TOS Season 1

“I’m so sorry.”

Really, it’s a bit unrealistic to expect Star Trek to come up with something to top “The City on the Edge of Forever” for its first season finale. Even if you, like me, grant that last episode was ultimately a morally bankrupt nightmare on every possible level, the sheer gravity it exerts upon the series, and the larger franchise, is undeniable. For those enraptured and left starry-eyed by the events of last week, it’s tough to see how anything, let alone a story about flying parasitic space pancakes, could possibly live up to their expectations, and for those with the perhaps more applicable response of being deeply disturbed and unsettled by the fallout from “The City on the Edge of Forever” (and maybe the last few months on the whole) it’s tough to get excited or optimistic about anything Star Trek does at this point.

But this is being a bit unfair to “Operation — Annihilate!”. The concept of the season finale as we know it was not one that was as entrenched in pop consciousness as an indelible part of television literacy the way it is today. That didn’t begin to happen until approximately the 1980s (and no, it was not the result of the episode you’re thinking of either: As talented as Michael Piller was, he didn’t invent the season finale-At the very least let’s not forget Dallas and “Who Shot J.R.?”). “Operation — Annihilate!” plays out more or less like an average episode of the series as of 1967, which is not entirely terrible. It’s certainly not as great as the best episodes of the year but, mercifully, it’s also leagues better than the worst (and there have been a lot of worsts).

The first thing this episode unequivocally has in its favour is the acting. Anyone who thinks William Shatner is a poor actor really ought to watch this one (and probably “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Balance of Terror” and “Miri” as well) because once again this is a stellar showcase for his talents. Kirk has a lot of emotional investment in this story, as first his brother, his family and then Spock all succumb to the neural parasites. Shatner plays it as any good old-school thespian would: With gratuitous, overstated theatrical flourish that very clearly marks every single thought and emotion that crosses Kirk’s mind. We watch Kirk grow increasingly more desperate and determined, and every single iota of his pain and and resolve is highlighted for our benefit.

What it comes down to is that Shatner isn’t a method actor: His approach is not, as a general rule, about trying to get his mental state to emulate Kirk’s. Instead, what he does is take great care to meticulously outline the sorts of emotions his character would most likely be feeling in a given situation and draws our attention to them by conveying them ever-so-slightly caricatured. So, for example, in the teaser, Shatner plays Kirk very visibly anxious and preoccupied when recording his log entry on the Deneva colony.…

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“I am my own beginning. And my own ending.”

“So. You’ve found the courage to speak to me face to face at last, have you? I must congratulate you on finally discovering your spine, however some thinkers far wiser than I might say there exists a very thin line between courage and stupidity.”

“I’ve not come for bravado-filled threats, I’ve come in the hope that together we might be able to negotiate an end to all of this. The damage can be repaired.”

“You people never fail to disappoint me, though your unwavering stubbornness is to be commended, I suppose. Have you nothing more or better to say to me than that?”

“Withdraw your troops from the 22nd Century. The damage can be repaired, and I’d hoped to make you remember the fundamental importance and worth of the Temporal Accords.”

“Please spare me your impassioned appeal to regulations and rules of order. I’ve lived far, far too long and much too hard to be swayed by your vapid platitudes, Agent.”

“Your quarrel isn’t with these people in this time! It’s with us!”

“Isn’t it? Tell me, do you know why my ships didn’t blow you out of the stars on sight? Because I wanted to show you this. This is what your people did on Earth in 1930, A.D. I want you to take a good, long look at it and try to defend or explain away your actions. Here. Now. To my face.”

“This…ceaseless hatred and violence…It is alien to us. And repugnant. We must depart this plane; the pain has become simply too great for us to bear any longer.”

“A philosophy of pacifism is only practical if you’re not living under oppression. It has been so very long: Do you remember what it feels like to be imprisoned? Trapped? Walked over? Used? Violated? We all know what the future means: Cycles of making and unmaking repeating themselves forever. We walk in eternity, you and I. But we are also stewards of it.”

“You are not of Organia, but you are like us. We should like to speak with you about this further.”

