Beyond those few technical details, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble deciphering the jabberwocky of the tv medium. Just sorta kinda picture what’s going on as if it were playing on a screen in your head. Get visual. That’s what we have to do when we write the stuff.

Now. There are things in this script that were taken out entirely. The first is the character of Beckwith. I was advised by NBC network continuity, at the time of the turn-in of the first draft of this teleplay, that drugs—even something as clearly a fantasy construct as the Jewels of Sound—could not be permitted on a show that was airing so early in the evening. Further, there is a killing on board: one crew member kills another. I was told that was nixed because no one onboard the starship Enterprise could be a bad guy. I railed at that concept. It always struck me as nonsense that the network could try to pass off a space battlecruiser of that size, with a complement of many hundreds of people, without a few rotten apples in the barrel. Just the rigors of space exploration and tight confinement should have made somebody go bananas. But, no, they didn’t want to shatter that silly myth that all tv heroes are just that: heroes. I was going for some reality, but the network gets inordinately uptight about such stuff. In the televised version, the entire Jewels of Sound/ Beckwith/LeBeque situation was replaced by the ship’s doctor injecting himself with some drug that made him go loonie, and he became the Beckwith character, going back in time.

The entire alternate universe thing with the space marauders was excised. [7] Much of the relationship between Kirk and Edith Keeler was watered down, to my way of thinking. But the two most significant changes, the ones I resented most bitterly, were these:

The joy of writing television is small. Once having written a script, once having poured one’s hours and emotions into a story, the script is passed into the hands of others, who alter the dream to fit their own interpretations and their own need to put their mark on something someone else has created. They have to justify their own jobs, even their existences in some cases.

To hear directors tell it—with that moronic “auteur theory” by which they bamboozle audiences into believing it is they who have the vision—nothing comes to life without them. If the truth be told, were it not for the writer, who has the idea, orders it sequentially and logically, builds the characters and gives them their words, the directors would be standing around with their fingers in their mouths waiting for divine guidance. Producers, network continuity people, production personnel, every advertising executive who has bought time on the show, and his or her spouse, and mother-in-law…all of them take credit for the script. But it is the writer who starts it all rolling. Without the writer you would turn on your television set tonight and be dazzled by uninterrupted hours of test patterns or, at best, recorded organ music.