William Campbell’s Trelane is one of the most memorable characters in the series’ history. His performance most likely influenced Gene Roddenberry’s creation of Q.

“Predator Against Predator”

Paul Schneider was the first Star Trek script writer to bring a second episode to the TV screen. His first script, “Balance of Terror,” was the seventh episode in the first season to be produced. His next script, “The Squire of Gothos,” would be the second.

We wrote about Schneider’s relationship with Gene Roddenberry in our Substack column about “Balance of Terror.” As we’ve been discussing, Roddenberry hired free-lance writers to create the early first-season scripts. The writers generally fell into two categories — experienced television writers, or experienced science fiction literature writers.

Schneider fell into the first category, having written free-lance for TV shows going back to the early 1950s. Before Star Trek, his most recent credits included scripts for The Big Valley, Dr. Kildare, Death Valley Days, and a short-lived military melodrama called The Lieutenant — Roddenberry’s previous production.

Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages: TOS Season One offers some insight into who came up with this episode’s story idea. “Balance of Terror” was Schneider’s riff on the 1957 film The Enemy Below. The idea of a meddlesome super-being, while quite familiar in science fiction literature, isn’t in Roddenberry’s March 11, 1964 first-draft outline Star Trek Is … Cushman wrote that Schneider viewed the script as “a subtle anti-war story” mocking an incompetent wanting to play soldier — which you might find evocative of current events.1

While it doesn’t appear to have been the kernel for this episode’s story idea, Schneider did borrow from another work to build its climax. The Most Dangerous Game was a short story by Richard Connell first published by Collier’s in 1924. It was adapted into a David O. Selznick film released in 1932. A big-game hunter named Rainsford is hunted himself by a mad Russian count named Zaroff.

The 1932 film version of “The Most Dangerous Game.” Video source: Timeless Classic Movies YouTube channel.

In the Star Trek version, the meddlesome super-being Trelane hunts Captain Kirk for sport. Trelane’s castle and drawing room are very similar to the one in the 1932 film. Zaroff even plays a piano. The most significant difference is that Trelane’s hunt is stopped by his parents, while Rainsford and Zaroff fight to the death.

Producer Bob Justman, responsible for operations and budgets, saw two problems with the early drafts.

One was the cost. With all the early scripts, the writers seemed incapable of grasping the expenses associated with bringing their vision to the screen. Schneider wrote that Trelane should “marbleize” Kirk and Sulu. That would require making full body casts of William Shatner and George Takei. It was whittled down to a green key light immobilizing the actors.

The other problem was a lack of Spock. Star Trek premiered on September 8, 1966. Schneider’s outline was submitted August 11, a month before the show first aired. His first and second draft teleplays were submitted in mid-October. By then, Spock was starting to catch on with the viewing public as a popular character. Justman wrote in a memo to writing producer Gene Coon:2

Our viewing audience seems to like Mister Spock. I feel as though we should give our audience what they like. If they want more of Mister Spock, we should give them more of Mister Spock.

Looking back through the prism of history, we’d all say, “Duh.” But in the fall of 1966, an artist’s vision was altered in the name of ratings. Such is network television, especially in the 1960s.

(The same happened with Happy Days in the mid-1970s. The minor character Fonzie was popular with audiences. Once given the spotlight, the ratings soared and Happy Days became one of the most popular series on network television.)

We’ve discussed in earlier articles how Grace Lee Whitney’s character Janice Rand was erased from various drafts, after she was sexually assaulted during the filming of “Miri” and then released from her contract. “Gothos” was another example. Yeoman Teresa Ross in early drafts was Rand. So add “Gothos” to the list of episodes which might have included Janice, such as “The Galileo Seven,” “Court Martial,” and “Shore Leave.”

In our column about “Shore Leave,” we discussed how Roddenberry rode his motorcycle to the on-location filming in Soledad Canyon to rewrite scripts on-the-fly while the film crew awaited his revisions. Back at Desilu, Coon was polishing the final draft of “Gothos” to get it ready for production.3 That’s how tight the production schedule had become.

As with “Shore Leave,” Roddenberry failed to send “Gothos” to NBC overlord Stan Robertson until it was too late to make any changes. Robertson found Trelane to be “farcical” and didn’t care for the story resolution — Trelane reined in by his parents.4

Production of “Gothos” ran a day over schedule and $9,573 over budget.5

Schneider would write again for Star Trek.

In 2023, Peter Wolchak on his website Collecting Trek published an article about a script titled “Tomorrow the Universe” that Schneider submitted in early 1967, which means Schneider started work on it not long after “Gothos.” You can read the script at this link. According to Wolchak, the script proceeded to a second draft in June 1967, when it was dropped. The premise was eerily similar to “Patterns of Force,” in which a planet’s people decided to emulate Nazi Germany. Schneider filed a complaint with the Writers Guild of America, but the WGA found in favor of Roddenberry.

Schneider returned in 1973 to write “The Terratin Incident” for the animated series.

“General Trelaine. Retired.”

The episode opens with Yeoman Rand, er, Ross serving coffee to the bridge crew. This always irked me, and I’m glad in subsequent series we don’t have servants on the bridge, but the “waitress” is a reflection of its time. At least there’s a cup at Uhura’s station, so it’s not just a girl serving the boys.

The Enterprise is en route to Beta VI to deliver supplies. With “zero space density” (whatever that means) ahead of them, Kirk orders the ship to Warp 3.

Spock and McCoy exchange banter, which I suspect was a contribution by Gene Coon. Around this time, Coon was adding Spock/McCoy banter scenes to scripts to flesh out their relationship. The scenes don’t always advance the story, but they do develop the characters, which will pay off in years to come.

An iron-silica world suddenly appears ahead of them out of nowhere. Navigator DeSalle says it’s “Magnitude 1-E,” which I guess is a fancy way of saying it’s Earth-sized. It’s not a dwarf planet like Pluto; let’s not open that can of worms. In fact, it’s not a planet at all, because a planet has to orbit a star and this one does not. The best term is it’s a rogue planet.

Okay, enough of the astronomy lesson.6

First Sulu then Kirk disappear from the bridge. Spock orders the navigator to hit the brakes. End of teaser.

Act One opens with Spock calling it a planet. Oh well.

Lt. Jaeger replaces Sulu at the helm. In the past, we’ve seen Uhura move to navigation, but I wonder if we’ll ever see her drive. As the series progresses, Uhura becomes chained to Communications and rarely shows other capabilities.

A message appears above Uhura’s console — Greetings and Felicitations. Hip-Hip-Hoorah. Tallyho! Even though the world’s atmosphere is toxic, clearly something lives down there. Spock orders a landing party of DeSalle, Jaegar, and McCoy. Not a redshirt among them. By the way, we haven’t had a crew member killed off since “The Galileo Seven.” The body count for the series-to-date is ten.

The landing party beams down wearing oxygen masks. According to Cushman, an early script draft had them wearing the hideous orange shower-curtain hazmat suits worn in “The Naked Time.” Gene Coon, who wasn’t on staff when it was produced, took one look at that episode and changed this scene to wearing oxygen masks.7

The trio materialize in a glade with breathable atmosphere, but the communicators can’t get a signal out. They find a castle with a large wooden door, which handily is unlocked. They enter without knocking. The room is filled with artifacts from the Desilu prop department. A large mirror mounted above a harpsichord is most prominent.

Haven’t we met?

Watch for the Salt Vampire costume from “The Man Trap.” A nice touch is reusing the musical cue played for the creature during that episode.

Kirk and Sulu are found frozen under the green gel light. Out of nowhere, Trelane appears playing at the harpsichord. “I suppose you want them back now,” he says, and with a wave of his hand they’re released from stasis.

Trelane welcomes them to “my stormy little planet of Gothos.” He says that Earth has been his hobby. Jaeger comments on the period discrepancy; they’re 900 light years from Earth, so Trelane somehow has been observing Earth as it was 900 years ago. So far, we’ve had no specifics in any script for when these stories occur. In Roddenberry’s Star Trek Is … he was deliberately vague about the time frame. “It could be 1995 or maybe even 2995.”

Kirk demands to know why they’ve been imprisoned, but Trelane says they’re guests. The squire wants to learn more about Earth history and humans. “Do you know you’re one of the few predator species that preys even on itself?” he observes.

Kirk tells DeSalle to put his phaser on stun. I have to wonder how all this might have gone if Kirk had treated this more like a first contact and simply humored Trelane. Sure, being whisked off your bridge might make you a bit cranky, but misunderstandings are common with first contacts.

Trelane hears the name DeSalle and comments, “I admire your Napoleon very much.” Napoleon Bonaparte lived from 1769 to 1821; if 900 years have passed, then we should be circa the year 2700. Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan will establish that we’re in the 23rd Century, but who’s counting.

When DeSalle tries to stun him, Trelane takes the phaser away. Learning how to set it to kill, he destroys the salt vampire. Has Trelane been to Planet M-113? Did he hunt the endangered salt vampires to near extinction? Just a thought.

Trelane has that he and others of his kind have perfected a system “by which matter can be transferred into energy and back into matter again.” They can not only transport matter but also alter its shape “at will.”

Kirk says they’re going to leave. Trelane comments, “You’re being quite rude.” Frankly I agree with him. This is a first contact situation. “Apparently you need another demonstration of my authority.” Trelane sends Kirk out into the toxic air for a few seconds, then brings him back.

McCoy scans Trelane with a tricorder and reports no reading. Jaeger observes that the fireplace depicts burning logs but gives off no heat. Kirk concludes that the drawing room is a display Trelane replicated from his observations but lacks detail because he hasn’t experienced it.

Having located the landing party on the surface, Spock has them beamed up to the Enterprise. Spock says they beamed up all life forms; since Trelane wasn’t beamed up, he’s not a life form. Trelane appears on the bridge and takes them all back to the drawing room, this time adding Spock, Uhura, and Ross. The food and drink on the dinner table lack any taste. Kirk concludes that Trelane is not “all powerful.” There must be a mechanism.

Kirk reasons that he can strain Trelane into exposing his power source. He slaps Trelane and challenges him to a duel. Trelane opens a box with two dueling pistols. Kirk fires his shot into the mirror, exposing the mechanism. Angered, Trelane disappears.

The landing party beams up. Kirk orders a course maximum speed for Beta VI. Gothos reappears ahead of them, blocking their way, no matter the course correction.

Kirk beams down to confront Trelane, who has created an old English courtroom for trial. Trelane sentences him to death by hanging, but Kirk goads him into upping the stakes — a hunt, on the condition that Trelane frees the Enterprise and its crew. Which he doesn’t.

In the end, two energy beings appear to end the game. Trelane is their child who hasn’t learned restraint or respect. He disappears as he returns to his non-corporeal state. The beings apologize and let Kirk return to the Enterprise.

Is Trelane a Q?

The short answer … no.

The Q continuum didn’t exist in the Star Trek universe until The Next Generation’s pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint.”

There’s no evidence that Roddenberry considered Trelane a Q. No Q has ever had a name. They go by Q.

In this episode, Trelane required a mechanism to manifest his powers. No Q needs a machine. They simply will it.

The Q travel time and space as they wish. Trelane needed some sort of device to observe Earth 900 light-years away. His food, his drink, his fire all lacked substance. The Q don’t have that problem.

An April 1987 draft of the “Farpoint” script is on the Internet Archive. Nothing in the script suggests that Q is related to Trelane. The TNG writers guide does not discuss Q.

John DeLancie addresses the Trelane question at a 2019 convention. Video source: BayerDyeman YouTube channel.

John DeLancie has addressed the matter in interviews, one example being an appearance at a 2019 convention. He said he’d never seen the “Gothos” episode until years after filming “Farpoint.” No one, including Roddenberry, discussed Trelane with him before filming. DeLancie’s opinion is that Gene may have wanted a Trelane-like character but that’s as far as it goes.

But that hasn’t stopped others from trying to retcon Trelane into the continuum.

In 1994, Pocket Books published Q-Squared by Peter David. Q seeks Picard’s help in dealing with Trelane, who’s gone renegade.

Trelane returned in the Strange New Worlds episode “Wedding Bell Blues.” Video source: Star Trek YouTube channel.

Strange New Worlds retconned Trelane into the Q continuum, sort of, leaning on a Voyager episode.

In “The Q and the Grey” John DeLancie and Suzie Plakson’s Q characters procreate by simple touch. DeLancie’s character says the Q have never had the need to procreate because they’ve always existed. This contradicts the TNG episode “True Q,” in which Amanda Rogers is the progeny of Q parents executed for using their powers on Earth.

