So who did the rewrite? Gene Coon took the first crack at it. As I recall, primarily he came up with structural changes, eliminating LeBeque and Beckwith and substituting McCoy as the catalyst. The pirates disappeared. In fact, the entire ship vanished because of the tampering with history. Kirk met Edith sooner, and dialogue and some relationships were changed. I believe it was Gene Coon whose delightful sense of humor spawned Kirk’s explanation that Spock’s ears got that way when he had a childhood accident—he got his head caught in a mechanical rice picker. Harlan hated it. He thought Steve Carabatsos had written it. No one offered to change that idea in Harlan’s mind.

Then Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon turned to me and said, “You’re it. You try a rewrite.” Talk about being tossed a live grenade! Harlan was a friend—and not only a friend. He was a writer I deeply admired, one who stood ten feet tall as a master of his art. The very notion of rewriting him scared me witless. On the other hand (said the coward in me), if I rewrote it, I’d do it with respect and love of the original work. I gave it my best shot.

The Jewels of Sound were gone, of course. I invented cordrazine to put McCoy into a temporary madness. I tried to build the relationship of love between Edith and Kirk gently and meaningfully so her death would be the most wrenching personal moment Kirk would ever know. And I inserted the running joke of Spock’s tricorder which grew larger and more complicated with mechanical additions each time it was seen. The tricorder was Spock’s instrument for discovering the focus of the history change—Edith—as well as the how and when of her death. Naturally, he was hampered by the fact that the tools he needed hadn’t been invented yet. Thus the octopuslike appearance of the contraption and its continual growth. Harlan liked this draft a little better, but not much. He thought the characterization and dialogue showed sensitivity, but it wasn’t his script. He thought Gene Coon wrote it. We kept our mouths shut. (Remember those places on the lot where grass still doesn’t grow?)

Gene Roddenberry decided to rewrite it himself, and it was his version which became the shooting script. Harlan’s general structure was there, as were his major characters and the main conflict of the story. What Roddenberry did was make it “more Star Trek.” You will notice that every writer who worked on the rewrite was trying very hard to please Harlan, allowing him to read each draft and comment on it. It was a sign of the respect Star Trek had for writers. That doesn’t happen now—on any show.