Forest of Illusions

“‘Oh, I wish it could stay like this forever!’ ‘So do I.'”

“The Mark of Gideon” is not one of the original Star Trek‘s finest hours. But you expected this. It has the makings of a great example of the show’s newfound direction, but it ultimately ends up proving the show is just drifting at this point, painfully obviously out of steam.

It tries though, it really, truly does. For an episode very clearly produced solely so the show didn’t have to build any new sets, “The Mark of Gideon” does the self-evidently correct story to make with that brief: Having a crewmember be mysteriously transported an eerily empty starship. It’s a novel concept, though it would be perhaps more novel if the show hadn’t pulled similar tricks in both “The Tholian Web” and “The Doomsday Machine”. So novel in fact it’s done again in the similarly resource-challenged second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (albeit to a much more effective extent) and one of the most frequently overlooked virtues of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was it’s ability to knock out world-class science fiction on a weekly basis while consistently only using one set.

This time though it’s Kirk who, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission to a notoriously reclusive and xenophobic civilization, beams down only to find himself apparently where he started, on the transporter pad of the Enterprise. Only now it seems like he’s the only one on the ship. To make matters worse, he has a mysterious bruise on his arm and nine minutes of his life, the period of time between when he beamed down and beamed back up again, are a blank to him. Soon though he realises he’s not alone when he meets a mysterious woman named Odona who claims to have been abducted from her home planet. Although she doesn’t remember much about it, she says it was extremely claustrophobic, and that thousands upon thousands of faces were constantly staring at her from every direction. Meanwhile, we keep cutting to scenes on the very much populated Enterprise as Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura try to determine why Kirk has disappeared into thin air and trying to navigate diplomacy talks between Starfleet Command and Gideon, the latter who are clearly hiding and withholding information.

This part of the episode is actually brilliant. There is a palpable sense of mystery surrounding the proceedings, keeping us constantly wondering about whether or not Kirk has been transported to another dimension or perhaps into his ship’s own past…or perhaps its future. It slowly builds tension and unease over the course of a full half-hour up until the moment Kirk and Odona look out of the portholes and suddenly see the stars transform into thousands of faces staring back at them, a scene which is genuinely unsettling to the point of actually being disturbing. Furthermore, just like the subtle Forteanism of “The Tholian Web”, the Fairy Myth overtones in “Wink of an Eye” and the supernatural horror of “That Which Survives”, the first half of “The Mark of Gideon” is yet another example of Star Trek shifting its approach to science fiction from the pulp and Golden Age tradition to the more fantastic trappings that come to define the genre from here on out, and indeed that the franchise is capable of making this kind of shift at all and living on after Apollo 11.…

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“A cat may look at a king…”

“Whom Gods Destroy” is famously bad. It is also famously unapologetically repetitive, reiterating the exact same plot of the first season episode “Dagger of the Mind” down to reusing the same chair prop that was central to that episode’s climax. It is also, like the vast majority of third season episodes, riddled with plot holes, logic lapses and inconsistent characterization: In terms of basic narrative structure and coherence, it’s once again a mess. “Whom Gods Destroy” seems to be a particular bugbear for Leonard Nimoy, who spent the entire week writing memos and complaints about it to anyone who would listen including, but not limited to, Fred Freiberger and Douglas C. Cramer, the Paramount Studios production executive.

While the laziness and sloppiness are painfully apparent, I’m not especially inclined to tear into them here for a few reasons. One, exasperating as it is, this is not really unusual for this season, and really I’d go so far as to say it’s standard operating procedure for the show at this point. Secondly, even if it hadn’t been officially stated yet, it’s pretty clear Star Trek‘s time is just about up. We’ve had our bonus year, and the show has about two months left before it’s put to bed for good. It’s rather pointless to get too worked up about structural problems now. While it’s possible we might get one or two late-stage minor classics along the lines of “Wink of an Eye” or “That Which Survives” in the remaining stories (I have little to no recollection of the next batch of episodes except for the really blatantly obvious ones), the show is for all practical purposes done and we’re just killing time before the inevitable sits in. This run of episodes is the word death of the Original Series.

