JennyOndioline

The man was a goddamn legend. Sad to see him go, but he lived long, and prospered, and that's all anyone can ask.

Side note: great DS9 writeup! It's my favorite modern Trek series by far, and it's always nice to see it get some love! It doesn't even really get started until Sisko grows the goatee and shaves his head.

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Trollheart

I've just written his tribute, which I'll air during Star Trek Month. A hard thing to do without the tears getting in the way...

Yeah, DS9 is my favourite too. I loved the way they looked into Starfleet and the Federation and said, you know, maybe this institution is not really so great after all? Closest to my favourite sf series, but then, you know what that is...!

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JennyOndioline

If it's Babylon 5, marry me.

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Trollheart

Just choose your ring...
Have you not been reading my coverage here? The very best sci-fi and even the second best drama ever on TV, and I'll fight anyone to the death who says otherwise!

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JennyOndioline

In Valen's name!

I only read off-and-on because I've been super busy lately, but it looks like I'm going to have to dive into your archives, because I wholeheartedly agree. B5 is my favorite SF series of all time, warts and all.

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Trollheart

begins tomorrow!


(Even Mister Worf is happy!)

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Trollheart

“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 boldy go where no man has gone before!”

With these words, not just a television series but a true phenomenon began. The Star Trek franchise is now worth billions of dollars worldwide, and has spawned four sequels and to date twelve Hollywood movies, as well as countless other tie-ins and spinoffs. The first real television franchise, Star trek is shown somewhere in the world almost every minute, and there can be few people who have not seen at least one of its incarnations. Even for those who have never experienced it, the words “Kirk”, “Spock” and “Enterprise” all have meaning, and all relate to the programme that redefined television drama, and almost single-handedly gave birth to the era of television science-fiction.

(Gene Roddenberry: the man who started it all)
Before Star Trek, TV was simple: the good guys chased the bad guys, caught them and said something pithy while smiling into the camera. That’s overgeneralising of course, but essentially that was the tried and trusted formula for TV, and it worked whether you had a cop show, a cowboy show, a comedy show or any other sort of show. It was a template, and with a very few exceptions writers wrote within that framework. Then came Star Trek. Rather than just be a chasing-aliens-and-space battles (which was surely not only envisioned but expected by executives when it was pitched to them), this series would take on the issues of the day, make political and social comment and attract far more than the expected geeky teenager audience, with its adherents eventually being academics, teachers, scientists and even astronauts.

Star Trek has become so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the world that it is now not at all unusual for people to have their first kiss to it, conceive their first child to it, even name the child after a character in it. Weddings can now be full Starfleet affairs, and where this sort of thing would be, and was, looked on as at best weird and at worst sad, these days it is almost acceptable. The poor maligned Trekkies and Trekkers may not quite outnumber the “norms”, but we’re getting there. Star Trek conventions are big business, the actors all get great jobs with voiceovers and sponsorship, and many have received honorary doctorates when, really, they wouldn’t know one end of a microscope from another. But it’s not for what they know that these people have been honoured, it’s for what they were a part of, how Star Trek changed the lives of more people than anyone will ever know. Many Apollo astronauts have cited the programme as a reason they wanted to go into space, while cults and even religions have grown up around the franchise.

(A "typical" Star Trek wedding)
I personally would consider myself a semi-hardcore Trekker. I’ve only been to one convention (and that wasn’t anything like I expected) and I don’t own a uniform (at least, not a Star Trek one! ) but I have watched all series (bar Enterprise) and can tell you most of what happens in every episode. I can argue the merits and failings of the Borg, Quark’s bar, Data’s approach to Shakespeare, or any other aspect you wish. I don’t go giving people the Vulcan salute (but I can do it: just) but I do often recall episodes or events in the series that I can use to parallel my own life. I’m certainly not a casual fan, but neither have I built Starfleet Academy in my back garden.

So here I’d like to take the month to look deeply into this amazing creation of one man --- or as deeply as I can in four weeks --- and try to give you a flavour of what it’s all about. I’ll be looking at episodes from all four main series as well as some of the movies, with articles on various aspects of the show and features on characters. If you haven’t seen the show before this could be a great introduction for you, and don’t be afraid to shout if you have questions.

