Wertzone Classics: Star Trek: The Original Series

Space, the final frontier. And so forth. In the mid-23rd Century, the Federation starship Enterprise explores strange new worlds under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, making discoveries both wondrous and terrifying.

Reviewing the original Star Trek is a bit like reviewing oxygen (you're not going to convince too many people about not using it), or Lord of the Rings. People are probably already going to watch it or have decided not to. I can't imagine there's too many people sitting on the fence over it. Still, having just watched the whole thing, reviewing it is only polite.

Perhaps the most succinct review of The Original Series, as it is now doomed to be called, came from Futurama back in 2002: "79 episodes, about 30 good ones." This is maybe a little harsh but also not entirely untrue. Airing from 1966 to 1969 (with an unaired pilot produced in 1964), Star Trek was a product of 1960s American assembly line television, producing a mind-boggling 29 episodes in its first season alone. Episodes were not so much carefully written as thrown together in a mad rush, with location filming being a rare luxury and decent visual effects an even rarer one. If anything, it's remarkable that the OG Star Trek holds together as well as it does, and when it works it's still excellent television.

The core of the show is the regular cast, particularly the triumvirate of William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock and DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy: the action hero, the logical analyst and the emotional heart. This trio works extremely well, with consistently outstanding performances from Nimoy and Kelley across the entire show (Kelley is easily the most underrated performer on the show and in the following movies, and is always a delight to watch; Nimoy's brilliance has been extolled so much over the years it's almost redundant to repeat it now). This focus on the core trio detracts somewhat from the wider cast: George Takei as Lt. Sulu, Walter Koenig as Ensign Chekov, Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura and James Doohan as Chief Engineer Scott (with frequent guest appearances by Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel, and a rotating cast of recurring actors as crewmen, some of whom play multiple characters). The wider group gets relatively little time in the sun compared to the core three, which feels a bit weird from a modern lens but was relatively normal practice at the time.

From a performance perspective, William Shatner is a fascinating study. He is, for the first half of the show, consistently very good. Kirk is authoritative, moral and decisive, balancing the logic of Spock with the humanity of McCoy to good effect. In the latter half of the series, starting late in Season 2, it feels like he's checked out a little. The much-lampooned cliches of over-enunciation, attempts at dramatic pauses (which just feel like he's forgotten his lines midway through a speech) and occasionally wild over-acting become much more pronounced. When he has a good day, or is in a good episode with good material, he is still great, but that does become less common as the third season goes on (his worst performance is easily in Turnabout Intruder, which mercifully is also the last episode of the series).

From a writing perspective, the show is often inventive, intriguing and relatively smart, at least in the early going. Later episodes tend to emphasise action and develop tropes that are so rapidly reused they become tedious: the godlike entity who can crush the Enterprise and its crew any time they want, but first they have to use Kirk and the crew as pawns in some game, and are eventually defeated either by semantic trickery or (less commonly) some kind of technological breakthrough. The Enterprise mysteriously loses the use of its weapons, shields and transporter so often that your eyes may roll into the back of your head. Kirk talks sentient computers into self-destruction frequently enough that you wonder why an anti-Kirk firmware update isn't in circulation in the sentient evil computer club.

But the show is also remarkably adept at employing metaphor: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield's commentary on racism is so subtle it flew over the heads of some people, who wrote into the studio to complain that the near-identical aliens hating one another on the basis of skin colour alone was stupid (right in the middle of America's Civil Rights period). It also sings when it moves away from the all-powerful aliens trope to more even engagements: Balance of Terror's WWII submarine-inspired tension is superb, and Space Seed's battle of intellect and wills between Kirk and genetically-engineered warlord Khan is excellently portrayed. The battle between two Federation starships and a powerful (but not unbeatable) planet-killer in The Doomsday Machine is outstanding. The Devil in the Dark is possibly the show's best statement on how to respect and treat sentient life even if it looks and acts nothing like you are used to.

Like most shows of the period, the idea of "worldbuilding" is absent as a conscious idea, but when it strays into it, it is excellent, such as with our first visit to Vulcan in Amok Time and the Federation conference in Journey to Babel. The Klingons and Romulans are both intriguing enemies, although the portrayal of the Klingons lacks depth (maybe aside from Michael Ansara in Day of the Dove); the Romulans appear less frequently but more memorably, with both Balance of Terror and The Enterprise Incident being series highlights.

The show also gives good comedy, with both The Trouble with Tribbles and A Piece of the Action emerging as comic powerhouses (and The Naked Time having its moments). Gene Roddenberry was definitely less keen on comedy episodes, feeling they encouraged people to mock the show, but it's something Trek has been consistently pretty good at over many different shows and episodes. The show is also adept at existential horror, particularly in the early going through episodes like Where No Man Has Gone Before and Miri which make you wonder how the hell Trek got its reputation as a family show with a lot of charm: these episodes are cold, bordering on the bleak at times. That concept doesn't really emerge until the latter part of Season 1 and really sings in Season 2. It's been said so many times as to be redundant now, but Season 3 sees a marked slump in quality, with some of the worst episodes of the show and the franchise like Spock's Brain. Excellent episodes still crop up amongst the dross, like The Enterprise Incident and All Our Yesterdays, but it can be hard going.

