even though Ellison feels that his original story was castrated (and I’d be more inclined to buy into that if it weren’t for his tendency to say that about an awful lot of TV projects he was involved in), it’s a damned good episode. If you own all 40 volumes of classic Trek on DVD, or only a couple, this disc probably needs to be one of them, despite the continued lack of extras (and admit it, with City on this volume, there could’ve been some really interesting extras on here).