Forest of Illusions

“Wait…Haven’t we done this already?”

On the surface, there’s not a whole lot interesting going on with “The Survivor”. Answering a distress signal from a one-person starship, the Enterprise crew is thrilled to discover it’s registered to Federation philanthropist and hero Carter Winston, missing and presumed dead for five years. As it happens, Winston’s fiance is aboard the ship: Eager to resume the relationship she goes to meet him, only to have him break her heart by saying he’s not the same person he was when he proposed. It quickly turns out that Winston is quite literally not the same person anymore, as he is, in fact, a shapeshifting alien Romulan operative who goes on to assume the forms of Kirk and McCoy to divert the Enterprise into the Neutral Zone, giving the Romulans have a reason to justify impounding the ship so they can reverse engineer it. Similarities immediately appear between this episode, “The Enterprise Incident”, “The Man Trap” and any one of the million billion other evil twin stories Star Trek has done for the past decade.

And exasperation is a not entirely unwarranted reaction, as this is definitely one of the weakest Animated Series episodes we’ve seen yet. The evil duplicate plot is, predictably, stultifyingly boring, but thankfully the show doesn’t linger on it that long and the crew figures out what’s happening pretty quickly, so there’s a minor plus. I’d really appreciate it if this franchise never did one of these stories again, but I suppose if it must it’s nice to see it somewhat self-aware and willing to address some of the inherent flaws with this kind of plot. The Romulans are, of course, wrong: Sending in spies to clandestinely violate the peace treaty with the Federation is behaviour in keeping with Star Trek: The Next Generation-era Romulans, but not the Romulans as we see them at this point. Of course, nobody except D.C. Fontana and Paul Schneider have ever gotten the Romulans actually right, so that’s to be expected…Except for the fact one of those people is the current showrunner and therefore a person one would expect might have been in a position to catch this. Really, you could have replaced the Romulans with Klingons and the episode would have been just as effective, if not a bit more so: They’re generic baddies (and indeed the Romulan ships shown here are, in fact, Klingon).

Although that said the actual Romulan Commander we get to interact with (who astonishingly still doesn’t get a name: Seriously, say what you will about Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Romulans-they at least had the decency to name them) is terrific. His exchanges with Kirk are delightfully snarky and self-aware. My favourite exchange in the whole episode comes here, where the Enterprise is first surrounded by Romulan battlecruisers:

ROMULAN COMMANDER [on viewscreen]: You appear to have a propensity for trespassing in the Neutral Zone, Captain Kirk.

KIRK: It was not deliberate, I assure you.

ROMULAN COMMANDER [on viewscreen]: It never is.

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The absolute pinnacle of limited animation.

Making a sequel to an Original Series episode is a self-evidently obvious thing for the Animated Series to be doing. Doubly so when the episode in question is “The Trouble with Tribbles”.

I don’t think there’s any disputing the fact “The Trouble with Tribbles” was the moment at which Star Trek secured its immortality. It’s pretty much the definition of “iconic” and an absolutely perfect bit of television. No questions asked. In fact, perhaps the most damning evidence the season three team simply didn’t understand Star Trek is to be found in Fred Freiberger saying “The Trouble with Tribbles” was too silly a thing for the show to be doing. But that said there’s danger in revisiting a story like this: There’s a significant risk that, in doing so, the sequel will inevitably cheapen the original’s impact and retroactively damage its reputation. Sequels simply are not as good as their source material, and I’m comfortable making that a firm declaration. There are rare exceptions of course and serialized, episodic stories are another matter entirely, but as a general rule that’s frankly the way it is.

Things look pretty bad for “More Troubles, More Tribbles” then. However, this is no ordinary sequel: For one, Dave Gerrold is writing again (and mercifully back in what’s familiar and comfortable territory for him this time) and then there’s the matter of this being planned for the third season of the Original Series. “More Troubles, More Tribbles” was not meant as a cheap cash-in on the popularity and legacy of the Original Series’ most beloved episode for the low-budget animated spinoff, it was a follow-up the original writer wanted to write, and for the “proper”, “grown-up” show to boot. Gerrold was one of the first people D.C. Fontana called when the Animated Series was greenlit and, as the two had become friends, basically told him “and the first thing you’re doing is writing that Tribble episode you wanted for the third season”. And so it was.

But even so, there’s an inescapable sense of…sequel-ness about “More Tribbles, More Troubles”. The Enterprise is escorting two robot ships loaded with special quintotriticale grain (it’s like quadrotriticale, except quinto) to Sherman’s Planet (of course) and they have to be on the lookout for the Klingons (of course) who are rumoured to be testing a new super weapon. Eventually, they run into some: A Klingon battlecruiser is pursuing a Federation scout ship and relentlessly pummeling it with disruptor fire. As this is in violation of treaty, the Enterprise moves to intercept and Kirk demands a cease fire, which is soundly ignored. A couple more volleys of words and gunfire and the scout ship is destroyed (though not before Scotty manages to rescue the pilot and cargo) and the Enterprise gets whacked with the Klingon’s new weapon, a projected stasis field that immobilizes all higher level energy functions on a starship, but drains a massive amount of power from the user’s own ship. The pilot turns out to be Cyrano Jones (of course) carrying a cargo of Tribbles (of course) genetically engineered to not breed (of course).…

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Uhura and Chapel decide to quit the Enterprise and form an alt rock outfit.

