If you’ve read the script, you will remember that Edith Keeler is an humanitarian whose philosophy is one of kindness and compassion. It is stated in the script that she develops, over the next few years, a coherent identifiable philosophy that many people in that post-World War I, semi-Isolationist society found appealing. It is set forth in the teleplay that her philosophy catches on—something like Scientology without the phony scams—and it is sufficiently appealing that it produces a tone in the body politic that briefly keeps America out of the war against Hitler. A brief period that permits the development of the first atomic bomb not by America, but by The Third Reich, and that leads to Germany winning World War II.

It is a “what if?” plot, and standard extrapolative play in the genre of speculative fiction. It is not a coarse, solve-the-problem-in-53 minutes oversimplification. But apart from the idiot bullshit dialogue that Roddenberry shoved into Sister Edith Keeler’s mouth—the kind of fuzzy-headed social thinking that could give you diabetes—she was a strong, decent woman. That’s why she remains appealing.

And how does the Bimbo Queen, Joan Collins, remember this glorious role, in this landmark show that still draws raves for her limited abilities? Well, read for yourself, from page 113 of Ms. Collins’s INSIDE JOAN COLLINS.

And if that journey “inside” Joan Collins doesn’t remind you of a visit to a forlorn, empty venue where the wind whistles forever across a sterile terrain, try this one from her own classic autobiography PAST IMPERFECT, page 248:

“So I worked…. and ‘Star Trek’—‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ became one of the most popular episodes. As Edith Cleaver [sic], a young mission worker for down-and-out men in New York in the Depression, I try to prove to the world that Hitler was a nice guy. Bill Shatner as Captain Kirk falls in love with Edith, and Dr. Spock [sic]—he of the ears—allows her to get run over by a truck lest her teachings lead the world to total destruction.”

I don’t know which one of them is the greater pinhead—Jay David who wrote the former book for Carroll & Graf in 1988, or the nameless editor at Simon & Schuster who apparently never fact-checked, much less read for sanity, the semiliterate blather of this latter—but there really ought to be a hell on Earth for literary dodgem-cars like that. The less said about Ms. Collins’s ratiocinative powers, the better off we’ll be but, amazingly, Collins seems to have taken the INSIDE JOAN COLLINS dementia version of my plot as gospel. She was interviewed last year on a British chat show, and she claimed that in “City” she was “in love with Adolph Hitler.”

I thought having Shatner getting it all mixed up was bad.

I didn’t know when I was well off.