A Trekkie, when Trekkie wasn’t cool
Liking “Star Trek” was never cool. It wasn’t even popular.
The original “Star Trek” series, which ran on NBC for three seasons debuted 50 years ago today, on Sept. 8, 1966, to little fanfare. It eventually limped into a third and final season only after an unprecedented letterwriting campaign by its tiny-butrabid fan base.
I know, because my very young self wrote one of those letters.
In a time before social-media marketing, before Netflix and Amazon, before even the CW or the late UPN, a show had to have mass appeal, or it was dead. (Which is completely different from saying the shows were bland or unimaginative. During this same period, over on CBS, “The Wild, Wild West” was helping to invent steampunk.)
Safe to say that not even “Star Trek’s” creator, Gene Roddenberry, could have foreseen, a half-century on, five live-action TV series (plus one coming in 2017), an animated series, 10 movies in the original timeline and three to date in the re-booted Kelvin timeline.
At 50, “Star Trek” is still not quite “cool,” but boy, it’s popular.
“Star Trek” was, and is, a story about the present set in the future. Except that — concentrate now — for much of the canon the present is now the past, so the original “Star Trek” looks and feels like the ’60s, and “The Next Generation” seems oh so very ’90s.
The original series, of course, thought it was futuristic. Women and nonwhite people in positions of responsibility! A Russian on the ship’s bridge! An interracial kiss!
Cast a cold eye, however, and the black female officer is sort of a space receptionist, the Russian is a Cold War cliché, the kiss is involuntary and the captain takes his womanizing ways to nubile aliens whose cultures have mastered the art of doublesided tape. And shouldn’t Chief Medical Officer McCoy be hauled off to Human Resources? Hostile work environment, y’all.
The show stumbled, but its heart was in the right place.
If the original “Star Trek” were on TV now, it would have 10 or 13 (probably spectacular) episodes a season. With 79 episodes crowded into three seasons, most of those original episodes were terrible. We like to remember, oh, the Tribbles, but we choose to forget the guy hopping around in the white gorilla suit with spikes on his back. Yes, that happened. After gaining a new audience from TV syndication and the animated show that began in 1974, Paramount greenlit a movie. The clunkily titled — and really not very good — “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” made enough money in 1979 to spawn a second film.
And “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” was perfect. With it the franchise found a footing it had never had before. (A note: “Star Trek” movies are the opposite of Beethoven symphonies. With Beethoven, go for the odd numbers. With “Star Trek,” go even.)
Since then, the franchise has never really stopped. It has never quite replicated the id-ego-superego corny perfection of the original McCoy-Kirk-Spock triangle, but what could?
Instead it gave us a French starship captain who was, inexplicably, very British. (“I think I’ll take up tea and the pennywhistle,” said no Frenchman, ever.)
It gave us a black captain, but stuck him on a space station that looked like an abandoned mall.
It gave us a female captain and relegated her to, literally, the middle of nowhere.
And then in 2009, the original series’ cast having died or aged out, a new “Star Trek” movie gave us a reboot.
Almost nothing has leaked about the new “Star Trek: Discovery” series, which will make its two-hour debut on CBS in January and then live on CBS All Access online, a paid platform.
It will be set in the “Prime” timeline — the one before the 2009 reboot — 10 years before the Kirk era. The main character will be a female officer called Number One, in honor of a character in the original, unaired pilot of the original series. The new starship looks bronze and a little forbidding.
But it will hold up the central Trek theme: openmindedness, curiosity, humor. What’s great about Trekworld is it thinks we humans are so much better than we actually are.
It turns out we can imagine adventurous, optimistic, cooperative people. But we can’t be them.
If we wanted to honor our imagined selves, we’d get serious about science and exploration and figure out we’re all on the same little blue planet. It’s not going to happen, but it’s worth considering.