A Brief Guide to Star Trek (44 page)
Read A Brief Guide to Star Trek Online
Authors: Brian J Robb
Television science fiction had changed in the 1990s, following the success of
The Next Generation
. The show had opened the doors to a new breed of darker science fiction and fantasy shows such as
The X-Files
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Babylon 5
,
Farscape
,
Stargate SG-1
(and its spin-offs,
Atlantis
and
Universe
),
Firefly
and
Battlestar Galactica
. Many of these shows successfully reacted against the edicts of
Star Trek
storytelling (in the way that
Deep Space Nine
had attempted) and fitted much better with television in the 1990s and 2000s when stories became darker and serial television was much more willing to deal in long-running story arcs. Characters would change and develop, often in dramatic ways.
Star Trek
told great stories, but apart from in
Deep Space Nine
, few of the long-running characters were very different at the end of a series than they had been at the beginning. The result was that the later
Star Trek
shows – especially
Voyager
and
Enterprise
– began to look old-fashioned,
like something from the 1960s, in fact. That echoing of the past may have worked well for fans in the final season of
Enterprise
(showrunner Manny Coto said he felt the fans were all that was left watching, so why not cater to them?), but it failed to engage the mass audience needed to keep such an expensive show on network television. Without the archetypal characters they remembered, and with many other better choices available, audiences began to desert new
Star Trek
.
Once seen as the saviour of
Star Trek
, Rick Berman was – by the time of the cancellation of
Enterprise
– enemy number one to fans. The perception was he’d destroyed the franchise he’d done so much to create and shepherd – after all, eighteen years of continuous television production of very complicated shows is not to be discounted. He seemed to believe that serving up more of the same, sometimes modelled on the character dynamics and dramatic situations from
The Original Series
, would be enough to see the lucrative franchise continue. Berman was wrong, and by 2005
Star Trek
on both the big and small screens was dead, slowly strangled by a failing formula and killed by creative complacency. The
Star Trek
franchise had simply not adapted – Borg-like – to the twenty-first-century television environment, and so it ultimately failed.
There was one lesson to be learned from all this:
Star Trek
worked as an event.
The Next Generation
had succeeded as a series with mass appeal, drawing an average of 10–11 million viewers per season, but none of the other series enjoyed the same success. Yet, each had begun with massive viewing figures.
Deep Space Nine
had drawn almost 12 million viewers to its spectacular debut episode, but had ended its seven-year run with less than 4.5 million watching regularly. Similarly,
Voyager
had begun with around 8 million but concluded its seven years on air with fewer than 3.5 million tuning in to see if the ship got home or not.
Enterprise
had an even better start, surpassing
Deep Space Nine
numbers with around 12.5 million, such was the attraction of a
Star Trek
prequel. The show was cancelled, however, because those bothering with the adventures of
Captain Archer and crew had collapsed to a low of 2.5 million. Those ‘first nights’ demonstrated one thing – a mass audience would come to new
Star Trek
as a one-off event, but only a core of dedicated fans and other open-minded casual viewers of around 3 to 4 million would stick with an ongoing TV series.
That’s why J. J. Abrams’ dramatic back to basics reinvention of
Star Trek
in 2009 was a movie that celebrated the iconic ori -ginal triumvirate and the rest of the original
Enterprise
crew. To the mass audience, these lovingly remembered characters
were Star Trek
, and that’s why the movie was a huge success.
There is no doubt that
Star Trek
has been influential beyond just television and movies. Nichelle Nichols tells a famous story of how she was persuaded to stick with the show when Dr Martin Luther King Jr explained how important her appearance on mainstream television was. ‘You changed the face of television for ever’, he told her, ‘you are a role model for everyone’.
Star Trek
’s racial diversity and (mostly) positive depictions of women in important roles of responsibility was part of the show’s positive view of the future.
The technology of
Star Trek
has led to the look and feel of many of today’s gadgets, used daily by millions of people. The incredibly popular Apple iPhones and iPads bear more than a passing resemblance to
Star Trek
’s communicator and
The Next Generation
’s PADD (Personal Access Display Device). Kirk and many of the crew of the first
Enterprise
were often seen using small hand-held computing devices. Similarly, Bluetooth in-ear phones match with Uhura’s oft-mocked communication device. Five years after the show was cancelled, Ed Roberts launched the build-it-yourself Altair 8800 computer, named after a galaxy featured on
Star Trek
(and its progenitor,
Forbidden Planet
). That machine in turn inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to improve upon Roberts’ innovation with their own Apple computer, launching a computing empire that led to the iPhone and iPad.
The Original Series
featured other devices that have since
become reality. Tricorders – portable scanning devices that assess the local environment – don’t quite exist in that form, but many personal phones are now mini-computers, which through GPS technology can provide information on nearby shops, museums or other attractions. The medical tricorder and sick bay monitors are much closer to reality with the rapid development of medical technology, to the extent that a modern ER can be a very high-tech place. Even more extreme technology, such as tractor beams, the holodeck, warp speed and deflector shields, are seen now as less like science fiction and more realistic in the future due to advances in the understanding of quantum physics. Work in the robotics and artificial intelligence fields is moving closer to a Data-style android.
