“Space… the Final Frontier.” It’s a provocative phrase, isn’t it? The Final Frontier, the last great mystery of exploration. In 1966, one of the most popular television genres was western adventure -Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Rawhide, episodic stories about life on this particular romanticized frontier were everywhere. What’s a competitive show to do but take it a step further? Where do you go once the west has been thoroughly demystified? How about a Wagon Train to the Stars?
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That was the phrase that one Gene Roddenberry used when pitching a series concept to Desilu Productions that would go on to be Star Trek, the basis of a sixty year television franchise (and occasionally film too), that would have one of the greatest out-sized impacts of a cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century. Desilu green-lit the idea (founder Lucille Ball specifically) and the rest is history. Three seasons that struggled in the ratings but gained an enormous fan following, a short-lived animated follow-up a few years later, a film series launched a decade after the show ended revitalizing the franchise for a cascade of spin-off shows (more on them later), more movies and cultural extensions. Born out of a simple idea realized to its most thrilling potential.
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Of course there were several ideas that Roddenberry wanted to encapsulate with Star Trek. In addition to its sci-fi equivalent of a western premise mixed with a healthy dose of the naval fiction Roddenberry absorbed so much in his youth (C.S. Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower books in particular), he wished for it to represent a distinctly hopeful image of humanity’s future. The exploration at the heart of his story would not be a conquering narrative of manifest destiny but a voyage in pursuit of knowledge. The space-faring world of the twenty-third century would be a utopia of cultures and nationalities living in peace with and uplifting one another -the bigotries Roddenberry observed so closely in American society of the 1960s would have no place. And oppressive systems of inequality and monetary capitalism would be a thing of the past. It was an appealing conceit to many, especially in a time of such social and cultural upheaval as the late 1960s. And just as much it was a dubious prospect to the establishment powers Roddenberry was forced to work within. It never went as far as he might have liked (in some cases that was for the best) -but its dream was an immensely tantalizing one.
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It is a big part of why Star Trek is still alive today, and why, though it may be in a state of flux at the moment, I don’t think it will ever die. It is a wonderful crystallization of a future worth working towards and not in the surface-level sense of the space aliens or technology, the things which drive its worst fans in the billionaire tech bro world, but the ideals that it espouses and has apparently achieved. But it is also still alive because its universe is extremely rich for storytelling, its canvas an ideal space to explore concepts and allegories, parables and fantasies. There are endless avenues of imagination to it that may be matched only by that other science-fiction franchise with “Star” in the title. Yet against the foreign, mythological tenor of that counterpart, Star Trek’s open connection to our world, our problems, and our future is one of its greatest strengths. And it was there right at the beginning.
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In 2026, it is a hard thing to convince people, especially young people, to watch any piece of media from the 1960s let alone one as weird, corny, colourful, and ‘hippie’ as Star Trek. It’s only fitting that of all the installments the franchise has birthed that original series is the most tangibly dated. In its effects, sure. In some of its politics, certainly. But it just feels of a different calibre to anything in T.V. as subsequent generations have come to understand the form. Yet Star Trek is one of the most important shows in television history for a reason, and as someone who admittedly came to the original series quite late, after absorbing several other parts of the Star Trek universe, I can say that it is worth watching (and at only 80 episodes not a particularly hard watch to take on compared to other shows of its era, or other Star Trek shows even). For the elements that are goofy or problematic or slow there are just as many that are intriguing, thought-provoking or thrilling; and in all of these respects it can be quite fun.
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For the uninitiated, the original Star Trek is set in the middle of the 23rd century, roughly three hundred years from when the show was first produced. It takes place aboard the starship Enterprise, an exploratory vessel in the service of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets. The speech that plays over the opening titles makes clear its mission -exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life, and boldly going where no one has gone before. The Enterprise is manned by a mostly human crew, representing a mosaic of humanity, from the black communications officer Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) to the Asian helmsman Sulu (George Takei), a feisty Scottish engineer called Scotty (James Doohan), and by the second season a Russian navigator (notable in the context of the Cold War) called Chekov (Walter Koenig). The one alien aboard the ship is the science officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who is half Vulcan -an alien race notable for their pointed ears, abstinence from emotion, and religious adherence to logic and rationality. This personality often sees Spock framed in contrast to the sarcastic and curmudgeonly ship's doctor "Bones" McCoy (DeForrest Kelley). At the centre of it all though is the classically heroic ship's captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), who is at the heart of most of the new discoveries and adventures the Enterprise encounters. Each of these characters have real moments to shine throughout the show, but Kirk, Spock, and McCoy receive preferential treatment, making for a fun and engaging trio of personalities -Kirk evening out the extremes on either side of him while his particular friendship with Spock, the most fascinating character on the show, provides the series its soul. They are, frankly, an ideal pair of surrogates for the audience.
