Classic Star Trek

[russkayatatu]

So, Star Trek Probably you know a little bit about the television series or at least the movies ... lines like: BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY and LIVE LONG AND PROSPER have gone into the public vocabulary ... although I wanted here to talk mainly about the original series, because it's not quite as well known, I think, and because there's a lot more to this series that the follow-ups (Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine) and the movies unfortunately didn't quite manage to recreate

Especially for people that only know of Star Trek and the Star T rek characters through the movies I wanted to create this thread, because the '60s TV show was much more idea-driven and intelligent - as well as exciting, suspenseful, romantic - than what was made of it later on. Even now, watching it, it's well-conceived, well-put-together, and most of the episodes are first class. So if anyone is interested, I thought here was where we could talk about it.

First of all ... the basic premise is one that you might already know: as the voice-over says: Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before . The Enterprise is a starship under the command of Captain James Kirk on a 5-year exploratory mission; in 79 episodes, which were aired in 1967-69, the ship and its crew encounter new planets, new civilizations, some far superior (and dangerous), some more primitive - many surprisingly humanoid (it is a low-budget TV show after all). Other main characters include Mr. Spock, the first officer, who is half-Vulcan, half-human: being Vulcan means the total rejection of all emotion in favor of logic, which gives the writers more dynamics to exploit.

One extraordinary thing about the series is how many things they managed to get right - almost all the ideas the Star Trek writers came up with are ones that scientists are still considering and think are plausible almost forty years later. Warp speeds, teleportation, the mixing of matter and antimatter as a source of energy - recently I read a book on hyperspace and string theory, and the author talked about Freeman Dyson's classification of civilizations: Type I, II, and III, and mentioned casually that the Federation of Planets in Star Trek is good example of a Type II civilization: one that's expanded beyond one planet and beginning to explore nearby star systems in its galaxy. And recently I read an article in a newspaper saying that everyone now needs to know at least a little bit about science to be considered 'educated' and recommended watching the old '60s "Star Trek" series as a way to do that. There are a lot of scientific ideas in almost every episode - life forms based on silicon, alien blood cells containing copper rather than iron - and philosophical, ethical ideas too: "man versus computer" is a common theme ... duty above personal will & desire ... the series was taken off the air after three seasons but there was a lot that it went over in that time.

There's a handful of episodes that are EXCELLENT, BREATHTAKING, there's no other word to describe them ... in 51 minutes they're better than a lot of full-length movies ... and then there are a lot that are very good, with a solid script, solid acting, solid effects. Out of 79 episodes I would say at least 40 are in that class ... there are only a few that are really bad, and not many that are mediocre either. And even the ones that almost everyone agrees are unsatisfying usually have something interesting: it didn't quite come off, and you might not want to see it again, but somebody was trying.

In case anyone is interested in seeing one-minute trailers for some of the episodes, so you can see a little of what the series was about, here are links to a few good ones:

Trailer for "Operation: Annihilate!"
Trailer for "City on the Edge of Forever" the most romantic episode and one of the very best
Trailer for "The Tholian Web"
Trailer for "Charlie X" one of the first episodes
Trailer for "The Immunity Syndrome"
Trailer for "Mirror, Mirror" another one of the very best
Trailer for "Amok Time" on Vulcan, another best
Trailer for "The Trouble with Tribbles" not all of them are so serious: this one is funny, also one of the very best
Trailer for "The Enterprise Incident"
Trailer for "By Any Other Name"
Trailer for "Spectre of the Gun"
Trailer for "The Naked Time" one of the best

Anyway, hope this was at least sort of interesting I grew up with this series and was wondering if anyone else knew it and liked it: as I said, I think it's pretty impressive for a once-a-week TV show especially ... it's held up well and is a pretty thoughtful exploration of some profound ideas. So if you've never seen it before, I would recommend it; I think it's worth looking into

[luxxi]

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctivness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." Borg "greeting".

