Star Trek: The Original Series

Dear Reader,

I had a hard time deciding which series I was going to write about first, so I decided to do it chronologically, so here we are. I almost wanted to go with the Next Generation and do this series last. I hope some people understand why I’d feel that way, but anyway, let’s go forward.

A little background. The original series (TOS) debuted in the 60s, at the height of golden age Sci Fi. The first season and especially the first few episodes are really like their times. So if you’ve never seen trek before, I highly suggest at a minimum you start with the latter half of season 1. Especially the pilot, it feels like you’ve travelled in time back to the 60s. While if you watch most other episodes it’s like you’re only going back to the 80s-90s (despite being made in the 60s).

I don’t know the details, but, as far as I know, there was a lot of friction between CBS and Gene Roddenberry. I am too lazy to research this stuff, but there are at least some documentaries on Netflix, and I’m sure you can get a lot from wikipedia and such. Anyway, according to my understanding, Roddenberry had an idea for a show that was supposed to be humans that have moved beyond the problems we have now. But, just like we discovered with cancer in the 1980s, getting the answers to our current questions leads only to more later. So going out into the universe has created even more questions and just exploration of brand new mysteries and concepts, whatever truth may be out there. Also (and probably for this reason), the show was fairly progressive with its casting of women and people of color. It is so progressive, in fact, is why the casting is more progressive than a lot of modern television.

Anyway, this conflict is why the first episodes suck. CBS wanted more of what was considered Sci-fi back then with rockets and deceptive alien races. Roddenberry wanted things more like Spock (who isn’t even in the episode), the (half) Vulcan who’s beyond emotions and a nearly perfect calculating machine.

So, now I will go on to the cast. Because that’s the most important part of Star Trek. Except for some of Voyager and some of Deep Space 9, the show is a monster-of-the-week thing, just like the first few seasons of the X-Files. Well, this series has a problem on that front, and you can see it in how the characters are written. They are incredibly inconsistent from the 1st to the 2nd season. They smooth out a bit once you get there. They are mostly decided by the late 1st season (though not entirely)/2nd season, and the series figures out what it wants to be by then. So I’m gonna describe it from then.

The two biggest characters are Kirk and Spock. Kirk is very emotional and is an embodiment of masculinity. He always stands up for the crew and right thing. He may not take the safest, easiest way to get to the right place, but he always ends up there. A problem that’s pretty obvious is that there are a lot of 60s values channeled through him, especially how women are treated.

Spock is nothing like that. He and Kirk agree usually on the end point and idea, but they hardly ever arrive there by the same means. Leonard Nimoy also added the Vulcan salute, which he got from Judaism. He is also physically superior and has a special trick to instantly incapacitate an enemy, and he is able to instantly evaluate something (like how long it will take a towel to dry or whatever). The Vulcans aren’t emotionless machines who operate only on logic, but they feel them intensely. However, they have decided to suppress them and cultivate their logic so that they can move beyond their problems. If I sound a bit repetitive now, it’s because the Vulcans are supposed to be an extreme example of logic over emotion that goes into contrast with the Klingons (more on them later).

So why are these two characters important? Because they represent all the thematic elements in the series. Every problem can be approached with the appropriate amount of empathy, understanding, thinking and resolution. Force is never needed to resolve 

Okay, there are a few other minor characters. First is Bones, the ship’s doctor. He really doesn’t like what he sees as Spock’s lack of emotions because he sees it as a lack of empathy. It is somewhat of an antiquated thought that machines can’t care about things. The emotion is carried on a little bit to the early seasons of The Next Generation. The other three characters that we see a decent amount is Uhura, Checkov and Scotty. None of them really do much or get much characterization. And as much as I said the characters are important, Kirk and Spock are most of the show, and if you see a random book that isn’t one of those five who wears a red shirt and goes on an away mission, they’re going to die from space enemy. That’s the source of jokes about red shirts.

Okay, I want to talk about the technology. Each Star Trek series handles technology in an interesting way. TOS, in retrospect, is the least interesting. But taken into the context of its origins, it’s the most interesting because it takes a ton of tropes and turns them on their heads. The transporter, originally used because they didn’t have the budget to show rockets going up and down from planets, turns into its own thing. What does it say? Well, first off, there’s no longer this great consumption of resources. A rocket, especially a re-usable golden-age-sci-fi one, is all about mankind’s domination over nature. Humans are able to overcome gravity by burning a lot of resources. A transporter means mankind is working in harmony with the forces of the universe.

In line with that is all the offensive weaponry. The starship has what they call the phasers, and people carry around phasers too. Uh, don’t think about it too much. Anyway, both of these are thought of and used both for their ability to destroy as their ability to wound, incapacitate or help (for example to destroy a door that’s in the way).

