And then he called me in to save his damned show.

In Shatner’s STAR TREK MEMORIES, on page 220, he writes, “Believe it or not, Harlan Ellison, who had become so thoroughly disenchanted with Gene Roddenberry and his Star Trek creation, can actually be held directly responsible for saving the show when it appeared headed for cancellation at the end of our first season,” and then he goes on to get the story I’ve told you here all wrong in his charmingly Shatnerian way. But he verifies what I’ve written here, and concludes with this:

“It is truly one of the show’s greatest ironies that Star Trek may have owed its continued existence in large part to Harlan Ellison, a man who would shortly become one of the show’s greatest detractors.”

And then they shot it. And I hated it. And I wept for Trooper, who never got to exist, and for the really lovely way I wrote that ending in which Spock, for the first time in the series, called Kirk Jim and not “Captain.”

And then the original version—the one published in this book—the unabridged, unchanged, unscrewed version—won the Writers Guild Award as Most Outstanding Teleplay. Not the aired version; not the many-hands-in-the-soup version; but my own original story that John Black and Gene Roddenberry and director Joe Pevney and Solow and Justman and Shatner and Trek zombies who write dopey books like THE CAPTAIN’S LOGS have been telling people was too expensive, too lacking in drama, too inept to shoot as I wrote it. My story won the most prestigious award a Hollywood screenwriter can win from his peers, an award given only after blind voting based on hundreds of scripts submitted. Me, not Gene Coon or Roddenberry or any of the people who have said, as Roddenberry said in a 1987 interview in Cinefantastique, “I think Harlan’s a genius but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world. He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!”

I gotcher Scotty right here, Gene.

Anybody who ever read that script knows there’s no Scotty selling drugs. Or any of the other horse puckey that has been spread for more than twenty-five years.

Do I still burn? Gee, gang, sorry about that. Am I less than slobberingly attentive to the myths and the upheld torches of historical revisionism that make me look like a jerk and mythologize Roddenberry as a high-flying interplanetary rara avis? Does my manner offend thee? Yeah, I’m always getting complaints about that.

But when it comes to the end of the day, it was I, no one but the guy who created and developed and wrote about “The City on the Edge of Forever” who dreamed that dream for the rest of you to call the best of the best. You should have gotten better, though. You should have gotten the original.

But, sadly, to quote one last time, from the 19th Century French essayist Jules Renard: “Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”