Production value-wise, the show is obviously almost sixty years old so doesn't look fantastic. Location shooting is a bonus, hugely enhancing episodes like Shore Leave and Arena, but most episodes are forced to rely on sets (of wildly varying effectiveness) to portray exterior locations. Makeup and prosthetics are mostly underwhelming, but imaginative design can help overcome that: the Gorn looks weak, but the drama of the script helps overcome these deficiencies. Modelwork and space shots are often decent, and the 2006 remastered version of the show is excellent for updating the space shots whilst staying true to the original design intentions. In a similar vein, the show has some wince-inducing dialogue and ideas about the treatment of women and minorities compared to modern shows, but in other respects, and especially by the standards of the day, the show is remarkably progressive (and later Trek shows aren't always fantastic in this regard either).

Star Trek: The Original Series (****) is, in some respects, dated. But in many others it is remarkably watchable, with frequently great performances. It mixes horror, comedy and SF action-adventure to good effect. It set the scene and groundwork for the most successful TV SF franchise of all time. Sure, there's a fair number of episodes which are poor and don't work very well, but when the show does work - such as in City on the Edge of Forever, Balance of Terror, Amok Time, The Doomsday Machine, The Trouble with Tribbles and more - it remains excellent entertainment. The show is available right now in most territories via Paramount+ and on DVD and Blu-Ray.

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Star Trek: Generations

Captain James T. Kirk attends the launch of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B. An emergency situation arises and Kirk, as usual, helps save the day, but he is apparently killed in the process. Seventy-eight years later, Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise 1701-D is put in a desperate situation when a fanatical scientist starts destroying entire star systems. Picard is going to need some help...

With the conclusion of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1994, a TV series that dwarfed the popularity and reach of its predecessors, Paramount was keen to move the show and its popular cast onto the big screen as soon as possible. Overriding the concerns of the production team, the film was immediately put into rotation to start shooting as soon as filming was completed on the TV show and to be on cinema screens before the end of the same year. It was a tall order, leaving the cast and crew exhausted from working on the TV show for seven years and then straight into a full-length feature film.

Some of this can be seen on screen. Star Trek: Generations (the first film in the series to drop the roman numerals) is a solid but unexceptional film, something of a surprise given it features Captains Kirk and Picard joining forces to take down a mutual threat, a charismatic villain played by Malcolm McDowell. There's some entertaining comedy beats and some very good characterisation, particularly of Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) as he gets used to his "emotion chip". Most of the castmembers get at least a brief chance to shine and, in the scene where the Enterprise-D's saucer section crash-lands on a planetary surface, one of the franchise's most memorable action and effects set-pieces.

The film relies a little too heavily on the TV show for setup. Villains Lursa and B'Etor have very little motivation and if you hadn't seen them already in the TV show, you'd have no idea why them showing up is a big deal. Similarly, Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) feels like a bit of a walking deus ex machina in the film and her character has no real arc.  The story also feels a bit overworked and overcomplicated, with too many moving pieces and a TV-like approach of pressing on regardless of if the plot makes sense  (Soren not being able to beam into the Nexus from a ship already feels a bit iffy, but the jump from that to blowing up entire stars to shift the Nexus's path feels extreme). The film's big ending being a fistfight between two middle-aged gentlemen and an older one on a big rock is also rather underwhelming. Destroying another Enterprise also feels a bit gratuitous, although it is at least done in an impressive manner.

Still, it's a long way from the worst entry in the Star Trek pantheon and it has fun moments. William Shatner takes a delight in hamming up every second he's on-screen, but for once this is more charming than annoying, due to his limited screen time (he has a brief appearance at the start of the film and then at the end, more of an extended camo than the promised film-length team-up). He and Stewart make for an entertaining team, even if the gulf in their respective acting abilities is more of a yawning chasm. Malcolm McDowell can do "charming but evil" in his sleep and the film packs a lot into its running time.

Star Trek: Generations (***½) isn't going to be winning any prizes for being a classic movie, but it is a solid and entertaining piece that does its job - passing the baton from one generation to another - efficiently.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Nimbus III: the "Planet of Galactic Peace," a world where the Klingons, Romulans and Federation have agreed to put aside their differences and work together to develop a society in tandem. The plan was a miserable failure, the planet reduced to a backwater, albeit the only backwater apart from Earth where representatives of all three powers can be found. When a terrorist group takes the ambassadors hostage, the USS Enterprise is ordered to mount a rescue mission.

They say if you stare too long, into the abyss, it will stare back into you. Watching Star Trek V: The Final Frontier makes the viewer acutely aware of the accuracy of that statement, except the abyss is William Shatner, believing he is a good director and very desperately hoping he can convince you he is as well.

