To a degree, we see a theme present in “City” that recurs in some of Ellison’s most renowned work, and yet it’s not exactly the happiest of themes: those who are the best, the brightest, the most vibrant and alive…they don’t survive. The perpetually unaging Jeffty—the embodiment of perpetual childhood—is battered, bruised and ultimately killed. The Harlequin, shouting defiance, is brainwashed into an obsequious supporter of The Way Things Are. Beth O’Neill, in order to survive life in the city, sacrifices her soul to become one of the grim, faceless beings who observe man’s inhumanity without lifting a finger to stop it.

And Sister Edith Keeler, well, jeez…this woman doesn’t just have society or the unspoken dark gods hiding in the city’s shadows arrayed against her. Fate itself, the cogs of time, crush her in their unyielding motions. It’s a somewhat fatalistic view of the universe—this woman must die, is meant to die, has got to die, or else matters cannot proceed. “City” presents a paradox of what’s right and what’s wrong, and the answer we get is that it just…is.

This is the core of the script, and it’s put forward far more forcefully in this version than in what aired. For example:

Beckwith, the drug-pushing, murderous Starfleet officer.

For all the claims that Star Trek is genuine, realistic science fiction, nowhere is this more brought into question than in the dismissal of the notion that a Starfleet officer would ever behave in the manner we see Beckwith engaging in.

If we parallel Starfleet to the modern-day navy, well, let’s see what we’ve got: Can you envision a modern-day navy officer reshaping a society into Nazism? Or ordering his officers to fight and die, one at a time, in a gladiatorial arena? Or battling, mano a mano, another officer to defend his place in a society built upon a corrupted version of the Constitution?

Suddenly Beckwith’s actions don’t seem too extraordinary at all. Not a whit, not a smidgen. But in a series which sought to explore infinite possibilities, Beckwith was just a tad too possible to make it on the air.

With the loss of Beckwith, we also lose one of the most morally complex and debatable aspects of the story. Here was a man who was a drug pusher and a murderer. Yet from Starfleet the worst he would have gotten was being tossed in the stockade, since the only thing you get executed for in the 23rd century is popping by Talos IV, the planet of the telepathic buttheads.