At first, Spock doesn’t know if McCoy kills Edith or saves her. All he knows from her obituary is that she dies in “some sort of traffic accident.” It isn’t until later, after they learn about the future pacifist movement, that Kirk and Spock realize she was meant to die in 1930, and McCoy must somehow have prevented this.
Yeah this book is one of their best and was designed to be accessible to people who only know the show and don’t read the books. Highly recommended.
Just checked Harlan’s original script, and the focal point in time concept is in there. In fact, the guardian (actually there are multiple Guardians) say they can’t go back to the exact time when the person who changed history (not McCoy in the original version) arrived, but they gave a choice of before or after that time.
And this is his sofa, is it?
Back to the OP (sort of), is that episode considered the best one, pretty much universally?
He was still sort of out of it when Kirk and Spock showed up, right? He had just decided that everything else was an illusion, but Edith was real.
Yes, and it was Roddenberry’s favorite episode.
McCoy had recovered by the time he was reunited with K&S, though he jokingly told Edith he thought his surroundings were an illusion (but she wasn’t). I suspect that by the time of the accident, he’d figured out he’d been displaced somehow.