The fifth mainline Star Trek feature film is something of an odd beast, to say the least. After Leonard Nimoy directed the third and fourth films, Shatner invoked a clause in his Paramount contract giving him the right to direct the next film in the series and have a say in its story. Paramount braced themselves for the experience and it was a heady one, with Shatner proposing a story where the crew of the Enterprise are forced to travel to a planet in search of God but instead discover the Devil pretending to be God, and are caught in a cosmic battle between good and evil. Aware they were under a contractual restraint, Paramount executives put the story into development, managing to convince Harve Bennett (producer on the second through fourth films) to return to help guide - or make filmable - the "ambitious" project. Bennett realised that Shatner had become fascinated by the idea of televangelists, particularly corrupt ones who conned people into giving them money by promising them a place in the promised land. Script rewrites with David Loughery developed the idea that there was no real God or the Devil in the story, and instead an imprisoned alien entity would pretend to be God to try to hitch a ride on the Enterprise out of its prison.

With this new story in place - one less likely to get the franchise blacklisted by Christians - and the cast signed up (Nimoy stoically agreeing to return as a professional courtesy to his colleague Shatner, but frantically encouraging rewrites behind the scenes) things were in a promising place for perhaps a watchable movie. But The Final Frontier immediately ran into a series of big problems: Paramount decided to rush-release the film to hit the summer 1989 market rather than wait until Christmas; additional rewrites designed to iron out the remaining script problems were halted by the 1988 Writer's Strike; and Industrial Light and Magic and most of the other big Hollywood effects companies were fully booked with projects like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II and Tim Burton's Batman. The only effects company available on short notice were, how shall we say, "not very good" and inexperienced, wasting a huge amount of the film's not-ungenerous budget (half again that of The Voyage Home) on test shots that went nowhere.

So, whilst Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a diabolical mess of a movie with awful visual effects, major script problems and leaden direction, it's unfair to blame all of this on the film's director and star. In fact, the film has a reasonable amount of merit to it. It's the only film in the franchise to follow the TV show's lead and focus extremely closely on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship, the emotional core of the original series. With Shatner clearly exhausted from pulling double duty as director, and Nimoy giving arguably the most phoned-in performance of his career (there are a few scenes where you can see Nimoy's soul vacating his body during some of his line readings), it falls on DeForest Kelley to emerge as the film's most valuable player. He adds charm and wit to the campfire scenes at the start of the movie, and the scene where he has to relive the death of his father might be McCoy's most challenging emotional scene in the entire franchise, and Kelley rises to the occasion tremendously. James Doohan and Nichelle Nichols have a fair bit to do, for once, and there's an intriguing hint that they're in a relationship, or might be headed that way, which is never really followed up on. Nichols also gets her infamous "fan dance" scene, which remains baffling (and where Uhura got the fans is never disclosed).

On the guest star front, the film lucks out with Laurence Luckinbill, a well-regarded stage actor who very rarely did film or television (Star Trek V is literally his last on-screen starring role). Luckinbill gives a spirited, enthusiastic performance as Sybok, the Vulcan who rejected logic to become a man of faith, very much the televangelist of Shatner's original inspiration. But he's not a lunatic or a fire-and-brimstone preacher, rather a man of charisma, intelligence and tremendous empathy who inspires trust. It's a really hard mix to nail successfully, but Luckinbill succeeds. Other castmembers are also very good, particularly David Warner, Charles Cooper and Cynthia Gouw as the ambassadors to Nimbus III, though they seem to have less screentime than was originally envisaged; Warner and Cooper were later invited back to the franchise, the latter also as a Klingon, possibly to make up for this. The other Klingon villains are a bit one-note, but they're not needed for much more than that.

So having an accomplished guest cast and some great scenes for the established regulars result in some pretty good moments in the film. Unfortunately, the problems elsewhere almost overwhelm the movie. The effects are terrible: back-projection (!) is used for some of the space scenes and other scenes that normally use greenscreen and this does not look very good, at all. Jerry Goldsmith returns for his first soundtrack in the franchise since Star Trek: The Motion Picture and seems to have gotten confused and just reused his score from that film with little in the way of new themes or development. It's the first time in the movie franchise so far that a soundtrack disappoints. The physical effects are also embarrassing. A physical fight between Kirk and a cat-alien on Nimbus III is Doctor Who-on-a-bad-day levels of cringe. The climactic battle on Sh Ka Ree sees Kirk call a photon torpedo - a device which at its lowest level is still basically a tactical nuke - down on his head and it causes almost no damage to the surrounding area. It's all deeply amateur hour, except there's Trek fan films which have more convincing production values.

