I’d say since he had no idea or reason to believe he was really back in time…he (maybe) died in a primitive insane asylum. Though he was well recovered when he saved Edith.
Or perhaps he did what Picard did in The Inner Light. Picard seemed to just give in to whatever was happening. and why not? If you’re stuck in a simulation or have been transferred into someone elses body or whatever…just make the best of it. Perhaps he decided if this was a hallucination, just make the best of it and turn on the charm with Edith Keeler. Hell…he may have misremembered some of the events of WW2 and actually encouraged Edith’s anti-war activities.
Like many of us who realize we’re in a dream and just go wild…maybe McCoy threw the PD out the window and went full-bore in trying to improve medicine and science. maybe Nazi spies kidnapped him!!
The simplest least messy theory, I think, is to assume he shoved Edith Keeler out of the way of the car and was fatally struck himself, thus removing any chance of him personally affecting the timeline past that point.
If he survived the accident, I think he’d pretty quickly figure out he’d been displaced in time somehow, even though he couldn’t remember the circumstances. In a case like this, I’d do my best to blend in with the natives and hope for eventual rescue from the future. In the meantime, he could well have improved the level of medicine in 1930s America.
Then again, there’s this nasty business with the Second World War. Knowing the alternative timeline, I’d kick myself for having saved Edith Keeler. No way would I encourage her pacifist tendencies.
Given that the Guardian was an unfamiliar technology with a high imprecision (jump in during a high-speed replay of events), that makes sense in this particular instance.
However, in almost any other time travel scenario, the whole point of time travel is that “eventually” isn’t required. If rescue from the future is coming, it should come immediately from the standpoint of the displaced party. Even in the Guardian scenario, the longer it takes for rescue to come, the less likely it’s coming at all.
If your coordinates are known with precision, yes. But as you note, precision was not the Guardian’s strong point. It took Spock and Kirk weeks to bump into McCoy, even though they were in the same general vicinity.
If Spock had had access to the Enterprise’s computers, he could have pinpointed McCoy’s coordinates, but it’s doubtful they could have been delivered there accurately.
The Guardian isn’t a tool of science, designed by some highly-advanced scientists to study the past. No.
It’s a shopping mall kiosk!
It shows time the way it does because it’s a game. You pays you money and you go back in time and try and change the past. Your friends wait behind and watch the changes. That’s why the landing party wasn’t “unrealed” out of existence like the Enterprise was. When you’ve made your changes, the Guardian pulls you forward again. And then makes the correction and puts the timeline back, or lets you fix it, or something.
When the Guardian tells Spock how it works, and Spock thinks it is insulting him, it’s not. That is literally all the machine knows about how it works. If you ask Zoltan the kiosk fortune teller how it works, you’ll get the same nonsense answer.
When it says to the effect “I was made to show time in this manner”, it’s not lying. It was made to work only that way.
So what happened? One day, some smart ass went back and made a huge change and then died or went rogue or something. The timeline was changed to one where the species never evolved on that planet. The guys staying behind suddenly found themselves in a wasteland with just the Guardian. They either died of starvation, or went back in time. And no one ever came again, until the Enterprise.
In answer to the OP, I think McCoy either died or didn’t know enough about WWII (I’m a doctor, not a historian! dammit!") to stop Edith from changing history. If he was alive when Hitler dropped his atomic bombs on America, he might have realized that something was wrong, but it was too late.
He was made to display the past in that way - but that doesn’t mean that the Guardian doesn’t have fine control of where people end up. Kirk and Spock ended up in the same location (within blocks) and same time (within days) of McCoy’s location. Maybe Guardian wasn’t being deliberately difficult, but Guardian certainly seems capable of understanding where K and S want to go, and get them there, in spite of a display that appears to give extremely poor precision (note that the Guardian displayed American history (or at least history familiar to Americans) to Kirk).
Hitler, shmitler. It would take a pretty big gap in his historical education not to know the United States entered the war immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Edith presumably (a) encouraged Roosevelt to appease the Japanese, thereby averting the attack, or (b) persuaded Roosevelt (and the rest of the American public) not to retaliate for it.
IRL, Hitler solved Roosevelt’s problem for him by declaring war on the US on 11 December 1941, *after *Pearl Harbor.
It was Spock’s evaluation they were swept roughly to the same place and time because of currents and eddies in time’s flow. If true, the Guardian had little to do with it.
I dunno, even in a deep post-rampage-hangover state, he manged to accurately guess the year to within a decade. I don’t know if this episode was before or after Patterns of Force, but I gather McCoy was not unfamiliar with historical Nazis and what they did.
Kirk and Spock arrived weeks before McCoy did. McCoy had pretty much just recovered from the drug when they met. It couldn’t have been too long, since Kirk knew what was going on at the mission.
We don’t know if this was a plot contrivance or done by the Guardian, but it was a miracle that K & S came anywhere close given the speed of the playback. This Wayback machine couldn’t be set to a specific time and place.
Yes, of course. What I meant was, it took weeks before they bumped into each other because McCoy arrived much later than Kirk and Spock.
Their time and place of arrival were based on Spock’s estimate of when to jump through the portal. They all ended up in the vicinity of the mission because Edith Keeler was a “focal point in time” (Spock’s words).
Good point. So he does have some historical acumen it seems.
But as afar as quickly realizing he really is back in time, as someone else mentioned…I dunno. Unless he knew the ship was riding “temporal waves” (or whatever it was)…I just think a dozen other scenarios would jump forth related to the only fact he has. That he overdosed. Holodeck therapy on a starbase. Some kind of telepathic therapy. He’s dreaming…he’s dead!!*
of course all this makes his reaction to Ediths death and bit of a teeeeeny plot hole.
Edit: Just watched it again. AS portrayed, McCoy actually doesn’t have time to do anything but push her out of the way.
However, Spocks conclusions are illogical. We don’t know McCoy literally pushed her out of the way from a car. More likely is he butterfly effected her out of the way. Which would mean Spock and Kirk themselves would have to kill her. Kirk himself would have saved her if Edith had stayed on that damn corner like Kirk told her too!