Spock Returns and Goes to San Francisco: or, How Star Trek Became A Franchise

The year was 1982, and Star Trek was back with a vengeance.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, despite being made on the cheap in a very short amount of time, had come out to rave reviews and the highest box office numbers ever.  In the world of American popular entertainment, Star Trek had officially arrived.  No longer was this odd little space property from the '60s to be the butt of jokes, tarred with its cheesy acting and the obsessiveness of its fans.  Star Trek had entered the ring of cinema--the epicenter of the mainstream, the home of the culturally respected and esteemed--and made a name for itself there.  Star Trek belonged.

More to the point, for the studio at least, Star Trek II was quite simply a success, financial and critical.  It was the kind of film every studio executive wanted to be responsible for: a hit.

Still, the studios, and Harve Bennett, were not yet satisfied.

The Wrath of Khan, the Recreation of Star Trek, and the Redemption of Kirk

If there's one key insight that animates the Wrath of Khan, fueling its action and driving its plot, it is this: Kirk is not a very good person.

Yes, Kirk, the heroic exemplar of Kennedy-era masculinity, Horatio Hornblower for the Space Age Gene Roddenberry's fantasy of an ideal military commander, is, in truth, a shallow, irresponsible man, egotistically obsessed with winning at all costs, who has spent his life flitting from one easy success to another without ever dealing with the consequences of his actions, his human limitations and flaws, and his own mortality.

This may seem harsh and one-sided; and indeed, Kirk is without a doubt the hero of The Wrath of Kahn.  But if this central point is not grasped, in all its starkness, then it will be completely impossible to understand what makes TWOK tick: and, more than this, what makes The Wrath of Kahn without a doubt the greatest of all Star Trek films, and, in my humble opinion, one of the greatest works of American cinema as well.

Where does this insight come from?  Well, to really understand that, we will have to go back in time just a bit, to explain the origins of TWOK as a film, and to tease out a number of other insights that ultimately paved the way for this one.

The Death and Highly Improbable Posthumous Success of Some Show From the '60s; or, Almost Everything Was Terrible in the '70s; or, The Messiest, Bloodiest Television Revival Ever; or, Why Star Trek the Motion Picture Is Not Very Good

Famously, Star Trek went off the air, finally and for good, only a matter of weeks before the Apollo moon-landing.  Later, people involved with Star Trek would wonder what might have been if this momentous event had happened earlier: would the reality of outer-space travel, beamed live to televisions across the nation, have given the nation's top dramatic space show a new lease on life?

Well, maybe.  But if so, it probably would have doomed Star Trek forever.

Getting cancelled, it turns out, was probably the best thing that ever happened to Star Trek.  If Star Trek had run for a few more years, winding down in the manner typical of a reasonably popular television show, it almost certainly would not have become a phenomenon at all, and we probably wouldn't remember it at all today: not any more than we remember Wagon Train, the popular, long-running show Star Trek was based on.

Why was Star Trek cancelled?  Well, really, the question is why it wasn't cancelled before.  CBS had in fact planned to cancel it both after its first year AND after its second year; both times, the show was belatedly saved by a letter-writing campaign, the first led by a number of respected science fiction authors, the second by a few ordinary fans, the legendary Trimbles.  Why the studio wanted to cancel it is a bit more complicated; but it mostly came down to the fact that Star Trek was very expensive and not quite popular enough to justify itself in the network's eyes.  According to some, Star Trek was, in fact, very popular with the "youth" demographic especially coveted by advertisers, which means that in this day and age it would probably have stayed on the air a good deal longer; but Star Trek came before networks had begun to think in this way.  Judged on an absolute scale, it simply wasn't popular enough for CBS and Desilu to continue underwriting its exorbitant budget.

And by the end of its third season, Star Trek was tired.  Gene Roddenberry, its creator, had already jumped ship for easier and more profitable pastures; and despite managing to pull together a decent season, Star Trek seemed to be feeling its age.  Death was, to a degree, a welcome respite.