"Cut the chit-chat. Raise the shields and fire." Capt. Janeway responding to above.

"She's perfect for you. Shes' not a hologram, she's not Borg and she's not dead." Paris to Kim on meeting female alien pilot.

"Irrelevant." 7 of 9.

[teeny]

I'm actually more of an Star Wars fan.. But I did see some of the newest series. Which one I don't really know. I do know that Wil Wheaton starred in it
And I've seen one of the movies. Also one of the newer ones.

[PowerPuff Grrl]

Hmmm...
I always got the impression that Next Generations Star Trek was the better series.
But of course I never really got into the original, the only thing I have ever heard from the series was the sci-fi campiness, homoeroticism, and William Shatner's horrendous acting;
"Will... you... beam-me-up... SCOTTY!

Though however, I did hear that it was the most progressives series on television.

[luxxi]

Originally posted by PowerPuff Grrl
Hmmm...
I always got the impression that Next Generations Star Trek was the better series.
But of course I never really got into the original, the only thing I have ever heard from the series was the sci-fi campiness, homoeroticism, and William Shatner's horrendous acting;
"Will... you... beam-me-up... SCOTTY!

Though however, I did hear that it was the most progressives series on television.

Personally I like Enterprise best. Original Star Trek aren't aired here. TNG is so-so with too much on form and too little on acting and scrips. Voyager is not bad but whole basis is a bit off How are they able to repair ship without dedicated facilities?

Enterprise, while I saw only couple of parts of first series I really like. They don't use transporters (which is only thing I really don't like), they can't tweek their sensors to detect practically anything (something they do in TNG or Voyager in practically every episode), they are still exploring. Best series so far (altough I haven't seen DS9 yet).

[luxxi]

2 spoofs

"Where no man has gone before" On women's toilet on Enterprise

"Jean Luc Piccard. Any card."

[russkayatatu]

Hmm, it seems that nobody is really familiar with the original series, but just for fun I found this passage, which made my day

I read this a few days ago in a book by David Gerrold ( himself a SF fan-turned-writer who penned the famous episode "The Trouble With Tribbles"): his version of a 'formula episode' for Star Trek. I think it reads better as a parody, and as such it's close to being hilarious: I quote:


With Star Trek, it might work something like this: The Enterprise approaches a planet. Something happens. Anything. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get captured by six foot green women in steel brassieres. They take away the spacemen's communicators because they offend the computer-god that these women worship.

Meanwhile, Scotty discovers that he's having trouble with the doubletalk generator, and he can't fix it - the Enterprise will shrivel into a prune in two hours unless something is done immediately. But Scotty can't get in touch with the Captain -

Of course, he can't - Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have been brought before the high priest of the cosmic computer, who decides that they are unfit to live. All except the Vulcan, who has interesting ears. She puts Spock into a mind-zapping machine which leaves him quoting poetry (17-syllable Japanese haiku verses) for the next two acts. McCoy can't do a damn thing for him, "I'm a doctor, not a critic!" Meanwhile, it's been more than two hours since Kirk's last piece of a*s and he starts getting twitchy. McCoy can't do anything for him either. So Kirk seduces the cute priestess - there always is at least one.

On the ship, sparks fly from Chekov's control panel and everybody falls out of their chairs. Uhura tries opening the hailing frequencies, and when she can't, admits to being frightened. Scotty figures only fifteen minutes are left. Already the crew members are starting to get wrinkled as the starship begins "prunifying."

Down on the planet, Kirk, Spock and McCoy are being held in the dungeon - why is it always a dungeon? - until the girl he has seduced decides that she has never been laid so good in her life and discards all of her years-long training and lifetime-held beliefs to rescue him, conveniently remembering to bring him his communicator and phaser. Abruptly, Spock reveals how hard he has been working to hide his emotions and then snaps back to normal. Thinking logically, he and Kirk then drive the cosmic computer crazy with illogic - naturally, it can't cope; its designers never having been as smart as our Earthmen - and it shorts out all its fuses and releases the Enterprise, just in time for the last commercial. For a tag, the seduced priestess promises Kirk that she will work to build a new civilization on her planet - just for Kirk - one where women's lib and steel brassieres will be illegal.

