Apologies, I meant to add more saying I could not get a remote machine to invoke the local emacs reliably. I got close with hacking up emacsclient to ssh back,

Apologies, I meant to add more saying I could not get a remote machine to invoke the local emacs reliably. I got close with hacking up emacsclient to ssh back, but was eventually stymied by new network policies at $JOB and eventually settled for the above. db48x has a great answer below.