A Brief Guide to Star Trek (2 page)

Among the host of others who have put their stamp on the concepts of
Star Trek
, some have honoured them (perhaps a bit too much), while others have bent them all out of shape (almost beyond recognition). Significant among them are Samuel A. Peeples, David Gerrold, D. C. Fontana and Gene Coon on
The Original Series
in the 1960s; Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer on the original cast movies of the 1980s; Rick Berman and Michael Piller on
The Next Generation
; Ira Steven Behr, Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Ronald D. Moore on
Deep Space Nine
; Brannon Braga and Jeri Taylor on
Voyager
, all in the 1990s; and Manny Coto on
Enterprise
in the twenty-first century. Some of them outstayed their welcome, while others had far too short a run, but each of these creators brought something unique to their respective attempts to create a new spin on Gene Roddenberry’s
Star Trek
.

The story behind the
Star Trek
phenomenon is one of inspiration, struggle and good luck. Following a less than stellar career as an episodic television writer, Gene Roddenberry pitched a series he dubbed ‘
Wagon Train
to the stars’, which was taken up by Paramount and ran for three seasons between 1966 and 1969 on NBC. The central trio of characters – headstrong Captain Kirk (William Shatner), inscrutable alien Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and McCoy (DeForest Kelley), the humanist doctor – rapidly became familiar to viewers. However, the series failed to capture a large enough audience to stay on air, narrowly escaping cancellation twice before the axe finally fell, following a lacklustre third season, in 1969. The show found new, unexpected success during syndicated reruns throughout the 1970s (and thanks to daily exposure, sealing the iconic nature of the central trio of characters in pop culture in the process), giving rise to a short-lived animated spin-off and – more importantly – a big-budget movie in 1979 intended to compete with the success of
Star Wars
(1977). While that film met with a mixed reception, it led to a successful series of movies, including the acclaimed
The Wrath of Khan
and
The Voyage Home
, which ran throughout the 1980s.

A return to television was inevitable for
Star Trek
, with Gene Roddenberry at the helm once more (for the first few years). Between 1987 and 2005
Star Trek
would be in constant production, spanning
The Next Generation
’s new journeys where no man had gone before, through the 1990s’ ethnic war dramas of
Deep Space Nine
, the exploration-driven
Voyager
and into the twenty-first century, with post-9/11 prequel series
Enterprise
. Franchise fatigue – too much mediocre
Star Trek
‘product’ flooding the market at the same time – led to the cancellation of
Enterprise
and the curtailment of
The Next Generation
movie series. The second batch of movies had produced one bona fide summer blockbuster in 1996’s
First Contact
(featuring
The Next Generation
’s signature antagonists, the Borg), but had crashed to Earth with the dismal
Nemesis
in 2002.

A rescue mission for
Star Trek
was necessary. It fell to film-maker (
Mission: Impossible III
) and cult TV producer (
Alias
,
Lost
) J. J. Abrams to rise to the challenge of reinventing
Star Trek
once more for a whole new generation. Alongside screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Abrams returned to the very beginning, rediscovering the iconic characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy.

Star Trek
has been acclaimed as utopian science fiction. Arriving at the end of the 1960s, Roddenberry’s space opera tapped into real-world social and political movements, presenting a vision of the future that offered infinite diversity in infinite combinations (IDIC) and the non-interference rule of the Prime Directive. Aspects of the world of
Star Trek
were obviously contradictory: these people of the future espoused clearly liberal values, but did so while encased in a military outlook. This was a future that displayed great advances in communications and medical science, but also offered similar advances in weaponry, such as photo torpedoes and phasers.

Each version of
Star Trek
reflected the times in which it was made. The movies of the 1980s featuring the cast of
The Original Series
tackled issues of ageing and rebirth through the core
trilogy of
The Wrath of Khan
,
The Search for Spock
and
The Voyage Home
. By the time of
The Next Generation
, the self-absorbed ‘Me generation’, who came to adulthood in the 1970s, were running things, so alongside the tactical officer and science officer, the bridge team of the new
Enterprise
for the 1980s featured a touchy-feely psychologist in the shape of Counsellor Troi.
Deep Space Nine
turned darker for the 1990s, a time when ethnic strife tore up central Europe and the Middle East erupted in conflict that continues today. The post-colonial world of Bajor and the United Nations-style peacekeeping crew of the space station
Deep Space Nine
dramatised issues of war, sacrifice and conflict in a way unthinkable in the comparably anodyne
Star Trek
of the 1960s. On the other hand, the next series,
Voyager
, reflected a somewhat blander, safer 1990s as the twenty-first century loomed; it also featured a failure of the imagination on the part of those creating
Star Trek
to genuinely escape from the past and boldly go into the unknown. They became trapped within the formula that
Deep Space Nine
had so successfully strayed from. Instead of updating
Star Trek
for the new century, both
Voyager
and prequel series
Enterprise
set about recreating the deep-space exploration tropes of
The Original Series
from the 1960s, and even tried to create new versions of the iconic 1960s characters through relatively colourless avatars like Captain Archer and Chief Engineer ‘Trip’ Tucker. Concurrently,
The Next Generation
movies had trouble defining themselves, failing to service the ensemble cast that had blossomed on television, yet succeeding when adopting the style and approach of the contemporary summer blockbuster in
First Contact
. Even here, though, the producers of
Nemesis
were looking backwards, attempting to model their new
Star Trek
movie for 2002 on the one that had succeeded twenty years earlier, 1982’s
The Wrath of Khan
.