But mostly I hope just to have fun here for the next month, exploring what it is that makes this originally only three-season, seventy-nine episode series such an enduring phenomenon, and why even now, nearly fifty years after its creation, it still has the power to enthrall, thrill and engage us. I should point out that, like everything in The Couch Potato, spoilers will abound, so if you’re getting into the series for the first time, be warned as there are major plot revelations all through these articles. There’s no point in my spoilering them, as it would just be impossible, so think carefully before you proceed. I don’t want to be held responsible for anyone’s disappointment later on.

Do be aware I am not covering the so-far most recent series, Enterprise, later Star Trek: Enterprise, for a range of reasons. Mostly because I didn't watch it all --- about half a season I think --- and what I did see gave me no hope it would get any better. I was bored by it, and while I can wax critical about Voyager, and it had some awful episodes, I can't ever really say it bored me on the same consistent level that Enterprise did. I didn't engage with any of the characters, least of all the captain, and I couldn't pick out one --- unlike the Doctor in Voyager --- who could have saved the series for me.

So, to all intents and purposes, although I of course know of it and wouldn't attempt to deny its existence, Enterprise is not a stop on our month-long journey. If you are a big fan and would like to write about it, drop me a line and I'll see what we can arrange. Otherwise, don't expect to see it covered here. It may be mentioned the odd time, but that will be about it. I apologise if you think it was a great series, but if so, then write about it for me here and try to show me how wrong I am. If not, then please just accept it will not be part of these proceedings.

So come with me now, as we beam aboard and begin our journey. Later on, we’ll rendezvous with the USS Nerdtopia as she begins her long mission to review that list of science-fiction movies I posted some time ago, but for now, let’s start off with the smaller screen, and nowhere better or more appropriate to begin than with the very first ever episode.

Ahead, warp factor five. Steady as she goes!
Welcome to

(Note: In the light of the recent tragic death of Leonard Nimoy I wrestled briefly with the idea of either delaying this special, or even cancelling it altogether, but I came very quickly to the realisation that, as Spock himself said, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and some of you have been waiting for this. Well, that guy down there has, he told me so. Also, if I can allow myself some incredible self-indulgence, I’d like to think that if he’s looking down on us now, Leonard would want us to go on, and celebrate his life and his work rather than mourn his death. In the final analysis, and to be completely Vulcan about it, it’s surely the logical thing to do.)

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Trollheart

Aliens!
Yes, the Trek universe was chock-full of them. You couldn't move without bumping into an Andorian or annoying a Klingon, and that spot of light on the wall could be a malevolent intelligence from a far distant galaxy. Here, there's a mixture of decent and quite crappy aliens.


Talosians: The aliens who lured the Enterprise here, and who capture and experiment on Pike, are good for the time. They're much taller than humans, have large heads somewhat akin to lightbulbs and their gigantic brains are laced with a tracery of veins which can be seen from the outside. They also communicate telepathically, something which I think was a first for science-fiction, at least on TV, and they have such low regard for Pike that they view him as something less than a lab rat. They're cleverly made up too, that their flowing robes cover their feet and so when they move they seem almost to glide.

(um, never named I think?): The enemy Pike faces in the dreamworld, however, is pathetic, nothing more than a tall man with a beard and some blacked-out teeth. Oooh! Scary!

Reasons not to be cheerful!
So why did the pilot fail? What was it that led to the network rejecting it, and what was it in the second one that caught their interest? You'd have to say that a lot of it lies in the characterisation, or I should say, lack of it. The main thing here is that you can't really care about anyone, from the captain down to the annoying “Happy Days”-like navigator. Nobody interacts with anyone. Nobody seems to be related or have anything to do with anyone. Number One is cold, almost mannish, obviously fiercely defending what we can assume to be the first, perhaps only, position of second-in-command on a starship, if what Pike says is true. The Doctor seems more interested in getting the captain drunk, and even Spock is hard to care about, though you can see his leadership qualities beginning to surface even this early.