“Shh, now. In time.”

“The City on the Edge of Forever” is also rather infamously the center of an extremely messy legal dispute between writer Harlan Ellison and the then-members of the Star Trek production team. There seem to be two versions of events here and, unfortunately, in neither of them does Gene Roddenberry come out looking good. The first account, which is supported by Bob Justman and Herb Solow in Inside Star Trek and even Ellison’s own book on the subject says that the original draft (which was delivered late) featured an Enterprise crewman named Beckwith who was a drug dealer. After murdering a fellow crewmember who threatened to turn him in, he was sentenced to death on the planet the ship was in orbit of, which in this draft was inhabited by an ancient race of time observers called The Guardians and who maintained a Time Vortex.…

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“Tell me, Jim: Why do you fight?”

“Errand of Mercy” is the moment where all the themes and motifs Gene Coon has been working with since the beginning of his tenure finally coalesce into a cohesive, articulate message. It’s a stinging indictment of what Star Trek is at this point, but what saves it from the nihilism of “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Space Seed” is that it’s paired with a slightly more hopeful outlook gleaned from the other scripts Coon is the sole author of. It’s not perfect, even by the standards the show’s laid out for itself by this point, but it’s a sufficiently effective statement of where the show is placing its ethics now. Also, it’s the debut of the Klingon Empire, which is somewhat self-evidently important, so I guess I’d better deal with that.

There are few things more immediately recognisable as undeniably Star Trek than the Klingons. In terms of ubiquity within the pop consciousness, they’re on par with Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise. They’re so well-known and beloved that fans who own replica Klingon uniforms, headpieces and weapons and speak Klingonese fluently are seen to be as quintessentially Star Trek as it’s possible to get, and none of these things are even going to be a part of the franchise until 1989 at the absolute earliest. Even the Federation and Starfleet don’t quite have this level of memorability and iconic status. In fact, the Klingons are so entrenched in people’s ideas of what Star Trek is about there’s only one other thing in the entirety of the franchise that can claim to have anywhere remotely near their level of cultural capital and that’s the Klingons’ own mortal enemies.Why might this be? Part of this has to be the fact the Klingons are the Original Series’ only recurring antagonists. Although they only actually appear in seven episodes out of the show’s 79 episode run, they do appear more frequently than any other alien race. Certainly the fact they get brought back and heavily retooled to become a lovable culture of proud, honourable (sometimes comically so) warriors in both the original movie series and the Rick Berman era also must have something to do with it, but there remains, after all, a reason they come back in the first place.

All that said, however, one thing that’s worth noting about the Klingons in “Errand of Mercy” is that they really don’t seem like they’re actually cut out for the job: I’m not so much referring to the general execution of the characters here, although John Colicos’ intense performance as Commander Kor is pretty much the one memorable, or actually convincing, acting job amongst the Klingon cast, but in terms of their actual conception. Common lore claims Coon based the Klingon Empire on the Soviet Union, and while there is evidence of this (Kor’s comment to Kirk about how all Klingons are cogs and everyone is monitored primarily), D.C. Fontana asserts that Coon wrote it as more an amalgamation of all the worst traits he saw in the people he fought during World War II.…

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This is the weirdest orgy I’ve ever been to…

“The Devil in the Dark” is one of the most beloved episodes of the Original Series to fans and at the top of both William Shatner’s and Leonard Nimoy’s list of favourite episodes they worked on. It’s deservedly a classic Star Trek episode and undeniably a highlight of the season-While it might not quite unseat “Balance of Terror” as the year’s high-water mark, it’s certainly one of the best episodes the show’s put out yet and absolutely the sort of thing we needed after the last month, which was just about enough to suck the will to live from anyone.