“Whom Gods Destroy” isn’t even all that bad given the standards of the 1968-1969 year. It manages to on the whole avoid being as incensing as “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Paradise Syndrome” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, though it does have a few ethical issues of its own. And, while it’s not as much of a B-movie pleasure as “Spock’s Brain”, there are certainly parts that are genuinely entertaining in a way only the most gloriously trashy science fiction can be. Indeed, though “Whom Gods Destroy” is certainly nowhere near as thought provoking as “The Tholian Web”, “Plato’s Stepchildren” or “Wink of an Eye”, it does actually manage to occasionally drunkenly stumble into one or two genuinely captivating concepts. What we have here is probably Star Trek’s first Curate’s Egg: It’s a disaster, but parts of this disaster are quite excellent.

Let’s square away the obvious issue right away. “Whom Gods Destroy” is literally a retelling of “Dagger of the Mind”, and a shitty one at that. This time the story follows the almost cartoonishly stereotypical plot of having the inmate running the asylum have a Napoleon complex, on which I’ll have more to say a little later.…

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“It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.”

Personally, I’ve never been drawn to the idea of casually “marathoning” a television show. The idea of spending days locked inside watching every single episode of some TV show sounds to me like some heretofore unknown circle of Dante’s Hell. I’ve never felt the need to be completionist about television because I’ve always understood the realities of day-to-day, ’round the clock production inevitably mean not every episode is going to be a classic, and I see no need to force myself to sit through obvious misfires in what’s supposed to be my downtime.

Now for a project like this I do, of course, have to watch every episode, or at least almost every episode, because the point here is to get a relatively comprehensive understanding of the history and evolution of Star Trek. But if I were to just watch this show casually, I’d have no hesitation to skip over huge swaths of it because frankly the idea of watching “The Paradise Syndrome”, “Elaan of Troyius” or “Space Seed” again is the antithesis of entertaining to me. My point being I was long under the perhaps mistaken assumption that other people might have a similar viewpoint to mine here, so whenever I’ve been asked by someone to introduce them to a show, I almost always give them a truncated episode list of recommendations instead of flopping a twelve-disc DVD box set on their table. I figure if a friend, who presumably shares at least some of my taste and habits, is asking my advice on Star Trek they’re not likely to find “A Private Little War” any more enjoyable or engaging than I did. So, when a few years back my sister wanted to get into the Original Series, of which she had no prior familiarity, I gave her a crash course on the show, and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” was the place I suggested she stop.

I hadn’t seen the Original Series in quite awhile when I made that list, and were I to do it again today I would have done a number of things differently: I’d have taken one or two episodes out and put a great deal more in (mostly from this season, interestingly enough), so apologies for that if you happen to be reading. I’m not sure if I would still have put the cutoff at this episode, because I have not, as of this writing, seen the last few episodes of the third season, though I at least feel I’d be justified in calling it quits here if I were so inclined (and yes, don’t worry, we’ll see the old lady all the way through “Turnabout Intruder” to port, no matter how painful it might be). “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” marks a number of endings and lasts of its own: It’s the last really iconic episode of the Original Series, mostly due to Bele and Lokai, though there’s something to be said about the art design on “The Cloud Minders”, I suppose.…

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“Monkey in the middle!”

“That Which Survives” opens promising to be one of the most creative and exciting episodes since “The Alternative Factor”, and that it doesn’t quite maintain that momentum for the whole of its fifty minutes is almost beside the point. We’re still in the curious mystical territory the show’s been exploring off and on since “The Tholian Web”, and here Kirk even uses the phrase “ghost planet” to describe an astrogeological impossibility: A planet too young to develop life and an atmosphere, yet which clearly has both. As the landing party is about to beam down, the transport sequence is interrupted by a woman who suddenly materializes, imploring them not to go down, killing the transporter chief in the process. She’s too late to stop the landing party, however, but as Kirk tries to contact the Enterprise Sulu informs him it’s simply not there anymore and that they’re stranded. Back on the ship, we learn the Enterprise has somehow been instantaneously flung to the other end of the galaxy.