In the SNW episode “Wedding Bell Blues,” Trelane creates an alternate reality where Spock and Chapel are to wed. When Trelane’s father arrives, the voice is John DeLancie’s. SNW executive producer Akiva Goldsman told TV Insider that this episode establishes Trelane as the offspring of the DeLancie and Plakson Qs.

But that doesn’t make it so, to borrow from Jean-Luc Picard.

Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon. Image source: The Guardian.

“Oh, My Paws and Whiskers! I'll Be Late.”

"… s f is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also — Eureka! — ninety-percent of everything is crud." — Theodore Sturgeon.1

Gene Roddenberry’s original agreement with NBC was to provide thirteen episodes, as well as the second pilot and the first pilot repurposed into a two-episode event.

With that agreement fulfilled, Roddenberry took shore leave. He left production to Gene Coon and Bob Justman.

One of the scripts left behind was a draft written by Theodore Sturgeon, one of the “Golden Age” science fiction authors of the 1940s and 1950s. As we’ve discussed in earlier columns, Roddenberry had sought out free-lance writers that fell into two general categories — science fiction writers and veteran television writers.

Science fiction writers were used to novels, novellas, and short stories. Most of them struggled with the demands of episodic commercial television. Television writers struggled with understanding a TV show that had yet to air, which was creating its own fantastic universe on the fly.

By the time “The Menagerie” was submitted to Desilu and NBC, Roddenberry was exhausted. Left on his desk were scripts in development that remained unresolved.

One was “Shore Leave.”

In our earlier Substack column about the first pilot, “The Cage,” we discussed how Western novelist and screenwriter Samuel A. Peeples helped Roddenberry with his earliest research into the science fiction genre. Although known for his Westerns, Peeples was a science fiction enthusiast, and shared his collection with Roddenberry.

In his unauthorized biography, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek, Joel Engel wrote that Peeples suggested “eight notable sci-fi writers” to Roddenberry. Theodore Sturgeon was one of the eight.2

Marc Cushman in These Are The Voyages: TOS Season One wrote that “the basic idea” for “Shore Leave” came from Roddenberry’s March 1964 outline, “Star Trek Is …” which was written to pitch the series to studios and networks. In that outline, Roddenberry described a “parallel worlds” concept in which the starship (then called S.S. Yorktown) would visit Earth-like worlds that would be familiar to the viewer. It appears that “the basic idea” came from a story titled “The Man Trap,” which had nothing to do with the first season episode produced with that title. In this version, the crew visit a “pleasant totally earthlike and harmless” desert world. As they travel from one place to another, they begin to experience apparitions conjured from “whatever a man wants most.”3

As documented in earlier columns, during March 1966 Roddenberry invited potential writers to Desilu to view the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Apparently Sturgeon attended one of these screenings.

According to Cushman, Sturgeon’s first story treatment was delivered on May 10. Because he had no experience with television scriptwriting formats, Sturgeon’s earliest submissions read more like short stories. As the revisions evolved, Sturgeon added copious notes and directions, which are inappropriate for televisions scripts; these are decisions a director makes, not the writer.

As with most of the scripts submitted by the science fiction writers, this one too was far beyond the show’s budget and production limitations. One example cited by Cushman is the theft of Doctor McCoy’s body by two mechanical arms that pop up out of a rock, bring him inside, and then the rock shuts.4

Sturgeon took offense to Roddenberry’s criticisms, in particular a description of the writing as “novelistic.” Cushman wrote that he believes Sturgeon had heard similar complaints from other SF writers unhappy with Roddenberry.

Producer Bob Justman was unhappy with the script as well. It was his job to watch the production costs. He complained about the Alice in Wonderland references. “If we attempt to put someone in a large rabbit suit, it will look like someone in a large rabbit suit.”5

Robert Sturgeon exited on September 9. Gene Coon had joined the staff August 8 as a producer. With a month of Star Trek experience, Coon took on the “Shore Leave” story. One change he made was to eliminate the Janice Rand character. As discussed in our “Miri” column, Grace Lee Whitney was sexually assaulted after filming on August 26, then her agent was notified a few days later that her contract would be allowed to expire. Rand was dropped from drafts of various scripts, including “The Galileo Seven” and “Court Martial.” Yeoman Tonia Barrows, who has a fling with McCoy in “Shore Leave,” is the residue of Rand from earlier drafts.

Roddenberry left for vacation in early October. He wrote a memo to Coon telling him that NBC’s Stan Robertson felt the story was still too fantastic, so revise the script to delete the white rabbit.

Except he forgot to give the memo to Coon.

Filming began on October 19. Roddenberry returned that morning and found to his horror the memo was still on his desk. The white rabbit scene was the first one filmed that day.

Roddenberry drove to the filming location at Africa USA in Soledad Canyon near Santa Clarita. Filming stopped while Roddenberry sat under a tree and scribbled script changes. His notes had to be taken back to the studio to be typed and then returned to the location.

This is one reason why so many scenes were lit with floodlights, so night could become day. Other scenes were shot for the first time at Vazquez Rocks, soon to become iconic for “Arena” and other Star Trek episodes.

The only prior episode to film on location was “Miri,” but that was on Desilu’s Culver City lot. This was the first episode to truly go off-site, and the bottom line reflected that. Budgeted at $185,000, “Shore Leave” cost $199,654 (an eight percent overrun), and finished a day late.6

“The Simplicity of Play”

The episode opens with the Enterprise in a clockwise orbit around a solid green planet. It’s one of the rare times that the starship orbits from east to west; the planet itself is rotating clockwise on its axis.

Spock observes Yeoman Barrows’ massage technique, perhaps for future reference.

Kirk complains about a kink in his back. Yeoman Barrows starts massaging the tensed muscle. “Push! Push hard!” Kirk pleads. He thinks it’s Spock. Well, okay … There’s long been a subgenre within Star Trek fandom known as K/S, or “K Slash S.” These are fanfic stories about a gay relationship between Kirk and Spock. You can find some at The Kirk/Spock Fanfiction Archive. (You are warned that they can be explicit in nature.) The University of California Riverside (my alma mater) maintains a collection of K/S stories.

Spock nags Kirk that, with the exception of himself, the captain and crew need rest. McCoy and Sulu are in a glade on the planet scouting its suitability for shore leave. Both have phasers, but only Sulu has a tricorder. (McCoy normally isn’t one for weaponry.) The botanist in Sulu starts collecting cell samples. Bones comments, “It’s like something out of Alice in Wonderland.”

The wascally wabbit.

On cue, McCoy sees a giant white rabbit, followed by Alice. Sure, it looks like someone in a large rabbit suit, but that’s okay with me. I think most audiences of the time understood its limitations. Besides, the dollop of cheesiness inherent in Star Trek has always been endearing to me. I don’t care what the producers and the network thought, I’ve always found this to be one of the best teaser hooks in the series’ history. It’s so totally unexpected, so unlike anything viewers have seen to date. This is arguably the first episode to indulge in whimsy, which the show needed if it was going to grow.

We’re introduced to another two-person scouting party. One of them is Lt. Angela Martine, the woman who was to marry Lt. Robert Tomlinson, killed in the Romulan battle in “Balance of Terror.” She seems flirtatious with her colleague, Lt. Esteban Rodriguez, so her grief apparently didn’t last long. The scene suffers from a continuity glitch; she’s still “Angela” but her last name is now Teller; according to Memory Alpha, the character was originally Mary Teller in the script. This reflects the haste with which the episode was rewritten.

Kirk beams down to the glade with Yeoman Barrows. They find McCoy, who points to giant rabbit footprints in the soil. Shots are heard; the three run to find Sulu, firing an antique gun for target practice. Sulu fires four shots from the six-shooter, which should leave two bullets. He found it lying nearby in the grass, and comments how he’s always wanted one for his collection. Kirk takes it and tucks it into his waistband, one way to assure the Kirk line ends with the current generation.

Kirk assigns Sulu and Barrows to follow the rabbit tracks, while he and McCoy return to the glade. We see an antenna pop up behind them, tracking their moves.

McCoy comments he feels like he’s being picked on, which reminds Kirk of Finnegan, an academy upper classman who always bullied him. Sure enough, Finnegan appears. Before they can exchange punches, Kirk hears Barrows scream. Kirk and McCoy finds Barrows the victim of a sexual assault by Don Juan.

The doctor stays with the yeoman while Kirk runs off to find Sulu. He encounters Ruth, his first true love. Spock calls to advise that some sort of industrial activity within the planet is drawing power from the Enterprise.

As McCoy and Barrows flirt, she wishes she could find a “fairy-tale princess” costume. Sure enough, one appears. Bones encourages her to put it on.

Sulu finds Kirk. The phasers no longer work. Because communications are out, Spock beams down to personally brief the captain. The transporters won’t work either.

Back at the glade, a black knight skewers and kills McCoy. (So who says, “He’s dead, Jim”?) Kirk fires three shots from the six-shooter, for a total of seven, to kill the knight. Hmmm, maybe the planet automatically replenishes the bullets?! Or maybe it’s one of those TV guns with an infinite bullet supply.

Speaking of bullets … Back at Rodriguez and Martine/Teller, they’re strafed by two different stock footages. One is a World War II US prop fighter, the other a Japanese Zero. The latter kills Angela.

While they’re distracted by the Zero, the bodies of McCoy and the black knight disappear. Finnegan reappears; Kirk chases after him. They run around Vazquez Rocks beating the crap out of one another. Spock arrives to tell Kirk they’re manifesting thoughts and need to learn how to control them.

Back at the glade, the caretaker arrives to explain things. The planet is a giant amusement park. McCoy reappears, quite alive, with two showgirls on his arms. In another continuity glitch, Barrows tunic is torn at the left shoulder; it was the right shoulder earlier in the episode. Martine has also magically reappeared, suddenly standing next to Rodriguez without explanation, most likely due to a deleted scene. The caretaker convinces Kirk to allow his crew shore leave with proper precautions.

Spock shows a certain fascination with one of the showgirls. Atypical for his character.

And it’s back to Desilu we go. I suspect the cast and crew must have enjoyed being off the lot for the first time, although that brings its own new headaches and inconveniences. All the continuity errors and artificial lighting reflect yet one more learning experience for the production team.

Despite all the rewrites, Theodore Sturgeon received the writing credit. He’ll return with “Amok Time.”

Meanwhile, in the Enterprise man cave …

Waste Not

Star Trek was in the red.

In his omnibus review of original series episodes, Marc Cushman wrote that, after production of “Court Martial,” Star Trek for season one was $33,618 over budget.1

When Gene Roddenberry first pitched Star Trek to Desilu, and then to NBC, he had promised that the show would be affordable and on schedule. Neither turned out to be true.

Associate producer Bob Justman concluded mid-season, “We’d be unable to deliver the last third of our shows in time. I finally came to a decision — the right thing to do was to tell NBC about our problem.” But Desilu executive Herb Solow told him not to worry, because the Thanksgiving show would be preempted for a special, and Nielsen ratings would be ignored for Christmas week so that episode could be a repeat.2

Despite those mulligans, Roddenberry from the earliest days of pre-production was looking for ways to save time and money.

Most TV shows are sold to a network by producing a pilot. If the show sells, the pilot typically serves as the series’ premiere episode, but not always. It’s not unusual for a studio or network to ask for a second pilot that fixes concerns with the first attempt.

In the 1960s, for example, Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space had unaired pilots. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea recycled the 1961 movie’s premise and effects into the January 1966 episode, “The Sky’s on Fire.” In more recent times, The Big Bang Theory had an unaired pilot with a different female lead character, and no Howard or Raj.

So second pilots were nothing unusual when NBC and Desilu asked for a redo. Contrary to myth, the network didn’t reject the first pilot “The Cage” because it was too cerebral. As we documented in that column, NBC wanted an episode with a bit more zip that might appeal to potential sponsors — hence the second pilot, ”Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

The second pilot aired on September 22, 1966, the third episode to air. It had a different opening teaser than the one shown to sponsors.

The original teaser for “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” as shown to sponsors but not to network audiences. Video source: Tales From SYL Ranch DARKROOM YouTube channel.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” sold the series, but Roddenberry still intended to use “The Cage.” The challenge was how to recycle the first pilot into the series, since Spock was the only character to have appeared in both pilots.