Sound familiar?



I was laughing so hard ... all of the very worst elements from the very worst episodes are there ... hopefully most of that is [i]not[i] true, and it's better than that ... Although there are far too many computer-controlled societies, and far too many computers that they can make self-destruct; that's the oldest, most over-used concept they have, without question

Well, I haven't reread what I posted first but maybe it was a little overblown For one reason and another though I've been reading a lot of science fiction - Harlan Ellison, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, Ted Sturgeon, Samuel R. Delany, Lester del Ray, Poul Anderson - and thinking more about this series; I'll come back to it soon.

[haku]

Well, i've seen every episodes of Star Trek Classic, Star Trek TNG and Star Trek DS9 several times and i like the 3 series. DS9 is my favorite though, darker than the others. I never really liked Voyager, it lacks something from the original concept.

I've always liked the fact that Star Trek is a very scientific series, they have real scientific consultants and the theories presented in many episodes are actually based on real theories and not just random stuff. The fact that Steven Hawking appeared as himself in one episode tells a lot about how real scientists regard the series, they love it.

[russkayatatu]

I want to talk a little about The Next Generation here because I've ... well ... I've been wondering about this series, how close it is to the original, how it stands up as science fiction, how Roddenberry's universe was realized again on television in the 1980s, especially after your comments that you'd 'heard it was the best' and that you'd 'watched every episode several times and like the series.' So I rented the pilot episode, Encounter at Farpoint, and prepared myself to be thrilled with the back-to-the-small-screen triumphal return of 'the show the network could not kill.'

I could of course not talk about it, but I've been thinking about it for a few days now and want to write it and get rid of it ... and I doubt anyone will read this, but if anyone does and thinks I'm totally wrong or watching the show like an idiot, I would love to hear those kind of comments. I'm looking in vain for most of what impressed me on the original series. [Jeez, I realize, looking at this post, I sound like a real Trekkie - not really, though - just casual interest that's turned more focused since I've been reading so much science fiction and watching science fiction tv - reading about television, how it works, the people behind it, the science fiction in particular, it makes me more analytical, apparently]

Let me be fair. I was excited for the first five minutes, and although I grew less and less excited as time went on and I kept hoping that the rough patches were somehow going to iron out and everything would be put in good order, when it came to the hour point I paused the tape while I got out some paper and wrote down all the things that tore me apart because I was afraid there were so many and the show was so forgettable that I may not be able to remember them later. I ended up about half a sheet, and I don't want to go into too many examples because that'd be boring, but just to give a few, in case anyone is interested, and to explain why I am less than enthusiastic about this pilot that apparently 90% of Star Trek fans liked when it was first put on the air. (Then again, there was a recent survey that showed 53% of Americans consider themselves Star Trek fans, so there are probably a lot of diverse people involved).

First of all, the script is messy, long, uncoordinated and unbelievable. I read in a book called The Next Generation Concordance that it was a combination of two episode ideas, one involving Q and the other involving Farpoint, which is exactly what you see in the result: two parts that don't fit so well together and somebody seems determined to make them stick even though the plot doesn't quite work around it. The scenes don't make much sense either. Picard goes to talk to his CMO about her son and whether she wants to be transfered right after he's decided to let Riker do this dangerous 'beaming over' mission. And then there are some things that I don't think make sense but maybe I missed something important: the communicators that don't work, something's blocking them, and then they move a little and Riker orders some people back to the ship and all at once their communicators work fine. I REWOUND the tape to see if I'd missed a line, but I couldn't find anything.

