1. The Guardian - "The City On The Edge Of Forever"
The crew of the Enterprise discovers an abandoned alien outpost that has the ability to project people backwards in time. This sentient artificial life-form can also extend its capabilities to any point in the galaxy. It is known as The Guardian of Forever. When a deranged McCoy accidentally travels back to 1930s, depression era America, he makes a change that forever alters the timeline, causing the Federation to never develop. It is up to Kirk and Spock to travel back to the 1930s to recover McCoy and repair the damage to the time stream. While Kirk is there, he meets and falls in love with Edith Keeler a social worker who has a great capacity to care - and whose caring persuades the United States to remain out of World War II. In order for the time stream to return to normal, she must die. This has to be Kirk at his most poignant. Not only does he risk his life to rescue his friend but he sacrifices the newly-discovered love he has found with 20th century Edith Keeler for the sake of the future. Billions of personal timelines are preserved at the expense of Kirks happiness. Its one of the most compelling and remembered episodes in the original series and one that shows the nature of Kirk and Spocks friendship. But what about the Guardian? I know there have been some non-canonical works about it which highlights my point about fans value on returning to favourite plotlines but out of four succeeding television series and at least eleven motion pictures, not one writer has thought to include the Guardian in any of its stories. Its a powerful story device; imagine a separate corps of Starfleet officers responsible to the time continuum. Remember the chronal cold war from Star Trek: Enterprise? Wouldnt the Guardian of Forever be a perfect base of operations for a Star Fleet-sanctioned organization to defend the continuum? This was a completely wasted plot asset that could have taken advantage of in all sorts of ways. There you have it. But dont take my word for it revisiting abandoned plotlines are incredibly successful stories and there is no reason to expect that any of these wouldnt sell. look at the success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; arguably one of the greatest Star Trek revisits ever. Famed comic artist John Byrne (Marvels X-Men or DCs Superman) picked up a great number of dropped plotlines and turned them into fantastic Star Trek comic stories that looked at the repercussions of the Organian Peace Treaty, what happened after the ST:TOS episode Balance of Terror and even Leonard McCoys career in between the television series and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Just recently he released a photo montage book (remember the old photo-novels about the original series from the 1970s?) that uses actual photographs from the series re-arranged in an original manner to create a brand new and amazing story that is a sequel to Mirror, Mirror. Its called The Mirror Crackd, published by IDW Publishing. As stated earlier, Star Trek survives because fans are always hungry for a new story, but continued stories are the best ones and theyre already there. Like some sort of buried treasure, theyre just waiting for the right prospector to come along and unearth them for the world to see them in another light.
John Kirk is a Teacher-Librarian and currently a History/English Teacher with the Toronto District School Board.
But mostly, John teaches Geek.
Comics, Sci-Fi (Notably Star Trek), Fantasy and Role-Playing and table-top games all make up part of John’s repertoire, There is a whole generation of nerds-in-embryo who rely on him to make sense of it all, to teach that with great power comes great responsibility, that the force will be with us always and that a towel IS the most useful thing to have in one’s possession.
When John isn’t in the classroom, he can be found in his basement writing comic reviews for www.popmythology.com and features for Roddenberry Entertainment's www.1701news.com.