But the key weaknesses of the film remain the script - even this much-improved one over the demented original story treatment - and Shatner's leaden direction. Although reportedly Shatner was a convivial director on set, even earning the respect of actors he'd annoyed over the years like Doohan and Takei, he doesn't have much sense of pacing or energy, and his shots are often rote. There's little sense of the invention or energy that both Meyer and Nimoy brought to the fore in the preceding three movies. In more than a few scenes, the lifeless takes make you horrifically wonder what the takes were like which weren't used. Mercifully, Paramount have declined Shatner's various offers of a Director's Cut, which is probably for the best.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (*½) is not a great movie, which is a shame because it does have potential. The idea of both individuals and an alien playing on people's faith to manipulate them has a lot of merit, and the character-based interplay between the triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy is the closest the movies ever get to the TV show. DeForest Kelley might give his franchise-best performance, making up for Shatner and Nimoy (both off their game). But the combination of Shatner's lifeless direction, the absolutely woeful visual effects, a phoned-in musical score and a weak script eventually provides the Enterprise crew with an enemy they cannot overcome.

Star Trek at 50: Crossing the Generations

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had been a major box office success upon its release in 1986, but the original crew's thunder had been stolen a little by the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation a year later. With that series established as a success, Paramount were keen to continue developing the movie series.

In order to retain William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Paramount had made an informal agreement for him to direct the fifth movie in the series. This followed Leonard Nimoy's directing of the third and fourth movies, both of which had been judged highly successful. Shatner's screen directing career was more limited than Nimoy's, limited to ten episodes of his TV series TJ Hooker, but he was certainly familiar with the process as well as knowing his fellow actors well and having the support of the filming crew, which would be a mixture of experienced personnel from the previous movies and staff from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Harve Bennett, who had produced every movie since The Wrath of Khan, also stayed on as producer for this film and helped break the story.

The premise was that the Enterprise crew were going to meet God, something Gene Roddenberry had been pushing for for a long time. However, the twist envisaged by both Shatner and Bennett was that it would be an alien posing as a deity who would manipulate people into following him through faith. Although the premise was judged strong, further rewrites were believed to be necessary to make the story stronger. This turned out to be impossible as the 1988 Writer's Strike took hold, forcing the movie to shoot with a script that had been less revised than was ideal.

Unexpectedly, the shoot turned out to be quite enjoyable. Even those actors who had experienced personal acrimony or issues with Shatner - most famously George Takei - found that Shatner as a director worked quite well. In particular, Shatner enjoyed getting his fellow actors involved in physical activities despite their age (they were then all well into their fifties and James Doohan was approaching his seventies), which they respected. They also appreciated the fact that Shatner kept backstage drama - such as budget cuts and constant interference from the studio - away from the rest of the cast.

As it turned out, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier nearly killed the franchise. The movie opened in the summer of 1989, in a crowded sequel season, playing against Ghostbusters II and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as well as Tim Burton's Batman. The film took home $63 million, a franchise low, against a franchise high budget of $33 million. The reviews were also terrible. Shatner accepted the blame, although also pointing out issues such as the script development being cut short by the strike and constant budget cuts meaning they had to use a less experienced special effects company.

Over the next year or so Paramount began to question the future fate of Star Trek on the big screen. The massive burst of popularity that Star Trek: The Next Generation underwent through its third season caused them to change their mind, as this resulted in renewed goodwill to the franchise on the eve of its 25th anniversary. Harve Bennett was asked to develop a new script which would act as a prequel to the series, featuring new, younger actors playing Kirk, Spock and McCoy at Starfleet Academy. This script went through several versions, but as momentum gathered pace the original series actors began to see the benefits of returning in a new film. There was a feeling that they did not want Star Trek V to be their goodbye to the franchise. Bennett was asked to jettison his previous work for a new story involving the old crew but he was not interested in this idea and decided to leave the series after spending ten years working on it.

Paramount began considering new writers and reached out to Leonard Nimoy for ideas. Nimoy went to see Nicholas Meyer, the director of Star Trek II and co-writer of Star Trek IV, and they started throwing concepts around. Meyer was thinking about contemporary issues and suddenly had the thought of the "the wall coming down in space", a reference to the then-recent fall of the Berlin Wall and the resulting end of Communism in Europe. He came up with the story that the Klingon Empire experienced a massive ecological disaster (comparable to Chernobyl) and this sparked the idea of glasnost with the Federation, but forces on both sides working to undermine it, including - unintentionally - Kirk. Nimoy took the idea to Paramount, who immediately saw potential in it, and Nimoy asked Meyer to direct. Nimoy himself was a preferred choice, but Nimoy foresaw possible difficulties with Shatner if Nimoy directed his third Trek movie to Shatner's one. Meyer agreed. Gene Roddenberry was brought on board as a consultant, but fervently disliked the movie's militaristic and naval tone. Meyer described one argument as being extremely passionate and angry, and he later felt ashamed of himself. Meyer particularly took issue with Roddenberry arguing that Saavik (a returning character from Star Trek II and III) would never betray Kirk, as Meyer himself had created the character. Ultimately, actor scheduling issues meant that Saavik had to be removed from the script and replaced with a similar Vulcan character, Valeris.