The fundamental thing that makes “The Devil in the Dark” so successful is that it’s just about everything “The Man Trap” was trying to do except done right. Once again, we have an unknown, dangerous alien lurking in the shadows and picking people off one by one who turns out to be a highly sophisticated and unique being and an intellectual equal to the crew, but here the justification for the creature’s actions is far clearer and far more defensible. Also, delightfully, the solution Kirk, Spock and McCoy come to involves communication (in particular giving the voiceless party the ability to speak that it had been denied before), cooperation and the free exchange of ideas instead of blowing it to pieces. The one thing this episode doesn’t do that its predecessor was able to is mix and match and play with the tropes of multiple genres, but I think there’s a good reason for that: We’re at the opposite end of the season now, and “Star Trek” is an established genre itself. While “The Man Trap” was in hindsight prophetic for where the franchise eventually goes, at the time it was really just experimenting to try and get an early handle on what made this particular show unique. “The Devil in the Dark”, by contrast, is about taking what we might expect typical sci-fi plot, or indeed a typical Star Trek episode to be (and tellingly, an early, Gene Roddenberry-produced episode) and setting about subverting those expectations.

Fittingly, this is another Gene Coon script. Coon seems liberated and refreshed here, which is a more than welcome sight after the past few scripts his name’s appeared on. Perhaps in hindsight most of the cynicism of the past month can be laid at the feet of Robert Hamner and Carey Wilber, because, freed from the shackles of having to adapt their stories to a teleplay, Coon is right back in “Arena” territory: He’s still very critical of the way the show is operating, but he remains optimistic it can do more and better than what it’s been allowed to be so far. Quite noticeably, once the Enterprise crew shows up Kirk immediately begins running the operation like a strict military commander: He paces up and down and addresses his men in a lineup (and “men” is a very appropriate term as there are zero female characters in this episode, save the Horta), formulates attack strategies with Spock and sends strike forces into the tunnels to hunt down the enemy.…

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Oh, I give up.

“This Side of Paradise” is a story about how dangerous idealized societies are. It’s also about how the pursuit of simple, communal living and an exploration of love are inhuman temptations and how it’s far better and more proper to focus on duty, responsibility, modernist, technoscientific notions of progress and suffering. At its best it’s a crass indictment of collectivist lifestyles as being “lazy”, “stagnant” and “counterproductive” and at its worst it’s the exact same goddamn story as “The Return of the Archons” from three bloody weeks ago. It’s also written by the same guy who penned “The Corbomite Maneuver”.

So yeah heads up there’s no way in hell there was ever the remotest chance of me liking this one. Just so I get it all out in the open right away: I think “This Side of Paradise” is utterly immoral and I have no intention whatsoever of mustering up a redemptive reading for it. I’ve also just about lost patience completely with this season, as this is the fourth story in a row with a rock-bottom cynical, nihilistic and actually downright mean-spirited attitude about it and at this point the series is genuinely teetering on the edge of invalidating itself and self-destruction. Thankfully, by the grace of some divine cosmic miracle I have something to talk about in this post aside from the unbelievably depressing and infuriating plot.

Firstly, there’s a second name on this script apart from Jerry Sohl (or rather his pseudonym Nathan Butler), the aforementioned writer who previously made me want to suplex my TV set with “The Corbomite Maneuver”. That name would be D.C. Fontana, who slips into her familiar Star Trek role with this episode. Fontana is one of the single most important creative figures in Trek history, story editing the lion’s share of the Original Series before becoming the joint showrunner of the Animated Series with Dave Gerrold and continuing to contribute scripts to the franchise as late as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is actually the third time we’ve seen Fontana’s name in the credits, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to explore her impact on the series in any meaningful way. She wrote the teleplay for “Charlie X”, but that was mostly a Gene Roddenberry effort, and she also wrote “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, but I decided to use my essay on that episode to play with temporal mechanics instead. Which actually turned out to be fortuitous, because not only is this really the best time to introduce Fontana as it’s where she first becomes story editor, it also spares me actually having talk about “This Side of Paradise”.

Fontana heavily retooled Sohl’s original contribution, apparently at the behest of Roddenberry, who is said to have told her “if you can rewrite this script, you can be my story editor”. He must have liked the job she did, as she was promptly hired for the position as soon as the story went out. Fontana’s alterations do undoubtedly improve the episode: She has the plants scattered all over the colony instead of being in one easily-avoidable cave as Sohl had written them and she also takes the love story with Leila, originally intended for Sulu, and gives it to Spock instead, which allows Leonard Nimoy to explore his character in a way he hasn’t really been able to since “The Naked Time”.…

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Shame I already used “I got your gun”.

