Star Trek: More Motion Pictures

Star Trek vs. Star Wars is a silly, undignified playground debate, like Nintendo vs. Sega, and the idea that one franchise can be held to be objectively better than the other when they’re really very different beasts which aren’t easy to compare and just happen to share a sci-fi aesthetic and misguided decisions by J.J. Abrams in common is ridiculous.

On the other hand, if you were having this argument specifically about the movies, then there’s certainly been more to talk about on the Star Trek side of things than Star Wars until Disney started their milking of the Star Wars legacy. That would be particularly true if you were having that playground argument in, say, the late 1980s to early 1990s – the sort of era when I was having this conversation on school playgrounds, in other words.

Whilst the original theatrical Star Wars movies ended up telling a closed story, with Return of the Jedi definitively ending the story and ruling out any possibility that the beastly Emperor Palpatine would ever menace the galaxy again, Star Trek had been an open-ended episodic series of one-off stories ever the original TV show; this was advantageous when it came to making sequels, because you could always just say “Here’s another adventure!” and it would not feel incongruous, because these were characters who were made to go from story to story, not ones whose tales were so inextricably bound with a particular story that once that tale ends it feels like their business is done.

So it was that, before the prequel trilogy brought Star Wars back into cinemas, Star Trek could boast double the number of movies. Of course, there was absolutely no way it would have gotten that far had the franchise repeated the weird, wonderful, beautiful, but astonishingly uncommercial and sedate experiment which was The Motion Picture. There would indeed be sequels, but the sequels would need to be different. And indeed, they were – very, very different indeed, both from The Motion Picture and from each other…

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Back on the original five-year mission, the Enterprise encountered the Botany Bay – a slower-than-light generation ship, and a relic of the devastating Eugenics Wars that ravaged Earth in the 1990s. Its cryogenic cargo was a brace of the genetically uplifted superhumans that were the misguided product of that terrible era, and their leader was Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán), former dictator of a wide swathe of the planet. Khan and his cronies attempted to take control of the Enterprise, aided by Lt. Maria Givers, who had fallen in love with Khan due to the combination of his manipulative abilities, her tradwife fetish, and her fascination for historical strongman dictators. Khan, Givers, and the rest of the antique ubermensch were exiled to Ceti Alpha V – but some years later one of the planets of the Ceti Alpha system exploded, altering the orbits of all the rest and rendering what was once a viable planet for them to live on indefinitely into a hostile wasteland.

Years later, the USS Reliant, commanded by Captain Terrell (Paul Winfield) and Commander Chekov, has been tasked with finding a lifeless planet to test the Genesis Project, a rapid terraforming technology developed by the mother-and-son team of Carol and David Marcus (Bibi Besch and Merritt Butrick) which has the scope of turning a lifeless planet into a paradise with astonishing rapidity – but which would wipe out the ecosystem of any inhabited world it was deployed on. When Terrell and Chekov beam down to what they believe to be Ceti Alpha VI, they fall into the hands of Khan and his goons – and with Givers dead, Khan is in a lousy mood. On learning of the Genesis project – and discovering that Carol Marcus is an old flame of Kirk’s and David is his son – Khan sees not only the opportunity to make himself the terror of the galaxy using this new superweapon but also a chance to get revenge on his old adversary.

Meanwhile, Chekov is not the only Enterprise veteran who’s gone up in the world; Spock is now Captain, and is tasked with training up a new crew of cadets, including Lt. Saavik (Kirstie Allie), his Vulcan padawan. Taking the ship out on a training mission, he’s only too happy to bring along Admiral Kirk, who’s managed to get himself assigned to give the ship an inspection so he can tag along for the ride. After receiving a bizarre message from Carol Marcus objecting to Starfleet demanding handover of the Genesis project, supposedly on his orders – orders Kirk knows he never gave and Starfleet Command disavow – Kirk takes control of the mission and heads for the Regula I space station, where the project is underway. Little does he or Spock realise that they are about to face The Wrath of Khan…

Star Trek: A Picture That Moved Me

Somewhere deep in Klingon space, a vast energy cloud travels, at the centre of which is some manner of object of impossible power – an object known only as V’Ger. Starfleet monitoring stations intercept emergency signals from the Klingon ships sent to intercept it – ships which the entity destroys as though they were nothing. Calculating the entity’s course, they realise that it’s headed directly for Earth; even if V’Ger’s intentions are wholly benign, the mere arrival of a power field that vast and intense in the Solar System could have cataclysmic consequences.