As with Star Trek V, there were significant struggles over the budget. Eventually, the sixth movie would come in at $27 million, $6 million less than the previous movie. Money was saved by redressing Star Trek: The Next Generation sets wherever possible, as well as reusing the already-built Enterprise, Excelsior and Klingon Bird-of-Prey models, as well as overhauling the Klingon battlecruiser model built for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was released on 6 December 1991 and was an unexpected hit, grossing just under $100 million. The critical reception was much stronger for the film and some of the marketing for the movie - most notably a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy as Spock on a Star Trek: The Next Generation two-part episode called Unification - was highly praised. Amusingly, the only real scorn was reserved for the movie's opening special effect in which a massive explosion in space only propagates in two dimensions rather than three. Enough of a fuss was made about this by fans that a similar stellar explosion in the following movie was explicitly shown to be a sphere.

Gene Roddenberry passed away barely six weeks before the film opened. The movie was dedicated to him. In addition, the castmembers' signatures appeared at the end of the film as they expressly said goodbye to the characters they had been portraying for a quarter of a century. The movie marked the final appearances by Nichelle Nichols (to date) and DeForest Kelley in a Star Trek production.

Behind the scenes, Paramount were very happy with the movie's rate of return versus its budget and began planning a seventh film. Star Trek: The Next Generation was planned to end with its sixth season and it was decided to bring the new cast and crew to the big screen. When it was decided to expand this to seven seasons, Paramount declined to change the release date for the movie, forcing the crew to begin development of the film whilst work on the final season of the TV show was underway (everyone involved later admitted that this was a mistake). The seventh movie would feature Walter Koenig and James Doohan in brief cameos, with William Shatner taking a larger role in a story which would teamed him up with Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard to defeat a mutual enemy.

Star Trek at 50: Phase II and The Motion Picture

Star Trek: The Original Series ran for three seasons on NBC from 1966 to 1969 and was a modest success. However, the show really found its footing in syndication and became a huge smash hit, with millions of viewers tuning in. In 1973-74 an animated series aired which was moderately successful, but fans were clamouring to see more live-action adventures.

 Concept artwork for Star Trek: Phase II.

So were Gene Roddenberry and Paramount Pictures, who had inherited the Star Trek franchise when they bought up Desilu. However, there were early disagreements over how to proceed. The fans wanted a new TV series which could explore many more characters and stories. Paramount were keener on a mid-budget film series. The cast were divided, but certainly Leonard Nimoy was highly ambivalent over returning to play Spock on a regular basis out of fear of typecasting (perhaps groundlessly, as he had among the busier post-Trek careers of his colleagues).

In May 1975 Paramount decided to proceed with a feature film and Roddenberry began considering ideas. He initially toyed with a prequel showing the Enterprise crew forming and coming together, but ultimately settled on the idea of a malfunctioning AI declaring itself a deity and travelling towards Earth. With the working title The God-Thing, the script underwent several revisions with writers such as Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Silverberg taking passes. However, Paramount were unnerved by the script's anti-religious overtones (especially the insinuation that by the 23rd Century religion had effectively become extinct on Earth) and pulled Roddenberry from the project. The new creative team developed a fresh idea called Planet of the Titans and considered a more action-oriented story featuring Spock fighting a Klingon nemesis played by Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.

Two years into development, Star Wars was released and Paramount got cold feet about launching a mid-budget production that would not be able to compete with George Lucas's movie in terms of visual effects. Reasoning that audiences would not be interested in two movie SF franchises at the same time, they brought Roddenberry back in and began developing a new Star Trek series, with the working title Phase II.

With Paramount looking to put the series into a reasonably fast turn-around to debut on their new TV network, Roddenberry quickly reworked The God-Thing into a much-less controversial script called In Thy Image, now envisaged as a two-part pilot episode. The new series would see the bulk of the old crew (including Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura) return on a drastically upgraded and rebuilt version of the Enterprise, Roddenberry using the real-life naval tradition of "refits" to justify the change in design. New characters would also feature, most notably Commander Decker as first officer, Lt. Ilia as a psychiatrist and counsellor and Lt. Xon as the new science officer. Spock would be reduced to a recurring role, playing a large role in the occasional episode but sitting out of most episodes. This was to satisfy Leonard Nimoy's conflicting desire to still do the series as a professional courtesy to Roddenberry and the fans, but not commit to it to the exclusion of other projects.

Sets were designed, costume and make-up tests were undertaken and original designer Matt Jefferies began updating the Enterprise model. Everything was going well and it looked like Star Trek: Phase II would enter production in November 1977.

The cast of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

What happened next took everyone by surprise: Paramount announced the cancellation of Phase II less than a fortnight before filming was due to begin. Apparently the studio had gotten wind of the pre-release excitement and hype for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, whilst Fox had announced that a Star Wars sequel movie was in development. Paramount had concluded that the marketplace could sustain multiple big SF movies simultaneously, and this was confirmed when Close Encounters came out at the end of November and was a massive hit. Paramount mandated that not only would Star Trek now become a feature film, but it would be a big-budget affair. But they wanted it in production yesterday.

