Reception
The filmed version of "The City on the Edge of Forever" is considered the best episode of the original series by many critics such as Entertainment Weekly. TV Guide ranked it #68 in their 100 Most Memorable Moments in TV History feature in its July 1, 1996 edition, featured ranked it #92 on the 100 greatest TV episodes of all time, and ranked it #80 on its list of "TV's Top 100 Episodes of All Time." IGN ranked it as number one out of their "Top 10 Classic Star Trek Episodes". Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode an 'A' rating, describing it as a "a justly revered classic".
It is one of the most widely acclaimed episodes of the original series of Star Trek. It was awarded the Hugo Award in 1968 for the "Best Dramatic Presentation" at that year's World Science Fiction Convention. It was twenty-five years before another television program received that honor again, and the next recipient became the episode "The Inner Light" from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Harlan Ellison's original version of the teleplay won the annual Writers Guild of America Award for best dramatic hour-long script. Gene L. Coon reportedly said at the time: "If Harlan wins, I'm going to die," and that "there are two scripts up tonight for the Writers' Guild Award, and I wrote them both." This quotation is of dubious merit, however, since the WGA rules do not allow production companies to submit scripts, but rather only the credited writers, who may submit whichever draft of their scripts that they may choose. Ellison submitted his original first draft for WGA award consideration, and not any version that had been edited by the Star Trek production staff, so Coon's supposed version of the script was ineligible and never submitted. Gene Roddenberry noted that "many people would get prizes if they wrote scripts that budgeted out to three times the show's cost." In the documentary To Boldly Go... included in the Season 1 DVD set, Leonard Nimoy characterizes the episode as a high-water mark in the series, calling it "good tragedy." William Shatner considered it one of his favorite episodes, and it appeared as his "Captain's Pick" in the "Star Trek Fan Collective—Captain's Log (2001)."
Read more about this topic: The City On The Edge Of Forever
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)