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It should be noted that within this premise the show is notable for its clichés as much as its hallmarks. And they are a major source of aging the show. Obviously the special effects, even remastered, are lame and corny -though it is a part of the show's charm. A lot of the aliens the crew encounter are very human in appearance, just with some make-up or minor prosthetics -if that at all. In one of the early episodes Kirk comes face to face with a "horrifying" creature called the Gorn, and the rubber suit of this lizard-man as it fights Kirk is still regarded as a joke by Star Trek fans. Kirk loses his shirt in that fight, which quickly became a trope of the show, alongside Shatner's penchant for over-acting and some ego that occasionally permeates the storytelling (Kirk is nearly always the one to solve the problem of the episode through either brawn or brains ...and at times libido as well). A frequent and very male-wish-fulfillment-fantasy aspect of the show was Kirk's habit of seducing or being seduced by just about any woman he meets in the course of the story. The show's overall attitude towards women is less than ideal -though those aboard the Enterprise do serve in ostensible equality to their male counterparts, their uniforms include short skirts, and certain individual depictions can feel like condescending tropes of the time. While the women met through exploration are presented often as sexually available temptations, whether Kirk succumbs or not. It very much speaks to the subtly misogynist horniness that seems to have motivated Roddenberry's hippie philosophy about women's lib and free love.
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More innocent tropes that Star Trek engaged with included the new worlds -limited by budget they often shot in similar locations or on sound stages with similar props and effects. Other times, Kirk and Spock will happen upon an alien world consumed by an aesthetic out of Earth history -whether a gangster planet or western planet or Nazi planet. And to drive home the danger of many of these worlds and new aliens, there would be a low-ranking officer -usually wearing a red shirt- who would be killed, to which McCoy might say some variation of "he's dead, Jim". "Beam me up Scotty", another catchphrase associated with the show was curiously never actually uttered in those terms ('beaming' being of course a convenient transportation technology to save on having to constantly show the ship landing). There were other things like computer malfunctions and a shocking number of god-like beings, and a lot of it was corny but in the right hands could be brilliant. One of Roddenberry’s best choices as a showrunner was to hire genre novelists as well as TV writers to help shape the show. These included Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend), Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), and Harlan Ellison, who wrote perhaps the best episode of the show, “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Of course in the context of writers I would be remiss not to mention D.C. Fontana, who looms large over Star Trek -a secretary turned story editor turned one of the show’s most reliable writers, who played a critical role in shaping the series’s tone.
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Fontana was also an example of the show practicing what it preached in terms of diversity, a theme it championed fairly early on. And Roddenberry, like Rod Serling before him on The Twilight Zone, was adamant about the show being a vessel of social commentary. Several episodes’ conflicts were designed as metaphors for social or moral issues of the times. “Balance of Terror” explores a very Cold War-adjacent type of conflict between great powers, “Space Seed” deals with themes on the anxieties around eugenics, “The Doomsday Machine” involves a parallel to nuclear weapons and the premise of ‘mutually assured destruction’, “A Taste of Armageddon” is a sobering critique of war, “Patterns of Force” had some astonishingly potent themes on fascism, and perhaps most prominently “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” bluntly addressed issues of racism. Additionally, most episodes were coloured by some smattering of Star Trek’s philosophy on progress, peace, diplomacy, and justice. A Vulcan pendant called an IDIC, developed largely as a marketing gimmick, has nonetheless resonated as an overarching theme for the franchise: “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”.
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Certainly that attention to diversity resonated -in a time when not a lot of mainstream television depicted minorities in appropriate or competent ways, characters like Uhura and Sulu were groundbreaking, especially to kids of their respective ethnic backgrounds -Nichols famously was persuaded to stay on the show by Martin Luther King Jr for this reason emphatically. Spock as well represented ‘the other’ extraordinarily, and Nimoy being Jewish he was sometimes cast as an avatar for that culture as well -his Vulcan hand salute paired with the immortal phrase “Live Long and Prosper” was even based on an old Jewish greeting. The show wasn’t always successful on these themes, especially where some stereotypes and coding came into play -the Klingons, an adversary alien civilization based aesthetically on the Mongols but contemporaneously representing the U.S.S.R, were one such example and often involved white actors playing the parts in brown-face. Such problems aside though, the heart of the show was in the right and forward-thinking place. It even got to make history in this arena -the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” featured what was for decades considered the first interracial kiss on television between Shatner and Nichols. Even under the plot conceit of the kiss being forced on them by alien captors, it caused shockwaves in a country where interracial marriage had only just been formally legalized and couplings were still a taboo in many areas. Star Trek was never perfect on any of the issues it addressed, but on its surface and in several of its demonstrated precepts it stood quite strong for its political values.