Roddenberry and his team of writers began reworking the script for In Thy Image into a movie script. With a much bigger budget available, they mandated sweeping shots of much more elaborate starship models than they had first envisaged and ordered the construction of much larger and more elaborate sets. Satisfied with early work, Paramount announced in March 1978 that Robert Wise would be directing Star Trek: The Motion Picture, based on a script by Harold Livingstone and a story by Gene Roddenberry. The budget was set at $15 million.

Richard Taylor and Andrew Probert updated the Enterprise design and model from the Phase II version into what would - arguably - become the most iconic and definitive version of the ship for the films. Syd Mead was brought into design the V'Ger spacecraft, a titanic model that ended up being over 68 feet (21m) long.

Filming began on 7 August 1978; delays had been caused by script dissatisfaction, especially with the ending, but these had been overcome. The intervening period had also been useful in allowing Gene Roddenberry to convince Leonard Nimoy to play a larger role in the story (Nimoy had originally planned to sit out the film altogether). However, as filming started the script was still being tweaked, with Roddenberry, Robert Wise and even Nimoy and Shatner suggesting a near-constant stream of updates and changes. There were also significant production problems, including faulty lights, dubious electrical issues and illness among the cast.

The refit version of the original USS Enterprise is often cited as the best version of the ship to date. It was so popular that the second Enterprise simply reused the same design.

Shooting finally wrapped on 26 January 1979, 125 days after it began, and a massive wrap party was held. Post-production then got underway, but even this spiralled out of control as the effects shots became more and more elaborate. Multiple companies and effects teams were brought in until Douglas Trumbull stepped in. Despite having only nine months to complete twice as many effects shots as Star Wars (which was developed over a three-year period) and a famously exacting nature, Trumbull managed to pull off the feat. However, the effects budget had ballooned out of control in the meantime.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released on 7 December 1979. To the horror of Paramount, the budget had ballooned to $46 million (over four times the budget of Star Wars and almost twice the budget of its then-in-production sequel, The Empire Strikes Back) and they began to fear a disasterous flop. Fortunately, this didn't happen. The film made $11 million on its opening weekend, which was considered very good, and ultimately the film grossed $139 million worldwide. This was not considered to be a massive, phenomenal success, but it was considered to be a good return given the critical reception.

The film was dubbed Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture almost immediately, with critics agreeing that the effects were dazzling but went on for far too long at the expense of characterisation. Robert Wise later regretted not test-screening the movie first, as he could have cut out some of the effects and reinstated some of the character material that had been cut for time. However, the film's cerebral core and interest in diplomacy and science over action and violence did go down quite well with some viewers and fans, who had feared a violent action-fest inspired by Star Wars.

With the film a success, Gene Roddenberry presented Paramount with an idea for a sequel, involving time travel and the assassination of JFK. Paramount thanked him for his and "kicked him upstairs" to a consulting role. They brought in a new writer and producer, Harve Bennett, who had been doing good work on television working on low and mid-budget productions. They asked him for his honest thoughts about The Motion Picture and he replied that he found it a bit boring. They then asked him if he could make a sequel for "less than forty-five f***ing million dollars". Bennett said he could make five movies for that amount of money. Bennett was hired on the spot. He did raise one objection: he'd never actually seen any Star Trek. He was given a screening room and the reels of all 79 episodes to familiarise himself with the characters and premise, as well as look at ideas for a story. Bennett was actually looking for something more specific: an antagonist, juding it a major weakness of The Motion Picture that it had no enemy or bad guy. It actually wasn't that long before Bennett found what he was looking for.

"Hi. I'm here to save your franchise."

Star Trek at 50: The Original Series

In early 1966 NBC and Desilu Productions signed an agreement formally committing to producing a full season of television based on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. To get to that point Roddenberry had had to create two pilots, hire a cast and build elaborate sets over a period of eighteen months, and still nothing had actually made it to the screen. The formal greenlight allowed him, his writers and his actors to breathe a sigh of relief.

"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Just a few weeks later, Desilu almost killed the series. Although the production company was influential and capable, it was not the largest in Hollywood and it could not afford to mount a number of large projects simultaneously. Bruce Geller had proposed a new, expensive spy drama series to Desilu that had gotten a number of networks very excited, more excited than they were over Star Trek. Desilu agreed to proceed with this series, but it put the future of the Star Trek deal in doubt, as it financially overextended the company. Herb Solow, the Desilu director of programming who was Star Trek's champion, had to meet the head of Desilu, the formidable actress and producer Lucille Ball, and convince her to back both shows simultaneously. Ball agreed and work resumed on both Trek and the spy show, which became known as Mission: Impossible, making this one of the more notably successful such gambles in the history of Hollywood.