I did like the scene with DeForest Kelley as the ancient Dr. McCoy, but I wonder about people who promote everyone to 'admiral', even if they're doctors, if they hang around long enough. And it feels like something stuck randomly into the plot; it has no continuity with anything preceding or following - I understand why it's there, of course, and in the pilot it's okay to have moments like that, but surely they have worked it a little more seamlessly? More than anything the teleplay reminded me of the V'Ger fiasco, the shooting script for the bomb 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture.' The new characters I all liked, though. They seemed to be interesting with a lot of potential.

These aren't the biggest problems, though; just the bare edges of the surface. In general the ship seems to have no sensors. Troi does the job of providing information. NOT science, but emotional lines like "I sense gratitude and joy" are what the captain uses to find out more what's going on. At the end, as Q gets angry that the captain's not blasting everything to rubble, we're treated to two jellyfish-like blobs on the screen, complete with Jerry Goldsmith's music swelling under their undulating limbs. What are these creatures? We don't know, they just show them to us in a special-effects show. But then came the moment that absolutely killed me: Picard, in rapture and gentle understanding, says that the other one had come to save ... its mate. Cut to the creatures again. What the hell is he talking about?! He doesn't have a clue; he has no reason for saying such a thing except that it's written into the script. I can think of several reasons why one person would come to save another and there's no reason to arbitrarily appeal to romantic sentiment.

The other major plot flaw (out of several) was that they never mentioned Starfleet, not once. Let me say that again: the Enterprise is threatened by an alien being of immense power, and only Picard and his crew know about it. Isn't this a potential threat to similar ships and shouldn't they be telling someone what's going on, what sort of situation they're in and what they're doing? What sort of command structure is there here? And this brings me to the most overwhelming problem I saw: that it was unbelievable as fiction and as drama. The pretense that this is a real ship, organized in a military manner, falls apart, and this is a shame because it's one of the things that the original series did so well. If you see earlier models of spaceships and space travel, like for example in the Twilight Zone episode "Death Ship," there's nothing there that has anything in common with army or navy discipline. Star Trek did that well; it had great verisimilatude. Unfortunately it seems the same thing happened as with the James Bond films: it turns into just another movie, with Bond as the hero, not a real drama about a part of an organization.

"Encounter at Farpoint" was a tremendous let-down; I felt beat up, especially since writing credit's given to Dorothy Fontana and I know she's done quality work, knows Star Trek (she was script consultant on the original series and wrote several episodes), so I was thrilled she apparently had such a big part in giving the TV series a second try. I was also glad to see Robert Justman, William Theiss, David Gerrold, John D. F. Black return. I'd thought that one of the reasons the movies were so mediocre was that they got people to work on them who didn't know and didn't particularly care about the original show - like Nicholas Meyer, director of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," who said he was approached to do a new Star Trek movie and he said, "Star Trek ... is that the one with the guy with the pointed ears?" Gene Roddenberry was there, of course. But Roddenberry has some bad ideas sometimes.

I didn't want to judge the entire series based on the movies (which are easier for me to see, I don't have to pay for them - they're mediocre, but that proves nothing about the series; the Star Trek movies are all pretty mediocre as well) and the pilot - none of which is in the standard series format of 46 minutes, after all - so I rented another episode, one called "I, Borg." I think it's number 123. It was not much better. It's okay. The dialogue clips along; the characters are two-dimensional. The scientific ideas are not bad, the dramatic are less so. I read somewhere that television episodes usually don't tell a complete story (there isn't time), but present one in visual shorthand. I think the plot of this one moved too quickly, was too short, to the point, again, of being unbelievable. The plot is nothing new; it reminds me a little of an "Outer Limits" episode called "Soldier."

In other words, I think the material is more or less decent but it's handled like a slick TV show; it reminds me more of "Sex and the City" than "Star Trek."

