A Brief Guide to Star Trek Read online

  Brian J. Robb is a writer and biographer whose previous books have included a New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biography of Titanic star Leonardo DiCaprio; Screams & Nightmares, the definitive book on horror director Wes Craven; Counterfeit Worlds, exploring the life and work of Philip K. Dick; and a series of acclaimed film star biographies. For over ten years he was the managing editor of The Official Star Trek Magazine.

  Recent titles in the series

  A Brief Guide to Secret Religions

  David Barrett

  A Brief History of Angels and Demons

  Sarah Bartlett

  A Brief History of Roman Britain

  Joan P. Alcock

  A Brief History of the Private Life of Elizabeth II

  Michael Paterson

  A Brief History of France

  Cecil Jenkins

  A Brief History of Slavery

  Jeremy Black

  A Brief History of Sherlock Holmes

  Nigel Cawthorne

  A Brief History of How the Industrial Revolution Changed the World

  Thomas Crump

  A Brief History of King Arthur

  Mike Ashley

  A Brief History of the Universe

  J. P. McEvoy

  His Finest Hour: A Brief Life of Winston Churchill

  Christopher Catherwood

  A BRIEF GUIDE TO

  STAR TREK

  BRIAN J. ROBB

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2012

  Copyright © Brian J. Robb 2012

  The right of Brian J. Robb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-84901-514-1

  eISBN 978-1-84901-822-7

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher

  Books published by Running Press are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or email special [email protected].

  US ISBN 978-0-7624-4439-7

  US Library of Congress Control Number: 2011933252

  E-book ISBN 978-1-84901-822-7

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing

  Running Press Book Publishers

  2300 Chestnut Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19103-4371

  Visit us on the web!

  www.runningpress.com

  For Paul Simpson,

  whose valuable feedback and Star Trek brainstorming sessions

  helped immensely to focus and shape my thinking.

  Contents

  Introduction: The Storytellers

  Chapter 1 Evolution: Star Trek Creator

  Gene Roddenberry

  Chapter 2 First Flight: The Two Star Trek Pilots

  Chapter 3 Where No One Has Gone Before:

  Star Trek’s First Year

  Chapter 4 Too Short a Season: Consolidating Star Trek

  Chapter 5 Timeless: The Birth of a Franchise and Fandom

  Chapter 6 Persistence of Vision: The Original

  Cast Movies

  Chapter 7 Far Beyond the Stars: The Next Generation

  Chapter 8 Future’s End: The Next Generation Movies

  Chapter 9 New Ground: Deep Space Nine

  Chapter 10 Business as Usual: Voyager

  Chapter 11 Yesterday’s Enterprise: Enterprise

  Chapter 12 Hollow Pursuits: Unmade Star Trek

  Chapter 13 Future Imperfect: Star Trek (2009)

  Chapter 14 Legacy: Can Star Trek Live Long and Prosper?

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  The Storytellers

  ‘The job of Star Trek was to use drama and adventure as a way of portraying humanity in its various guises and beliefs. Star Trek is the expression of my own beliefs using my characters to act out human problems.’ Gene Roddenberry

  Whether you are relatively new to Star Trek, having enjoyed the J. J. Abrams blockbuster movie from 2009 or the sequel, or a fan of the show who’s been following the various series and movies since the US debut of the original in 1966, it is clear that this iconic television show that struggled through its first three years on air has – to adapt the worlds of the Vulcan Spock – ‘lived long and prospered’.

  The phenomenon of Star Trek has been much studied, from features in the popular media and in-depth academic analysis to fan commentary and internet flame wars. The forty-five-year history of the ‘franchise’ has been dissected every which way in an attempt to discover the reasons for its success, longevity and cultural impact – why has Star Trek been so long-lasting when other science fiction TV series have fallen by the wayside, and why have its various iterations on screens large and small been so popular?

  This is not an academic tome, but a critical cultural history of Star Trek. It’s an in-depth look at how the various series and movies were made, the creative forces driving them, what their cultural impact was and what it all means. The book will examine how Star Trek changed through the decades and how it perhaps eventually failed to change enough with the times to escape ossification and irrelevance, requiring a dramatic re -invention to save it. It will also look at what the future might be for the Star Trek concept, assess what the series’ impact has been on viewers, and consider the unstoppable growth of Star Trek fandom.

  Star Trek now spans five distinct television series (six, if you include the often overlooked early-1970s Star Trek: The Animated Series) and eleven movies, from 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture to J. J. Abrams’ 2009 reinvention, which has led to a new series of movies to take the franchise through the next decade and maybe beyond.

  While many have pointed to the way Star Trek has reflected and critiqued the ethical, social and philosophical issues of our times and attempted to depict progressive gender, class and racial representations – so offering a hopeful and positive vision of the future of humanity – the secret of the success of the series is much simpler: it’s all down to great storytelling.

  The genius of Gene Roddenberry in creating Star Trek was to tackle those serious and important issues through well-told science fiction action-adventure tales that appealed to a mass audience. It was the unusual stories and unforgettable characters that first attracted curious television audiences in the 1960s, while the forward-looking ideas presented by the series turned many of those viewers into lifelong fans.


  Legend elevates Roddenberry – known to fans as the Great Bird of the Galaxy – to the status of sole creator of Star Trek. However, while his important role as the instigator of the series and author of its concept should not be undervalued (three times, no less: in its original 1960s incarnation, its reinvention as a series of movies and its return to television in the 1980s), Roddenberry himself wasn’t necessarily the most successful Star Trek storyteller. In fact, Star Trek has enjoyed more success when under the control of other storytellers, as this book sets out to demonstrate.

  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.

  Note on Titles Usage

  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 Serie
s (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)

  Chapter 1

  Evolution: Star Trek Creator

  Gene Roddenberry

  ‘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.