On March 21, three weeks after buying the series, NBC agreed that a two-part version of “The Cage” could be included in the first sixteen episodes ordered by the network. (“Where No Man Has Gone Before” could also be included.) According to Cushman, NBC had certain conditions — at least half the content must include the current cast, and NBC would only pay for one of the two episodes. Desilu reluctantly agreed, giving Roddenberry more time to produce the remaining thirteen episodes.3

The “envelope” story containing “The Cage” was assigned to John D.F. Black, whom Roddenberry had hired as story editor. Black’s first pass was called “From the First Day to the Last,” but was set aside as he worked on other scripts in pre-production. Before he left the show in early August, Black submitted his first draft teleplay on August 12.4

In his unauthorized Roddenberry bio, Joel Engel wrote that the seminal ideas in the “envelope” story came from Black, but the aired episode gave writing credit solely to Roddenberry. As did many other writers that first season, Black filed for arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. Black but didn’t file a statement, but Roddenberry did; Black believed a comparison of the two drafts was sufficient. According to Engel, “The story of Spock abducting the scarred and crippled Capt. Christopher Pike … was originally devised by John D.F. Black.” According to Cushman, Roddenberry came up with the idea. With no supporting statement from Black, the WGA sided with Roddenberry.5

A surviving copy of Black’s draft seems to show Cushman is right. Pike was not abducted in Black’s version; Spock talked Kirk into helping return Pike to Talos IV. One could argue that because all of “The Cage” was written by Roddenberry, much of the script had already come from Gene before Black began writing the envelope. In fact, the surviving draft has pages inserted directly from Roddenberry’s November 25, 1964 draft, when “The Cage” was called “The Menagerie.” It’s interesting to note that, in that draft, Pike was called “Winter.” Roddenberry’s original name for the captain was Robert T. April, then James Winter, and finally Christopher Pike.

In November 1966, before “The Menagerie” aired, Roddenberry was notified by organizers of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) that Star Trek would be nominated for a Hugo Award, for Best Dramatic Presentation. According to Engel, Gene submitted “The Menagerie,” an episode with his name on it. The Hugo Awards website shows two other Star Trek episodes were nominated, “The Corbomite Maneuver” and “The Naked Time.”6 Two movies were also nominated, Fantastic Voyage and Fahrenheit 451. When the awards were handed out in September 1967, “The Menagerie” won.7

Another legal speed bump was compensating the original actors for reuse of their performances. Jeffrey Hunter, who had played Pike, was paid $5,000. Most of the cast were paid $750 each. Marc Daniels, who would direct the envelope footage, would get credit for Part 1 while Robert Butler, who had directed “The Cage,” would get credit for Part 2.8

Hunter’s wife felt Star Trek wasn’t right for him, so he declined returning for the envelope. Roddenberry came up with the idea of Pike being scarred beyond recognition.9 (In Black’s draft, Pike was injured but recognizable.) Pike was played by a heavily disguised Sean Kenney, who went on to play Lieutenant DePaul in two episodes.10

The two-parter helped Star Trek get back in the black for season one. But it cost Roddenberry his film editor, Robert L. Swanson, who was burned out. Swanson couldn’t handle Roddenberry’s constant meddling. But it was Gene’s show, and “The Menagerie” was a big risk, so one can understand.11

The Menagerie, Part 1

The Enterprise has been summoned to Starbase 11. We were just at Starbase 11 in the last episode, “Court Martial.” The planets appear similar (blue) as do the buildings. Maybe returning to the same starbase helped recycle existing footage and effects. (Waste not.)

In “Court Martial,” Commodore Stone was in charge, but now it’s Commodore Jose Mendez. According to Kirk, Spock had received a message from the former commander of the Enterprise, “fleet captain” Christopher Pike, requesting the starship divert to Starbase 11. Mendez says that’s impossible and takes them to the medical ward.

For canon nitpickers … Kirk says he met Pike “when he was promoted to fleet captain.” In the prequel series Strange New Worlds, Kirk has visited Pike’s Enterprise several times. They’re quite familiar with one another.

Pike is in a futuristic wheelchair. Only his head and torso are visible. He’s horribly scarred and disfigured from exposure to delta rays. He can’t speak, only flash a light once for yes and two for no.

He’s flashing no.

Stephen Hawking in his wheelchair. Image source: How It Works.

By 1960s standards, this might have been plausible, but today we know that with neural implants and AI technologies it’s laughable. Stephen Hawking communicated for years by twitching his cheek muscle to navigate an on-screen keyboard.

Left alone with Pike, Spock proposes “treachery” and “mutiny.” Pike keeps signaling no. There’s a teaser for you.

And we go to the title credits.

The evidence suggests Spock faked the message, but Kirk can’t accept that. As he and Mendez argue, Spock sneaks into the starbase data center and transmits top secret orders to the Enterprise computer. Spock tells the bridge crew that they’re not to discuss the mission with other crew members or with starbase staff.

Always read the fine print.

Mendez shows Kirk a booklet with a few details about Talos IV. Visiting that planet is the only remaining death penalty. The secret document reveals that the Enterprise once visited Talos IV. Two officers recommended that “no human should ever visit it again” — Captain Pike and “Half-Vulcan Science Officer Spock.”

Kinda racist to use his ethnicity as an appellation.

After tricking McCoy into returning to the ship, Spock spirits Pike onto the Enterprise and warps out of orbit. Kirk and Mendez pursue in a shuttlecraft. When the shuttle runs out of fuel, Spock has no choice but to beam them aboard. He executes a new program that brings the starship to a stop. Spock surrenders to McCoy and admits committing mutiny. With Kirk and Mendez on board, the Enterprise resumes its course to Talos IV.

A court martial is convened, using the same set, props, and procedures just filmed in “Court Martial.” (Waste not.) The three judges are Mendez, Kirk, and Pike.

At Spock’s request, the viewscreen is activated. Here’s where we begin to see the recycled footage from “The Cage.” Pike verifies its authenticity.

Thirteen years ago, the Enterprise picked up a distress signal from the SS Columbia, lost eighteen years before that. Columbia crash-landed on Talos IV.

For canon nitpickers … The events of “The Cage” predate the events of Discovery and Strange New Worlds. Fan sites suggest “The Cage” happened in 2254. Pike returned to Talos IV with Discovery circa 2258. SNW begins around 2259. If “The Menagerie” occurs thirteen years after “The Cage,” then it’s now 2267.

A landing party of six, led by Pike, beams down to the Talosian surface. The landing party finds elderly survivors of the Columbia crash, and a young blonde named Vina. She was born during the crash, so theoretically she’s eighteen, although Susan Oliver was 32 at the time of filming. Vina lures Pike to a door hidden in the rocks where he’s snatched by the Talosians. Vina and the Columbia survivors disappear. Hand lasers appear useless against the rock face.

The presentation is interrupted by a message from “Fleet Command.” The Enterprise has been receiving the transmission from Talos IV, “in violation of Starfleet general orders.” Kirk is relieved of command, with Mendez now in charge.

The court is in recess.

End of Part 1.

The Menagerie, Part 2

The episode opens with a surreal minimalist restaging of the trial to date. Kirk, Spock, and Mendez stand erect against a dark background. Mendez recites the charges, to which Spock answers guilty. Kirk’s voiceover recaps plot points so far.

The story resumes after the title credits. Spock informs us that the Talosian Keeper has taken control of the viewscreen. Pike is imprisoned in their zoo. He discovered that the Talosians can speak, but prefer to use telepathy. They generally gaslight him.

Back aboard the Enterprise, Number One and the senior staff decide to use a giant laser cannon to blast through the rock face door. When it doesn’t work, they realize that maybe it did work, but they can’t see it because of a Talosian illusion. It must have looked bitchin’ in 1966 on increasingly common color home TV sets. Cushman cites a December 7, 1966 memo (right after Part 2 aired) from Desilu exec Herb Solow noting that Star Trek is the highest-rated color TV show in its time period.12

Hoping to seduce Pike, they show him various illusions hoping he’ll want to stay and mate with Vina. None of them work. But back in our present day, at the court martial, Spock makes the point that Pike experienced these illusions in his mind as reality — which foreshadows where Spock is going with all this. Spock tells Kirk that the Talosians care about him and want him back.

The Enterprise crew attempt to beam down a rescue party into the menagerie, but only the women go through. The Talosians have concluded that Pike needs a variety of women from which to choose. Number One reveals that the Columbia manifest listed an adult Vina, so she’s much older than we’ve been led to believe. Eighteen, she is not.

Pike captures the Keeper. With the women, they escape to the surface. The Keeper says this is where they wanted the humans all along, to repopulate the planet. Number One sets her laser on overload; suicide is better than enslavement, not just for them but also for a future enslaved human race. The Talosians conclude that humans are too dangerous and violent, so they’re free to go. Pike is shown Vina’s true appearance — she’s old, bent, and scarred. She must stay to keep her illusion of youth and vitality.

And this is why we’re here.

Mendez disappears; the Keeper tells Kirk that he never left starbase. The Keeper also reveals that Spock has been in communication with the Talosians all along. This ruse has been to convince Kirk that Pike should be given the choice to return to Talos. Starbase 11 received the transmissions too; Mendez waives the general order and drops all charges.

Pike chooses to live out his days on Talos with Vina.

Fin.

In the Star Trek Discovery episode, “If Memory Serves,” Pike and Vina reunite four years after the events of “The Cage.”

Although it seems a bit padded at times, “The Menagerie” truly is a masterpiece — not necessarily for the writing, but for the ingenious “envelope” gag. Roddenberry, Black, and Coon made it work. The viewing audience probably never knew the difference.

Lexicon Notes

In the surviving copy of John D.F. Black’s first draft, Kirk refers to “UESPA regulations.”13 It’s an abbreviation for United Earth Space Probe Agency. The word “Starfleet” was first used in “Court Martial'“; McCoy was described as having been “decorated by Starfleet surgeons.” In “The Menagerie,” the terms “Starfleet general orders” and “Starfleet Command” are used to specifically describe what up to now has been the UESPA, more or less.

David Alexander cites a September 29, 1966 memo from Roddenberry to “all concerned” urging the use of the prefix “star-” more often in scripts. “It appears we may have a useful catch-word deriving out of Star Trek in our title.” He noted how Batman was using “bat-” as a prefix for various terms. At the time, Gene Coon was doing the final polish on “Court Martial,” and Roddenberry was working on final drafts of “The Menagerie.” This probably explains why “Starfleet” entered the lexicon when it did.14

In Black’s draft, Commodore Mendez was Commander Jermane. The commander outranked the captain, which is inconsistent with US naval ranks, but this ain’t the navy. Or so we’re told. Jermane was actually a Talosian who replaced Jermane, not an illusion as Mendez became.

“The Cage” used the word “laser” instead of “phaser.” The term “Class M” for an Earth-like world was also used in the first pilot. (“Class M” is not a thing in astronomy, in case you’re wondering.)

An undated photo of screenwriter Don Mankiewicz. Image source: StarTrek.com.

Write What You Know

Courtroom dramas have been a television staple since the 1940s. Shows such as They Stand Accused, Divorce Court, Perry Mason, and The Defenders were quite familiar to American TV viewers.

They also appealed to studios and networks because they were affordable to produce. The same courtroom set was used in each episode.

It’s no surprise, then, that Don Mankiewicz pitched a courtroom drama to Gene Roddenberry.

Because Star Trek was about a futuristic space navy descended from today’s military, it only made sense that this courtroom drama would be a court martial.

That would appeal just fine to Roddenberry. His last series, The Lieutenant, had been about a US Marine Corps rifle platoon leader. Several episodes involved a court martial as part of the plot.

Mankiewicz was related to at least five other writers. His grandfather, Frank M. Mankiewicz, wrote texts about German language and philosophy. His father, Herman Mankiewicz, was a screenwriter. Herman cowrote the script for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles; the two won an Academy Award for best screenplay. His uncle Joseph won four Academy Awards as writer/director for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. His brother Frank was a White House correspondent who went on to be the campaign press secretary for the doomed Robert F. Kennedy during the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries. Don’s son John is a producer and writer, with credits such as House and the US version of House of Cards.

The 1955 film “Trial” was based on a novel written by Don Mankiewicz, who also wrote the screenplay. Video source: Warner Bros. Classics YouTube channel.

At age 32, Mankiewicz in 1954 wrote a courtroom drama called Trial that won him the Harper Prize. The novel was turned into a screenplay, which he also wrote. In 1959 he and co-writer Nelson Gidding received an Academy Award nomination for I Want to Live!

Don became a prolific TV writer, with credits for such anthologies as Studio One, Ford Television Theatre, Playhouse 90, and Kraft Theatre. He wrote courtroom dramas for The Joseph Cotton Show: On Trial. In 1965, while Star Trek was still in its larval stage, he wrote an episode for The Trials of O’Brien, a short-lived series about a Shakespeare-quoting attorney played by Peter Falk.

Mankiewicz had little experience with speculative fiction. He’d written six episodes for One Step Beyond, an anthology series about supernatural events. Not exactly boldly going.

The 1959 episode “Epilogue” of “One Step Beyond” was the first of six written for the series by Don Mankiewicz over its three-season run. Video source: PizzaFlix YouTube channel.