Alongside these series and movies, a different type of utopian experiment was going on as
Star Trek
fandom developed, grew and changed, aided and abetted by developments in modern technology (the Internet, cheap video). Starting out in the
1960s as isolated local clubs and mail-order fanzines (fan-produced magazines),
Star Trek
fandom grew during the 1970s thanks to mass conventions that brought like-minded people together to celebrate their obsession. The future depicted on
Star Trek
created a genuine new community here on Earth.
Star Trek
served to free fans’ imaginations and to spark their creativity, allowing them to become creators (of, among other things, slash fiction). The fans themselves became
Star Trek
storytellers, bringing their short stories to each other through communities spawned on the internet and in the making of officially tolerated not-for-profit fan video films, such as the
New Voyages
/
Phase II
fan-made movie series.

All of this began with the vision of one man: Gene Roddenberry. His basic ideas were taken by others, shaped and reshaped, stories told and retold. Actively involved audiences took it upon themselves to create their own versions of
Star Trek
, keeping the concept alive during the ten-year gap between the end of
The Original Series
and the arrival of the much-compromised
The Motion Picture
.
Star Trek
endured for the simple reason that Gene Roddenberry’s creation allowed all those involved to tell great, relatable stories.

In this volume I’ve adopted the official Paramount/CBS designations for each of the
Star Trek
TV series and movies. Each TV show or film is usually prefaced with the label ‘
Star Trek
:’, but I’ve sometimes dropped that in the interests of providing a smoother read. Below, ‘TV’ indicates a television series, while ‘F’ indicates a cinema release. The series and films will be referred to using the following notation (in strict chronological order):

The Original Series
(TV, 1966–9)

The Animated Series
(TV, 1973–4)

The Motion Picture
(F, 1979)

The Wrath of Khan
(F, 1982)

The Search for Spock
(F, 1984)

The Voyage Home
(F, 1986)

The Final Frontier
(F, 1989)

The Undiscovered Country
(F, 1991)

The Next Generation
(TV, 1987–94)

Deep Space Nine
(TV, 1993–9)

Generations
(F, 1994)

Voyager
(TV, 1995–2001)

First Contact
(F, 1996)

Insurrection
(F, 1999)

Enterprise
(TV, 2001–5)

Nemesis
(F, 2002)

Star Trek
(F, 2009)

Star Trek sequel
(F, 2012)

‘
If you are cursed with a somewhat logical mind, you ask questions. I have many thoughts which, if I were to voice them, would turn many people against me
.’ Gene Roddenberry

Science fiction has a long and proud history across all media, but it has perhaps had the most impact and success with mainstream audiences through the visual media of film and television.

Ancient literature is rife with tales of the fantastic, often used by developing cultures as ways of exploring and explaining the wider world they were beginning to discover beyond their immediate environment. Modern science fiction can generally be dated to the early-nineteenth-century works of Mary Shelley with
Frankenstein
and
The Last Man
, followed by the speculative novels of Jules Verne, such as
From the Earth to the Moon
. A series of turn-of-the-century novels by H. G. Wells developed many of the basic tropes of modern science fiction, primarily in
The Time Machine
,
The Invisible Man
and
The War of the Worlds
. Wells’ work can even be seen directly in a
Star Trek
episode, with his 1901 short story
The New Accelerator
a clear inspiration for
The Original Series
episode ‘Wink of an Eye’, in which Kirk is physically speeded up so much he vanishes relative to those around him.

The ‘scientific romances’ of the late nineteenth century led to the science fiction magazine boom of the early twentieth century,
with the genre becoming codified and popularised. Printed on cheap wood-pulp paper (leading to the usually derogative ‘pulps’ tag), these popular magazines featured fast-paced, adventure-driven tales and prospered from the mid-1890s (with Frank Munsey’s
Argosy Magazine
) through to the mid-1950s, when cheap paperback novels largely replaced them. Titles such as editor Hugo Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories
(from 1926 onwards) and John W. Campbell’s
Astounding Science Fiction
(from 1929, later
Analog Magazine
) gave an outlet to the first wave of professional science fiction authors in the 1930s and 1940s. Emerging in this period were writers such as Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Fred Pohl, James Blish, E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and A. E. van Vogt (and several of these ‘first wave’ science fiction storytellers would later have
Star Trek
connections).

The science fiction novel developed in the 1950s and 1960s and brought new, longer-form writers to the genre, including epic and influential works by Frank Herbert (
Dune
), Harlan Ellison (known for his short stories and essays) and Philip K. Dick (a major influence on film and television fantasy and SF from the 1980s through to the twenty-first century). With the longer form came a more in-depth exploration of ideas and a better focus on character, along with an improvement in the literary quality of the writing.

The same period saw a dramatic boom in science fiction on radio, film and television, much of which had a direct influence on those who’d later tell their stories through
Star Trek
. Radio is the perfect medium for science fiction drama. It is a truism that the locations are much better on radio, not requiring the extravagant budgets often needed for visualising science fiction settings in film and TV. On radio, ideas and settings could be explored in dramatic fashion, relying on the listener to fill in the blanks with their imagination. Shows from the 1950s – such as NBC’s
Dimension X
and
X Minus One
– dramatised short stories from the pulps and the new paperbacks, as well as producing original scripts. Other shows included
2000 Plus
and
Beyond Tomorrow
, although much of the material produced was simplistic and juvenile.