So once again we’ve stumbled into a region of space where weird and inexplicable things happen. This time though, the closest analog seems not to be pagan mythology but supernatural horror movies: The mystery woman materializes every once in awhile to a specific crewmember, both on the planet and aboard the Enterprise. Puzzlingly declaring she is “for” them and that she knows everything about them, she gains their trust enough so she can touch them, at which point she explodes every cell in their body simultaneously. The mystery woman is a slasher villain then, and “That Which Survives” works a bit like an old haunted house movie, where travellers have to seek shelter in a dark and foreboding mansion. But it’s also a survival movie, as Kirk, Sulu and McCoy are forced to search for food and water as they’re now cut off from the Enterprise and are unsure if they’ll ever be able to leave. And, in a cruel twist of fate, it seems like the planet they’ve found themselves on has neither.

However, this is just half the story. “That Which Survives” is split between the landing party and the Enterprise at the other end of the galaxy trying to return to where it was. On the Enterprise, the episode plays out entirely differently-While the mystery woman still hunts people down, the challenge Spock, Scotty, Uhura and M’Benga face is an entirely different one: This part of the episode is straightforwardly a thriller in the mould of “The Doomsday Machine”, albeit with the inspired decision to put Spock at the centre and forcing him to react to everything. The crew soon discovers that in addition to throwing them across the galaxy, the mystery woman has somehow also sabotaged the ship’s warp drive. With the warp engines locked and accelerating at a rate beyond Scotty’s control and to a speed at which the Enterprise wasn’t designed to withstand, the crew has fifteen minutes to figure out what’s happened and correct it or the entire ship will blow up.…

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“I knew this would happen if we gave the LHC access to Starfleet’s resources.”

One of the things that’s especially curious about the third season is that in some ways it is arguably the most thematically consistent the Original Series ever was. We’ve now had several stories dealing quite explicitly with the question of utopia, idealism, Star Trek’s Western pedigree and what makes the show ultimately valuable and worth preserving. And then there’s that odd flirtation with the mystical, something “Wink of an Eye” doubles down on to a delightful extent.

This episode sees Gene Coon back (at least I’m assuming I can attribute it to him: He didn’t write the screenplay but the story is credited to Lee Cronin) and it’s sort of chilling how easily he seems to have embraced the magickal head trip the series has gone on recently. What we have here is a story that can be quite easily read as being just as Otherworldly as “The Tholian Web”, and takes a unique look at a number of science fiction conventions to boot. First of all we see the Enterprise answering a desperate distress signal from the people of a planet called Scalos, but beaming down they find the entire planet devoid of life. Spock and Uhura reason the distress call was prerecorded, but just as the landing party is about to beam back up the redshirt suddenly vanishes into thin air in front of McCoy. back on the ship, random pieces of equipment start malfunctioning and circuits start rerouting themselves. McCoy and Chapel tell Kirk the medical supply cabinet has been broken into and things have been rearranged, and people keep hearing a strange, insect-like buzzing sound. The whole first act then once again brings to mind ghosts, and this time evokes in particular stories of places haunted by poltergeist activity.

But that all changes in the second act when Kirk vanishes too. This time we get to follow things from his point of view, and it turns out that the culprits are in truth the Scalosians themselves, who beamed aboard the Enterprise with the landing party and have commandeered it. It turns out that the Scalosians conceive of time differently than other people, and exist in a state of perpetual hyper-accelerated existence. Kirk meets Deela, the Scalosian Queen who makes the interesting declaration that she has chosen Kirk to be her king. Deela says that long ago the Scalosian civilization was wiped out by a series of natural disasters that also sterilized the male population, and they now have to abduct men from other species and bring them into their plane to ensure the survival of their people.

As cheesy as that scenario sounds, I first have to give the show credit for inverting the stock “Mars Needs Women” scenario long before most people realised that was in fact a stock scenario that could be inverted. This perhaps isn’t the episode to talk at length about this, but the kind of role reversal we see here brings up the question of the effectiveness of turnabout as a form of social criticism: “Wink of an Eye” doesn’t quite manage to shed absolutely all of the disturbing sci-fi rape connotations of this kind of plot, though it’s clear Deela would prefer her subjects to know and love her first, which is something of a start I suppose.…

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“You’ll have to get your entertainment someplace else.”