For the series itself a number of additional castmembers were added. The second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, saw William Shatner cast as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy retained as Mr. Spock and them both joined by James Dooham as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott and George Takei as Mr. Sulu. Sulu was initially characterised as a scientist but for the show itself became the helmsman of the Enterprise. Paul Fix played Dr. Piper in the second pilot but for the series he was replaced by DeForest Kelley at Dr. Leonard McCoy. Gene Roddenberry was interested in diversifying the cast with female roles, so retained Majel Barrett from the original pilot, The Cage, in the new role of Nurse Christine Chapel and cast Grace Lee Whitney as Janice Rand, the captain's yeoman. However, Roddenberry wanted a female character front and centre on the bridge, so cast the young African-American actress Nichelle Nichols as communications officer Lt. Uhura. This was an unusual move in the racially sensitive period of the 1960s, but Roddenberry felt it was essential to show an aspirational future free of the petty prejudices of the day.

Filming commenced in the summer of 1966 and the first episode, The Man Trap, was aired on 8 September 1966. The show initially had favourable ratings, but a mixed critical reception. The show's ratings also dipped as the season continued. However, NBC had started studying the demographics of viewership rather than just the raw numbers and concluded that Star Trek's audience, although small, was committed and also young. Using these figures, it was able to still sell advertising space at a favourable rate which kept the show on the air for the rest of the first season.

The Hugo Award-winning City on the Edge of Forever is widely (but not unanimously) regarded as the best episode of The Original Series. It was written by Harlan Ellison, with rewrites by a team including D.C. Fontana, Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon.

The first season of the original Star Trek is often regarded as the best, featuring episodes such as The Galileo Seven, Balance of Terror and, most memorably, Space Seed and The City on the Edge of Forever. Space Seed saw Ricardo Montalban cast as Khan, a genetically-engineered super-criminal who nearly seizes control of the ship with the help of a Starfleet traitor. Kirk exiles Khan to the planet Ceti Alpha V at the end of the episode and them promptly forgets about him. City on the Edge of Forever, written by popular SF novelist and short story writer Harlan Ellison, was unusual for Star Trek in that it mixed in time travel with a love story, featuring William Shatner's Kirk falling in love with a political activist played by Joan Collins. The script would be partially rewritten by D.C. Fontana and Roddenberry himself, amongst others, to bring it in on time and budget. The episode won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and became something of a pop culture phenomenon even outside Star Trek's own fanbase: the 1990s British sitcom Men Behaving Badly set an entire episode around the characters watching this episode on a rerun.

Star Trek's first season also saw NBC receive a large amount of praise for the show. It received 30,000 pieces of mail about the series, including letters from scientists, doctors and engineers praising the show. The Smithsonian Institution requested a copy of the series to be stored in its archives as it was of scientific and cultural interest. NBC was taken aback and this support helped it make the decision to renew the series, even though the ratings had already been good enough to ensure that anyway.

The second season saw only a few cosmetic changes to the formula from the first. The most notable was the addition of Walter Koenig to the cast as Ensign Pavel Chekov. Roddenberry had decided that adding a Russian character was a good idea to show that in the future the United States and Russia would have put aside their differences and reconciled, which he thought was a healthier message than other shows which were using the Cold War as a source for action and conflict.

More subtle, although irritating to some of the cast, was the fact that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had emerged as the stars of the show and were now given the lion's share of the action. DeForest Kelley's Dr. McCoy became an excellent foil to the two so the show became centred on the three leads (although McCoy had relatively few episodes about him specifically, compared to Kirk and Spock), with the other characters becoming supporting roles. Nichelle Nichols considered leaving the show at this point and to use her newfound fame to get work on Broadway. However, at a charity fundraiser she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose civil rights movement was at its height. He told Nichols that she was an inspirational role model for both women and people of colour across the United States and asked her to stay. She agreed.

The second season saw additional memorable and classic episodes, including Amok Time, The Changeling, The Doomsday Machine, Journey to Babel (which introduced Spock's parents) and The Trouble with Tribbles. The show continued to gain fans but the ratings remained less than what NBC would have preferred. However, Star Trek was outperforming the opposition and the demographics continued to show that affluent and professional people were watching the series. A change in transmission date meant that some of the younger viewers from the first season were no longer watching, which have led to some brief discussions at NBC and the rumour that they were considering cancelling the series. This does not appear to have been seriously on the cards, but Gene Roddenberry fanned the flames of the rumour at a series of SF conventions. 116,000 pieces of fan mail flooded the NBC letter room begging them to keep the show on the air. NBC made the unusual step of announcing the renewal live on air, just to let the fans know the show would definitely be coming back.

Things looked rosy for Star Trek but then a problem emerged: internal network politics. The plan had been to move Star Trek to a Monday night, which was considered prime airing real estate. However, the producer of the comedy show it would have replaced angrily objected and, due to contractual agreements, that show could not be moved. Trek had to be dropped back to Friday nights. This was considered the kiss of death as Trek's target audience frequently went out on a Friday evening, but there was no other slot available. The advertising revenue for this slot was also lower than Trek's old slot, so this resulted in a 10% budget cut compared even to Season 1.

