"Staaardaaate!", my father would bellow on those 90s Saturday mornings to call us before the TV set as the intro of the next episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 9 (or some other spin-off) started on the screen. I usually answered the call, but sometimes I had something better to do. Star Trek was, like Dr Who, a series I have really wished to be a fan of, and never managed. On the surface, it had the potential to be everything I wanted from TV. The basic theme of a spaceship in a mission to explore the galaxies is not only incredibly cool in and of itself, but it can also lend itself to every genre I enjoy. War, adventure, drama, comedy, parody, survival horror, crime, or even western if needed, and of course, pure science fiction, with emphasis on either the science or the fiction part. And occasionally, the show contained these in traces. But not enough. And there was the low-budget atmosphere, a "made for TV" sense around it (this was a decade before series caught up with and then surpassed motion pictures in quality). Long story short, the TV show left me sympathetic, but lukewarm.
Then came the 2010 blockbusters movie remakes with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, which were a disappointment of another kind. They were not low-budget anymore, but they also didn't seem "Trekkian" either. Just science-fiction action movies that happened to feature a spaceship called USS Enterprise and officers named Kirk, McCoy, and Spock.
Still, my kids enjoyed them, and when I noticed that Netflix put the original 1966-1969 series in its offerings, I thought, well, let's show them some classics. And I'm glad I did that.
To my surprise and delight, the original series delivered on all the fronts its sequels (at least the ones I saw) did not. It made ventures into every genre mentioned above and more, and absorbed them seamlessly into its world. It also created a still-living cultural phenomenon, not to speak of its cult status, which very few TV shows, if any, managed to achieve.
But admittedly, it's a bit of an acquired taste for modern viewers, and this post is partly a modest attempt to make that acquisition easier. What strikes most viewers first (like five seconds in) is the special effects gap between Star Trek and Star Wars, the two seminal space-opera phenomena barely a decade apart. Whereas Star Wars was a decade ahead of its time in that respect, the stage set and scenery of Star Trek episodes, with their plywood buildings, plastic rocks, laughable costumes, big, colored buttoned control panels, remind the viewer of the TV of the fifties. The second hurdle to modern expectations was the acting style, the occasional, strangely long monologues or heated, dramatic, theatrical confrontations. After a cursory 10-minute experience, ST can be easily misjudged as a terribly outdated, although charmingly quaint, low-budget TV series that lacks most of what makes modern shows so great: no-cost-spared design and quality, overarching storylines, and complex character development. But after watching just a couple of full episodes, it's obvious that what you watch is not a leftover from the 50s or the poor man's sci-fi show, but a theater stage on screen. With well-written scripts and good, serious actors to play them, too. Their acting style - even the much maligned "shattnerisms" - was deliberate and fitting.
Theater wasn't the only older medium Star Trek creators successfully tapped into. Either Gene Roddenberry was a fun of old-school radio dramas, or this was just the way they made TV in the sixties, but the dramatic or suspenseful music pieces accompanying scenes were so well chosen that you could close your eyes and still have a sense of where the story is going, even when the characters are silent.
So much for the stylistics, now about the content.
The basic premise of the series is well-known. In the mid-third millennium, humanity has become extra-terrestrial and united under an intergalactic Federation. The story follows the starship USS Enterprise on its 5-year mission to explore new frontiers, to find new civilizations, and (in the most famous split infinitive in pop culture) "to boldly go where no man has gone before". The Enterprise's prime directive forbids interference with the development of other civilizations; its sole purpose is collecting data and expanding human knowledge.
The range of types of stories the ship's crew find themselves in encompasses everything the creative scriptwriters could come up with. Well-known story archetypes were implemented in multiple variations, and some episodes lay the blueprints of new archetypes for future works of fiction. Just to list the most common examples:
The treasure trove of stories about abandoned ships or remote research stations where the Enterprise has to solve the mystery of missing or deceased crews is inexhaustible.
Many times, some virus attacks the protagonists, and they must run against time to find the antidote.
More than once, they confront god-like entities, who occasionally regard them as either playthings for entertainment or means to some alien purpose, and other times try to steer them for their own benefit. The kinds of entities range from indestructibe robots, erstwhile biological species having evolved to near omnipotence, wholly unexplicable intangible intelligence, child-like entities demanding enetrtainment, to most amusingly and poignantly the actual Greek god, Apollo, who with his whole panteon left the old Earth behind once there followers died out, and as the last remaining member of his kind tries to survive by finding worshippers.
Time-travel with its paradoxes ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday"), or parallel worlds with diverging histories or personalities ("Mirror, Mirror"), each is too good an archetype to pass.
So are the classic whodunnits, see "The Conscience of the King", where a traveling troupe of actors leaves a trail of dead bodies behind them, or "Wolf in the Fold", where Scotty is framed for murders committed by an invisible entity.