“Plato’s Stepchildren” is utterly unwatchable, critically important and incredibly easy to talk about all at the same time.

Leonard Nimoy has said the majority of the third season was “embarrassing” for him, and nowhere is that clearer than here. This is one of the most excruciatingly painful and humiliating episodes to watch of the entire franchise. It is also one of the most popular and important, and it’s not at all difficult to see why. It is straightforwardly a reiteration of a number of the themes the show has been grappling with dating back to the Gene Coon era with very little new to say about them, but it’s also the most concise and blunt about them the show will ever be. Actually, I’m not certain the franchise is ever this blatant about these ideas and concepts ever again. “Plato’s Stepchildren” doesn’t quite work: It almost does, but it’s messy and sloppy and needed to go one little step further to really sell what I think it was attempting to drive home. Nonetheless, it had a measurably, provably positive effect on world culture, and that alone unquestionably seals its legacy.

A bit like Star Trek itself then.

Put most basically, “Plato’s Stepchildren” concerns a group of extraterrestrial settlers who lived on Earth during the time of Ancient Greece and were inspired by Plato make the utopian republic he imagined a reality. When settling on a new planet, they discovered that eating the native fruit, mixed with their endocrine systems, gave them massively powerful psychokinetic abilities, through which they perfected the use of their minds and intellects…while regarding anyone else as so inferior and beneath them to be not even worthy of the most basic amount of respect and dignity. Aside from being utterly without compassion and empathy, they’re also ruthlessly sadistic: Luring the Enterprise to their planet under false pretenses, the Platonians, as they have come to call themselves, capture the crew and turn them into human (and Vulcan) marionettes to be subject to their every capricious whim.

Obviously, “Plato’s Stepchildren” is not treading any new ground here. It is once again conceptually extremely similar to many previous episodes, most notably “The Cage”, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (it even recycles the “absolute power corrupts absolutely” speech), “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and “Bread and Circuses”. The difference here is in execution: As a standalone piece of television, “Plato’s Stepchildren” seems to come up extremely wanting when compared to some of those episodes: It’s not as poetic and doesn’t feel as fresh as “Where No Man Has Gone Before” did, and it’s nowhere near as boldly creative as “Bread and Circuses”, at least the Gene Coon part, as that episode managed to effortlessly equate the Roman Empire, the larger Hellenistic tradition, the Gladiatorial spectacle, television and the general state of United States culture circa 1967 in a grand, sweeping condemnation of Westernism. That said though, “Plato’s Stepchildren” doesn’t have Gene Roddenberry to come in and screw all that up with one of the most morally bankrupt and reprehensible denouements in TV history, and in the process drive away his show’s biggest creative force.…

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“Promenade across the floor/Sashay right on out the door…”

In the 1980s and 1990s Galoob produced a line of miniature models called Micro Machines. They were mostly replicas of different automobiles, but Galoob also produced tie-in sets of Micro Machines for a number of different licensed works. Merchandise is typically seen by those of a leftist persuasion as a primary symptom of crass capitalist frivolity and indulgence, and while I’m not largely inclined to disagree in the general sense, I do believe there are enough positive effects to glean out of the phenomenon to justify its existence, and ultimately it’s intrinsically linked with the concept of Soda Pop Art and thus an important facet of Western culture.

But my qualified defense of merchandise will have to wait for a later date. The reason I bring it up now is that there were in fact Star Trek themed Micro Machine sets, and I happened to have a few of them. each set was patterned after a different incarnation of the franchise and typically featured three different ships, the implication being these were the most notable and important vehicles. The Original Series set featured the Enterprise, of course, but also a Romulan Bird-of-Prey and a Klingon D7 battle cruiser. On the back of the box there were some basic overview specs, probably taken from Mike Okuda’s Star Trek Encyclopedia. There was also a note that indicated which episode the ship was from. Now obviously most of these ships appeared in a great deal more than one episode, so Galoob picked the episode they must have figured was the ship’s most iconic appearance. For the Bird-of-Prey they understandably picked “Balance of Terror” (if for no other reason than that’s the only episode unique footage of the model was shot for), but for the D7 they picked “Day of the Dove”.