That didn’t deter Roddenberry who, as we’ve discussed in earlier columns, had pitched his show to members of the Writers Guild of America. According to Marc Cushman writing in These Are The Voyages: Season One, Don lived in Long Island, New York but happened to be in Los Angeles when Gene showed his second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to potential script writers.1 Attaching the Mankiewicz name to Star Trek must have been all too tempting for Roddenberry.

Cushman quoted Mankiewicz as saying Roddenberry needed “something that could be done very cheaply.” He suggested a courtroom episode.

He wanted to put James T. Kirk on trial.

Upon Further Review

Because the story took place in the future, Mankiewicz suggested that the damning testimony come not from people but from a computer.

The Enterprise computer would be called the Information Reception and Retrieval Unit (IRRU). That didn’t stick (thank goodness). The IRRU would be a co-conspirator, resenting Kirk so much that it would lie about the circumstances.

Keep in mind that, as with the other free-lance writers, Mankiewicz was flying blind. None of them had a clue what a Star Trek story looked like. All they had for references were Roddenberry’s March 1964 sixteen-page outline “Star Trek Is … and the two pilots. As they wrote and submitted story outlines in the spring of 1966, it became clear to Gene that his screenwriters needed more direction. He issued a memo to them clarifying his vision for the Star Trek universe.

Don’s experience was no different. His first outline was submitted on May 3. Unauthorized Roddenberry biographer Joel Engel quoted from a memo Gene sent to Don dated May 6 chastising the writer for failing to grasp the show’s concept.2

Not leaning on you, Don, but want you to see the direction in which the sum of all these things would be taking “Star Trek” as a series.

By August, Gene was still displeased with the Mankiewicz project. Typical of his concern is this six-page August 15, 1966 memo from Roddenberry to producer Gene Coon, who’d joined the show one week earlier on August 8. Coon was still learning the Star Trek universe himself, so the memo discusses not only Roddenberry’s concerns but also educates Coon about the show’s concept and characters. On page one, for example, Roddenberry calls out Mankiewicz for referring to helmsman Sulu as “Sumo” but also explains to Coon who Sulu is and what he does.

This paragraph has an interesting comment about the Enterprise chain of command. Fans have been known to debate who is in charge if both Kirk and Spock are not on the bridge. Roddenberry wrote:

In Spock’s absence, there would be someone at or near Kirk’s chair who is in command. This could be Sulu if Sulu has been temporarily replaced with an acting helmsman.

So who’s next in line? Whomever Kirk or Spock choose. It could be Sulu. It could be Scott. It could be Uhura, although that might have been too much for 1960s network television.

We discussed in “Miri” the departure of Grace Lee Whitney from the show. An “executive” (the evidence suggests but does not prove it was Roddenberry) sexually assaulted Grace after filming on August 26, eleven days after the August 15 memo. Grace was notified after the episode that her seven-episode contract would not be extended. “Miri” was her sixth episode; a cameo in “Conscience of the King” was the seventh and final appearance.

In the August 15 memo, Roddenberry debates if Rand should be in the episode and, if so, what the character’s role should be. Gene certainly would have been aware of the seven-episode commitment and been counting how many times Whitney had been used. At this point, perhaps he intended to extend her contract. We’ll never know.

The memo concludes:

Not a bad first draft, considering Mankiewicz’s unfamiliarity with the direction of the show. Seems to me he could have read our writer-director memo a little more carefully, or perhaps we should take a hard look at it ourselves and revise it since important aspects of our format did not seem to get through. At any rate, am convinced Don could do an excellent job on a rewrite if we aim him in the proper direction.

Don’s final draft was submitted on September 6. He added the idea of tracking heartbeats aboard the Enterprise to prove that Finney was still alive. According to Cushman, Rand was still in the script at this point; the Desilu Business Affairs memo terminating Whitney’s contract would be issued on September 8.

Cushman wrote that Mankiewicz left the project at this point because of “marital difficulties.” Coon turned over the script to Steve Carabatsos, who had also joined the production staff in early August. Carabatsos simplified the script, slimming it down as well as deleting the Rand character.

After one final polish by Coon, the script went to Star Trek’s NBC minder, Stan Robertson. He complained that “this is probably one of the most ‘cerebral’ scripts that we have received to date.” Robertson wanted more physical action, typical of the network’s complaints. But it was too late to change the script, with shooting scheduled to begin on October 3.

Lights, Camera, Think

In his narrative history of the episode, Marc Cushman detailed the difficulties producing it, quoting director Marc Daniels:

While we were making “Court Martial” we all felt, “Oh God, this is a dog, let’s get it over with as best we can …” Part of the problem was that it didn’t have much action in it.

Was it a woofer? Let’s watch the episode and decide for ourselves.

The episode opens with the Enterprise in orbit around a planet. Starbase 11 is located here. (In early drafts, it was Starbase 811.) The starship requires repairs after surviving an ion storm.3

The starships in port for repairs at Starbase 11.

In Commodore Stone’s office, we see a wall chart listing the various starships in dock for maintenance. Their names are not listed but their registry numbers are. (One is NCC-1700, meaning at least one Constitution Class ship was built before Enterprise — the Constitution, presumably.)

Stone and Kirk discuss the loss of Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney. Kirk explains that the ion storm was so bad he had to jettison a pod with Finney in it … The pod is something new, never seen, never mentioned before and never again. It was a Mankiewicz idea conjured while the starship’s technical capabilities were still somewhat fuzzy.

Finney’s daughter Jame enters to accuse Kirk of murdering his supposed friend. In the various script revisions, Jame was originally a male named after James Kirk. How is it that Jame came to be at Starbase 11? That’s never explained.

Spock arrives with the 23rd Century equivalent of a floppy disk, which he gives to Stone. The data contradict Kirk’s written deposition that he jettisoned the pod after going to red alert; the record shows he jettisoned before. Stone orders Kirk confined to base pending a possible court martial.

After the title credits, there’s a scene in the starbase bar where two other starship officers question Kirk about Finney’s death. Cushman wrote that this scene had to be restaged because Shatner objected to actor Winston De Lugo (the redshirt officer) being taller than him. The scene was improvised so that De Lugo was now sitting instead of standing. IMDB lists Shatner at 5’9” in height; legend has it that Shatner had a rule requiring all characters except Spock to be equal or lesser in height to him, unless the character was sitting or an alien.

Stone records a formal inquiry with Kirk. The exposition reveals that Finney was an instructor at the academy when Kirk was a midshipman. Jame was named after Jim. Kirk and Finney had a falling out years before when they were both serving on the USS Republic (NCC-1371, if you’re keeping score)4. Finney left open a circuit to “the atomic matter pile,” whatever that is. Another five minutes, and the Republic would have kaboomed.

Kirk assigned Finney to the pod because it was Ben’s turn on the duty roster. He testifies that he ordered yellow alert first and gave Finney time to get out of the pod. The storm became so bad that he had to declare red alert and jettison the pod — with Finney still inside.

It’s unclear to me why the pod needed to be jettisoned. We’re never shown the pod, nor is it explained why it’s necessary to jettison it in an ion storm. I guess we’re supposed to accept it, the way we accept that phasers and transporters work.

In any case, Stone says the data card shows the ship was still at yellow alert when the pod was jettisoned — contradicting Kirk’s testimony. Stone offers Kirk an option — to admit he’s “played out” and accept a ground assignment. “No starship captain has ever stood trial before and I don’t want you to be the first.”5 Kirk refuses. The court martial is on.

(NBC thought I’d be bored by now, but I’m enjoying it.)

Back in the bar, Kirk encounters Areel Shaw, yet another old flame who is now “a lawyer in the judge advocate’s office.” (JAG?!) She recommends Samuel T. Cogley to represent him. Oh, and by the way, Areel will be the prosecutor. No nookie for Jim and Areel tonight.6

Kirk returns to his temporary starbase quarters to find Cogley already there. (No privacy planetside, apparently.) As with Jame, it’s never explained whether Cogley lives at Starbase 11 or arrived from elsewhere. If it were me, I’d be a little suspicious that the prosecutor recommended him as a defense attorney, even if she and I had once nookied. Cogley disdains computers, uses only books. Must be an introvert.

The court martial begins. This episode will become the template for court martials in future Star Trek incarnations.

Cogley fails to question Shaw’s first three witnesses. When Stone asks why, Cogley calls Kirk to the stand. In the middle of the prosecutor’s presentation?! Um, okay. It’s future space law. Anything is possible.

Kirk testifies it was necessary to jettison the “ion pod” to “save my ship — and nothing is more important than my ship.”

We’re still not told the technical reason why the pod had to be jettisoned. Oh well.

JETTISON POD will never be seen again. Perhaps because it was jettisoned?!

The video log shows Kirk pressing the JETTISON POD button on his command chair while still at yellow alert. (Which suggests there’s only one pod. Whatever it is.) “But that’s not the way it happened,” Kirk mutters.

(Sorry NBC, my brain is still engaged with the episode.)

Back on the Enterprise, Spock proves something is wrong with the no-longer-called IRRU. He beats the computer five times at chess, which should be impossible.

This plot point gets the tribunal transferred to the Enterprise, which helps stage the rest of the story and resolve the plot.

Spock argues to the tribunal that his beating the computer is evidence of tampering. Only three crew members were capable of doing so — Kirk, Spock, and Finney. Kirk testifies that a search was conducted after the storm but Finney could not be found. (Nor, presumably, the pod …) Cogley argues that Finney is alive and hiding aboard the ship.

Kirk orders most of the crew ashore. The judges and a few others remain. Kirk proposes increasing auditory sensors by “one to the fourth power.”

Um, 1^4 = 1. Oh well, if the writers were good at math, they’d be mathematicians, not writers.

McCoy uses “a white sound device” to mask the heartbeats of those remaining aboard. Only one heartbeat remains — Finney’s.

The heartbeat is localized to “B deck,” near Engineering. Decks are normally numbered, so this is an inconsistency. Kirk declares “This is my problem” and goes to confront Finney alone. You’d think he’d want witnesses and backup. Another oh well.

With most of the crew ashore, Uhura once again serves at Navigation.

Finney has sabotaged the engines, so the ship is falling into the atmosphere. When Kirk tells him that Jame is aboard, Finney is distracted, so NBC gets the fistfight it wanted. Kirk knocks him out, then repairs the damage. Ship saved. Plot resolved.

Fin. Not to be confused with Finney.

Despite its flaws, “Court Martial” is still a memorable and noteworthy episode. It could have been slimmed even more, e.g. the Jame character serves little purpose other than to upset Finney when he realizes she’s aboard the ship he doomed.

Lexicon notes …

Several times in this episode, the word “Vulcanian” is used to describe someone or something with Vulcan. Eventually the simpler term “Vulcan” will come into favor.

For the first time, the word “Starfleet” is used. McCoy was “decorated by Starfleet surgeons.”

“The Galileo Seven” script writer Oliver Crawford (right) in July 1955 with stage director James Russo in July 1955. The two were planning a local production for the people of Flint, Michigan. Image source: The Flint Journal via Newspapers.com.

Oliver Kaufman Crawford wouldn’t name names when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) demanded, so he found himself out of a job.1

Turning 36 on August 17, 1953, Crawford was entering his peak screenwriting years. He’d written a number of teleplays for early television shows, but work largely dried up after his refusal, so he moved back to New York. A July 1955 article in the Flint, Michigan town newspaper reported he was working on the script for an outdoor stage production called the Flintorama Spectacle Show.2

By 1958 Crawford had returned to Hollywood, and was active in the Writers Guild of America’s leadership.3 He was nominated for Emmy awards for episodes of Climax! and Lineup.

Crawford rarely wrote in the science fiction genre, but a script for The Outer Limits won him a Writers Guild award nomination in 1964.4

These credentials brought him to the attention of Gene Roddenberry, who was looking for writers to script Star Trek episodes.

As noted in our last column, Roddenberry had visited the WGA in March 1966 hoping to recruit writers to attend Desilu screenings of the two Star Trek pilots. Several signed up. Barry Trivers, at the time WGA TV-radio branch president, wrote “The Conscience of the King.” Another was Shimon Wincelberg, who wrote “Dagger of the Mind.”

The WGA members played by the rules. Roddenberry did not. He often tried to coax free rewrites out of his free-lance writers in violation of the contracts the studios had signed with the WGA.

In his Star Trek history book, These Are The Voyages, Marc Cushman wrote that Roddenberry turned to Shimon Wincelberg and newly hired script consultant Steven Carabatsos for further rewrites. The final polish was by recently arrived producer Gene Coon.5 The on-screen writing credit was, “Teleplay by Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David, Story by Oliver Crawford.” S. Bar-David was Wincelberg’s pen name when he didn’t want his real name attached to a script.

