By then it was fall, and changes had taken place on the staff of the show. Gene Roddenberry had moved up to the position of Executive Producer, and Gene L. Coon had come aboard as Producer. John D. F. Black had departed as story editor to write a movie at Universal, and Steve Carabatsos replaced him. I had left the position of Roddenberry’s executive secretary to write freelance, so I wasn’t there when Harlan was asked to do revisions on the script and turn in his final draft.

When he did, things were still in flux. Grace Lee Whitney had completed her thirteen-show contract, and the character of Yeoman Janice Rand shipped off the Enterprise.

DeForest Kelley’s role had become more important because his warm and gently humorous portrayal of Dr. McCoy balanced the logical Spock and the volatile, action-oriented Kirk. Roddenberry decided he would not renew Steve Carabatsos’s contract and offered me the opportunity to become Star Trek’s story editor if I could do a good rewrite on a troubled script. The complete overhaul of the script which became “This Side of Paradise” landed me the job of story editor at the beginning of December, 1966. I reported the first day and walked right into a hornet’s nest of trouble with “The City on the Edge of Forever” at the heart of it.

Harlan’s script was brilliant. Always a master of words, his language conjured the images of the desolate planet “as if some cosmic god had flicked an ash and it had grown into a world,” the enigmatic Guardian of Forever, and the Time Vortex. The streets of 1930 Earth were described artfully—deep in the Depression, peopled by characters like Verdun veteran Trooper and the vivacious Edith Keeler who could see beyond this moment into a hopeful future. What man wouldn’t lose his heart to her (except for Mister Spock, of course)?

If “The City on the Edge of Forever” had been written for an anthology such as Outer Limits, undoubtedly it would have been shot almost without change. As written, it stands shoulder to shoulder with Harlan’s bleak study of future warfare, “Soldier,” and his twisting, turning, character-rich “Demon with a Glass Hand.”