In more trekkiesque stories, the crew gets unwillingly involved in local political conflicts, balancing different interests: survival, adherence to the prime principle of non-interference, and the well-being of the indigenous population. Often, the concrete problem the protagonists face prompts them, and the viewer, to ponder the meaning of life or the purpose of humanity in the universe. Many such episodes raise interesting questions that the creators intentionally left open-ended.
The stories blend a multitude of genres, with proportions varying from episode to episode. The spectrum of their tone ranges from comical (when a planet's society reforms itself to mirror 1920s gangster romantics based on a book written on the topic, carelessly left by a previous Star Feet officer) to sinister (when a scholar of 20th-century fascism inadvertently reintroduces it on another planet), but most of the time, it finds its natural equlibrium in adventure.
Star Trek broke the mold not only in the types of stories it presented on TV, but with the crew itself. Out of the ~400 crew members, the half-dozen recurring characters represent a remarkably diverse bunch for the 60s, in sex, race, and even species. Their second-tier comprises the whiskey-appreciating Scottish chief engineer, Scotty, the mesmerizingly beautiful (and daringly clad) black communications officer Uhura, the swashbuckling Japanese helmsman Zulu, and the very-Russian navigator, Chekov. The main protagonists are Doctor McCoy, scientific officer Spock, and (as first among equals) Captain James T. Kirk.
Spock from the planet Vulcan is an emotionless human-computer, a typical specimen of his species, who is often in conflict with the romantic, impulsive, deeply human McCoy, who, for many, is the heart of the series. The dynamic between the two is the main source of comedy in the series. Spock's silent amusement over his crewmates' very human follies, mostly expressed by dry remarks or by mere silence with comically highly raised eyebrows, is one of Star Trek's trademarks.
Jim Kirk, the most prominent character in the series, is, in some ways, the amalgam of his two friends. He is passionate and warm-hearted, but also assertive, cool-headed, and decisive under pressure. He is depicted as the ideal leader, who can tread the line between the different and equally valid interpretations of the challenging situations offered by Spock and McCoy: the logical and the humanist.
He is also occasionally rash, arrogant, and stubborn to a fault, as put on display in "The Deadly Years" in season 2, where a rapid aging process transforms the crew into walking mummies and Kirk to a cantankerous, thick-headed, argumentative old fool who can't recognise his own decline and refuses to give up command.
Kirk is also the main action character of the series, often flaunting his athletic (by 60s standards) naked upper body and dispatching opponents with well-aimed punches of a boxer, open-handed karate chops, or remarkably well-executed, even acrobatic jiu-jitsu moves. As is probably obvious from above, next to McCoy and Spock, Kirk also often serves as a source of comedy.
Despite the aforementioned diversity, the original Star Trek is a child of its time. The main protagonists are white men, and women serve the role of romantic interests more often than not - and the 60s dressing styles are joyfully bold. Kirk is, of course, a ladies' man; in the span of around sixty episodes, he must have engaged in passionate kissing with at least twenty women. But he isn't a lothario, rather he represents the chivalrous ideal of man of the era: confident, brave, gentle, and protective.
Kirk's romantic escapades always end with kissing (including the first interracial kiss on American TV!), not a step further. The only time I can think of sex being alluded to, with big smiles on the male characters' faces, is when, inspecting the unchanging, docile population of a planet, where physical contact is forbidden, a female member of the crew wonders aloud how the population keeps growing.
Beyond keeping a prudent lid on steamy subjects, there is a general sense of intentional innocence in the show. The action scenes, although frequent, resemble more derring-do adventure flicks than real violence. The crew's main weapon is the phasers, deliberately bland-looking, tiny devices that merely stun or unceremoniously disintegrate their target. No blasting sound effects, no horrible wounds or bodies flying in the air.
The Enterprise's challenges are solveable by science, wit or courage, and conflicts can often be resolved by clearing up misunderstandings and finding mutually beneficial outcomes. The characters often make remarks on history which reveal that wars of conquest, ideology, or religion are now consigned to humanity's barbaric past and looked upon with disdain. In the three seasons, the only reference to the religious beliefs of the crew is made when Kirk rejects the demand for worship of Apollo by declaring "Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate." And I think even this was made merely to cater for contemporary American sensibilities.
One can write a long list of reasons for Star Trek's enduring popularity. Its protean nature, the eternal allure of space adventures, its embrace of diversity, its commentary on sociology and history, and on and on. But at its core, what made Star Trek such an cult phemomenon I think is this aspiration to represent a better future, the possibilities that scientific discovery can offer combined with what is the best in us. Our curiousity, our capacity to cooperate, our compassion to our fellow human beings. Who says pop culture cannot promote lofty ideas?
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