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It's one of the great wonders of TV history.
How did a show that nearly didn't get approved for production, that was cancelled once before it was finally shut down and that only lasted three seasons become the most popular TV franchise in history?
How did STAR TREK manage to spawn, over 40 years, an abundant stream of TV series, feature movies, novels, audio books, CD-ROMs, conventions, creative tributes by fans and an unprecedented number of phrases now embedded in our culture? Phrases like...
"Beam me up."
"That would be illogical."
"Live long and prosper."
Red alert
Vulcan mind meld
The Prime Directive
Warp drive
"I'm a doctor, not a [fill in the blank]."
To see what's propelled TOS, let's imagine the USS Enterprise's stories if The Cage, its first pilot, had actually launched the series …and then let's see in what directions the immediate successor series, STAR TREK: The Next Generation (TNG), later flew the craft marked NCC-1701.
A Different TV History
The Cage, produced in 1966 as the first pilot for STAR TREK (Where No Man Has Gone Before would be the second - and successful - pilot), was never broadcast as part of the regular series. In this first look on the STAR TREK world, the Enterprise's Captain Christopher Pike is trapped in a cage by powerful, telepathic aliens who offer him an imagine-any-fantasy world. It features a terrific performance by Susan Oliver as Vina, whose final decision is one of the most heartbreaking in classic television.
To get a better sense of what TOS is, though, imagine what it would have become if The Cage had actually kicked off the series. As they might say on STAR TREK, the space-time continuum of TV history would be very different.
First, comparing Jeffrey Hunter's performance as Captain Pike to William Shatner's Kirk is no contest. Shatner, with an easy confidence and command that made him stand out in every scene, was clearly central to the eventual success of the series. And his ability to move easily into a comic mode - now frequently on display in his role as Denny Crain in the "Boston Legal" series - helped give TOS its lighter moments.
The Nerd-Warrior
Then there's Spock. In The Cage, Spock is as hot and angry as he is later cool and collected. He seems not only out of character here, but out of place, hot-headed without reason or context. As Leonard Nimoy said in an interview with tvland.com, his character took some time to define. In this first pilot, he is not yet the most…let's see…logical choice for what Spock should be.
As a result, the Vulcan's battle with his all-too-human emotional side - TOS' contribution to storytelling's ancient battle between thinking and feeling - is nowhere to be found in the first pilot. Can you imagine TOS without the carefully-controlled Spock? The half-Vulcan, half-human helped balance the main crew members-the hot-headed, sarcastic McCoy on one end, the cool, ironic Spock on the other, and Kirk in the middle.
Spock became that rare archetype-a character who uniquely defines a character type. He was more influential than even series creator Gene Roddenberry might have imagined. Before STAR TREK, Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has said, scientists were often depicted on TV and in movies as lab-coated nerds. Mr. Spock's appeal as The Nerd-Warrior helped change that for countless fans, like NASA deep-space scientist Dr. Marc Rayman.
"When I was younger, Mr. Spock was my favorite," Dr. Rayman told tvland.com. "He appealed to me because he was a scientist -- and he got to have exciting adventures in space."
Roddenberry's Vision
The Cage's versions of the Captain and Mr. Spock are only one aspect of what the future STAR TREK might have become. The Cage's lack of the famous "to boldly go where no man has gone before" opening is the most obvious, but not the only, indication of a lack of the mission that would so define TOS. In this first STAR TREK, there is no indication that the crew had a larger purpose beyond getting picked up for a regular season.
This absence highlights the remarkable emergence in TOS of what is often called Gene Roddenberry's "vision." Remember that TOS originally aired 1966-69, just as the Vietnam War was tearing both Vietnam and the U.S. apart. Roddenberry's vision mind-melded a "mission impossible"-combining the dreams that the counter-culture/civil rights movement had for the future, with the organized discipline of a military expedition.
Roddenberry's vision, which would more fully emerge in the second pilot and in the series, starts with the crew. In The Cage, the characters surrounding Pike and the proto-Spock give little indication of the celebration of diverse and distinctive characters that would become characteristic of TOS. The all-American, all-Caucasian crew in The Cage lacks the wise-cracking McCoy, the pump-the-engines Scotty, calm Uhura, Pavel "we invented this" Chekov and even-keeled Sulu.
TOS featured pioneering roles for an African-American actress and a Japanese-American actor, and included a Russian character at a time when the U.S. was in a constant state of near-war with the U.S.S.R. There was even a bi-racial character on board-although the "races" he represented were Vulcan and human.
"Leave any bigotry in your quarters," Kirk says in The Balance of Terror. "There's no room for it on the bridge."
The lessons that the mid-20th Century was trying to teach itself apparently were fully realized in the 23rd. In The Savage Curtain, the newly materialized Abraham Lincoln calls Uhura "a charming Negress." When he apologizes for any insult, she stops him. "We've each learned to be delighted with what we are," Kirk explains to Lincoln. "The Vulcans learned that centuries before we did." STAR TREK realized fictionally what Lincoln helped to begin.