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When episodes weren’t relating these kind of messages (or sometimes when they were) the series would also indulge in curious science-fiction thought experiments and hypotheticals, of that kind that drove many an old sci-fi novel or more directly inspired episodes of The Twilight Zone. Stories that speculated on a sci-fi concept like time travel, alternate universes, alien characteristics, or artificial intelligence (oh, to the days when it was a far-fetched concept…) and extrapolated on curious scenarios out of them: the ethical implications of changing the past, the dangers of great supernatural power, what happens when an A.I. grows past the capacity to control it. And confronting many unique sci-fi forms of madness or egomania. The show’s imagination could sometimes be limited when it came to playing out some of its fantastical scenarios, but then even some of the goofier ideas that didn’t make for good episodes made for interesting experiments -what if your good and bad halves were split into separate entities for example.
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Occasionally the show took time to build its universe out -sometimes the Enterprise would visit a Federation outpost or interact with another starship. It never went back to Earth in its own time but it still created an image of what this next step in human civilization looked like, how that world functioned -and there was some comfort in that aspects of it weren’t too alien. Of course there were aliens, even a few recurring alien races the series chose to showcase. The Klingons, with their warrior culture and nefarious tendencies. The Romulans, Ancient Rome-inspired cousins to the Vulcans though militaristic and expansionist. A couple lesser-seen but visually striking aliens included the blue-skinned Andorians with great antennas poking out of their white hair, and the green-skinned Orions -represented in this series purely through their women as exoticized sex objects. But the aliens that were the most developed beyond the surface were the Vulcans through episodes like “Amok Time” and “Journey to Babel” which looked at their culture and more intriguingly Spock’s relationship to it. Spock’s backstory and half-human conflicts are some of the most engaging material in the show on the occasions it comes up. Character development was not generally a priority of Star Trek (as it wasn’t on most shows of that era), but Spock, and also Kirk, sometimes got really strong bits of it that helped define them both within the context of the show and outside of it. And no surprise, those personal elements made for some of the better work that Nimoy and Shatner were able to express.
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And how about that work? After a failed pilot that resulted in a recast of virtually everyone but Spock, the first season of Star Trek wound up being pretty strong. After getting past some memorable growing pains with episodes like “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “The Naked Time”, and “Charlie X”, the season produced several highlights of the show. “Miri” depicts a world governed by immortal children. “The Corbomite Maneuver” features a mysterious alien testing the Enterprise. “Balance of Terror” hones in on a dramatic stand-off between Kirk and the Romulans. “Shore Leave” follows a series of campy adventures on a world where fantasies come to life. “The Squire of Gothos” is this show’s best version of the godlike being toying with Kirk and his crew. “Space Seed” confronts the theme of genetic engineering, the episode that introduces one of the franchise’s most enduring villains Khan -played by a delightful Ricardo Montalban. “A Taste of Armageddon” drives home the show’s best anti-war theme. And “The City on the Edge of Forever”, a time travel episode, is unusually harsh and moving in its blunt theme on the integrity of history against a rarely tangible Kirk romance.
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Season two opens with “Amok Time”, which tests Kirk and Spock’s relationship through the latter’s cultural mating ritual. “Mirror, Mirror” explores the concept of a mirror universe to great fun for the whole cast. “The Doomsday Machine” makes for one of the show’s most timely and potent allegories on the Nuclear Age. “Catspaw” is a lot of fun, the series’ only Halloween episode. “I, Mudd” centres on a planet of androids run by a con man and features some fun acting from the whole ensemble. “Journey to Babel” is a diplomatic murder mystery couched in Spock’s family drama. “The Trouble with Tribbles”, an ideal gateway episode and one of the most famous, is probably the best demonstration of the show’s comedy. And “Patterns of Force”, the Nazi episode, actually works pretty well at depicting the ultimate futility of Nazi philosophy -of all episodes it perhaps has aged like wine.
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The second season ended however on an episode that was a backdoor pilot for another show, representative perhaps of declining ratings. But the cult fanbase was powerful, and (with Roddenberry’s encouragement) a letter-writing campaign saved the show from cancellation -one of the first examples of fan culture being a driving force in popular entertainment. Unfortunately though, the third season is widely agreed to be the weakest, with several quite bad episodes beginning with the notorious “Spock’s Brain” and including a very poorly thought-out Native-American episode, a run-in with exhausting space hippies, and a horribly sexist episode for a series finale -the show being successfully canceled this time around. But there are still fun and entertaining moments throughout and some better episodes. “The Tholian Web” is a neat execution of a concept of two dimensions existing in space simultaneously. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, for how blunt it may feel today, is a decent examination of the senselessness of racism. And “All Our Yesterdays”, the episode intended to have been the finale, traps Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on an alien planet in different timelines and gives them some last solid material to work with.