I read in The Next Generation Concordance that Dorothy Fontana and David Gerrold both left the show soon after it started; Gerrold later said that it was because of "promises made and not kept." That does not sound like a good sign for the overall quality to me, losing two good writers right at the beginning. Reading the accounts of the first season episodes it sounds like the writers were rewritten constantly. And there are two mandates of Roddenberry's, given by this book, that I don't like: 1) no carryovers from the old series (i.e., the main aliens aren't going to be Vulcans and Romulans and Klingons; we want this series to be different), and 2) don't emphasize interpersonal relationships, especially problems with them, between the crewmembers. The reasoning here is - so I heard - that in the 25th century humans will be beyond most of this, have figured it out. I think I have that right, although I want to check again because when I write it like that it seems absurd. Harlan Ellison, who's an acclaimed writer for TV and worked with the original series, said (in the context of discussing rewrites of his script for "City on the Edge of Forever") that basically that this idea of Gene's, expressed to him once as 'the ultimate perfectibility of the human race', is bullsh*t: ("yeah, but all them third world aliens, who were nothing more than surrogates for ghetto minorities, they could be miserable rotten sonsabitches. Talk about your White Man's Burden." ) Or, in the words of Melinda M. Snodgrass, who was executive script consultant on "The Next Generation":

"I came aboard Star Trek: The Next Generation, and within weeks discovered I was bound in a creative straightjacket. The directive had come down from high - my people are perfect. Star Fleet is perfect. The Federation is perfect. Only the little fuzzy-wuzzies possess flaws, and our mission is seek them out and set them straight ... in addition to the mantras of 'Picard is the Captain, keep him strong,' and 'my people are perfect,' we often received the directive to 'LET THEM F*CK!' Read 'City' [Ellison's original script, unaired, that won a Writer's Guild Award] again. This is about love. Not f*cking."

I hope I'm not infringing on copyrights; I got these quotes from the book Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay that Became the Classic Star Trek Episode. Which brings me back to the original series, which is what I wanted to talk about in the first place. I guess I got a little carried away with The Next Generation.

I don't think it's a bad show, just not a good show. And although I don't really feel like spending more money on it I'll rent "The Best of Both Worlds" soon, because if I'm going to think and talk about it I should watch what everyone considers the highlights; I want to be fair. And probably I'll get at least one more episode as well, one that doesn't involve the Borg this time, because I don't want to judge everything by these few episodes I've happened to see that involve the Borg.

[luxxi]

How to create core cast for new series.

1. You need a captain. Despite the fact that Federation has lot of members it has to be human. Sorry, that's a deal breaker.

2. You need somebody rational. In absence of Vulkans androids can fulfill that role.

3. You need somebody passionate. Klingons are prefered.

4. You need females. Sevaral of them, but less then core males so there is some competition. Preferablly from diffeent species, but must have atributes humans find atractive.

5. You need enemy that aren't quite enemy but aren't quite friends either. They should pop up every couple of episodes but our heroes will outwitt them every time.

6. Children. Preferably in their teens so they fall in love with members of other species and cause troubles.

7. All core members must be humanoid. Sorry, that's another deal braker.

8. Somebody from core crew should be between cultures, part of both but not fully part of either.

9. Heavy dose of liberal values.

10. Ship has to be modified on regular basis and new sensors, weapons etc installed by it's crew.

[rylettia]

XD I loved the original series. I actually bought most of the episodes a few years ago, making me the dorkiest teen I knew...

I think the cast and writing is much better than the later Star Treks (Captain Picard never came off as crafty as Kirk did :P), which are becoming spin off of spin offs of spin offs, very mundane. With the exception of frequent cheesy fight scenes, I love the content...and Spock.

[rosh]

i was never much of a trekkie fan, my ex is tho and used to make me watch it with her on tv

"we are the homoborg, lower your pants and surrender your bums!"


errr hehe

rylettia i love your weebl and bob avatar

"dont be fooled by the pie that we got, i still i still weebl this is bob. used to have a donkey that i loved a lot, now she lives with a ninja ..." "pirate!"