This was bad news for a lot of people, though, including the many who had drawn their paychecks from the show; but it was especially bad news for William Shatner.  Having just gone through a costly divorce, he found himself completely insolvent, forced to travel the country with a theater troupe, a dog, and pickup truck, living out of a camper because he couldn't afford to pay hotel bills.  Eventually, by taking every single role available to him, he was able to get back on his feet in time for Star Trek's eventual revival.  Leonard Nimoy did much better; he continued to work on television and theater in various high-profile roles, including on Mission Impossible and as Sherlock Holmes.  Deforest Kelley took a supporting role in one of the greatest worst films of all time, Night of the Lepus, about giant, mutant killer bunnies with a taste for human flesh (I highly recommend it), and then retired to his house and wife.

Life, it turns out, goes on.

A Computer, a Space Hippy, and the Ubermensch Walk Into A Bar

Following on my previous analysis of Star Trek TOS as a whole, here, taken pretty much at random (based, that is, on my own personal likes, dislikes, and fascinations) are discussions of three individual episodes of Star Trek TOS.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

This episode has a very special place in Star Trek history; it was the episode that convinced CBS that Star Trek could work as a network television show.  The network had been naturally impressed by Star Trek's concept, which promised a relatively simple and potentially lucrative way to do science fiction on television; however, it was ultimately disappointed by the first pilot produced, the "Cage."  Led by Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, and featuring large-headed alien zoo-keepers with the power of illusion, the network felt that the show was, in a quote that has since become legend, "too cerebral."  Really, they were basically right; the Cage, for all the bluster of its lead character, is a rather stiff hour of television, appreciably strange, but patently lacking in human interest.  By the time Pike has angrily and defiantly, for the fourth time or so, declared to his captors that human beings will never stop resisting cages, even pleasant ones, and will always prefer difficult reality to pleasant illusion, we appreciate the point, but do not really feel much affection for the man making it.  An entire twenty-six episode season of such breathless didacticism would be difficult to take; and CBS was right in saying so.

However, as it goes, the network was, in fact, so interested in the basic concept of Star Trek--Gene Roddenberry's "Wagon Train to the Stars," science-fiction-as-Western-and-military-drama brainwave-- that they took the unprecedented step of commissioning a second pilot for the proposed series.  Left to his own devices again, Gene Roddenberry booted the entire cast--with the exception of a certain pointed-eared alien--but kept the sets and format basically the same.  What he needed was not so much a better concept as better storytelling, by a better writer, with more human and sympathetic characters.  He found his writer in Samuel A Peeples, an old hand at television (and Western) writing; he found his leading man in William Shatner, as I discussed in my last post.  CBS was much more impressed by what they saw this time, and ordered a full season of Star Trek; and they were, frankly, right to be impressed.  Even with all the rough edges typical of a pilot episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before is a truly excellent piece of television, with both an intelligent and worthy moral AND effective human drama.

The Original Series and the Myth of Originality

When I spoke in my last post about Star Trek as a myth, I used that term in a very specific sense: that of a body of stories produced by a society and reflective of it.  I did not use in its more common, colloquial sense, of a story that is simplistic, fantastical, and false.

However, in discussing Star Trek The Original Series (as it is now commonly known) and its origins, I must use the term in the second way.  I must now talk, not about Star Trek itself, but about the stories told about Star Trek--stories that are commonly believed, but false.

I first heard these stories when I was a child, reading various officially licensed "behind the scenes" books about the franchise and its development.  These books were the product of the great 1990s zenith of Star Trek, when Star Trek shows and movies multiplied in abundance, along with their officially licensed offspring.  I still hear these stories repeated from time to time, and their influence is still easily discernible among fans and even in the culture at large.

This cycle of myths begins with the Myth of Gene Roddenberry: a kind of modern-day creation myth about a benevolent deity, his "grand vision," and his many heroic struggles to create, preserve, and protect that vision from the evil forces of Bigotry, Pessimism, and Studio Politics.

Gene Roddenberry, of course, is generally acknowledged as the Creator of Star Trek, and is commonly worshiped by fans under the title of "Great Bird of the Galaxy."  Roddenberry, the story goes, had a grand and original vision in the 1960s...a vision of a bright, optimistic future, where mankind had at last outgrown its troublesome childhood, abandoning war, hatred, and religion, and creating a global utopia of peace and plenty for all races and nations.  Unfortunately, when Roddenberry tried to share these ideas with the world, he was cruelly defeated by the awful, reactionary Television Censors of the Studios, who refused to allow him to share his Gospel.  Undaunted, Roddenberry came up with the idea of sharing these ideas through a science fiction show, where the foolish Censors would be unable to detect their presence.  With the Great Bird working heroically and almost single-handedly to bring his vision to life, in the face of setbacks and omnipresent Studio opposition, Star Trek was born, an utterly unique and original vision of a progressive, rational, and enlightened future for all.

