Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969) Review

Seventy-nine episodes across three seasons, made for a network that cancelled it twice and a studio board that did not want to pay for it. A five-year mission that lasted three years and then became the most consequential piece of American television science fiction ever produced.

The 6 to 8 is a range because the show will not hold a single number. The production values are 1960s network television, the acting conventions belong to that decade, the sets are plywood and colored light, and none of that is a secret to anybody watching it now.

What survives is what the show was willing to put on screen. Genuine moral ambiguity, an argument in most episodes instead of a threat, and a captain who would act when the situation required somebody to act.

The honest way to watch it is to move back and not to drag it forward. Accept the era, accept the budget, and a considerable amount of it is very good. Refuse to, and the corniness is all that is left.

It Is 1966 and You Have to Meet It There

The dating is the first thing anybody notices and it is not one problem, it is four separate ones.

The production is cheap in ways that are visible in every episode. Planets are a cyclorama and colored gel, corridors repeat because there is one corridor, and the same rock formation at Vasquez Rocks stands in for most of the galaxy.

The acting conventions are theatrical by modern standards, because television in 1966 was made by people trained in theater and radio and played to a small screen with poor resolution. Shatner in particular is doing something that reads as mannered now and read as forceful then.

The gender politics are the hardest part to sit with and the film cannot be argued out of them. Uniform skirts, yeoman roles, Kirk’s habit with visiting women, and a great many lines that were unremarkable in 1966 and land badly now.

What the era gave in exchange is a writing culture that took ideas seriously. Network science fiction was cheap enough to be left alone, which meant a story about a war conducted by computer or a planet that had bureaucratized its own atrocities could get made without anybody asking whether it tested well.

The corniness and the substance are also the same property, which is the thing most modern viewers get wrong. A show that will stage a philosophical argument in a plywood corridor is a show that has decided ideas matter more than surfaces, and the plywood is the price.

Watch it as a document and it works. Watch it expecting a contemporary production and the first ten minutes will end the experiment.

Kirk Would Act

The captain is the reason the show still functions as drama and the comparison with what followed is unavoidable.

Kirk is reckless, impulsive, frequently wrong, and will make a decision. He violates the Prime Directive when he judges it necessary, argues with Starfleet, takes a landing party into situations he does not understand, and accepts the consequences afterward.

That willingness is a structural asset instead of a character trait. A protagonist who acts generates plot, and a protagonist who deliberates generates discussion, and an hour of television needs the first more than it needs the second.

The triangle is the other half of it. Spock argues the logical position, McCoy argues the human one, and Kirk decides, which gives the show a debate structure that works in any story regardless of what the planet of the week is doing.

That arrangement is doing something almost no ensemble manages, which is to make the argument the format instead of the content. The three of them can disagree about anything and the scene will hold, because the disagreement is the show.

Shatner’s performance is also better than its reputation once you account for the register. The pauses that became a joke are doing real work in several episodes, and the moments where Kirk is genuinely frightened are played without any of the bluster the impression rests on.

The contrast with Picard is the one I would draw hardest, and it is covered in the Next Generation review on this site. A philosopher in a command chair is an interesting character and a problem for a series that needs somebody to give an order.

Where It Came From

Nothing about the show is original and the borrowings are worth knowing, because they explain what it was trying to be.

Forbidden Planet is the direct ancestor and the debt is enormous. A starship crew, a captain and a ship’s doctor, a landing party, a mission of investigation, an artificial intelligence, and a visual grammar the series adopted more or less whole.

Roddenberry’s pitch was reportedly Wagon Train to the stars, which is exactly what the format is. An episodic anthology with a travelling regular cast, a new situation each week, and a structure borrowed from the Western and not from science fiction.

The Day the Earth Stood Still supplied the moral posture. A visitor who is more reasonable than the people receiving him, a warning delivered instead of a threat carried out, and the idea that the interesting question is how humans respond.

The written science fiction of the period is the other source and the series hired from it directly. Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad and Jerome Bixby all wrote episodes, which is why the best hours read like short stories instead of like television.

That hiring decision is the single most consequential thing the production did. A network drama that goes to working science fiction writers for scripts gets science fiction, and one that goes to television writers gets a Western with rubber masks.

The Twilight Zone is the model it is closest to in ambition, and the difference is the regular cast. Serling’s anthology could end anywhere and this show had to return the same people to the same bridge, which is a harder constraint and produced a different kind of story.

The Essential Episodes

The range from 6 to 8 is not hedging. The gap between the best and worst hours here is larger than almost any series since, so the useful thing is a list instead of an average.

The Trouble with Tribbles is the best episode of the original series and it is a hundred percent better than anything else in it. A space station, a shipment of grain, a trader with a sack of small furry animals that do nothing but eat and reproduce, and a Klingon plot that the tribbles expose by disliking the right person.

