A Brief Guide to Star Trek (8 page)

‘
Although we were in the seemingly simplistic medium of television, this simplistic medium allowed us to really ask very deep questions. And we didn’t always give deep answers, because it wasn’t possible. That’s why the audience, over the last twenty-five years has stayed with
Star Trek.’ Gene Roddenberry

Star Trek
was all about its characters. That was as much a sensible storytelling decision as anything else. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘
Wagon Train
to the stars’ concept was sound enough, but someone – in this case the practical production team of Robert Justman and Herb Solow – had to realise the planets, creatures, aliens and future technology that was required every week. Hence, rather than focus on the set dressing or the ‘wow’ factor of alien environments,
Star Trek
’s core – and the main reason it has endured for over forty-five years – was to be in its unique characters.

It is the distinctive triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy that has resulted in the
Star Trek
phenomenon living long and prospering. Each of the characters in the original series of
Star Trek
has become iconic, and that is because they are simply defined (which is not the same as being simple). The central trio are positioned at distinct points of an emotional continuum, at least to begin with. Spock is the cold, logical alien who looks quizzically upon humanity. Dr McCoy is essentially Spock’s opposite, driven by his emotions and his natural engagement
with humanity (that’s why he’s a doctor, dammit!). In between is Kirk, the leader who must strike a balance between the opposing viewpoints of Spock and McCoy, and take into account the wider welfare of his crew and the new life forms and new civilisations the
Enterprise
encounters through its explorations of the galaxy. Each is prone to extremes, and their actions are often modulated by one (or both) of the other two.

That each of
Star Trek
’s core characters is easily summed up in an instantly recognisable iconic catchphrase is a testament to the impact of these characters on viewers worldwide. They may not have actually used any of these specific phrases that often, but they became embedded in popular culture (along with the never-uttered ‘Beam me up, Scotty’) as central to viewers’ ex -periences of
Star Trek
. When novelty group The Firm bizarrely reached number one in the UK music charts in 1987 (and became the ninth best-selling single that year) with ‘Star Trekkin’’, it was because the song was made up of nothing but phrases associated with each iconic
Star Trek
character. They were instantly recognised by British viewers who’d grown up watching the show in endless reruns throughout the 1970s. Rather than the oft-uttered ‘Hailing frequencies open, Captain’, Communications Officer Uhura gets ‘There’s Klingons on the starboard bow’, while Spock is represented by the classic ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’. McCoy gets a variation of a phrase he did often say on TV, ‘It’s worse than that – he’s dead, Jim’, while Chief Engineer Scotty is represented by the famous ‘Ye cannae change the laws of physics’. Kirk himself gets ‘We come in peace; shoot to kill’, a phrase that never appeared on the show, but summed up a popular impression of the trigger-happy captain’s approach to alien encounters (when he was not bedding alien women, of course). This approach would not necessarily work as well with the characters from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, who were harder to sum up in such simple, iconic and memorable lines.

That these characters could be invoked in a novelty song made up of simple catchphrases twenty years after
Star Trek:
The Original Series
was in production is astonishing and stands as a testament to the storytelling of Gene Roddenberry, the writers and producers and William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of
The Original Series
cast. It is this trio of characters that explains the lasting impact of
Star Trek
on pop culture worldwide.

With an order for an initial sixteen episodes of
Star Trek
delivered by NBC in February 1966, it was down to Gene Roddenberry to draw together the stories and scripts needed to feed Robert Justman’s weekly production machine if air dates were to be maintained. The two pilots had shown just what an uphill task it would be to bring the diverse and exotic worlds of
Star Trek
to the TV screen on a weekly basis. Jefferies and Theiss were central to the task, as was Fred Phillips, who would have to handle the make-up requirements of Spock and any visiting guest star aliens-of-the-week.

Roddenberry’s biggest and most immediate requirement by early March 1966 was for writers for the new series, with shooting due to begin at the start of June. The executive producer himself would function as an ideas and rewrite man, not an original writer, but he needed scripts he could rewrite to make them uniquely
Star Trek
. The TV writers who were to be involved in the creation of the show had to be comfortable with the fact that their work would always be subject to Roddenberry’s revisions – but not all were.

Talent agencies, independent agents and professional colleagues all got the call:
Star Trek
needed writers! Groups of aspiring episodic contributors were invited to a Desilu screening room, there to be shown the second pilot episode and to hear Roddenberry outline the premise of the series and the requirements the show had for scripts. The process was enough to turn off many established TV writers who just didn’t get the concept, didn’t think the show would last, or simply knew that ‘sci-fi’ was not for them. It was a disappointing process for Roddenberry, who realised he was going to have to put in much
more one-on-one time with individually selected writers if he was going to succeed in generating the story ideas and finished scripts he urgently needed.

Roddenberry drafted a memo (largely based on his original 1964 series proposal) for aspiring
Star Trek
writers that outlined the series and included a collection of ‘springboard’ storylines as examples of the kind of thing the series required. The new ‘writer’s guide’ outlined the main characters, the series situation, the world of the future the characters inhabited and the science and sociology of the show. It was hoped this document would provide enough information for writers more comfortable with Western towns, courtrooms or hospital emergency rooms to write for a space-traversing ship and her diverse crew.

Roddenberry, however, had ambitions to reach beyond just TV writers: he wanted to appeal to successful science fiction novelists and short story writers. His thinking was that such people, even if they had no experience of writing for television, would be familiar with the ideas behind the futuristic drama of
Star Trek
and so would be able to contribute in a unique way to the development of this most singular of television series. While his instinct was right in reaching out to other accomplished science fiction storytellers, it was to be an approach that produced very mixed results.

