After all that time it had taken me to write it, Roddenberry now had been put on notice by his leading man that if the script wasn’t substantially altered, there would be, er, uh, some hesitation on Bill’s part when it came time to shoot the story.

Oh, hell, why belabor it…I rewrote the script, I rewrote it again, I worked on it at home and on a packing crate in Bill Theiss’s wardrobe room in Building “E” and when Gene kept insisting on more and more changes, and when I saw the script being dumbed up, I couldn’t take much more, and I went on to do a 90-minute script for Cimarron Strip.

And Gene gave it to a guy named Steve Carabatsos, who’d been brought on staff after Johnny Black had his falling out with Gene and righteously walked off the show; and Carabatsos took a chain-saw to it, and screwed it up so badly that Gene asked me to come back and do yet another rewrite (for no money, of course); and then it was rewritten by yet another hand (whose name I’ll not reveal here, but it wasn’t Roddenberry, who for years afterward told everyone that he had been the great talent who had “saved” poor inept Ellison’s script), and I hated it; and I tried to take my name off it, and put on my pseudonym Cordwainer Bird—which everyone in the industry knew was Ellison standing behind this crippled thing saying it ain’t my work and sort of giving the Bird to those who had mucked up the words—but Gene called me and made it clear he’d blackball me in the industry if I tried to humiliate him like that; and I went for the okeydoke. I let my name stay on it.

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.”