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Star Trek’s then unprecedented fan popularity refused to let it die of course. It was syndicated and remained a marketing success. The very first fan conventions were nurtured by Star Trek’s acolytes; fan fiction became quite popular notably among female fans (Kirk and Spock obviously were one of the genre’s first “ships”), and Roddenberry played a part in encouraging all of this. In 1973, Star Trek was brought back in the form of a Saturday morning animated series, that is very of its time in its goofy, extremely limited animation. But it brought back most of the cast and went a little further with elaborate alien designs within the new medium. It lasted a short two seasons that could perhaps fulfil the “five-year mission” of the show’s opening statement (though for a while it was not considered canon). It’s a nifty little oddity that is charming to watch, though its only essential episode is “Yesteryear” which again centres on Spock’s backstory and a vital moment from his childhood.
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This show was canceled as well, but the fan momentum for Star Trek continued. And then in 1977, a little movie called Star Wars broke every box office record, and looking to capitalize on a space trend, Paramount found it had just the right intellectual property in its pocket, and one with a built-in devoted fanbase. The Star Trek film series that lasted from 1979 to 1991 is what really catapulted the franchise back to relevance and set the stage for everything that has followed. Gone were the dated and cheesy special effects -with the emergence of CGI, the spaceships and worlds could look more real. With advances in make-up effects the aliens could feel more alien -notably, the Klingons got a complete redesign that mostly did away with their Orientalist appearance. Combining these attributes with some of the charms of that cast and their history worked wonders, and for decades after made them more accessible. My first exposure to Kirk and his Enterprise crew came through these movies as I know it did for others. Maybe it is a lot to convince someone nowadays to watch a show from the 1960s that looks and feels like it. It is easier to get them to watch a movie blockbuster from the 1980s that doesn’t show its age nearly as much.
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It was a rocky start. Gene Roddenberry, for as inspired a visionary as he was, was not a particularly good storyteller; and he was effectively handed the reigns for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which wound up being a heady story about the Enterprise investigating a mysterious entity threatening Earth. It had some great talent behind it including Oscar-winning director Robert Wise, and 2001’s Douglas Trumbull handling the special effects. But its pacing is notoriously sluggish, its performances rather underwhelming, its costuming outright bizarre, and the story though interesting would make for only a modestly appealing episode of this series stretched to feature length. Its structure is reminiscent of the show when a new approach for the new medium was required. The movie performed well enough to warrant a sequel three years later though, and under the stewardship of producer Harve Bennett and director Nicholas Meyer (with Roddenberry rather sidelined), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan set a new high watermark. Bringing back Khan in a Moby Dick-inspired confrontation with Kirk whilst diving deeper than ever before into Kirk’s own character-his insecurity about aging and inability to face death specifically, the movie is still widely regarded as the best Star Trek film and for good reason. Nimoy had only agreed to do the movie on the condition he be killed off, having grown tired of the Spock character and his typecasting, and got one of the most famously heartfelt death scenes of the ‘80s for it. But he was rejuvenated by the project and thus came back for the third film, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock -albeit in the role of director for most of it. This film follows directly on the heels of the last, and while it was regarded as a disappointment, I still say it is quite a fun film, with Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon villain and a little bit more action allowed for the supporting characters of the story in their effort to bring Spock back to life -which they do at the end at the cost of the Enterprise.
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Nimoy stayed at the helm for the next film, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home -a time-travel fish-out-of-water adventure story in which the crew travel back to then contemporary San Francisco to bring some humpback whales to their time in order to fend off an Earth-threatening alien probe with their echolocation. Probably the weirdest premise for a Star Trek movie, but it really works wonderfully in a very fun and mostly lighthearted comedy that again makes stupendous use of the ensemble. This was the highest-grossing of any of the Star Trek movies, ensuring its cultural staying power, but this was not the case for its follow-up. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier saw Shatner assume the director’s chair for a story about an extremist hijacking the Enterprise in an effort to find God at the centre of the universe. Markedly more expensive than its predecessors, it is an awkward movie to say the least, de-emphasizing the crew’s supporting characters whilst languishing in Shatner’s ego through tonal whiplash and a misguided underwhelming conceit. It is still often regarded as the worst Star Trek movie. Still, they got one last feature and were able to go out on a high by returning to one of the franchise’s signature wells -allegory. Pitched as “what if the Wall came down in space”, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country explores a diplomatic crisis amidst peace negotiations between the Federation and the Klingons, bringing to the fore issues of prejudice (particularly from Kirk) against the winds of political and societal change. It is a rather excellent movie that potently reckons with these themes that fit extraordinarily well both the post-Cold War context of the time and these characters and their adventures finally moving on. Also it’s got a great Christopher Plummer performance as the villain. A very worthy final note for a show that began twenty-five years prior.
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