Shatner and Nimoy were "unimpressed" with the quality of scripts for the show's third and final season, but particularly despised Spock's Brain, possibly the nadir of the entire Star Trek franchise.

Roddenberry was utterly furious and spent months locking horns with NBC to get them to change their minds, to no avail. He was so annoyed that he withdrew from day-to-day production duties on the show. Roddenberry's previous co-producer had been Gene L. Coon (aka "The Forgotten Gene"), who had joined halfway through Season 1 and won the respect of the cast and the writers as a skilled, even-handed showrunner with a fine eye for quality scripts. Unfortunately, Coon had been offered an excellent deal at Universal and left towards the end of Season 2 (to the later woe of the cast and crew alike), although he continued to contribute scripts under a pseudonym. NBC appointed Fred Freiberger to take charge of the production instead. Freiberger was less interested in serious SF stories and instead mandated more action and monster stories, to the consternation of the cast, writers and fans. The third season was critically mauled compared to the first two, especially the mind-bogglingly awful episode Spock's Brain which opened the season. Nimoy and Shatner were both embarrassed and annoyed by the script, and Nimoy considered the episode the most appalling thing he'd ever worked on. Freiberger's influence on the show was regarded as highly detrimental, replacing the more serious SF of the first two seasons with shlock and cheap sensationalism. A decade later, he would do the same thing when he took over the running of Space: 1999 for its second season and likewise sent the quality of the show right off the edge of a cliff.

Later episodes were better, however, with The Enterprise Incident, The Tholian Web and Day of the Dove considered to be quite strong pieces. The season also managed to score two notable points for political commentary: Plato's Stepchildren featured a kiss between a mind-controlled Kirk and Uhura. Although not quite the first interracial kiss on American television (Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nancy Sinatra had kissed on a TV show a year earlier), it was still considered provocative and daring, and attracted complaints from NBC affiliates in the South. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was an allegorical episode, featuring the Enterprise crew stumbling on a planet with an overclass who consider themselves racially superior to the underclass, yet both are identical: black on one side of the face and white on the other. The crew are baffled when they realise that the sides of the colours are inverted between the two sides, a completely arbitrary distinction. The racial allegory was unsubtle but somewhat effective.

Ratings for the third season, as expected, tanked and this time no amount of letter-writing could save the show. Turnabout Intruder, the final episode of Star Trek, aired on 3 June 1969. The sets were struck and the actors moved onto other projects. Leonard Nimoy, in fact, only moved across the lot to join the cast of Mission: Impossible. Star Trek, it appeared, was done.

Or maybe not. One month after the final episode aired in the States, the show aired in the United Kingdom for the first time, on the BBC. Glossy and in full colour, Star Trek showed up the BBC's own Doctor Who as looking a bit tired and antiquated, helping inspire a full, dramatic revamp of that show (less episodes, higher budgets and a move to full colour). The show also started airing in many other countries, where it quickly became popular. Star Trek also finished airing just a few weeks short of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Suddenly science fiction was a hot property, and everywhere. NBC's cancellation of Star Trek after just 79 episodes fell short of the normal number required for syndication (roughly 104, allowing stations to show two episodes a week year-round), but they found a lot of interest anyway and sold the entire series to local networks to air as and when they pleased.

The result was an explosion of popularity. Suddenly Star Trek was in constant reruns all over the United States and many other countries. Books started appearing, and in December 1972 a Star Trek-specific convention was organised in New York City, attended by Gene Roddenberry. Soon Trek conventions became an annual event, attracting thousands of attendees with castmembers regularly showing up.

Star Trek: The Animated Series ran for two seasons in 1973 and 1974. It reunited most of the original cast for a new series of adventures, mostly scripted by writers from the original series. Gene Roddenberry was not a fan of animation and later "decanonised" the series. However, it was restored to official status in the 1990s.

This belated success caused Roddenberry and NBC to consider a revival of the show. The actors and writers had other commitments which made this difficult, but in 1973 the cast did regroup to make Star Trek: The Animated Series. This ran for two seasons on NBC and was a moderate success, particularly for the way it allowed much more alien creatures and worlds to be used, but the fans were keen for new live-action adventures.

What followed was story of conflicting interests, with Paramount keen to use the name appeal of the show to launch a feature film series and Roddenberry and the fans generally more inclined to want another TV series which would allow them to see more of the characters. Other factors came into this, such as Leonard Nimoy's reluctance to reprise the role of Spock for long periods (his first 1975 autobiography, I Am Not Spock, saw him engaging in this debate publicly) out of fear of typecasting. This series of battles and corporate conflicts was finally settled in May 1977: the release and massive success of Star Wars led - somewhat bafflingly - to Paramount concluding that no-one would go and see two science fiction movies so close together, so they formally greenlit Star Trek: Phase II, a new TV series reuniting the original cast but adding new characters and featuring Spock only as an occasionally recurring role.

Star Trek was on its way back to the screen.