This is another of the most iconic episodes of the Original Series, becoming memorable enough to warrant a considerable number of sequels and references in future incarnations of Star Trek. This, combined with the generally very positive reception amongst fans makes “Day of the Dove” in many ways the definitive Klingon episode of the Original Series. It’s not difficult to see why it’s garnered this reputation: This is the first time we see Klingons behaving in a manner that’s somewhat consistent with their later depiction, as a proud culture of warriors that values honour and courage. Kang throws out Klingon proverbs and phrases on a reliably regular basis, many of which served as the inspiration for future explorations of Klingon philosophy, and even carried through wholecloth into future series. Kang is also played with impeccable force and prowess by Michael Ansara: He’s without doubt one of the most memorable antagonists the show’s seen, Klingon or otherwise, or at least the one who it’s the easiest to see why the fans would be drawn to him: He has a charm and charisma absent from several previous Klingons (although I still prefer William Campbell’s delightfully camped-up Captain Koloth in “The Trouble with Tribbles” personally).…

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You know, sometimes the picture just says it all.

This was an episode I never saw much of. I’d seen scraps of it here and there, but it was never a story I deliberately sought out to watch, for a number of reasons. First of all, I was just never as big a fan of the Original Series as I was its two immediate sequel shows and I wasn’t especially inclined to be a completionist about it. Also, from everything I’d seen of “For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky” told me it just wasn’t my kind of story. Not that it was bad, and indeed by all accounts it was a highlight of the third season, it’s just this kind of weighty tragedy is not really the way I enjoy spending my leisure time, even knowing it of course had to be undone at the end of the episode. But it seemed like a very well-regarded tear-jerker of a character study awash in a dreamlike sense of poetry, as anything with a title that breathtakingly pretentious damn well better be.

Yeah, no, it’s terrible.

“For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky” is “The Gamesters of Triskelion” for the third season. It is so awash in Star Trek cliches the show itself seems tired of them. It’s not even really possible to come up with a list of episodes this one cribs from, as it seems like it just stole from everything, but, off the top of my head I can maybe mention “The Return of the Archons”, “The Apple”, “By Any Other Name” and most obviously “The Paradise Syndrome”, from which this episode takes its basic plot about a member of the Enterprise crew abandoning Starfleet to live a simpler life married to a high priestess, not to mention a worrying majority of its set. None of this really fills one with boundless enthusiasm.

The one innovation this episode brings to a mountain of overplayed, hackneyed Star Trek standbys is the idea that the reason McCoy wants to retire to Yonada is because he’s suffering from a terminal illness. This isn’t something Star Trek had looked at before, probably for good reason. Imagining any of the previous creative teams attempting a plot like this is a somewhat frightening prospect, and as good as writers like Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana might have been, this isn’t really the sort of thing that’s in either one of their wheelhouses. Of course, this logically means we should expect *this* creative team to make an absolute hash of this, as they were both stupidly confidant enough to attempt this kind of episode in the first place and blissfully ignorant of the actual extent of their grasp to the point they could tie it to a story about an intergenerational asteroid starship. We would not be wrong to expect this as the finished product is in fact embarrassingly awful, but let’s briefly pause for a moment to remember that intimate character drama isn’t really all that unusual a thing for Star Trek to attempt.…

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“Well, shit.”

For a season so thin on actual quality, there are an intriguing number of truly iconic moments and scenes from Star Trek‘s final year: It’s difficult to forget images like the Melkotians from “Spectre of the Gun”, the half-moon cookie aliens from “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, the cloud of anger and the commandeering of the Enterprise in “Day of the Dove”, the asteroid spaceship from (not to mention the title of) “For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky”, the Kirk/Uhura kiss in “Plato’s Stepchildren”, the cloud city from “The Cloud Minders”, Ro-Spock from “Spock’s Brain” and everything about “The Empath” (that last one may just be me, but I’ll fight for it to the end).