For the fourth episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, D.C. Fontana and her team brings back Original Series veteran Margaret Armen for the first of two contributions to the new show. “The Lorelei Signal” concerns a planet of women with hypnotic powers over men who, in the manner of Sirens (or really, the Rhine Maidens from Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen) lure starships to their world so they can drain the life force of their male crewmembers in order to remain eternally young and beautiful.

There is nothing in the above paragraph that evokes hope, inspiration, wonderousness or anything that embodies goodness or joy.

Margaret Armen is the single worst writer of the original Star Trek. At least Gene Roddenberry started to redeem himself a bit at the end with “Turnabout Intruder”, “Assignment: Earth” wasn’t entirely unwatchable and there were some good bits in the part of the first season he oversaw. Armen, however, is some kind of Dark Mirror of D.C. Fontana: She’s the only other woman writer to contribute more than two scripts during this period, and she regularly struggles with issues of representation such that it overshadows every other aspect of her work. Both “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome” are serious contenders for the title of worst Star Trek story ever, or at least worst in the Original Series just on structural terms. That’s not even getting into her aforementioned terrible track record on representation: The depiction of Native Americans in the latter episode was absolutely inexcusable. The only thing remotely positive she’s been associated with was “The Cloud Minders”, which was already far from perfect, and she still only wrote the teleplay in that case and was working off a Dave Gerrold/Oliver Crawford joint venture.

Of all the writers to bring back, I cannot begin to fathom why Armen was anywhere near the top of the list. She’s not even the second-best or second most-experienced woman writer we’ve seen so far, if that’s what the team was going for: I can’t come up with a single conceivable reason not to give Shari Lewis, Judy Burns, Joyce Muskat or even Jean Lisette Aroeste a couple more shots before bringing Margaret Armen back. But maybe I’m being too harsh on her: Perhaps freed from the constraints of the Original Series and with D.C. Fontana’s help Armen is going to be allowed to blossom here. Except no, forget that, because “The Lorelei Signal” is another crateringly awful disaster. The key twist is that the women hypnotize and suck the life out of the men because they’re trapped on a planet that causes rapid aging while giving women inexplicable and ill-defined powers over men. So obviously this was the only course of action available to them. Also, they feel their immortal lives are shallow and meaningless because while they have eternal youth they’re rendered unable to bear children. If I didn’t know better I’d swear this drivel was dreamed up by the the most defiantly and proudly retrograde misogynistic scumball man to ever haunt Hollywood.…

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There’s a bizarre subgenre of Star Trek stories that ape Fantastic Voyage…

The title “One Of Our Planets Is Missing” sort of lets you know right from the start what kind of story you’re in for. There’s a giant space cloud going around literally eating planets which the Enterprise crew notices when, in fact, one of their planets happens to go missing. It’s at once the kind of delightfully mental science fiction concept that can really only be done justice to through animation, but also a plot that’s simple and straightforward enough to convey in twenty minutes.

We haven’t talked much yet about the difference in runtimes between Animated Series and Original Series episodes. A necessary consequence of changing from a primetime drama to a Saturday Morning Cartoon Show is that the episodes went from being fifty minutes each in the 1960s to only being twenty minutes each on the 1970s. This is largely to Star Trek’s benefit: One of the biggest problems with the pulp style of pacing and structure the Original Series so often lapsed into is that it’s essentially built around padding. The average pulp action serial plot is nothing more than a series of increasingly tedious captures and escapes occasionally broken up with an implausible, ridiculous and unnecessarily gratuitous fight scene. And indeed, it’s a model of storytelling Gene Roddenberry was quite a fan of, even judging only by “The Omega Glory” and “The Savage Curtain”. What this means is that, stretched to fifty minutes, this kind of plot grows tiring and irritating extremely quickly. However, now that Star Trek is a cartoon, it doesn’t have the luxury to indulge itself like that anymore: Twenty minutes is just enough time to set up the basic plot, lay out the boundaries of the conflict and than do something about it before the credits role again.

Which is exactly what we get in “One Of Our Planets Is Missing”. The titular planetary misplacement occurs, we get to see some funky looking space cloud that eats things and then there’s a rapid-fire bit of exposition about how it exhibits traits of unicellular organisms and grazing animals and oh, by the way, it’s currently on a direct course to a planet inhabited by millions of people so we’d probably best figure out a way to stop that. Then the Enterprise itself gets engulfed and partially digested, so oh bugger. With that taken care of, the episode gets to focus on the actual interesting bits, which involve the Enterprise crew making continuous observations about the creature and debating amongst themselves what the best course of action to take is. Nobody has to get kidnapped and we don’t have to introduce some left-field plot element three-quarters of the way through: It’s just the distilled essence of a Star Trek space adventure. The episode doesn’t quite pick up on all the intricacies afforded by its new model yet (there’s a wee bit too much technobabble even for my tastes) but honestly? In the scheme of things I’ve complained about so far?…

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Godzilla vs. Spock was one of the lesser-known Godzilla films of this period…

“Yesteryear” is pure D.C. Fontana.