I suspect if there’s one episode of the original Star Trek that my readers will expect me to come up with some mad, overblown stream-of-consciousness, recursive mess of a writeup for it would probably be this one. I hate to disappoint expectations, but that’s not going to be the case here. There was a fairly unbroken streak of episodes starting midway through the season that all seemed to call out for that kind of interpretation, hence a number of the last few blog posts have been in that style, and there’s at least one more coming up that will more likely than not warrant it as well, so my abandoning that structure is certainly not something to worry about for the short term. However, “Space Seed” calls for a different approach.

The elephant in the room is naturally that this episode provides the subject matter for the consensus-best Star Trek movie, which is at once a kind of revisit and reimagining of the events of “Space Seed” and also the debut of Nicholas Meyer’s unique, and much loved, interpretation of the franchise. Whether or not I feel Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is actually deserving of the kind of breathless worship it gets from mainline fandom or is worthy of the title of Best Trek Ever, let alone Perfect Cinematic Masterpiece, is something I’m not going to even begin to worry about until we reach 1982, which is still quite a long ways off from where we are now.

The more important thing to keep in mind for now is that Carey Wilber, who was the actual writer of this episode is not Nicholas Meyer, and this is really where we need to begin before we get anywhere near close to figuring out what this episode really is. Gene Coon has a secondary credit on the teleplay, but given this episode’s plot and general tone I’m going to assume he just did some cleanup work after the fact because, for reasons I’ll get into a bit later, “Space Seed” doesn’t feel like Coon’s material at all. Actually, I’ll just come out and tip my hand right away. I’m positive this is going to be a nuclear bomb of a claim to make and this is without doubt the entry that will turn away any longterm Star Trek fans who haven’t been driven off already, but this is my reaction and my blog and I get to say it: This episode is bad. Really bad.

Actually, I take back part of that last paragraph. This isn’t *bad* television: It’s as competently and professionally made as any of the strongest episodes of the series so far. In this regard, the incoherent structural jumble of something like “The Menagerie”, or especially “The Alternative Factor”, is much worse. But the thing is both of those episodes hinted at, or maybe accidentally hit on, deeper, more exciting concepts and wound up delightfully oversignified as a result.…

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Jimmy wants big boom.

What’s most immediately interesting, to start with, is that we seem to have encountered a temporal event of our own and skipped several episodes. The Federation was established in “Arena”, and Starfleet way back in “Court Martial” but we haven’t seen much of either of them since and it didn’t seem to alter the status quo of the show in any meaningful way. The Enterprise still putted about on routine patrol for the most part. “The Alternative Factor” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday” gave us some sweeping, dramatic shakeups, but both of those seemed like special exceptions: Not quite narrative collapses, but definitely temporary crises in the way things worked. Still, nothing we didn’t really think we wouldn’t come back from. The only indication things might be changing at all was in, ironically enough, Gene Roddenberry’s own “The Return of the Archons”. In “A Taste of Armageddon”, however, the Federation now has the full name of the United Federation of Planets (implying a structure larger than just Earth and its colonies) and the Enterprise is now escorting its ambassadors on a mission to open up friendly negotiations with civilizations around the galaxy (confirming it). This is, to understate things considerably, a rather immense shift in standard operating procedure for Star Trek.

A cursory glance at the credits reveals this to be not completely unprecedented or unexpected, as this is the second script from Gene Coon, who, recall, penned “Arena” himself as well. This one is also credited to a Robert Hamner, but, aside from an interesting note that he is listed as the creator of the police procedural S.W.A.T., I can’t find a lot of biographical information on him and not having seen that show personally I’m somewhat at a loss to talk about his positionality and interests as a writer. But Coon is a known quantity to us by now, and as his name shows up twice, as both the co-writer of the episode and the current showrunner, it’s probably safe to attribute an at least not-insignificant amount of the ethics here to him. And besides this makes sense as “A Taste of Armageddon” is very much the evolution of the territory we first found ourselves in with “Arena”.