Then there’s “The Tholian Web”, which is just about made of iconic moments.

Right from the start we have what amounts to a ghost starship, which is a concept so fundamentally and basically wrong the Enterprise‘s own sensors refuse to accept it’s there. Beaming aboard, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov find the entire crew dead, apparently at their own hands. While it’s never explicitly stated this time, the Defiant bears all the symptoms of what could be called a dead starship, and when those show up it’s usually the sign something very big and very serious is about to go down. Indeed, the Defiant takes this theme to the next level: If a starship can die, a starship can become a ghost as well, and it can also haunt. And this is very clearly what the interspatial rift is: It’s a haunted region of space where weird, unexpected and incomprehensible things happen. This was even more blatant in Judy Burns’ original script, which also featured cosmic spirits manifesting in space and fading in and out of existence onboard the Enterprise. However, as Gene Roddenberry didn’t like the supernatural and had specified as much in his writer’s guide for Star Trek, this plot point was altered somewhat in the produced episode.

But even so enough of this remains in “The Tholian Web”, and the episode we get is still extremely eery and atmospheric. What clinches it is when the Enterprise is attacked by Commander Loskene and the Defiant fades out of normal spacetime. Kirk had stayed behind when the initial landing party was forced to return as the transporter was only able to beam back three at a time, thus becoming trapped onboard the departing Defiant, and is declared dead by Spock. From this point onward, Kirk becomes a ghost himself, and he haunts the remainder of the episode on a number of levels. First, his absence understandably causes great strain on the crew, particularly Spock and McCoy. Without Kirk to mediate between them, their normally quasi-friendly banter becomes openly hostile, each clearly resenting the other’s presence. This could be interpreted as evidence of the old reading of Star Trek that posits Kirk, Spock and McCoy represent the tension and interaction of the id, ego and superego, but I still disagree with that pretty vehemently.…

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“There’s no greater sacrifice than one’s self, and Joyce Muskat’s ‘The Empath’ proved that to SF fans worldwide.”

Science fiction aficionados of a certain age will probably remember Starlog: A fan magazine looking at sci-fi and other genre film and television works, often focusing on the perspective of writers, actors and the community fans built for themselves. Starlog actually began as essentially an unlicensed fanzine for Star Trek fan culture that broadened its scope to avoid legal troubles, which was interesting for me to read: It was always a bit curious to see Star Trek get such a focus in the magazine, although back then I just chalked it up to the massive amount of cultural capital and ubiquity the franchise had at the time I was reading it.

Starlog was really my primary entry into the world of science fiction culture. I never went to Star Trek conventions or anything like that (OK I think I did once, but it was so long ago I remember next to nothing about it), nor did I have a bunch of spin-off or reference books (well, at first I didn’t at any rate). Partly because of this, I never considered myself a massive Star Trek fan, let alone a massive genre fiction fan. Star Trek had certainly captured my imagination, but a large part of the reason why it was able to do that was because at the time it was wildly popular and when I talked to people about television, it was naturally one of the things that came up.

But Starlog gave comprehensive coverage to a wide spectrum of film and TV projects: Articles on the latest Star Trek and sci-fi shows were mixed in with, retrospectives on the live-action Batman and Spider-Man shows, cartoons, bits on action spy fiction, cowboy westerns and interviews with the writers of really obscurantist stuff like The Powers of Matthew Star. Looking back, the magazine was probably my introduction to a lot of shows, like Buck Rogers, Red Dwarf, Doctor Who and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (which probably directly led to my years-long belief Doctor Who was some kind of peculiarly and flamboyantly British version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and why Jon Pertwee remains one of my favourite Doctors). It was also my first, and for a very long time only, exposure to Star Trek: The Animated Series: Seeing gorgeously lush and evocative screenshots and cells from what seemed to be a Star Trek cartoon that continued the story of the Original Series was unfathomable to me at the time, and all I knew was that I needed to see a lot more of it and as soon as possible. But no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find anything more on it, so it remained a part of the franchise’s history forever ungraspable to me.

Starlog then was my window into what went into making these programmes and what allowed me to read the reflection of the people and positionalities involved in bringing them to life.…

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