And what of Pike? He plays the role so straight-laced, so lantern-jawed and with a constant scowl of derision on his face that you sort of hope he gets killed. There's nothing attractive about him: oh, as a man I guess he's handsome and strong, but there's no ... charisma about him. It's hard to believe that this is a man whom others would follow into battle, and his self-doubt about his own position does nothing to endear him to us, unlike Benjamin Sisko in the pilot of “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” decades later. He never smiles, he never relaxes, he never seems to be “off”. His commands are given with an almost scathing authority, like a sergeant major, whereas when Kirk, later, commands, it always seems like his crew are happy to oblige. It's their job, their duty, yes, but they always seem like it's no trouble and there's no resentment there. Pike, to me, does not carry the mantle of authority on his shoulders in the same easy, affable way that Shatner as Kirk would later. Even when Vina vanishes, screaming of being punished, his eyes betray barely a flicker of emotion. He doesn't shout “Leave her alone! Take me!” as we know Jim Kirk would in his place. To be honest, the only time we see him show any genuine emotion is when the Talosians punish him, making him feel like he is on fire.

But it's not just the cast, though they really are not up to this task at all. The story, too, is a little hard to follow, or would have been, for audiences spoonfed on the likes of I love Lucy, Dragnet and The High Chapperal, series that really required little or no thought, and in which everything that needed to be explained was explained. If Little Joe went off the Ponderosa to track down Indians, you knew what he was doing. If Lucy got in an argument with a traffic cop, it was simple and straightforward. But here, not only does Roddenberry begin in the middle, as it were --- the Enterprise is supposedly heading home after a disastrous mission --- he spends no time introducing the characters, even naming many of them, and expects us to know who they are. Who is the guy in the Happy Days hair? Who is the doctor? Nobody knows. Or, indeed, cares.

Then he brings in the idea of telepathy and humans being used as experimental animals. It would have been a hard concept for the American television audiences of the sixties to grasp, and though he tries to explain it through Pike, Jeffrey Hunter just does not possess the screen magnetism to make people listen to him. Though he's the central character, most of the time he seems to be almost muttering to himself, and his facial expressions don't help; this is not the face of a man you really want to listen to, much less trust. He's also way too All-American-Blue-Eyed-Boy. When the girl offers to “become anything, be anyone” he wants, he stands there, jaw jutting out so far you could build a pier on it, eyes steely and straight, rejecting the idea out of hand. He doesn't even consider it. What man would not, if even for a moment, waver in the face of such fantasy? But Pike is untouchable, unreachable, cold and hard and unflinching, and he is not as other men. Now, put Kirk in that situation...

Look at Spock too. When he realises there is no way to get down to the planet, does he put that superior Vulcan mind into overdrive? No. He decides to bail on the captain and first officer, and tries to run. He rationalises it as “the safety of this ship is paramount”, but isn't this a case of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”? Yeah, but Spock, the Spock we came to know, would never abandon his captain, at least, not without a plan to return and save him. Again, Spock gives no indication that he has any friendship with Pike, that he cares about him any more than any other member of the crew. And if these people don't care for each other, how can we be expected to care for them? This is something Roddenberry addresses quickly in the “re-pilot”: from the off, we see not crewmembers but friends, not subordinates but comrades. Kirk genuinely cares for his crew, and they respect and admire him. Pike? He can just fuck off: nobody cares, including me.

Oops!
Even after the failure of the first pilot, fame could have been Jeffrey Hunter's for the taking. I personally think his wooden acting in this pilot should have precluded him from any future episodes, but it turns out that he was required to reprise the role should the network pick up the series. As they rejected it though, he was not expected to take the role in the second, more successful pilot which led to the series being taken up. Although Roddenberry was said to have no animosity towards Hunter, the wife of the man who could have been Kirk seems to have been the main obstacle standing in his way, declaring haughtily “Jeffrey Hunter is a film actor: he does not do television!” Stupid bint by that single statement deprived her husband of what could have been, in effect, immortality. Who does not, after all, recognise the name James Kirk?