This was, more or less, the story that was repeated, ad nauseam, by licensed Star Trek products in the '90s.  It has much to commend itself: a noble hero, dastardly villains, and a magnificent triumph against odds.  What it lacks is the truth. 

A Brief Introduction to Star Trek

What is Star Trek?

On some level, that's an easy question to answer.  We all know Star Trek: a television show (five television shows!); a Motion Picture (13 movies and counting!); some vast, indeterminate number of (licensed, non-canon) novels and comics and video games; action figures and mouse pads and perfume; a "franchise" (whatever that is).

What is Star Trek about?

That's where it gets a lot harder; because the answer to that question gets very different, depending on who's doing the asking and answering.  For JJ Abrams, it's about Kirk and Spock, a bromance of opposing types.  For Michael Piller, Star Trek is about character, the stable warmth of family and community, a gentle humanism of difference.  For Nicholas Meyer, it's about eternal, universal human nature, with its friendships and bigotries, its governments and diplomacies, its great literature and its petty quarrels, and above all with its mysterious destiny of old age and death.  For most Americans today, it is some hodgepodge of Kirk and Spock, "Beam me up, Scotty," William Shatner's overacting, Patrick Stewart's gravitas, laser guns, and some vague sense of progressive intellectualism.  For Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek is...well, that's not at all an easy question to answer, though it is one we will quickly be confronted with.

The purpose of this post is to announce (to whom?) that I will be, for reasons of my own, writing a series of posts (essays) about Star Trek over the next weeks (months?).  The thesis of this series will be that Star Trek is, in a real way, a myth; or rather, a whole series of myths, a corpus of mythology for the utterly bizarre monstrosity that is the modern world.  Like all myths, it is the product of collective labor: it has no auteur, no Michelangelo painstakingly crafting every fold and wrinkle, no Kubrick perfecting every frame.  And like all myths, its meaning is not as easy to tease out as your typical work of art.  This is not because it is meaningless, as a shallow critic might think; rather, the trouble with myth is that it is too meaningful, too packed with significance.  Mythology is like a scarecrow stuffed with straw by a whole village, every man putting in his piece, until the whole thing threatens to fly apart.  For while ordinary works of art (perhaps) are the product of individual men and women, mythology is the work of a whole society--if not several.

It is in this way that I will approach Star Trek: treating it as a body of mythology, created collectively by many men and women living in many different times, and even different societies.  Star Trek is, of course, indelibly American--the product of that heroic, self-creating America for which Europe, not to mention the rest of the world, is at best a romantic background.  Star Trek is also, at this point, a very old thing; this year, 2016, is officially its 50th anniversary.  In that 50 years, Star Trek has seen a lot.  It was born in the '60s, in that bright, catastrophic explosion that created our modern society, and died just before the decade ended; it was revived in the '70s, in the midst of cultural malaise and despair; it found its footing in the more stable '80s; expanded and retrenched itself in the eternal '90s; died in the turbulent early 2000s; and was brought back in newer, shinier form again just in time for the beginning of this decade.  As I write, a new television series is scheduled for 2017.

My own qualifications for writing about all this are almost nil.  I grew up watching and reading Star Trek--reading especially that strange form of official mythmaking that is modern tie-ins and "behind-the-scenes" books--and have at this point so absorbed much of it into myself that it has become a part of me, influencing the way I live and see and think.  I am (for better for worse) currently on track to become an academic, and am profoundly interested in philosophy, theology, and history in many periods-- though my academic specialization, such as it is, is over a thousand years prior to Star Trek's creation.  Perhaps one day there will be great works of academic scholarship produced about Star Trek; perhaps, for all I know, there already are.  These blog posts will not be any such work; far from it.  This series will be, at best, open and avowed pseudo-scholarship.  I will discuss many things with which I have little competency, work almost entirely from memory, and not cite my sources.  Nevertheless, this I can offer; that I have spent a truly shocking amount of my life thinking about Star Trek, reflecting on it, and reading other people reflecting on it.  I love Star Trek--I hate it--I am, like many, fascinated by it.  Many people--many talented artists and writers--have grappled with the great myth of Star Trek, without managing to pin it down.  I am content to be simply one more such person.