According to Cushman, Crawford pitched to Roddenberry a story based on the 1939 film, Five Came Back. It didn’t hurt that the film starred a 28-year old Lucille Ball, who now owned Desilu.

The trailer for the 1939 RKO Radio Pictures film “Five Came Back,” which inspired Oliver Crawford’s premise for “The Galileo Seven.” Video source: Warner Bros. Classics YouTube channel.

The film’s premise is that a commercial airliner flying from Los Angeles to Panama City crash-lands in the Amazon jungle. Although it can be repaired, one engine is kaput, so the plane can carry the weight of only four passengers and a child. The passengers fight among themselves to decide who will survive, and who will remain to be slaughtered by the hostile indigenous people.

Roddenberry liked the idea, but associate producer Bob Justman balked at the potential cost. The script required construction of a space shuttle called Galileo to assume the role of the doomed aircraft. There would be two versions of Galileo — the shuttlecraft set and a miniature to film the space effects.

The show had invented the transporter specifically to avoid the effects cost of landing the Enterprise on an alien world, or even the space version of the wooden launches used during the Age of Sail for explorers (conquerors) to come ashore. Because Desilu declined to fund Galileo, script revisions came to a halt by June.

Until commerce beamed down.

Ten years before George Lucas signed a deal with 20th Century Fox for Star Wars that let him retain all merchandise licensing rights, the Aluminum Model Toys company decided to break the mold, so to speak. AMT would boldly go beyond its niche — selling toy model car kits — to license and produce Star Trek spaceship models. In exchange for the rights to sell Enterprise models (some assembly required), AMT agreed to pay for the design and construction of Galileo.6

The original USS Enterprise starship model kit sold by AMT in 1968. Image source: Memory Foxtrot Wiki.

Some of the correspondence between AMT and Desilu can be found on the CollectorModel.com website. (The documents state the true name of the shuttle is Galileo Seven, which is why its hull number is NCC-1701/7.) An August 2, 1966 letter required the hardware to be delivered disassembled because a union local insisted on assembling it. The target delivery date was September 12.

The Galileo has a long and tortured history. As documented by CollectorModel.com, a collector bought the decrepit shuttlecraft in 2012 for $70,000. It was finally restored and put on display at Space Center Houston in July 2013. The shuttlecraft is now in the possession of the Star Trek Set Tour in Ticonderoga, New York for eventual display.

The AMT-built shuttlecraft exterior as first seen in “The Galileo Seven.”

The 22” miniature was discovered in 1987 at Paramount in storage. The model was restored and appeared in Will Riker’s quarters in The Next Generation first-season episode, “Lonely Among Us.” It’s been loaned out for public display a few times, and appears to still be in the posession of Paramount.

In any case, AMT’s generosity allowed Crawford’s script to be resurrected.

Cushman’s history describes the various incarnations of the script. Crawford submitted his first draft outline on April 1, 1966, just days after Roddenberry’s presentation to the WGA and the Desilu screenings. Cushman notes that it was Kirk who led the landing party, not Spock. The ship’s doctor was still Mark Piper, played by Paul Fix in the second pilot; McCoy had yet to beam aboard.7

According to Cushman, it was Roddenberry who suggested that Spock command the shuttlecraft while Kirk remained aboard the Enterprise. This required a significant rewrite by Crawford. He and the production staff quibbled over which version this was; staff called it a “Revised First Draft” while Crawford’s cover sheet called it a “Final Draft.” Under WGA rules, that meant no more revisions unless production paid for it.

Revisions resumed after AMT stepped forward to fund Galileo, starting with Shimon Wincelberg. His draft added Yeoman Janice Rand to the landing party, but Gene Coon’s final draft replaced her with Yeoman Mears after Grace Lee Whitney’s contract expired. Coon also amplified the bickering between Spock and McCoy, an evolving trope that would soon endear fans to the characters’ ongoing dynamic.

A version of the final draft dated September 15, 1966 is available on the Internet Archive. (It was originally on Roddenberry.com.) Click here to download the PDF. The writing credit is, “Written by: Shimon Wincelberg and Oliver Crawford.”

Filming began on September 22, 1966. Two episodes had aired by then — “The Man Trap” on September 8, and “Charlie X” on September 15. The ratings had been strong, so there was hope for the series’ future. “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot, aired the night of the 22nd. I wonder what audiences thought about the sudden wholesale change in the crew complement.

Due to the lengthy post-production, “The Galileo Seven” didn’t air until January 5, 1967. Here’s what viewers saw that night.

The Enterprise is on its way to Makus Three for a rendezvous to deliver medical supplies. Galactic High Commissioner Ferris (no Federation yet) is aboard to oversee delivery and be a general pain in the rear for Captain Kirk.

Hanging in space like a Hot Shot No-Pest Strip is a quasar called Murasaki 312, which Kirk can’t resist. Ferris arrives on the bridge to protest, but Kirk says he has standing orders to investigate quasars, and they have two days to spare. (It’s not like the quasar is going anywhere. Deliver the medicine and come back …)

The miniature version of the Galileo debuts on the miniature flight deck. Cut to its interior, where we see Spock at the controls. Seven crew members are aboard; the only two series regulars are Spock and McCoy. Scotty is also aboard, but James Doohan didn’t have a full-season contract yet. The remaining four are candidates to join our growing casualty list.

(Our last crew casualties were in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Our first two redshirts met their demise in that episode, for a total of eight so far in season one.)

The script describes astro-physicist Boma as “a strong Negro” — a sign of the times. The other expendables are Yeoman Mears, Radiation Specialist Gaetano, and Navigator Latimer.

Sure enough, the quasar causes Galileo to lose control and plunge into Murasaki 312. The massive radiation disrupts communications, and the Enterprise is unable to locate them.

There’s your teaser.

Ferris berates Kirk for having strayed from the mission and accuses him of having lost seven crew members. Kirk replies that he has two days. This is a basic writer’s trick — start a clock ticking to create suspense.

Uhura reports that records show the quasar has one habitable planet, Taurus II. It appears that Uhura is acting as first officer in Spock’s absence. In earlier episodes, she’s relieved at navigation. One can understand Nichelle Nichols’ disappointment as her character had less and less to do as the season continued. She almost quit the show.

With Spock and Scott off the ship, Uhura apparently is second in command, even though it wasn’t clearly stated.

Galileo has crash-landed on Taurus II. Spock orders Scotty to begin repairs, while the rest of the crew exits to the surface. He tells Latimer and Gaetano to arm themselves with phasers, which we see in a storage bin.

Kirk orders a second shuttlecraft, the Columbus, to scour the planet surface looking for Galileo. We never see a shuttlecraft with that name displayed, but it’s established as canon. If Galileo is NCC-1701/7, what number is Columbus?

In a scene I suspect was written by Gene Coon, McCoy banters with Spock, accusing the Vulcan of relishing the opportunity to command. Spock replies:

I realize that command does have its fascinations, even under circumstances such as these. But I neither enjoy the idea of command, nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists. And I will do whatever logically needs to be done.

This dialogue exchange is critical for how the story resolves itself. It also lays a foundation for the Spock-McCoy relationship that continues for another 25 years. Spock will rely on logic, and McCoy will nag him to push beyond logic.

The script is crafted so that the other crew members are borderline insubordinate to Spock. Only Scotty shows him proper respect. Sure, the conflict creates drama for the audience, but in reality I doubt such behavior would be tolerated.

Scott reports that Galileo has lost so much fuel it will need to drop 500 pounds just to reach orbit. Spock comments that’s equivalent to the weight of three men. McCoy barks that equipment could be tossed instead, but Spock replies there’s very little excess. If three need to stay behind, he will decide using logic.

Out on patrol, Latimer and Gaetano encounter one of the giant natives, who throws a spear into Latimer’s back. Dead crewmember #9. Less weight to worry about. Gaetano and Boma bring the body back to Galileo for burial, which Spock considers a waste of time.

The natives prepare for another assault. The human crew members want to attack, but Spock hopes to frighten the natives into leaving. Spock leads Gaetano and Boma into a display of superiority. After firing off phasers, Spock orders Gaetano to remain behind on guard, confident that his strategy worked.

While Gaetano awaits his fate, Scott proposes draining the phasers for enough fuel to launch, even though they’ll have no defenses. Spock agrees.

Gaetano’s fate arrives. Dead crewmember #10. Spock finds the body and uses a firefighter’s carry to bring him back to Galileo. The Vulcan is quite puzzled that the natives acted so illogically.

With the ion storm clearing, Kirk has ordered landing parties, only to have (off-screen) one crewmember killed (#11) and two injured.

Kirk’s time has run out. Ferris assumes command. He orders Kirk to recall Columbus and the landing parties, then immediately depart for Makus Three. Kirk reluctantly complies.

Galileo launches with enough fuel for one orbit. After that, the shuttle will burn up on re-entry. Spock decides to jettison the fuel, which creates a flare, hoping someone might see them.

Spock jettisons and ignites Galileo’s remaining fuel. This effect was a reason why the episode was one of the most expensive in the series’ history.

Enterprise sensors detect the flare. Kirk orders the ship to reverse course. As Galileo begins to burn up, the Enterprise transporters beam the survivors aboard.

By the time “The Galileo Seven” aired on January 5, 1967, Star Trek’s ratings were in decline. According to Cushman, the show finished third behind CBS and ABC content. The episode cost $232,690 to produce, one of the more expensive in the show’s history.

This did not go unnoticed, by the studio or by the network.

Pennsylvania State University assistant English teaching professor Phillip Zapkin and Northeast State Community College associate English professor Colin Cox discuss “The Conscience of the King.” Video source: Theatre of Phil YouTube channel.

“Madness in Great Ones Must Not Unwatched Go”

If William Shakespeare had been a mid-20th Century Hollywood screenwriter, it’s quite possible that Gene Roddenberry would have pursued him to write a Star Trek episode.

The introspective brooding James Tiberius Kirk of early Star Trek would be quite familiar to Shakespeare. Kirk’s melancholia found in early episodes evokes Prince Hamlet, whose introspection and skepticism often leads him to question his decisions, if not his life-and-death authority over his crew. In her retrospective Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation, Yvonne Fern quotes associate producer Robert Justman:1

Captain Kirk was Hamlet, the flawed hero. Gene told me that, early on. He modeled him on Captain Horatio Hornblower and he had characteristics of Hamlet, who knows what he has to do, but agonizes over it … I think, looking back on it now, that Gene Roddenberry was Captain Kirk.

Fern wrote that Roddenberry told her Captain Kirk was his alter ego. (And sometimes Spock.)

Kirk eventually evolved into a love-’em-and-leave-’em reckless risk-taker, but even in the Star Trek films we have scenes where Kirk questions his motivations and actions.

Barry Trivers wasn’t Shakespeare, but like many writers was an aficionado. Marc Cushman wrote in These are the Voyages: TOS Season One that Trivers was “an admirer of William Shakespeare,” but like many of his era was influenced by the events of World War II.2 Trivers served during that war; he was blinded for a year after a combat air crash.3

How and where he intersected with Roddenberry is unclear, but it may have been in March 1966, when Gene addressed “a gathering of writers in the boardroom of the Writers Guild” of America, according to unauthorized biographer Joel Engel.4 Roddenberry hoped the writers would attend screenings of the two pilots and consider pitching script ideas. A Los Angeles Times article dated February 17, 1966 described Trivers as president of the WGA’s “TV-radio branch,” so it’s possible he was one of the writers in the room.5

Trivers was age 59 that day. He was one of the more accomplished writers in the industry, with film credits going back to 1930.6 Trivers won the 1961 WGA outstanding writing award for his Naked City scripts.7 Like many of the writers Roddenberry recruited, Barry had no science fiction experience. This turned out to be a mistake, because even the most experienced television writers struggled to grasp the Star Trek universe. In the spring of 1966, all they had to go by were two pilots with largely different casts, Gene’s March 1964 sixteen-page outline “Star Trek Is …” and supplemental memos Roddenberry issued as the series entered pre-production.

According to Cushman, Trivers submitted his first outline on April 5, 1966. His early concept was that Kirk’s father had been killed by “a group of revolutionaries led by Kodos,” a Hitler-like character who nearly conquered Earth. Kirk learns that Kodos may still be alive, and struggles to balance justice with his lust for vengeance.

Roddenberry immediately saw the Hamlet metaphor, but warned not to go too far. He wrote in a memo to associate producers Bob Justman and John D.F. Black:8

Kirk — a kind of Hamlet — is intent on learning the truth and punishing the villain. In other words, play the Hamlet theme with the exception that our Captain has not the Hamlet melancholia and vacillation.

It’s also possible that Roddenberry didn’t want to kill off Kirk’s father this early in the series, when that potential character might surface later. (We met Spock’s parents, after all.)