But Hunter stuck to his guns and, even though he went against his wife's wishes a year later and wrote a pilot for another thriller series which the network passed on, he ended up with parts in mostly foreign B-movies, and he died in 1969, just as the series he had initially helped to get off the ground, if stumblingly, was beginning to find its space legs. It's ironic that, had he sat for the second pilot, it too may have been rejected and Star Trek never been, as I really feel that much of the antipathy directed towards the pilot was down to his mechanical, deadpan acting, something that belonged more in the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers morning television serials of the thirties, as well as perhaps western series and some detective ones. Emotion was what eventually brought Star Trek to life and allowed it to stand out from its peers, and become the colossus it did. Jeffrey Hunter was not to be part of that, and though we can feel sorry for him for having missed what was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, I personally can't say I'm sorry, as I felt he brought nothing to the role.

In what could have been a blunder of monumental proportions, the network advised Roddenberry to “get rid of the guy with the ears”, little realising that it would be Spock who would come to crystallise the idea of Star Trek and represent the series, as Nimoy grew into his rewritten role and became not only the new captain's indispensable right-hand man, but also his fast friend. Star Trek without Spock would have been good, but with the Vulcan it was great and destined to become a true classic.

Messages
One of the core differences between Star Trek and other series at the time was Roddenberry's intent of delivering important social and political messages through the medium of his show. Although his view of the future turned out to be a little too Utopian, too rose-tinged for reality --- as later partially addressed by its successor series, The Next Generation and more widely by its descendant, Deep Space 9 --- he did channel some important messages, such as the need to resist tyrants, the importance of keeping one's integrity and a basic compassion for all life, no matter its race or colour.

Which makes it all the stranger that here, it is the reliance on strong, brutal, primitive emotions that proves to be the one weapon the Talosians cannot control. When Pike fills his mind with images of hate, murder, anger, he can block the telepathic influence of his captors. This leads, to me anyway, to an uncomfortable conclusion: that the more primitive emotions are what make man unique and help him survive, and there's no doubting that: timid cavemen did not last long. But in this enlightened future (I believe no time is specified, but we know from later episodes that the series takes place in the 22nd century) you would expect such imperatives to be less, not more important. As a matter of fact, Roddenberry and his writers would address this, or I should say redress it, in season three's Day of the dove, where a malevolent alien intelligence, intent on pitting the humans against their enemies and each other, finds itself defeated by ... laughter.

That's more like it.

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Trollheart

What makes a good series? Decent writing, good plots, good dialogue, yes all of these. But if you don't have characters people can engage with then you may as well call it a day, as the original pilot for TOS found out. Here I'll be dipping into the series (all four) and sketching a brief outline of characters, some major, some minor, but all integral to the success of each show and the franchise as a whole.


Name: Worf, son of Mogh
Race: Klingon
Born: Quo’nos
Assignment: NCC-1701D as Security and Tactical Chief, then Deep Space 9 as Chief of Operations and later Executive Officer of the Defiant.
Marital status: Widowed
Family: Mogh (Father, deceased), Sergey Rozhenko (Foster father), Helena Rozhenko (Foster mother), Kurn (brother), K’Ehleyr (Mate, deceased), Alexander (son), Jadzia Dax (Wife, deceased)
Important episodes: (TNG) Heart of glory, The emissary, Birthright, Sins of the father, Redemption, Reunion, Rightful heir (DS9) The Way of the Warrior, The sword of Kahless, Sons of Mogh, Broken link, Apocalypse rising, Favor the bold, Sacrifice of angels, Looking for par’Mach in all the wrong places, You are cordially invited…, Change of heart, Tears of the Prophets, Shadows and symbols, Tacking into the wind

After his parents were killed in the Romulan attack on the Khitomer outpost, Worf was taken in by a human Starfleet officer and his wife, who treated him as their own child and brought him up on their home planet. As they were human, Worf learned a lot about the race and when it came time to choose his career decided to enlist in Starfleet, as a way of repaying the agency by which his life had been saved. In this, he was making history, as no Klingon had ever, or has ever since, served in Starfleet. This would however put him on something of a collision course with his own people, for although Sarek opposed Spock’s joining Starfleet, and made no bones about letting his son know of his displeasure, Worf’s father was dead and his foster father supported his decision. However, to the rest of his kind he was the closest thing to a traitor, or at least not fit to be among them, serving with the race against whom the Klingons had struggled for over seventy years.