When returning from a mission of research into Federation history through the Guardian of Forever, Kirk is stunned to find out nobody on the Enterprise seems to recognise Spock, and that he himself doesn’t recognise the person the crew is calling the ship’s first officer: The Andorian Commander Thelin. A brief scan of the ship’s record banks indicates that Sarek and Amanda, Spock’s parents, divorced about twenty years ago after the death of their only son, Spock. This is of course, patently untrue as Spock is sitting at the table as the computer relays this information. The computer goes on to say that Amanda was later killed herself in a shuttlecraft accident. Reasoning that history has somehow been changed by their presence in the past, Kirk and Spock return to the planet and Spock recalls that the date he is said to have died is the same day he remembers being saved by his cousin Selek from an attacking wild animal. After being pressed by Kirk, Spock recalls that actually, now that he thinks about it, Selek looked an awful lot like him.

Before we go any further, I want to talk a little about the temporal mechanics in this story, as they’re fascinatingly not the norm for time travel stories. The crucial detail is in how the Guardian of Forever works: It exists at the vortex point where every timeline in the universe converges and, as a result, endlessly broadcasts a record of every possible time stream. We can interact with it by leaping through it at the appropriate moment. What happened was that while Kirk and Spock were in the past, Vulcan’s own history was being broadcast at the same time. Because Spock saved his own life and he was in a different time stream when the moment he was supposed to save himself was playing, he missed the crucial moment. But he doesn’t erase himself from history, to the contrary: He turns both himself and Kirk into historical orphans by jumping each other’s time streams. In other words, the Guardian of Forever works like a television set.

Although this was hinted at a bit in “The City on the Edge of Forever”, it’s extremely clear in “Yesteryear”. The different time streams are easily comparable to television stations, and the slow, methodical cycling through them all is very much like someone sitting down and turning the dial on their set. The Guardian even looks like an old-style tube TV in this episode. This is altogether fitting in the context of the position Star Trek is now in: The Original Series is now more popular than it’s ever been and is enjoying runaway cult success in perpetual, neverending syndicated reruns. Meanwhile, along comes the Animated Series attempting to make a decisive claim for what the future of the franchise should look like, and there’s already a considerable amount of ambivalence about the project.…

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“Whoa, guys. Just…Just seriously. Don’t drop acid before studying termite mounds.”

“Enterprise log, Captain James Kirk commanding. We are leaving that vast cloud of stars and planets which we call our galaxy. Behind us, Earth, Mars, Venus, even our Sun, are specks of dust. The question: What is out there in the black void beyond? Until now our mission has been that of space law regulation, contact with Earth colonies and investigation of alien life. But now, a new task: A probe out into where no man has gone before.”

The canonicity, and thus ultimate legacy, of Star Trek: The Animated Series has been a point of contention amongst fans and creative personnel since just about the day it premiered. While I’ve outlined my thoughts on Star Trek “canon” previously (in brief, I think it’s largely hogwash) it’s important to consider the general reception works like this attain, as doing so allows us to understand the ebb and flow of the overall work that is Star Trek over time.

If anything has the right to be called Star Trek though, it’s surely Star Trek: The Animated Series, isn’t it? It served as a reunion for almost the entire creative team from the Original Series, with the exception of Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Walter Koenig, John Meredyth Lucas and the Season Three team (The show couldn’t afford Koenig, Coon was, erm, dead, Roddenberry wasn’t interested, Lucas was busy on Insight and I really can’t say I miss Arthur Singer) and D.C Fontana herself personally spearheaded the project. Fontana stands behind the show to this day, firmly stating that her and her team always tried to make the best possible Star Trek they could under the circumstances, which I think is actually truer here than it was throughout the majority of the Original Series. In fact, Fontana considers Star Trek: The Animated Series the official fourth year of the Enterprise‘s famous five-year mission, and I’m not really one to disagree with D.C. Fontana.

But in spite of her convictions, Fontana’s claim has not only not gone unchallenged but it’s been largely ignored. Despite the occasional in-joke or reference in future series and the more relaxed attitude of places like the Memory Alpha wiki, Trekkers seem to have a very hard time accepting Star Trek: The Animated Series into their hearts. In the years and decades since it was made, there have been countless attempts to tell the story of those infamous “last two” years of the five-year mission, completely disregarding the existence of the Animated Series. There have been number of tie-in novels and comic books, not to mention the video games Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Trek: Judgment Rights and the as of this writing forthcoming fan production Star Trek Continues that all purport to tell the story The Animated Series has ostensibly already told.

This is highly unusual for Star Trek fans, who usually hang off of the words of creators as if they come down from On High.…

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