At first glance this episode would seem to be about the juxtaposition of the Enterprise crew and the world of Federation diplomats. Ambassador Fox is depicted first as just as much of an obstructive bureaucrat as Commissioner Ferris in “The Galileo Seven” and he frequently butts heads with Kirk, and later Scott, in a rote safety of the mission vs. safety of the ship debate that’s already become a stock and hackneyed Star Trek plot. It’s Fox’s bizarre fixation on opening relations with the Eminians at all costs that puts the lives of everyone on the ship in grave jeopardy, leads to Kirk’s away team being captured and thrusts everyone headfirst into the EminianXVendikan war. Following the logic the show has established up to this point, it would seem sensible to read the episode’s central conflict as one between distant officials in fancy suits and the soldiers on the front lines who know the reality of living day to day on the edge.…

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Kirk sees no reason why he can’t have both a frock *and* a gun.

Let’s take care of the obvious first, shall we? We’ve got Gene Roddenberry writing again this week. By this point we should know what this means: Terrible pacing, ham-fisted, confused ethics, a disturbingly capricious attitude towards the personhood of women, screamingly vast logic lapses and a truly amazing ability to craft a cartoonish 16-ton safe of a moral and somehow still manage to miss the point entirely. With that squared away, let’s take a look at the less obvious: “The Return of the Archons” is final, conclusive evidence Roddenberry’s original concept of Star Trek wasn’t a utopia and is the first appearance of the Prime Directive (and thus also the first deconstruction of the Prime Directive).

The Prime Directive is a very interesting concept unique to Star Trek, and by this I mean I don’t like it very much. I never have: Traditionally doing a Prime Directive story is the quickest way short of doing an “evil clone frames the hero” plot or having a woman strut onto the bridge in a miniskirt to get me to shut the TV off. On the surface, it sounds like a self-evidently Good Thing, as it prohibits Starfleet officers from interfering in the natural development of a society (although here it’s framed more in terms of a vague opposition to “noninterference” of any sort). In fact, at conventions or in interviews Roddenberry (or those attempting to speak for him) would tout the Prime Directive as a key indication of the Federation’s evolved, idealistic society, typically framing it in opposition to Western colonialism or the cargo cult myth. This is of course hilarious, as every single Prime Directive story throughout the entirety of Star Trek is either about how demonstrably, measurably worse off the local people are by the crew’s adherence to it or how they just go ahead and flagrantly violate it anyway because they know better. Anthropologically speaking, however, it’s a nightmare, and given my prior experience in that field it causes me no shortage of headaches.

That said I don’t want to spend too much time on the Prime Directive here as, aside from this being the first mention of it, it doesn’t play an enormous role in the ethics debate of the week and there are two episodes coming up in the second season which are in many ways the definitive Prime Directive stories, so it seems something of a waste to use up all my critique of it in this post. What’s more interesting about how it’s used in “The Return of the Archons” is that it’s explicitly framed as a mirror of Landru’s “Prime Directive” to preserve The Body at all costs. As it’s Landru’s fixation on this basic order that results in the Beta III colony becoming “soulless”, in the words of Spock, it could be argued Roddenberry is trying to tell us blind adherence to orders is a Bad Thing and people need to think for themselves and make decisions on a case-by-case basis, and furthermore, that he’s now become perfectly willing to point the finger as much at his own people as he is at others.…

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Current theory points to the Enterprise being responsible for medieval Earth legends about the Skyships of Magonia.

The following is an excerpt from the archives of the United Federation of Planets Temporal Integrity Commission. It appears to be a fragment of an introductory text for prospective Agents educating them on proper temporal mechanics and etiquette.