The next item is the communicator. It’s basically a glorified walkie-talkie that works over vast distances. It isn’t innovative because the radio’s an easy concept for a generation that came right after WW2. However, everyone who goes away on a mission has one. It’s a nice step to show that everyone on a starship is valued (uh, except those red shirts apparently).

The last thing I want to talk about is the computer. Like the other inventions, it changes a lot from series to series (and that’s why I talk about them). The computer can do calculations faster and better than Spock, but it’s also capable of inferences and answering most any question. Such as, if we do this, and they do that, what will be the outcome? Some things to laugh about because this was made in the 60s is some of the hilariously dated technology. The computer prints things on tapes (because somehow they could envision this all but not the transistor or lasers), and people have to fill out forms on clipboards.

Okay, finally, probably the traditionally most important part, the plot. Nothing up until now describes what actually happens in the stories, just the background. Well, the plot isn’t particularly present. The stories are at most 2-parters, but the vast majority are one-offs. The closest thing you can see is the conflict between the Federation and the Klingons. Also there are the Romulans.

The Klingons are basically what the Federation isn’t. There are two ways to see them (in TOS). They are either the space soviets, or they’re the opposite of the Vulcans. They are very aggressive and imperial. One example is season 1, episode 26. The Klingons arrive and declare the planet Organia and its inhabitants theirs because they arrived with force. They are the stronger, so therefore they are the winners. The Federation arrive and stand in contrast. Their message is that Organia has to side with them, to give them a choice, because to not side with the Federation is to lose their ability to choose. So you can see that’s kinda bullshit, but the only two choices are either some form of distant colonialism or brutal military oppression. I’m not going to go into the details of what happens in the episode, but that’s the quintessence of the Klingons in the original series.

The Romulans are a brief side-plot. They are distantly related to the Vulcans, so the impact of their appearance (after a hundred year pause where they disappeared into their own space) is that it stokes tensions in the Federation against Spock because he might be secretly one of them. It’s an episode about racism, much like the whole concept of races because a singular thing (oh man, am I gonna have fun with this concept when we get to Deep Space 9).

Okay, so that really doesn’t answer the question either what the story of Star Trek is. I hope you’re beginning to get the point, but I’m gonna talk more about the individual episodes. TOS is known as kinda hilarious for the stupid hijinks and plots. There’s the nazi planet, there’s the gangster planet, there are the space hippies, there’s the mining because of space capitalism planet, there’s the Greek gods planet, etc. A lot of them.

Devil in the Dark (mining for space capitalism) is the first one I’m going to talk about. Kirk and Spock go down to a mining colony that’s having trouble. They want to figure out and resolve the problem. A rock monster attacks and kills a few of the crew. But Kirk, when confronted with it, doesn’t kill it after he has wounded it. Instead, he convinces Spock to mind meld with it (another Vulcan super power) and find out what it wants. It turns out that it’s protecting its eggs in a really long spawning cycle. The miners, in their zeal to hit their quotas and sell enough rocks, were killing the eggs and encroaching on the species’ habitat. It’s not a particularly innovative message, but it’s more nuanced than what I would expect from 60s television. However, the message is clear: problems need not be resolved with relentless greed or aggression lest there be nothing left besides us. Remember, this was created during the Cold War when the desire to defeat the Soviets was greater than any concept of conserving what we have on Earth or caring about diversity.

I think I’ve said all I wanted to about TOS. I could analyze more episodes or discuss the general messages, but TOS isn’t that great of a show. It was innovative and amazing for its concepts and because it asked questions about the universe that weren’t Heinlein or War of the Worlds. It also opened up the possibilities for later shows (and maybe when I’ve watched the first two seasons of Discovery, I can talk about why it isn’t really Star Trek for me). The show has lots of flaws, including kinda boring or repetitive plots. But it showed that there was so much potential out there for people to explore.

With all the other series I will end the post by suggesting some episodes. I have a harder time with that because I like most of the episodes about the same, but here are some of my favorite: Season 3, Episode 10: for the world is hollow and I have touched the sky. I like it because it’s about compassion in a way that predicts a lot of future sci-fi plots about computers protecting humans from themselves. Season 3, episode 5, and the children shall lead is kinda fun and funny in a campy way. Season 3, episode 7, is there in truth no beauty? is one of my favorite, and I’ll have a hard time writing a concise summary. It’s contemplative and takes one of the few breaks the series gets from humanoid aliens.

Most of what I will call the worst aren’t really too bad (exceptions being the first season), but they are kinda stupid. One is season 2, episode 25, the omega glory, where the big reveal is basically ‘but it was earth all along’. Both the pilot (the cage) and the first real episode (where no man has gone before) are both pretty bad and unenjoyable. Surprisingly, the last episode isn’t bad.

Anyway, until next week (or whenever I get around to The Next Generation)!