As in the era of Star Trek: The Original Series, starship-grade craft are comparatively rare. (“Starship” is not a synonym for “spaceship” – it means a spaceship of especially high capabilities.) In fact, the only one which is in position to intercept is the Enterprise – which has been undergoing a comprehensive refit process in Earth orbit. Prior to V’Ger’s detection, the plan had been for Captain Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) to take command of the ship and take it out on a shakedown mission – but this is a big crisis for a new captain to handle. Therefore, Admiral Kirk has persuaded Starfleet command to let him step in and reassume his old role as captain of the Enterprise – bumping Decker down to First Officer.

Soon the entire band has got back together, combining the experience they had honed on their five-year mission with the enhanced capabilities of the newly refitted Enterprise and the fresh perspective of their new crew members. Everyone will need to work together if they are to unravel the enigma of V’Ger – which means that Decker will need to navigate some difficult emotions. For one thing, he needs to wrangle his resentment at Kirk usurping his command; for another, he needs to deal with the return of an old flame – Lt. Ilia (Persis Khambatta), the ship’s Deltan navigational officer, assigned to replace personnel lost in a transporter accident. Matters only get worse for Decker when Ilia is abducted and replaced with an android replica by V’Ger to act as a probe for its investigation of the Enterprise…

Star Trek: the Original Shambles

Kirk and the USS Enterprise were on a five-year mission on The Original Series; my watchthrough of the show has been more of a three-month errand, and now here I am at the end. After spending its first season gradually establishing the parameters of its universe, the show’s second season was something of a peak, Gene Roddenberry, D.C. Fontana, and other regular writers bringing a greater degree of continuity to bear, deepening and enriching their mythology, and getting the most out of the characters. Towards the end of the second season, however, declining ratings had the executives at NBC contemplating cancelling the series.

The weren’t prepared for the passion and determination of modern fandom, and the willingness of the Trek fanbase to mount an energetic letter-writing campaign to try and save the show. To be fair, they couldn’t have been prepared; Star Trek fandom was among the first modern fandoms, if not the first. Sure, there’s ample past precedents for similar audience outcries, and for fanbases for particular fictional properties becoming quite organised – look at Sherlock Holmes, and how popular demand brought him back from the Reichenbach Falls.

Still, Star Trek fandom was something else – taking that sort of thing to the next order of magnitude. The Trek afficionados were a force to be reckoned with, and season 3 was the result, enjoying… a greatly reduced budget, and the graveyard slot on the schedule.

Huh. That doesn’t bode well. Still, surely the team would step up to the challenge by making a comeback episode which truly showcased the series at its best, right?

Star Trek: the Original Slash

You could make an argument that Star Trek wasn’t quite Star Trek in the early stretches of its first season. So many of the features we now regard as essential to the franchise – including ideas as central as the Prime Directive and the Federation – hadn’t really been worked out early on in the series, and only really coalesced quite late in that season. It wasn’t a bad start to the show, but it had its bumpier moments, because the series was still trying to figure out what it actually was.

By contrast, the second season of Star Trek: The Original Series was made with the benefit of hindsight, written by a team of writers who now knew that this was a universe where the Federation, Prime Directive, Klingons, Romulans, and whatnot were all part of the picture, and they were writing for a cast who now had a solid grasp of their characters and their mutual chemistry. It’s got some of the most memorable episodes of the series, but is it all it’s cracked up to be? The only way to find out is to watch.

First off is the episode that launched a thousand ships – in the slash fiction sense – Amok Time. It’s the one where Spock is horny due to Vulcan hormonal cycles, and there’s this Vulcan gal called T’Pring (Arlene Martel) who’s trying to get with Spock, and Spock doesn’t like it and Kirk’s not comfortable with it so Kirk and Spock do this ritual combat by hitting each other with big ornate club-axe thingies and tying each other up with little ropes until they’re all tired out and Spock feels enough of an emotional release to soothe his condition.