While
Star Trek
itself was inspired by the 1960s space race between the United States and the Soviet Union – it was the reason NBC decided to go with the show – many modern scientists have in turn been inspired by
Star Trek
to go into science. One such was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Steve Matousek, who was involved in the 1990s Mars Pathfinder mission, among others. ‘
Star Trek
gives you a way to see ahead, to look into the future’, he told Jeff Greenwald in
Future Perfect
. ‘I wanted to be an aerospace engineer because I knew that they were the ones that designed the things that went out into space.’ Of the 6,000 who worked at JPL, Matousek estimated that up to 75 per cent had been inspired by
Star Trek
. In 1996, physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote an entire book devoted to the science of
Star Trek
and its real-world impact in
The Physics of Star Trek
. The first NASA prototype space shuttle – which unfortunately never journeyed to space – had even been named
Enterprise
, thanks to fan pressure.
While waiting for scientists to invent the future, most fans thought the only way they’d ever get to live the
Star Trek
experience would be to visit the studio sets at Paramount in Los Angeles where the episodes were made. Indeed many fan-journalists, a few privileged guests and a handful of competition winners got to do just that. Even so, many fans did get a chance
to experience a little of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries,
Star Trek
-style. Interactive exhibitions, including recreations of the
Enterprise
bridge, props and costumes, toured the world, touching down in Edinburgh, Berlin, and the Science Museum and Hyde Park in London. A more extensive venue was the
Star Trek
Experience, located in the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel for a decade between 1998 and 2008. This provided a much more immersive encounter, allowing fans to fully enjoy as much of
Star Trek
’s visionary future as could be recreated here on Earth. A steady stream of spin-off novels and a variety of computer games fed fans’ imagination and participation in the worlds of
Star Trek
.
Star Trek
has been a pervasive part of the cultural environment worldwide for over forty-five years. It has developed and changed, prospered and failed and become part of the identity of millions of people. The return of the archetypal
Star Trek
trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy has given the concept new life in new stories on the big screen.
Star Trek
has always prospered when true storytellers have been able to make the series their own. Now, a new generation of storytellers is charged with re -vitalising the series’ iconic characters and ensuring that
Star Trek
will truly ‘live long and prosper’.
Alexander, David,
Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry
, New York: ROC, 1995
Asherman, Allan,
The Star Trek Compendium
, London: W.H. Allen, 1983
Ellison, Harlan,
Harlan Ellison’s Watching
, Novato, California: Underwood Miller, 1989
Ellison, Harlan,
Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Screenplay That Became the Classic Star Trek Episode
, Clarkston, Georgia: White Wolf, 1996
Engel, Joel,
Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek
, New York: Hyperion, 1994
Geraght, Lincoln (Ed).,
The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture
, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008
Gerrold, David,
The World of Star Trek
(revised edition), London: Virgin Books, 1996
Greenwald, Jeff,
Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth
, New York: Penguin, 1998
Gross, Edward and Mark A. Altman,
Lost Voyages of Trek and The Next Generation
, London: Boxtree, 1995
Gross, Edward and Mark A. Altman,
Captains’ Logs: The Un -authorized Complete Trek Voyages
, New York: Little Brown, 1995
Hark, Ina Rae,
BFI TV Classics: Star Trek
, London: Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2008
Hughes, David,
The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made
, London: Titan Books, 2008
Jones, Mark and Lance Parkin,
Beyond the Final Frontier: An Unauthorised Review of the Trek Universe on Television and Film
, London: Contender, 2003
Meyer, Nicholas,
The View From the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood
, New York: Penguin, 2009
Nimoy, Leonard,
I Am Spock
, London: Century, 1995
Reeves-Stevens, Judith and Garfield,
Star Trek: Phase II – The Untold Story Behind the Star Trek Television Series That Almost Was
, New York: Pocket Books, 1997
Shatner, William with Chris Kreski,
Star Trek Movie Memories: The Inside Story of the Classic Movies
, London: HarperCollins, 1994
Solow, Herbert F. and Robert H. Justman,
Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
, New York: Pocket Books, 1996
Whitfield, Stephen E. and Gene Roddenberry,
The Making of Star Trek
, London: Titan Books, 1991
All the
Star Trek
TV series and movies, from
The Original Series
to 2009’s
Star Trek
are available on DVD (and increasingly on Blu-ray).
Online episode guides are available at fan site Memory Alpha (
www.memory-alpha.org
) and the official site
www.startrek. com
An invaluable resource – and highly recommended – is the official
Star Trek Magazine
, edited by Paul Simpson (titanmagazines.com/t/star-trek/)
Abel (Robert) and Associates
102
Abraham, F. Murray
162
Academy Awards
167
Adam, Ken
87
Agutter, Jenny
134
Alexander, Larry
95
Allen, Irwin
15
Altman, Mark
132
Ambrose, David
95
Anderson, Darrell
25
April, Robert (character)
26
,
83
Archer, Captain (character)
212
Armen, Margaret
94
Arnold, Richard
250
artificial intelligence
64–5