Harlan Ellison RIP

The irascible Harlan Ellison died last week at 84: “I hate when a director says to me ‘Here’s how I envision this scene’, excuse me? It’s right here in the script – I ‘envisioned’ it FOR you. Do what I wrote. If you want to ‘envision’, you should become a writer. Where the fuck were you when the page was blank?”

From counterpunch.com

Harlan Ellison wrote the Emmy-winning episode of Star Trek, "City on the Edge of Forever". As I understand it, in his original script, recreational drug use had become a thing on the Enterprise but this was taken out.

It was kind of ahistorical. Dr McCoy went berserk and leapt through a time portal to go back to 20th century Earth where he disrupts history by saving the life of a pacifist street preacher who will be elected to Congress and delay US entry into World War Two.

I'm not sure that would be possible. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler inexplicably declared war on the United States and started torpedoing ships off the US coast. I guess the Nazis might not have done that if the woman had somehow stopped Lend Lease, but they declared war on us, we didn't declare war on them.

It's like Southerners who think the North started the Civil War. Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania. The Confederates invaded the North first, and they rounded up every Black man woman and child to ship back south as slaves.

In any case, the US barely put a dent in the Third Reich. The Soviets won the war.