Yes, this is the episode which establishes the Vulcan condition of horny jail pon farr, where Vulcan dudes get an urge to bone down with someone they are psychologically bonded to so intensely that if they don’t resolve it they get a “blood fever” which causes them to die. It’s also the first time in the franchise we visit Vulcan itself, and the first time we really get an insight into Vulcan culture beyond Spock himself – it’s also where we first see the Vulcan salute and hear the “live long and prosper” catchphrase.

It was inevitable, given what a breakout character Spock was, that we’d get this sooner or later, but it’s still wild that it was arrived at in such an unabashedly horny on main way. An interesting aspect of the pon farr thing it’s that a hitherto-unknown feature of the Vulcan species which is a disadvantage for once. Season 1 kept going back to the “Spock has a secret Vulcan ability we haven’t found out about yet” well often enough to risk making him superhuman, so this is a welcome redressing of the balance.

Star Trek: the Original Sins (and Virtues)

Star Trek: The Original Series has an odd relationship to the rest of the franchise. On the one hand, there’s a constituency of viewers who simply choose to skip over it (and the Animated Series), and it’s not hard to see why; its aesthetic is much more rudimentary than the movie series, or The Next Generation and subsequent TV shows, for one thing. For another, the run of television from TNG to Deep Space Nine to Voyager to Enterprise is much closer to how we experience TV these days (in part because it played a big role in shaping that), with long-term storylines creating more of an expectation that you’d watch each episode in order.

In addition, those four shows also constitute a substantial block of TV which ran more or less continuously for far, far longer than The Original Series never did – even if you account for nobody watching Enterprise because it was a bit rubbish for most of its run, and in the course of this they have more or less burned themselves into the culture as firmly and deeply as The Original Series has. There was a time when Star Trek called to mind the bright colours of The Original Series, and there’s certainly a generation for whom it primarily still does, but there’s others for whom the 24th Century-based series is what they immediately think of, and that may be a big reason why Lower Decks is set in proximity to them.

The upshot of all this is that whilst The Original Series is the foundation the rest of Star Trek is based on, the subsequent franchise doesn’t use all those foundations. Some have dated poorly enough that they’ve been gently retired; some have been considered to be too goofy to be used outside of Lower Decks jokes; some are used extensively to this day. What I didn’t realise, until I decided to actually watch The Original Series systematically, is that this process of chopping and changing what Star Trek actually us was ongoing right from the start of the show.

See, I’ve never watched the original series all the way through previously. Back in the day, when I still watched broadcast television, I’d catch a random epsiode here and there if it happened to be repeated at a time I was watching, but I hadn’t actively sought it out. For this article, I’m going to take a look at season 1 of The Original Series, in the original transmission order, to revisit how the franchise introduced itself to audiences and established the parameters of what it was doing from the start.

Although The Cage, the original pilot episode, is now pretty famous, the way Star Trek was originally introduced to the world was via The Man Trap, not the first of the series to be filmed but selected to be the first episode to air. It’s the “salt vampire” episode, and is the first of many instances of the “sexy illusion disguises lethal danger” trope the series would wheel out over and over again, so it’s about as archetypal as Trek gets; its opening also puts the soap opera and science fiction elements of the show front and centre, since we’re introduced to Nancy Crater (Jeanne Bal) as an old flame from Dr. McCoy’s past, and within seconds of her appearing it’s effectively communicated to us that everyone perceives her slightly differently. There’s no coyness about the fact that she’s responsible for the deaths of crew members (two blueshirts and a yellowshirt) – the enigma here is what her deal is, and how the crew will end up sorting her out.

The Animated Frontier

It’s weird how thoroughly Star Trek: The Animated Series got flushed down the memory hole for a while, Gene Roddenberry and Paramount mutually deciding that the series wasn’t canon, and was not worth revisiting. In that 1990s era when Star Trek repeats were a regular fixture on the BBC schedules, The Animated Series never got a look in. When it aired in 1973-1974, it was the first significant chunk of new official Trek content since The Original Series got cancelled, and it actually won an Emmy; arguably, without that, you don’t get The Motion Picture, the movie series following on from that, and The Next Generation and its followups.