Over the coming weeks (months?) I will be writing various posts on the various Star Trek series.  At this stage, I anticipate writing one (lengthy) post at least on each of the first three Star Trek series, TOS, TNG, and DS9 (I apologize if these acronyms mean nothing to you).  These may mushroom into more than one each.  I will most likely not write a lot about either Voyager or Enterprise, parts of which I have never seen, and neither of which were ever of great interest to me; that is not to say, though, that they are not fascinating in their own right, only that they will have to wait for other, more willing, pens to do them justice.  I will at some point also attempt to tackle the films as well, probably in batches--but TWOK (more acronyms!) will almost certainly take an entire post of its own.  Will I ever complete this monumental task?  Will it make any sense?  Will anyone read it?

As Spock once said-- in a line that helped resolve a dispute between studio and filmmaker and bring about both a sequel and a resurrection-- "There are always possibilities."

We Are All Ukrainians

The more I read and hear, the more I believe that the crisis in Ukraine is of incalculable importance not only for Ukrainians, but for the entire world. This is so whether you are Christian or non-Christian, American or European, Liberal or Conservative.

First of all, the Ukrainian Revolution was an entirely remarkable event. Despite the lies of the Russian propagandists, I am not aware of any revolution that has been more peacefully conducted or more justifiably waged than this one. The people of Ukraine did not take to the streets out of spontaneous love for the EU or America; they did not get beaten by riot police and shot by snipers for any mere legal or social issue, however important. No, millions of ordinary Ukrainians from every walk of life and every political persuasion traveled across the country to the tents and fires of the Maidan, and stayed there through the coldest winter on record, simply to affirm the most basic rights and dignities of the human person.

They did not suffer for European social policy or American capitalism: they suffered to create a society where they would be free from the arbitrary abuse of those in power, where their basic right not to be stolen from, beaten, tortured, and wrongfully imprisoned would be respected. It is not for nothing that Patriarch Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Catholic Church has repeatedly called it a "Revolution of Dignity." These people suffered--and died--for the inviolable dignity of the human person, and the for basic human rights we all take for granted.

And that they succeeded--against a corrupt oligarchic regime awash in Russian money, against the propaganda of the Russian state media, against riot police, sniper fire, and sub-zero temperatures--is almost miraculous.

On the other side of the current conflict is that entity that for the last hundred years has most exemplified arbitrary, self-justifying abuse of power: the Russian state. The abuses of human rights and dignity that take place daily in Russia are too many to recount. There are judges in Russia who have never found anyone innocent; bribes are required even for the most everyday aspects of life; and the complicity of the state with organized crime, including sex trafficking, is immense. Russia today stands for a system of enforced, universal complicity and corrupt, autocratic abuse of power.

And Russia is trying, with all its might, to crush the Ukrainian revolution. It is trying to do this because it is afraid of this revolution--or, more precisely, because it fears what this revolution stands for. Vladmir Putin fears the Ukrainian revolution because what it stands for is diametrically opposed to what he and his country stand for. He thinks it is a threat to him, his allies, and his way of life; and he is right.

This conflict, then, is quite simply about the most basic ideas on which Western Civilization, and indeed all civilization, is founded.

We, as a people and as a civilization, claim to stand for liberty, for human dignity, for justice. This is what the Ukrainians today stand for; this is what they suffered and died for; and this is what they will soon be fighting for.

If we simply stand back and allow Russia to devour Ukraine, to crush its people into the dust and forcibly incorporate them into its system of abuse and corruption, then how can we ever claim to stand for these things again?

I am normally someone who finds slogans about liberty rather distasteful; but if this is not a conflict between liberty and tyranny, then what is?

I am normally someone who urges caution and complexity rather than judgment; but if this is not a conflict between good and evil, then what is?

I firmly believe, then, that it is our responsibility as human beings, whatever our political or religious affiliations, to do everything we can to support the Ukrainian people at this time. We must pray for them, we must stand with them, and we must be willing to suffer for them.

For now, in a very real sense, we are all Ukrainians.