It works because the comedy is entirely structural. Nothing in it is a joke. The animals behave consistently, every character responds to them in character, and the escalation is arithmetic, which is why it is still funny sixty years later while almost no other television comedy of 1967 is.

David Gerrold wrote it at twenty-three, three credits short of a degree at Cal State Northridge, and it was his first professional sale. He got the writing assignment partly because he was quick and partly because he was cheap, and then sat on a ladder watching his own words being shot.

It was nominated for a Hugo, which was the first time anybody’s first professional sale had been nominated, and it lost by six votes to The City on the Edge of Forever. Two episodes of the same season taking the top two places is the strongest single fact about what that writing staff was doing.

Gerrold then wrote the whole thing up. The Trouble with Tribbles, published in 1973 and reprinted repeatedly since, is a complete account of one episode from outline through sale to the shooting stage, and it is one of the few genuinely useful books about writing for television that exists. Anybody on this site should read it.

He became a considerable force in the franchise afterward. Roddenberry brought him back in October 1986, alongside Robert Justman, Edward Milkis and D.C. Fontana, as the production nucleus for The Next Generation, and Gerrold wrote much of that show’s writers’ bible before leaving near the end of its first season in a dispute with Roddenberry.

The Doomsday Machine is second and is the planet-killer episode. An automated weapon the size of a moon is eating its way through a star system, the Enterprise finds a wrecked sister ship, and the surviving commodore takes over Kirk’s bridge to hunt the thing that killed his crew.

The Berserker resemblance most people notice is real and it did not come from the writer. Norman Spinrad has said his source was Moby-Dick, that his novelette The Planet Eater predated Fred Saberhagen’s stories, and that what he wrote was an organism. The production turned it into a machine, and the machine version is what looks like a Berserker. The Star Trek Concordance calls it exactly that.

The City on the Edge of Forever is the third and is usually ranked first outright. Harlan Ellison’s script, heavily rewritten and the subject of his complaints for thirty years, puts Kirk in 1930s New York and requires him to let somebody die to restore history.

Balance of Terror is a submarine film with a Romulan commander who is the most sympathetic antagonist in the series. Mirror, Mirror invented the parallel-universe device the franchise has run on for sixty years. The Devil in the Dark inverts its own monster and Kirk ends up negotiating with it. Amok Time takes Spock out of control of himself.

Space Seed, Arena, A Taste of Armageddon and The Enterprise Incident round out the dozen worth showing anybody. That is the show at its rating of 8 and above.

At the bottom is Spock’s Brain, which is a 1 with no defense available. Somebody steals Spock’s brain, the crew fit his body with a remote control, and the hour proceeds as though none of that is ridiculous. The Alternative Factor, And the Children Shall Lead and The Way to Eden sit beside it, all third season, made with a cut budget on a Friday night by a production that knew it was finished.

That third season collapse has a documented cause instead of a creative one. The budget was cut, Gene L. Coon had left, Roddenberry had stepped back to a nominal role, and Fred Freiberger inherited a show with less money and a worse night than either of his predecessors had to work with.

It Exists Because of Lucille Ball

The production history is better than most of the plots and the central fact is not widely enough known. Star Trek was made by Desilu, and Desilu was Lucille Ball’s company.

She had bought out Desi Arnaz’s stake in 1962 and was running the studio when Roddenberry brought the project in around 1964. CBS passed on it. NBC commissioned a pilot.

The Cage was rejected, reportedly as too cerebral, with Jeffrey Hunter as Pike and Majel Barrett as Number One. That is normally where a project dies. Instead NBC ordered a second pilot, which Desilu executive Herbert Solow described as enormously rare, because networks did not give failed pilots another attempt.

Ball overruled her own board to fund both of them. The directors did not want to carry the cost, the show was expensive for its era, and she pushed it through anyway. By several accounts she did not entirely understand what she was backing and thought it involved travelling entertainers.

The second piece is the audience. When NBC moved to cancel after the second season, Bjo and John Trimble organized a letter-writing campaign, and the network renewed for a third year, on Friday nights with less money.

That third season is the whole franchise. Seventy-nine episodes is enough to strip daily in syndication and two seasons is not, and syndication through the seventies is where the audience really formed, long after the show was off the air.

So the sequence is a comedian overruling a board, a network giving a second chance it did not usually give, and viewers writing letters to buy a season nobody at the network wanted. Remove any one of those and there is no franchise to have opinions about.

Should you watch Star Trek: The Original Series?

Yes, and go back to 1966 to do it. Cheap sets, corny in places, badly dated where it is dated, and still a show that hired working science fiction writers and let them argue about something in a plywood corridor. Start with The Trouble with Tribbles, then The Doomsday Machine, and skip Spock’s Brain entirely.

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