It is common knowledge the the United Federation of Planets of our time requires all Starfleet officers to observe strict adherence to the Temporal Prime Directive. As its name would suggest, this directive is an extension of the earlier Prime Directive, which was a policy of nonintervention with the natural development of cultures less developed then ours. The logical outgrowth of this core premise, the Temporal Prime Directive clearly states that interference with historical events is strictly forbidden, and the current timeline must be upheld at all costs. In our age of freely available and accessible time travel, the preservation of the sequence of events leading inevitably to this glorious present is of paramount importance. Under no circumstances will any time travel event that could jeopardize or even nullify the possibility of this particular future coming to pass be tolerated, and the stewardship of our timeline can only be seen as our primary responsibility as Starfleet officers.

Once time travel technology became commonplace in all the civilized cultures of the galaxy, an interstellar pact was signed between all the major political powers mutually agreeing to prohibit the use of that technology for any purpose other than pure, untainted scientific research. Furthermore, the agreement outlines explicit guidelines, instructions and procedures on how time travel can be undertaken safely, rationally and virtuously without contaminating or endangering the timestreams that lead to our reality. The ratification of this treaty and related documents, which collectively became known as the Temporal Accords, remains the fundamental guiding tenet of Federation and Starfleet policy to this day. Although most governing bodies freely accepted the new terms, many more did not, and broke off their Federation alliances, feeling that temporal mechanics should be used to change the past for self-centered and misguided notions of “personal improvement”. Such temporal incursions are the greatest threat to our safety and sovereignty, and it is the sworn duty of all temporal agents to track down and repair the damage caused by such incursions, and ideally preventing them from occurring in the first place whenever possible.

Although time travel of any sort is discouraged if it can be avoided, Federation and Starfleet policy does acknowledge that the past holds merit from a scientific perspective. One of the reasons it is imperative that we do not change the past is that studying it both teaches and gives us perspective for how to live in the present. In this regard, a history of time travel is beneficial to help us better understand the moral and ethical ramifications of temporal mechanics, why Federation policy has evolved to the point it has and how best to handle a time travel situation should you happen to find yourself in one.…

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Then Captain Kirk left the Enterprise and went back to the space that was not a space.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, genre fandom underwent something of a shift in the way it expressed itself, at least on the Internet. A new generation of fans-turned-critics sprang up, ushering in a new style of criticism that can loosely be described as the Internet Review Show. Centred mostly around the website network Channel Awesome, which itself grew out of both YouTube and YouTube’s copyright policies, these shows took concisely analytical and frequently equal parts extremely nostalgic and extremely negative, perspectives on science fiction and pop culture ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s, often using the analytical tools of film school. Two of the primary influences on Channel Awesome and similar sites were Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Agony Booth, both of which were known for their trademark style of sarcastically sending up assorted bits of genre fiction’s past.

Don’t you see? This is not Your ship. This is not Your crew. It’s changed, different: It’s already begun. It may be too late to undo the damage that has already been done, but You can set things right and prevent further harm from coming to Your universe. You see now the danger You are in? The natural order of things is at stake because of this! It’s not only this plane, but all of them! The Future, Our Future, Your Future is on the verge of nonexistence. You must put a stop to this here and now so the proper path of Things-To-Come may unfold as it is destined to. Find him, stop him, destroy him, whatever it takes! You must do it and do it immediately! The fate of Reality-As-We-Know-It is in Your hands!

The reason I bring all of this up is because one of the primary ways by which Star Trek fandom as we currently know it was able to take shape was through The Agony Booth’s text recaps of various episodes from across the franchise. The cancellation of Enterprise put Star Trek pretty clearly into the category of “the past”, and even in spite of J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzmann’s two blockbuster cinematic reboots, there is still a lingering sense in many corners of the fandom that Star Trek as a relevant, extant thing remains dead and buried. Therefore, it was sites like The Agony Booth and related web efforts (like SF Debris) and its descendants (like Channel Awesome and other sites like it) that helped usher in a reflexive and introspective period of self-examination in Star Trek fandom. The one problem is that, given their status as entertainment based on making fun of things, the consensus of places like this is going to be extremely negative, or at the very least they heavily emphasize the parts of the series they look at that are the easiest to lampoon.

Yes, I am He, the horrific and terrible monster who destroys civilizations and can make reality vanish in the blink of an eye.…

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