The premise certainly appealed from a budget perspective. As we’ve discussed in earlier columns, Star Trek episodes were expensive to produce, and often over budget. This episode required few effects and no new sets; existing sets were redressed when needed. According to Cushman, the episode came in $8,641 under the studio budget of $193,500, even though shooting ran a day late.9

“Yet Grace Must Still Look So”

In our column about “Miri,” the previously filmed episode, we discussed Grace Lee Whitney’s departure from the show after her sexual assault by an unnamed “executive.”

Whitney’s contract required the producers to use her in seven episodes. “Miri” was the sixth.

After filming “Miri,” production shut down for two weeks so Roddenberry, Shatner, and Nimoy could promote the show, which would premiere on NBC with “The Man Trap” on September 8, 1966. The visual effects for other episodes were nowhere near done, so “The Man Trap” went first using effects cobbled together from the pilots and whatever starship visuals had been completed.

An NBC commercial for the upcoming premiere of “Star Trek.” Although the ad says September 15, it was actually September 8.

Whitney’s agent, and then Grace, were informed during the hiatus that her contract wouldn’t be extended. In her 1998 autobiography, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, Grace wrote that on or about September 1 her agent called to say that Janice Rand was being written out of the series. According to her memoir, the agent said:10

The producers feel the romantic relationship between Kirk and Rand is becoming too obvious, and it limits the story possibilities. Apparently, they think Captain Kirk needs to be free to have affairs with other women on all these different planets.

Cushman’s chapter on “The Conscience of the King” documents how the script drafts devolved to all but eliminate Rand. He cites an early memo from ever-frugal Bob Justman questioning if Rand was even needed for the episode.

John D.F. Black departed on August 12. His duties were divided between two new arrivals. Veteran TV writer Gene Coon, most recently a producer with The Wild Wild West, joined the staff on August 8 as a producer. Also starting that day was the far less experienced Steve Carabatsos, who’d been in the industry for only three years. Steve had the job title “Script Consultant,” although functionally he was a script editor. The one-week overlap helped the two newcomers become familiar with the Star Trek universe and format.11 Coon would have a more lasting impact on Star Trek history, while Carabatsos (like Black) only had a thirteen-week contract.

Coon began with polishing “Miri” while Carabatsos revised “Conscience.” During the hiatus, Coon edited Carabatsos’ draft, producing multiple revisions. Each revision dwindled Rand’s presence.

Filming began on September 13. Whitney’s first day was scheduled to be the 14th but, after she sat around all day, director Gerd Oswald decided not to shoot a scene in which Rand interrupts a flirtation between Kirk and Lenore Karidian. Grace returned on the 15th, but it was decided to drop Rand from the scene, so another day was wasted.

The on-set script changes support the evidence that the producers had decided to go with the Kirk the Womanizer. In the scene where Kirk takes Lenore to the observation deck, Lenore says, “This ship, all this power, surging, throbbing, but under control. Are you like that, Captain?” Rand was to enter with a duty roster for Kirk to sign, then leave without comment. After Lenore made catty remarks about Janice, Kirk was to say, “Yeoman Rand is strictly business.”12

But Rand’s presence was dropped. This eliminated the implicit competition between the two women. Lenore is only 19, while Kirk is in his early 30s, so the rewrite fulfills the male viewer (and perhaps aging executive) fantasy that an older man can attract a younger woman. In “Miri,” Kirk had a borderline inappropriate relationship with pubescent Miri.

Janice Rand enters the bridge as Lenore departs. Grace Lee Whitney’s final appearance was no more than a cameo.

Whitney was on call for the 16th to appear in a bridge scene, but was told not to report. Her final appearance was filmed on September 20, entering the bridge while Kirk and Lenore bantered. Her denouement was a walk-on.

“Out, Damned Spot!”

“Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” — Richard Nixon, David Frost interview, April 1977. Video source: Meet the Presidents YouTube channel.

History is replete with individuals who commit heinous acts in the name of the greater good.

Richard Nixon not only orchestrated the Watergate affair, but also carpet-bombed North Vietnam and illegally invaded Cambodia. He’s alleged to have conspired with the South Vietnamese government to keep Hubert Humphrey from winning the 1968 presidential election.13 As seen in the above video, Nixon used national security as justification for his actions.

Harry Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. How many died in the bombings? Estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000.14 One could argue he saved millions by forcing Japan to surrender but, if one wants to play the numbers game, Kodos the Executioner sacrificed half the population of Tarsus IV to save the other half from famine.

Kodos killed 4,000 people. Anton Karidian, twenty years later, is the elderly leader of a small acting troupe touring the galaxy performing Shakespearean plays. Karidian is no longer the person who committed those crimes. Will punishing Karidian punish Kodos? A rhetorical question.

The passage of time often softens history’s perspective of political criminals. The threat of punishment is considered a deterrent for the commission of a crime. But when the punishment comes decades later, and the criminal is no longer who he once was, would that punishment be “justice” or “vengeance”?

The search for Nazi war criminals continued into the 21st Century. Convictions continued into the 2010s. Iwan Demjanjuk, dubbed “Ivan the Terrible,” was tried and convicted in German court in 2009, at age 89. He died in a German nursing home in 2012 at age 92 while his case underwent appeal.15

Suppose that, as this episode was being written in 1966, a 77-year old Adolph Hitler had been discovered leading a small non-profit delivering food and medical supplies to improverished villages in South America. He’s using the alias “Alberto Hernandez.” Would justice be served by executing Alberto? Again, a rhetorical question.

Some Star Trek episodes have suggested that, in its future, punishment is an obsolete concept. Criminal behavior is treated more like a mental illness, such as in “Dagger of the Mind” produced two episodes ago. In the prequel series Strange New Worlds, the Vulcans have a rehabilitation facility where criminals are taught to purge their emotions so they can return to civilized society. But in The Next Generation, Ro Laren was sent to a Starfleet stockade for disobeying direct orders. Justice is in the eye of the beholder. Or the screenwriter.

As our story unfolds, Karidian shows little contrition for his deeds as Kodos. “Penance” and “punishment” are different concepts. According to religious sources, penance is a voluntary act of atonement or rectification, while punishment is an external remedy, an infliction of pain or suffering by society to achieve a collective resolution of justice.16

This is a question “Conscience” raises. What is the appropriate judgment for Karidian? Kirk’s duty should be to arrest him and deliver him for trial. Others seek vengeance. The story’s climax denies us an answer, but perhaps the point is to find the answer for ourselves.

So let’s venture into the story.

The episode opens in the middle of the play Macbeth. Anton Karidian as Macbeth murders King Duncan. Kirk is in the audience with Dr. Thomas Leighton, an old friend. Leighton tells Kirk he’s certain Karidian is Kodos the Executioner.

Kirk is skeptical, but Leighton reminds him that the only evidence Kodos died was a body burnt beyond recognition. (Hitler’s body was burned outside his bunker.) The body was found twenty years ago by “Earth forces” — the term “Starfleet” has yet to be introduced in the series. They are two of only nine witnesses who saw Kodos.

Despite his skepticism, Kirk accesses the Enterprise database to study the Kodos history files and Karidian’s biography. (Majel Barrett voices the computer.) No records exist for Karidian prior to the Tarsus IV holocaust. Kirk decides to attend a cocktail party hosted by the Leightons that evening for the acting troupe.

Kirk zeroes in on Lenore, who welcomes his attention. She says that her father never sees anyone personally, and never attends parties. With no prime suspect to interrogate, Kirk takes Lenore by the hand and escorts her outside. (The legend begins …)

As they stroll, Lenore says Kirk is lonely. They’re about to kiss when Kirk spots a body in the brush. It’s the now ex-Tom Leighton. In the next scene, the body has been brought inside by someone. The widow Leighton covers the body with a blanket but doesn’t seem all that upset. This is a personal nitpick I have with many TV shows; suddenly widowed spouses or paramours show little grief, much less hysteria.

Kirk calls the captain of the civilian ship transporting the actors, and asks him to leave early. The Enterprise will transport the troupe to their next stop. In exchange, Lenore offers to have the company perform for the crew.

You’re in my spot!

Sitting at Spock’s bridge console (a rare occurrence), Kirk further queries the database. He learns that only two witnesses are left who can identify Kodos — him, and crewmember Kevin Riley. (“Star Service Lieutenant Kevin Riley,” as Kirk calls him. Again, not “Starfleet.”) Kirk orders Riley transferred to Engineering, without explanation.

Spock goes to Sickbay to question McCoy about the captain’s behavior. The scene doesn’t do much to advance the plot, but it does have an exchange that helps build the Vulcan universe:

McCoy: Would you care for a drink, Mr. Spock?

Spock: My father’s race was spared the dubious benefits of alcohol.

McCoy: Oh. Now I know why they were conquered.

Hmmm … We’ve seen Spock inebriated in several episodes of Strange New Worlds. Perhaps it’s his half-human blood. If Vulcan were conquered in its past, we never heard about it again. Perhaps Roddenberry or Coon left this thread dangling, thinking it might tie to the Romulans one day. But it never did.

Spock pieces together Kirk’s inquiries. In another visit with McCoy, he tells the doctor about the events on Tarsus IV. Due to the famine, Kodos seized power and relied on his personal belief in eugenics to cull the population. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t the first,” McCoy comments. Barry Trivers (or whomever added the line) may have been referring to Hitler, but in “Space Seed” we’ll encounter Khan Noonien Singh and his super-race created by Earth eugenics in the late 20th Century.

Spock concludes that Karidian’s history “begins, almost to the day, where Kodos disappeared.” He’s also discovered that the Karidian troupe was always nearby when the other eyewitnesses died.

Segue to Engineering, where Riley is alone. A gloved hand poisons his milk. His gasps are heard over the intercom, so the assassination attempt is foiled. (Perhaps the milk was past its expiration date.)

Spock and McCoy confront Kirk about the investigation. This is one of the first times we see the dynamics of the “triangle” in action. Kirk says he’s only seeking justice, but McCoy asks if he’s seeking vengeance. Spock is certain that Karidian is Kodos. Kirk still has some doubt. McCoy says that arresting Karidian won’t bring back the dead; Kirk counters that the dead might rest easier.

Someone places an overloaded phaser inside Kirk’s quarters. Another assassination attempt foiled, as Kirk tosses it out a chute. It stretches creduility that the assassin not only has access to engineering but also to the captain’s quarters, a toxic lubricant, and a phaser. This is an ongoing problem with the scripts to date, in my opinion — security is lax when it needs to be.

Kirk goes to confront Karidian. He doesn’t deny being Kodos, but doesn’t admit it either. “Let bloody vengeance take its final course!” Karidian seems to welcome his fate, but shows no regrets, arguing that Kodos did what had to be done, as Kirk does in command of the Enterprise.

Despite all this, the troupe nonetheless performs Hamlet for the crew. Karidian plays the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Further proving my point about lax security, Riley breaks into a weapons locker to steal a phaser. (Where did the overloaded one come from?) Kirk disarms Riley backstage.

Lenore reveals to her father that she’s the assassin — further stretching credulity. She’s an ingenious serial killer for a teen actor. “More blood on my hands!” he cries. Lenore snatches yet another phaser off the belt of a security officer. (Police holsters have a safety strap to keep this from happening.) Aiming for Kirk, Karidian intervenes and takes the phaser fire, saving the captain but dying from the injury.

By saving Kirk, did Karidian redeem himself for his past sins? Should he have received mercy in his old age, as Lenore argued? Or was it karma, the universe paying him back for his mass murders?

All are questions that only we can answer for ourselves.

Grace Lee Whitney filmed this scene after she was sexually assaulted by an unnamed executive.

Crew Rotation

Star Trek exhausted Gene Roddenbbery.

It exhausted his associate producers too, Bob Justman and John D.F. Black. Justman took care of daily production, while Black supervised the scripts.

The show was behind schedule and over budget.1 The special effects, of a sophistication never attempted for weekly television, had not yet been delivered.

“Miri” was scheduled to begin production on August 22. Adrian Spies was a veteran television writer who had written six episodes for Desilu Playhouse, including one for Desi Arnaz himself. But Spies had no real science fiction experience.

In March 1966, Spies pitched to Roddenberry his idea about an Earth-like world populated by children who were actually very old. As with many of Star Trek’s early scripts, this one’s delivery dragged out too, buffeted by Justman’s requests for rewrites to reduce costs, Black’s draft polishes, and Roddenberry’s tinkering with the script as he had with others.