In more recent years, however, Paramount seem to have warmed to The Animated Series; they acknowledge it more, writers in new Trek series are making more references to it, and whilst there has not been a specific announcement that it’s canon again, it seems to be more or less be treated as such. Between DVD and Blu-Ray sets and the entire series being available for streaming (on Netflix in the UK, I guess it’s probably on Paramount+ in the US), it’s never been easier to dip into it. For this article, I’m going to do that – in part to offer my thoughts on the series itself, but also because I think it’s interesting to compare it to the current cartoon Star Trek offering, Lower Decks.

The first episode, Beyond the Farthest Star, pretty much sets up what to expect from The Animated Series. On the one hand, the animation is often a little rudimentary – there’s lots of shots where little beyond the characters’ mouths are moving, some use of silhouettes is used to cut corners, and where material can be recycled it is. All of these are sins of 1970s-vintage American TV animation, of course, but it’s still potentially off-putting.

That said, the episode also nicely showcases the possibilities of the new show. Thanks to the ample availability of footage from the original show to rotoscope, the animators are able to get the look of the returning cast down just fine. There’s also new characters. Lt. Arex, who replaces Chekov on the bridge because the production team didn’t want to shell out for Walter Koenig (James Doohan provides the voice for him) is a three-armed alien of a sort which it would have been difficult for 1960s-vintage practical effects to pull off, and the still shots in the episode depicting this astonishing alien ship are fantastic. Later, the episode The Time Trap depicts a council consisting of a large number of alien races – something it would have required a significant cast to pull off, each with separate makeup and prosthetic requirements to pull off using practical effects.

GOGathon: Point-and-Kirk Adventures!

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary casts you as Kirk, in command of the rest of the familiar Enterprise crew, setting its adventures somewhere in the vicinity of the original five-year mission. Originally released in 1992, the definitive version of the game is usually held to be the CD-ROM release, which made some minor changes (the Starfleet admiral who gives you your missions is now a woman), tuned up the sound effects and music (including more sound loops from the original series) and, perhaps most importantly, had voice acting from the original cast.

In fact, this game and its sequel (of which more later) represent the last Star Trek thing which Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Takei, Koenig, Nichols, and Doohan would all appear in together, and perhaps the greatest joy of the thing is how well it captures the tone of the original series – right down to Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov not really getting that many lines, Uhura enjoying a bit more spotlight thanks to her comms role, and most of the cast interplay taking place between Kirk, McCoy, Spock, and whichever redshirt you happen to have tagging along with you on a particular away team mission. (Hilariously, the redshirts all look the same, and whenever danger crops up in a mission the redshirt usually buys it first.)

In some ways, the game was very ahead of its time, since it presents an explicitly episodic point-and-click adventure experience. Each episode in the game is kept fairly short and simple, with the idea being that you can play through a single episode in a reasonable amount of time and enjoy the game in bite-size chunks. This certainly enables the game to present players with a wide range of scenarios without needing to weave them all into a single narrative, and enhances the sense that you’re playing through a lost season of the original show.

Star Trek: the Awesome Generation

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

I have to admit that I was mildly concerned about the new Trek movie. While I’ve never been immersed enough in the franchise to actually buy any DVDs or read any of the spin-off novels or study Klingon, I’ll happily watch it if it happens to be on TV – provided we’re not talking Enterprise or one of the Voyager episodes that doesn’t quite reach “so bad it’s good” territory and remains mired in “just bad” – and I’ll go along to see the films in the cinema.

The problem is, the whole Trek idea has seemed somewhat sickly of late, with both the movies and TV series running out of ideas. I personally hold the opinion that the biggest mistake Paramount made with the series was cancelling The Next Generation. Let’s leave Deep Space 9 out of the discussion for now, because what we tend to forget when we wear our gold-pressed latinum-framed rose-tinted sunglasses and gaze fondly back at DS9 was that it was never actually permitted to be the flagship show of the series; for pretty much the entire run it was being produced simultaneously with The Next Generation and Voyager. Perhaps, if it had been allowed to step up and take the place of The Next Generation, then DS9 would have taken the franchise down a very different path from the one it eventually chose.