Of those consulted, the one who most readily grasped the concepts and characters of
Star Trek
was Richard Matheson. He had contributed episodes to Rod Serling’s groundbreaking SF, horror and fantasy anthology
The Twilight Zone
(which, like
Star Trek
, had initially begun life as a pilot at Desilu), and had written a series of fantasy novels, several of which would later become films (among them
What Dreams May Come
,
Somewhere in Time
and
I Am Legend
). He would contribute ‘The Enemy Within’, the fifth episode of the first season, that saw a transporter accident split Captain Kirk into his ‘good’ and ‘evil’ personalities.

Others, such as novelist A. E. van Vogt, could not come to terms with the economic limitations of weekly television compared to the limitless canvas of the blank page. The ideas
and characters he submitted to Roddenberry were either not well developed enough for television or unsuitable for the medium, being better suited to a 200-page novel than a one-hour TV episode.

Throughout the original three-year run of
Star Trek
, several well-known science fiction writers did get episodes on air, not all of them without incident. Among those who succeeded were Ted Sturgeon (who did much to develop Spock and Vulcan culture in the second season opener ‘Amok Time’), Jerry Sohl, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison (the most problematic), Jerome Bixby, George Clayton Johnson (another
Twilight Zone
veteran) and Norman Spinrad.

Roddenberry welcomed their inventiveness and ideas, but he had to put huge amounts of work into translating their concepts into shootable scripts for Justman to get on the stages at Desilu. Not all the authors understood or were comfortable with the process of weekly television, but most were content to bow to Roddenberry’s reworking of their originals (Harlan Ellison being the notable exception). After all, most reckoned, who knew
Star Trek
better than Gene Roddenberry?

Many of the initial basics of the show were driven by the realities of television production. As well as the time-saving transporter that ‘beamed’ the crew up and down from planets, it was deemed that the crew should predominantly visit Earth-like worlds (labelled Class-M planets) as then the production could avoid the need to put the show’s stars into bulky space suits every week. Additionally, although the opening mantra of the show promised voyages ‘where no man has gone before’, in the old
Star Trek
joke there always had to be someone there when they arrived (alien or human) otherwise there was no drama . . . The civilisations discovered far out in space would also often reflect those on Earth (whether it be Romans, Greeks, Chicago gangsters or Nazis) in order that viewers could relate. In his original 1964 pitch document, Roddenberry had called this the ‘parallel worlds concept. It means simply that our stories deal with planets and animal life, plus people, quite similar to
that on Earth. Social evolution will also have interesting points of similarity with ours. There will be differences, of course, ranging from the subtle to the boldly dramatic, out of which comes much of our colour and excitement. The “parallel worlds” concept makes production practical by permitting action-adventure science fiction at a practical budget figure via the use of available “Earth” casting, sets, locations, costuming, and so on . . . The “parallel worlds” concept tends to keep even the most imaginative stories within the general audience’s frame of reference.’ The truly alien would have a hard time holding the attention of a mid-1960s TV audience, or so executives and creatives alike believed. Roddenberry also had an ulterior motive for this propensity for Earth-like planets . . .

From the very beginning
Star Trek
was about exploring ‘strange new worlds’, but as it turned out, the strangest world the series would explore was 1960s America. As with Rod Serling before him, Gene Roddenberry wanted his stories to mean something, to contain some kind of social or political commentary, but to evade the attentions of nervous commercial sponsors and network censors he found a way to disguise his social commentary in science fiction stories of far future worlds.

Second only to Roddenberry in controlling the creative storytelling side of
Star Trek
was writer and story editor D. C. Fontana. She had briefly been Roddenberry’s secretary, but quickly became a writer on the new show, starting with the seventh episode of the first series, ‘Charlie X’. This was based on one of Roddenberry’s ‘springboard’ storylines titled ‘The Day Charlie Became God’. As with the second pilot, it was another story about a crewman attaining God-like powers. Fontana would go on to write several notable episodes of the series, but more importantly she quickly replaced the show’s initial story editor Steven W. Carabatsos in early 1967. She would go on to story-edit
The Animated Series
of 1973, contribute scripts to
The Next Generation
and
Deep Space Nine
, as well as various
Star Trek
spin-off projects, and co-write the post-
Star Trek
TV pilot
The Questor Tapes
(1974) with Roddenberry.

Supporting Fontana on the creative story side was John D. F. Black. He was the executive story consultant on the series, hired by Roddenberry after he won a Writers Guild Award for an episode of the series
Mr. Novak
. His role was to supervise the various freelance writers, monitor their work and get their scripts in on time and in suitable shape for Roddenberry’s review. Although Black didn’t write much for the series itself (in fact he contributed only a single episode, ‘The Naked Time’ – and its follow-up on
The Next Generation
, ‘The Naked Now’), he was crucial in shaping other writers’ work.

There was another Gene, writer–producer Gene L. Coon, who was a key authorial voice alongside Gene Roddenberry in the early codification of the
Star Trek
universe. Following the departure of John D. F. Black, who had difficulty dealing with Roddenberry’s constant rewriting, Coon became the key cre -ative force behind the development of
Star Trek
beyond Roddenberry’s original series concept, joining the series as producer after the initial thirteen episodes.

Like Roddenberry, Coon was an accomplished TV writer mainly on episodic Western series like
Have Gun, Will Travel
,
Wagon Train
and
Rawhide
. Also like Roddenberry he’d served in the military during the war, although his experience came from the Pacific theatre. From the middle of the first season to the middle of the second, Coon brought a strong streak of moral thought to the drama, something that defined many of the best and best-remembered
Star Trek
episodes. Coon directly scripted twelve episodes in all, more than any other writer, and he closely influenced many more.