When Civilization Grows Up
Roddenberry's vision included not just a crew defined by equality and diversity, but a mission defined by what civilization can be when it grows up. In this future, all life forms and cultures are valued.
By setting TOS in space, hopping from world to world, all boundaries to exploring that vision were literally removed. Visiting different planets often meant visiting the realm of a different issue-including civil rights, what it means be human, painful choices that leaders make, the rights of living creatures, the corruption of power, the differences between children and adults and logic versus emotion, to name a few.
Did Roddenberry's vision-equality, addressing social issues-make a difference in the series' success? It's hard to separate those subjects from the stories themselves, but if you talk to enough fans, you find them frequently mentioning the evergreen subjects that were tackled.
The "vision" also helped create a new kind of a civilized expeditionary force, with enlightened rules of engagement: use force when necessary, but do not intervene in other cultures - per the Prime Directive - and, whenever you can, resolve things peacefully.
Peaceful resolutions were part of the show's statement, part of what a grown-up civilization would prefer. In Devil in the Dark, for instance, purportedly Shatner's favorite episode, the miner-killing creature is eventually left alone to peacefully co-exist because, as Kirk says, "We were destroying her eggs."
"Roddenberry's vision was that all conflicts must end peacefully," science fiction novelist Greg Bear said, in an interview with tvland.com. "And this would come to full fruition in The Next Generation."
The Next Generation
Like trying to gauge the contributions of a dynasty's founder without considering the accomplishments of the descendants, it's hard to consider TOS without having STAR TREK: The Next Generation (TNG) in the picture.
TNG picked up TOS's founding principles and storylines and literally flew with them. The other STAR TREK series - Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise - have their fans, but TOS and TNG created the key models for the STAR TREK universe.
Just as The Cage's shortcomings highlighted what TOS eventually offered, so TNG showed how TOS's initial storyline components could evolve. Data, the android with Pinocchio-like yearnings to become human, takes Spock's struggle to the next level. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, brings a Shakespearean depth to the same kinds of moral and tactical choices that the more easy-going Kirk had to make. In TNG, the vision of peaceful resolution, of exploring social issues and new worlds, and of equality among races/species, became more pronounced. And while Picard's libido was not as famously engaged as Kirk's, the TNG captain faced many choices of the heart.
Protection Against Aging
Of course, TNG's special effects were light years ahead of TOS, realizing the kinds of space battles and other visualizations that TOS could only dream about. TOS' effects, rustic by today's ultra-realistic standards, have a kind of charm that is almost theatrical or metaphorical, adding to their sense of being a classic.
Primitive though they may now seem, those effects still serve the story. More importantly, TOS was never really about the effects, the technology or, arguably, even space. "I had an interviewer ask me what my favorite gizmos were on STAR TREK," Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and author of The Physics of STAR TREK, told tvland.com. "I said I didn't have any, because it was never about the gizmos. It was about the stories."
The stories and the colorfully defined characters are TOS's ultimate protection against aging and, ultimately, the key to its longevity. Certainly, some shows are loved for their campiness (see Spock's Brain or Kirk and Spock singing as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum in Plato's Stepchildren), but so many more have storylines that still resonate.
The Doomsday Machine resurrects the doomed revenge quest of Moby Dick. A perennial fan favorite, The City on the Edge of Forever, features a painful logic-versus-emotion choice. In another, The Trouble With Tribbles, furry creatures overpopulate and outlive their welcome. In Where No Man Has Gone Before, total power makes a man believe he is a god. Illusion disguises a primal need in The Man Trap, a leader's bloody choices echo Macbeth's in The Conscience of a King, memory competes with recorded reality in Court Martial and human definitions are compared in What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Despite the wide range, the stories retain TOS' underlying optimism, a sense of a good future, where all beings are part of the fabric of the galaxy-and where everyone looks good in those tight-fitting fabrics.
When The Future Began
Jeff Greenwald, author of Future Perfect: How STAR TREK Conquered Planet Earth, told tvland.com that TOS's enduring legend is due, in part, to the fact that it "came at the beginning of an age - the age of information, the age of space flight, the age of technology" - and so helped to define it.
In short, TOS came at the time when the future began. The future is now here, with cell phones that look suspiciously like Kirk's communicator, microcomputers, space travel and even recent glimpses of an actual invisibility cloaking device.
When a TV series helps to define something, it becomes part of it. STAR TREK is part of this culture, this future. Somehow, though, our 21st Century's stories-mistrusting, often apprehensive - rarely take part in the good future STAR TREK envisioned.
But right now, traveling at the speed of light, far beyond this century's cynicism, the original broadcast transmission of the original STAR TREK has reached the nearest stars.
Barry Levine, the Supervising Producer for this STAR TREK microsite, co-wrote (with Marc Okrand) the STAR TREK audio book, POWER KLINGON: Mastering the Language of Warriors.
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