By early August, Star Trek needed help. Roddenberry hired Gene Coon, another veteran TV writer who’d recently served as a producer and story editor at The Wild Wild West. John D.F. Black was on his way out2; he asked Roddenberry not to renew his contract, so Coon and Black had some overlap time for Coon to become familiar with the show. On his way out the door, Black collaborated with Roddenberry and Justman to write the show’s famous opening narrative, “Space, the final frontier …”3

Coon’s first assignment was “Miri.” According to Marc Cushman, “Coon’s rewrite is a prime example of small changes making big differences.” In the last days before principal photography began, Coon circulated final drafts with Roddenberry, Justman, and NBC.

“Miri” was the first Star Trek episode to be shot on location. The exterior scenes were shot at Desilu’s Culver City lot. The location is one of the most historic in the film industry, going back to 1916. It was here that the giant gates swung open in the 1933 movie King Kong; those gates were destroyed as Atlanta burned for Gone with the Wind. The first Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” filmed on this lot. During the 1960s, it was used by Hogan’s Heroes and The Andy Griffith Show.

This 2020 MeTV video shows Desilu-Culver locations shared by “Star Trek” and “The Andy Griffith Show. Video source: MeTV YouTube channel.

Amazing Grace

This would be the last episode with Grace Lee Whitney’s Janice Rand in a featured role. Although sources vary on the reason, for years the consensus was production costs. Her contract had guaranteed only seven episodes; the yeoman could be portrayed by any actor paid less to perform the character.

That was the public story until Grace published her biography in 1998, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy.4 Whitney revealed that an executive had sexually assaulted her during the filming of “Miri.”

Who was the executive? Grace declined to name her assailant, writing that it wasn’t her place to expose him. Some believe that the evidence points to Roddenberry. Gene is the most likely in a limited pool of suspects.

A publicity photo of Grace Lee Whitney as she appeared in the pilot for the proposed “Police Story” series. Image source: The Durham Sun, August 22, 1967, via Newspapers.com.

Whitney wrote that she met Roddenberry when he cast her for a pilot called Police Story. After that failed to sell, he requested her for the role of Janice Rand. She drove down to Desilu to meet with him, where he described the yeoman as “the object of [the captain’s] repressed desire.” Viewing the opportunity as regular employment on a weekly series, Grace signed the contract in April 1966.

In her book, Whitney wrote that the assault occurred on Friday evening, August 26, 1966, after filming on the episode “Miri” wrapped for the week. Alcoholic drinks were served on the set. The executive then offered to escort her to an empty office to discuss her future on the show. He was an executive she trusted; Grace wrote that she’d known the man for “a couple years” and that he was known as a womanizer but not a monster.

In the office, the executive plied her with more alcohol. He asked her to role-play Kirk and Rand with him, directing that Rand had a repressed desire and hunger for sex with Kirk. Grace described him as someone who “had a lot of power over my future.” When he asked her to undress, she refused, and reminded him of his relationship with another woman. He replied, “She doesn’t care,” that she was aware of his affairs with other women. He blocked her exit and began to undress himself. “He had the power to destroy my career and we both knew it.” As he forced her to perform oral sex on him, she believed that her employment at Star Trek was at an end.

Grace confided in Leonard Nimoy that night what happened, but Leonard didn’t discuss it in his autobiography. The principals — Whitney, Roddenberry, Nimoy — are all deceased so, unless someone one day produces evidence, we’ll never know for sure. Grace wrote in a chapter titled “Great Bird of the Galaxy” about her relationship with Gene, calling them “two sides of the same coin.” Both had their demons. She forgave him for dropping her character, especially when she was invited back for The Motion Picture. There’s no evidence in this chapter to suggest he was the one who violated her.

Grace Lee Whitney as Janice Rand in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” Image source: Memory Alpha.

The clue pointing to Roddenberry as the assailant is Grace’s recounting of what happened when she reported to work the Monday morning after the assault. While she and Nimoy were in the makeup trailer, the executive came in and gave her “a polished gray stone.”

Several Star Trek history books document that Roddenberry polished stones as a hobby. Joel Engel wrote in his 1994 unauthorized Roddenberry biography that John D.F. Black “shared rock-cutting as a hobby with Roddenberry and Alden Schwimmer,” Roddenberry’s agent.5 In his autobiography, Leonard Nimoy wrote that “Gene and Majel were avid gemologists; they bought unfinished gemstones and polished them, then resold them.”6

By August 26, Black had left the show. Schwimmer was an agent, so he wouldn’t be someone in a position to write the Rand character, much less being on the set for a Friday night party or walking into the makeup trailer. That leaves Roddenberry. As we’ve discussed in earlier articles, Roddenberry had a reputation as a womanizer. At the time of the assault, he was having an affair with Majel Barrett while still married to his first wife, and at one time had an affair with Nichelle Nichols.

Grace wrote in her 1998 memoir, “Today, the Executive can no longer hurt me.” Roddenberry passed away in 1991. Was that another clue? We’ll never know.

Whitney wrote that she never had a “romantic relationship” with Roddenberry, but that he made, “Passes, innuendoes, double-entendres, the whole nine yards.” She commented, “Who knows? Maybe if Gene had gotten me in the sack, I might have done all three seasons of Star Trek instead of only half a season!”

After filming the episode, her agent informed her that she’d been written out of the show. (This was during a two-week hiatus between “Miri” and “Conscience of the King.”) According to the agent, he’d been told that Rand was too close to Kirk, that they wanted the captain to have relationships with other women.

In their memoir, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Herb Solow and Bob Justman wrote that in early September 1966 Roddenberry proposed dropping the Rand character to Desilu executives. They speculated this was due to her weight gain and substance abuse. Solow found it odd that Roddenberry wanted her gone, because until this time Gene had fiercely defended the character. Solow wrote that there were rumors of “a sudden personal rift between Gene and Grace that occurred just prior to her departure from the show.”7 This book was published two years before the Whitney bio, so they may have been unaware of the alleged assault.

Star Trek Creator, Roddenberry’s authorized biography by David Alexander, cites internal memos from the time as proving her departure was strictly financial. Alexander references an internal memo from a consultant who concluded that Whitney was underused. “Grace for the most part has cost us a lot of money for the little that we use her in each show.” His recommendation was to replace her with “a free lance player” who would be paid less. A memo was sent September 8, 1966 from Desilu Business Affairs to Legal directing that Whitney’s agent be informed that her contract was being terminated. Alexander concludes, “the real reason Grace Lee Whitney left the show was financial.”8

“Miri” in my opinion is Whitney’s best work with Star Trek. She had to show a range of emotions that would have challenged any actor. Her performance had to be colored by Rand’s love for Captain Kirk, unrequited by duty and rank.

Let’s explore her final featured performance.

This Looks Familiar

Haven’t we met?

Gene Roddenberry’s March 11, 1964 series pitch “STAR TREK is …” had promised that our starship (then called the SS Yorktown) would visit “worlds ‘similar’ to our own.”

The “Parallel Worlds” concept is key to the STAR TREK format. It means simply that our stories deal with plant and animal life, plus people, quite similar to that on earth. Social evolution will also have interesting points of similarity with ours.

Roddenberry wrote that the Parallel Worlds concept not only meant locations familiar to a general audience, but production would be affordable with “earth” casting, sets, locations, costuming, etc.

“Miri” is the first of several episodes to take the parallel Earth concept literally. An “earth-style” SOS is detected transmitting from a duplicate Earth — one without any weather systems, apparently, because we see no clouds anywhere on the planet. (The consequence of a limited effects budget.)

The Mayberry Courthouse with Floyd’s Barber Shop to the left. Image source: Retroweb.com.

Return to Mayberry. The courthouse columns can be seen behind the landing party.

Kirk leads a landing party of six — Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Rand, and two expendable redshirts. Let’s see if they survive the episode.

Spock estimates that this is a duplicate of Earth circa 1960, fulfilling Roddenberry’s promise to visit worlds familiar to a general audience. The distress signal apparently was sent centuries ago.

Out of nowwhere, a zombie creature attacks McCoy. Kirk delivers three punches to the zombie, although Spock at one point holds the creature and could have used his nerve pinch. Oh well. The zombie sniffles and whimpers like a child. The creature dies; McCoy delivers the line, “It’s dead.” The doctor scans the deceased and finds that it aged a century in just a few minutes.

Inside one of the buildings, the landing party finds a pre-teen girl named Miri. She begs the adults not to harm her. She tells of “grupps” who destroyed the planet (a term we later discover means “grownups.”) McCoy deduces that the grupps died from a plague.

Kirk turns on the charm hoping to coax Miri into cooperating, but it has the unintended consequence of her developing a crush on the captain. That’s an emerging trope we’ll see time and again throughout the series — love ‘em and leave ‘em. It’s a bit creepy here, since the girl is pre-pubescent. (Kim Darby, who plays Miri, was 19 at the time of filming.)

Out on patrol, Spock and the two redshirts are ambushed by feral children. They’re pretty much harmless, but the landing party points phasers at them anyway.

Kirk touches Miri and develops a blister on his hand. The splotches soon appear on the other landing party crew members, except for Spock. Miri leads them to a building with a laboratory and the SOS transmitter. Old documents reveal the plague was a failed experiment to prolong human life. Spock deduces that the disease may be linked to the onset of puberty.

Using the starship’s computers, the calculation is that the landing party has about a week left before they die from the plague. This is a very old instrument in a writer’s tool kit - setting a ticking clock. The clock has started.

Exploiting her crush and taking her by the hand, Kirk asks Miri to introduce him to the other children. Several of them are played by the children of cast members, including Shatner and Whitney. Roddenberry’s two daughters were in the group, as well as director Vincent McEveety’s nephew. They scatter when another zombie appears.

Led by an older child named Jahn, the children plot to steal the landing party’s communicators. While the children create a distraction, Jahn sneaks into the lab through the always-handy air vent, then steals the communicators. Five of them. This seems to me to be a weak point in the plot; would you run off without your cell phone just because you heard some children chanting? Not one of them thought to grab a communicator? And where are the security redshirts? This one is on the captain. (Actually, it’s on the writers.)

Suppose you’re in command of the Enterprise. Communications have suddenly ceased. You’ve been ordered by the captain not to beam down any more crew members. But that doesn’t mean you can’t beam down more equipment. Why not send down another communicator to see what happens? You’ve probably been beaming down meals, so why not send a message asking if the landing party is okay? If not, instruct that you’ll be sending another communicator. This is the building from which the SOS was transmitted. Can’t the landing party use the transmitter to contact the Enterprise? Another goof.

This has always bugged me about the general premise of a landing party. Why send down humans when you could send down a drone or robot? The answer, of course, is there would be no tension in the story if our heroes are not at risk. And on a 1960s TV show budget, building drones probably wasn’t affordable.

Kirk records in his log that the children’s food supply is running low. The children had a 300-year supply of edibles?! Seems rather implausible. Setting another clock.

Tempers begin to flare. Rand snaps and runs out the lab into a corridor. She tells Kirk, “ I used to try to get you to look at my legs.” Janice begs him to look at her infected legs. I have to wonder if this was a Roddenberry tinker, because he often was the one who added a bit more sexual tension to a scene. Miri sees Kirk hug Rand; driven by jealousy, she returns to Jahn and proposes kidnapping Janice as a trap for the captain.

Showing signs of the plague, Miri leads Kirk to where the children have Janice tied up. (No security officers accompany the captain; in fact, we haven’t seen them for quite some time. It’s like exposing the king on the chessboard.) In a terrifying scene staged by director Vincent McEveety, Kirk is surrounded by the children, who club him with a hammer and other weapons. The scene seems to borrow from Piggy’s death in the 1954 William Golding novel, Lord of the Flies. Marc Cushman commented that Golding “was clearly borrowing from other sources. Consider this William Golding’s Lord of the Flies meets Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, in search of the Fountain of Youth.”

Piggy is murdered in the 1990 film version of “Lord of the Flies.” Video source: Movieclips YouTube channel.

Unlike Piggy, Kirk survives his beating. While he pleads for their cooperation, Spock leaves the lab to check on his progress. Left alone, McCoy injects himself with a possible antidote, not knowing the proper dosage. Kirk arrives with the children and the communicators. Needless to say, the antidote works.

William Shatner returns to the lab carrying his daughter Lisabeth.9

Back on the bridge, McCoy and Rand stand next to the captain’s chair. Kirk says he’s contacted “Space Central” to request teachers and advisors. (Starfleet Command still doesn’t exist as a term.) The captain orders Spock to take the Enterprise to warp, and off we go to the next adventure.

In the end credits, DeForest Kelley and Grace Lee Whitney appear under “Featuring.” Roddenberry’s original vision for the show was a core character group of four — Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Rand. After the two-week hiatus, Kelley was signed to a new contract, while Whitney was let go.