Worf begins his tour of duty on Captain Picard’s USS Enterprise, where he is the tactical officer, but on the death of Lieutenant Tasha Yar in “Skin of evil” he is promoted to Security Chief, a post he holds until he is transferred to Deep Space 9, initially temporarily but the posting turns out to be permanent. Worf has romantic liaisons on the Enterprise, firstly with his mate, K’Ehleyr, with whom he had fathered their son, Alexander, and later with Deanna Troi after K’Ehleyr’s death. When he is injured and paralysed, he asks Deanna to look after his son, intending to take his own life. After he survives an experimental procedure that completely restores his health (yawn!) he becomes romantically involved with Deanna, realising he has feelings for her. He requests Riker’s permission to court her, believing that anything else would be dishonourable to him, his friend and Deanna. He ends this relationship when he is reassigned.

Worf often finds it hard to fit in, being dour and unsmiling as a Klingon and finding human humour, like Data, hard to comprehend and thus to join in with. He is befriended by Guinan, the ship’s bartender, who introduces him to prune juice, a beverage he consumes for the rest of his life, and tries to make him laugh. She’s very annoying. On Deep Space 9 he meets Jadzia Dax, who quickly becomes his next conquest (“She is glorious!”) and in fact puts her before his duty later, when her life is in danger and to save her he must abandon his mission. Defending his father’s honour when Mogh is accused of being a traitor, Worf accepts “discommodation” to preserve the empire. This means that he is shunned by every Klingon; even his own brother must turn his back on him. Some time later he is able to redress the situation and is accepted back into the fold. He eventually leaves Starfleet, taking up his new position as Federation ambassador to Quo’nos.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Being a science-fiction and space exploration series, Star Trek is of course home to many varied and interesting alien races, all of whom have to come from somewhere, so in this section I’ll be giving you the ten-dollar tour of some of the worlds in the Trekverse.



Name: Ferenginar
Alignment: Neutral
Home to: Ferengi race
Capital City: Ferenginar
Orbital Star: Ventarus Idrilon, M-class

If there is one place in the world where it rains more than in Ireland, it’s the Ferengi homeworld. Torrential rains teem down both night and day, necessitating the building of domes to prevent its inhabitants drowning. The constant lash and patter of rain is a sound so endemic to Ferenginar that those who live there probably don’t even hear it, fading into the background, and when they leave their home planet it must come as something of a shock to see worlds that are dry. The damp, dreary, dismal atmosphere on the planet is pretty much well suited to a people whose lives are rules by figures, profit and loss, calculations and money matters. The Ferengi are a sort of cross between a race of accountants and entrepreneurs, and the miserable weather on Ferenginar is most likely part of the reason many of them leave to seek opportunities beyond their home planet.

The biggest and most imposing and well-known landmark on Ferenginar is The Tower of Commerce. It stands high above any other buildings in the centre of the Sacred Marketplace, and is where all official business is conducted, and also where the ruler of the planet, the Grand Nagus, dispenses financial advice and makes the laws that govern the planet. It is home too to the offices of the Ferengi Commerce Authority, the FCA, who must approve or ban any business venture undertaken by a Ferengi, with the requisite cut for them of course. The Tower has also been used as a place of execution, with offenders taken to the roof and thrown off.

Other landmarks include The Nagal Residence, the palatial home of the Grand Nagus, Mount Tubatuba, a volcano and the Vorp Memorial, a monument to Vorp, one of the planet’s greatest and most tragic innovators. Other than that most of the planet is unremarkable, consisting of mostly swamps, rotting vegetation and rivers of muck. Nice place!

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018