Synopsis: Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock must follow Dr. McCoy into the past in order to un-do an act he did in his drugged visit to 1930s Earth that caused a change in history.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” is one of the most acclaimed of all the episodes from Star Trek: The Original Series, and much has already been written about it. In this post I will look at it from a mythological and depth psychological perspective.
Carl Kerényi has written that myth has been called the rearising of the primordial reality in narrative form (1949), and as such myth and depth psychology, which delves into the primordial reality that it calls the collective unconscious, is inexplicitly intertwined with myth.
The myth that I will focus on in interpreting “The City on the Edge of Forever” is that of Orpheus, the great musician, and his beloved Eurydice, who on their wedding day was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the Underworld. Orpheus followed and through his music so charmed Hades that this God of the Underworld allowed him to visit and search for Eurydice and bring her back to the upper world, as long as he did not look back at her before reaching the surface. He did and she was lost forever.
In this episode, Captain James T. Kirk would be the Orpheus figure and the Guardian of Forever can be interpreted as the embodiment of Hades – who allows passage to try to locate, Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy – the Eurydice figure – and correct what he has done there. The accidental injection of a drug that renders McCoy paranoid, can even be seen as an instrument of a psychopomp – something that leads one to the Underworld. Unlike Orpheus, Kirk obeys the rules put forth by the Guardian of Forever and is successful in his mission. But like Orpheus, this came at the cost of losing a loved one forever, in this case Edith Keeler. This loss cuts deeply into Kirk as evidenced by one of the few closing lines of an episode containing a curse word: “Let’s get the hell out of here.” Mild by today’s standards, but in 1967 Star Trek: The Original Series when this episode first aired, it was unusual.
Jung, C. G., & Kerényi, C. (1949). (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Essays on a science of mythology: The myth of the divine child and the mysteries of Eleusis . Pantheon Books.
Original post created 3 February 2021
mydailysoultrek 