The other day I was watching the original Star Trek (the only one I’ll actually watch) and the episode “City On The Edge Of Forever” came on… It’s not a bad episode, really, with one exception, which I’ll come to later.

In this particular episode, the Enterprise is experiencing ripples in time from the planet they’re orbiting, which is tossing the ship around (or, more precisely, the actors are throwing themselves around the set). It’s during one of these violent ripples that McCoy accidentally lands on a hypo and inadvertently injects himself with an entire vial of cortrasine (a fictitious medicine used to correct Sulu’s heart flutter from an earlier ripple). As we soon learn, a lot of cortrasine is a bad thing. McCoy totally loses his shit and begins to hallucinate that assassins are trying to kill him. He’s tripping balls… He takes off from the bridge, goes to the transporter room and goes to the planet’s surface. A landing party follows to retrieve the deranged McCoy and find what can best be described as the guardian of time (that lit up stone portal in the picture). As the guardian is playing time like a DVD on fast forward, McCoy jumps through the portal, going back in time. Once he does, the Enterprise disappears and the guardian informs them that all they knew is gone. McCoy seriously fucked something up in the past and changed the present. It’s then that Kirk and Spock decide to travel to (hopefully) prevent McCoy from doing whatever he did to make such a cluster fuck of everything.

Now, here is the part that makes this episode not as good as it appears…

The entire concept is the most annoying paradox!!!

Think about it… McCoy goes back in time and changes something that fucks up the present so badly that the Enterprise and everything the landing party knew was gone. If that’s true, then why the fuck are they still on the planet after the fact?! The Enterprise obviously didn’t exist, so how would they have gotten there let alone remained on the planet? For that matter, if the Enterprise didn’t exist to take them there because McCoy fucked shit up, then how did McCoy get there to go through the portal to fuck shit up?! See what I mean…? It’s a paradox! And the most annoying one at that!

In the end, Kirk and Spock discover that one woman, Edith Keeler (a young Joan Collins) is the focal point. McCoy prevents her from being killed in a traffic accident and she begins a peace movement that delays the US’s entry in WWII and allows Germany to take over the world.

Sucks to be Kirk… He confesses to Spock that he’s in love with Edith. Spock isn’t surprised by this admission. Of course not! I mean, it’s painfully obvious to anyone with eyes. Even so, it’s really no surprise since every woman the Enterprise crew encounters, Kirk puts the moves on. He’s a poon hound and all 400 odd people on the ship know it…

In the end, Kirk stops McCoy from saving Edith. She gets struck by a car and is killed. Kirk is distraught and they are sent back through the portal, time being returned to what it once was. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to feel sorry for Kirk… You’d think he’d be happy to not end up getting tied down, considering his track record…

Every time I watch this episode of Star Trek, I literally obsess over this for days… I just can’t wrap my head around this crazy ass paradox! It stays with me for days, driving me insane as I try to find some way for things to make sense, which they never do…

Eventually my brain gives up and forgets about this paradox… until the next time I see the episode or someone mentions it. It’s literally maddening, trying to figure it out! But that’s okay… We really are all mad here…