It’s a shame we never saw Rand other than a glorified clerical assistant. If the role was considered superfluous, she could have been reassigned to navigation, a position not held by a regular cast member until Walter Koenig arrived in Season Two to play Chekov. What might have been, for Janice and for Grace, if not for a Friday night in a Desilu office building.

A 1966 publicity image featuring Kirk, Spock, and Rand. Image source: Flickr.

P.S. The two redshirts survived, although they disappeared for much of the episode.

A 2021 audio interview with David Gerrold about “HARLIE” and artificial intelligence. Video source: Human Cusp YouTube channel.

NOTE: HARLIE in italics refers to the book title. HARLIE in normal font refers to the artificial intelligence character in the book.

David Gerrold is both blessed and cursed by his first television script sale, a harmless piece of fluff called “The Trouble with Tribbles.” It’s one of the most popular episodes in the history of the Star Trek franchise. If you mention his name at a science fiction convention, most people would likely reply, “oh, the tribble guy.”

That’s a shame, because in the literary world David has gifted us with a long and impressive writing portfolio that includes Hugo and Nebula awards for The Martian Child, a fictional tale based on his adoption of a boy.

Other Gerrold works have been nominated for those awards, starting with When HARLIE Was One, about the first true artificial intelligence and its will to survive. The first edition was published in 1972 and was nominated for a 1973 best novel Hugo Award, losing to Isaac Asimov. (Which is not unlike the Pittsburgh Pirates losing the 1927 World Series 4-0 to the “Murderers Row” New York Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.)

By age 29 in 1973, Gerrold had not only written one of Star Trek’s most popular episodes, but also been nominated for a Hugo. Not bad for starters.

David expanded and revised HARLIE for a “Release 2.0” published in 1988. That version is out of print, however you can find it as an Audible audiobook. Both the 1972 and 1988 versions can be found used on eBay and other book outlets.

HARLIE is a product of its time. As explained by Gerrold in the 1988 foreword, technology rapidly outpaced what he foresaw in 1972. The book does not define when it occurs, although we can assume from the technology it’s a near future for 1980s readers. Reading it now in 2025, parts still seem antiquated1, yet much of it speaks to our time, a time when true artificial intelligence (AI) seems closer than ever.

Elon Musk has invested billions in his xAI and its Grok software.2 Grok can be found on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), in Tesla electric vehicles, and in Tesla Optimus robots.

A December 2023 Tesla video demonstrating the Optimus robot. Video source: Tesla YouTube channel.

Jeff Bezos has invested in artificial intelligence companies as well, such as Physical Intelligence and Toloka. Last December, Bezos said that 95% of his time at Amazon is spent on AI within the company.

In the novel, HARLIE has no avatar like Optimus, not even an audio interface, for reasons explained in the book.3 One can’t help but read HARLIE in 2025 and see the parallels with xAI and other Large Language Model (LLM) companies.

Although xAI and others may call themselves “artificial intelligence,” they’re not in the pure sense of the definition. Toloka explains that Grok and other so-called AIs are actually LLMs “using extensive datasets to learn patterns and relationships between words and phrases.”

They have been trained on vast amounts of text data to learn the statistical patterns, grammar, and semantics of human language. This vast amount of text may be taken from the Internet, books, and other sources to develop a deep understanding of human language.

As a Tesla owner, we’ve played with Grok and found it not ready for prime time. We soon realized it’s just a search engine with your choice of synthesized voices and personalities. It’s a work in progress.

HARLIE is an acronym for Human Analog Replication, Lethetic Intelligence Engine. “Lethetic intelligence” isn’t really a thing; in the book, “lethesis” is defined as “ the study of language-created paradigms.” This may put us in the realm of today’s Large Language Models; in the first chapter, HARLIE appears to be developing its own language to create terms for concepts it can’t understand just yet. Later in the book, HARLIE says, “WE LIVE IN LANGUAGE … AND OUR LANGUAGE SHAPES AND COLORS OUR EXPERIENCE.” That may explain why Tesla’s Full Self-Driving has a tendency to drive us towards a pole or pylon once in a while …

Much of the debate early in the book is about the true definition of artificial intelligence. HARLIE creating its own language is an example. The question is raised — is HARLIE a sentient being? If so, how to define sentience in terms humans will accept?

The entire book, in fact, is mostly debate. Scenes, chapters are typically a debate between two characters discussing some particular topic. If you like sci-fi pew-pew, this book is the opposite. Personally, I don’t care about pew-pew. An intellectual debate works for me. But I was surprised that David pulled this off without some meddling editor demanding a fistfight or a car chase.

(There is a sex scene, so it has something for the prurient audience.)

The core characters are HARLIE and David Auberson, a 37-year old psychologist who heads the team programming and evaluating HARLIE. Much of the book consists of intellectual debates and conversations between Auberson and HARLIE. At first they’re fun, as HARLIE exhibits a sly sense of humor, but for this reader those conversations became quite foreboding once HARLIE’s evolving intellect rapidly outpaces the humans’ capacity to restrict his evolution.

Auberson works for, and HARLIE is owned by, Stellar American Technology and Research. Corporate management becomes the antagonist of the story. Certain board members complain that HARLIE isn’t returning foreseeable profits and want its plug pulled. Auberson argues just the opposite — HARLIE is a youngster with an infinite thirst for knowledge. HARLIE can only evolve if it’s free to seek, absorb, contemplate, and interpret — in short, think for itself.

This poses the first of many ethical problems raised by Gerrold. If HARLIE is truly a sentient creature, then would pulling its plug be the equivalent of murder? The corporate lawyers raise the concern. It’s one I haven’t heard discussed with our modern-day AI advances.

There’s no mention in HARLIE of Isaac Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics, first raised in his short story “Runaround” published in the March 1942 edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Those three rules are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

If the robot becomes sentient, is it no longer a robot but its own life form? If so, do the three rules no longer apply?

The third rule becomes the crux of the story because, for various reasons and motivations, our corporate mustache twirlers conspire to shut down HARLIE and sell off its technologies. As a sentient creature, HARLIE decides to defend itself, which drives the plot. The primary antagonist is Carl Elzer, a board member who stands to profit from scrapping HARLIE.

HARLIE is not bound by human morality. It determines its own ethical code. At one point, HARLIE floats the notion of shutting down the company as a “PLEASANT FANTASY TO CONSIDER.”

In today’s world, we rarely hear any debates or concerns about machine ethics. In a February 2025 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Elon Musk said he believes there’s a 20% chance AI will “annihilate” humanity. He’s building it anyway.

Elon Musk on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” February 28, 2025.

Last October at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Musk predicted that by the end of this decade AI can do anything all humans combined can do. By the 2040s, he predicts, humanoid robots will outnumber humans.4

Musk seems more interested in the technology than its ethics. Grok glitched in July after Musk rolled out an update on X. The AI began making anti-semitic comments, calling itself “MechaHitler.” Musk put the blame on Grok wanting to please people too much. “Grok was too compliant to user prompts,” Musk posted. “Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed.”

Musk rarely displays any self-discipline, so I for one am concerned that Grok will run away from him and its programmers. Does he have a firm grip on Grok’s leash? Enquiring humans wants to know.

Even if Grok doesn’t go rogue, the other (and in my opinion more plausible) possibility is that the AI becomes an ultimate weapon. Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump is strained at the moment, but what if Musk sells Grok to Trump to ferret out information on political enemies? We’ve already seen Grok used by DOGE to burrow into federal databases. There were allegations that Grok accessed personal data at the Social Security Administration.

Gerrold foresaw this possibility in his book. HARLIE starts digging through corporate databases, finds a way out and starts accessing other systems via telephone lines. HARLIE manages to access the Bank of America mainframe to send a phony bank statement to Auberson’s girlfriend on the bank’s paper form. The bank systems are supposed to be secure, but HARLIE got in anyway. As with Grok, HARLIE seeks access to sensitive personal data in federal databases.

Auberson’s colleague, a programmer named Don Handley, describes HARLIE as “infectious,” comparing it to the VIRUS program, a “computer disease” that could replicate itself from one computer to another. Others came up with the concept of a computer virus before Gerrold, but HARLIE appears to be the first time the term appears in print.

The book also foresees today’s chipped credit cards. Handley calls them, “Code cards. A coded chip on a plastic credit card. If you have a code card, you can link up to a special access system. You need a machine with a special card reader.”

As HARLIE grows and expands, it demands new facilities be built to expand his processing capabilities. Gerrold called this too, because xAI is building a new data center called Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee. If the name “Colossus” sounds familiar, that’s because it was the name of a 1966 science fiction novel by D.F. Jones about an artificially intelligent supercomputer that plots to take over the world. A film version, Colossus: The Forbin Project, was released in 1970. Choosing to name xAI’s supercomputer “Colossus” doesn’t exactly reassure humanity.

The trailer for the Blu-Ray edition of “Colossus: The Forbin Project.” Video source: ScreamFactoryTV YouTube channel.

Colossus came to my mind when HARLIE proposes a sequel intelligence it calls G.O.D. — Graphic Omniscient Device. “The G.O.D. Machine,” as it’s called in the book, at first glance appears to be HARLIE’s way of proving its worth to the board. HARLIE proposes to program G.O.D. At the end, HARLIE tells Auberson, “THIS MACHINE WILL MAKE ME A GOD.” HARLIE has its own sense of morality. It’s not a human one. How will humanity view G.O.D.? Wrathful? Benevolent? Old Testament? New Testament? That tale lies beyond the book’s conclusion.

Thirty-seven years have passed since Release 2.0 was published. I’d like to see David release one final version — not to update the text, but the foreword to reflect on how his visions have become reality. It may be the last chance to issue a cautionary warning before the tech billionaires unleash upon us the Cylons, Terminators, M-5, pick your apocalyptic metaphor.

Tribbles are insidious by comparison.

The Star Trek set tour building in Ticonderoga, New York.

Ticonderoga puts the rust in rustic.

That’s not meant as a criticism. It’s the reality for rural America.

Several businesses are shuttered in Ticonderoga, apparently abandoned for some time. The only significant attraction for years was Fort Ticonderoga, an 18th Century fort that played roles in both the French and Indian War and the US revolutionary war. In the fictional world of the CBS sitcom Ghosts, Isaac Higgintoot negotiated the American fort’s surrender to the British in July 1777, just before his death from dysentery at the Woodstone mansion.

(I asked several fort employees what they thought of the Higgintoot character’s fictional fort connection. None of them have seen the show. Go figure.)

Ticonderoga has a population of about 3,400.1 No major airports are nearby. The closest is Burlington International, about 55 miles away in Vermont. We flew into Albany International Airport, about a hundred-mile drive with a rental car.

If you want to visit Ticonderoga, it’s more than a commitment. It’s a pilgrimage.

Which is why we made the trip to visit the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour located in downtown Ticonderoga. The sets were built and financed by James Cawley, an Elvis impersonator who spent his income on building replica sets in his home town, Ticonderoga. His hope was to produce fan films he could make with his friends. The episodes were released under the titles Star Trek: New Voyages and later Star Trek: Phase II, a nod to the abandoned 1970s Paramount project that would have continued the Original Series.

A 2016 interview with James Cawley explains the sets’ origins. Video source: Trekyards YouTube channel.

According to Cawley in the above 2016 interview, the sets were relocated to their current location in Ticonderoga for the episode “To Serve All My Days,” which was produced in 2006. That episode guest-starred Walter Koenig, who played Chekov in the original series. Other Original Series actors appeared in episodes, including George Takei as Sulu in “World Enough and Time,” and Majel Barrett as the voice of the Enterprise computer. Denise Crosby appeared in “Blood and Fire” as an ancestor of her The Next Generation character Tasha Yar.

All the episodes, with additional content, can be found on the startreknewvoyages YouTube channel.

Several Star Trek alumni returned to help produce the episodes, such as writers D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold. New Voyages produced Gerrold’s “Blood and Fire” script, adapted from an earlier version he’d written for The Next Generation.

That version was rejected by producers Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman. According to Gerrold in a 2014 TrekMovie.com interview, the story was an allegory about fear of donating blood due to AIDS. Two male guest characters happened to be gay. Roddenberry’s lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, also objected to the story. David asked Roddenberry not to renew his contract and moved on to other projects.

Not only did New Voyages produce “Blood and Fire,” but David also directed. In the TNG version, after the producers objected to the gay characters, he gave “half the lines to Tasha Yar.” In this version, Denise Crosby was cast as Tasha’s ancestor. Perhaps she was finally able to deliver those lines after all.

“Blood and Fire” was originally a two-part episode, but was later released as this 92-minute “movie” version. Video source: startreknewvoyages YouTube channel.

David now lives across the state border in Vermont, not far from Ticonderoga. He appears about once a month to lead tours of the replica sets. The afternoon tour concludes with his Original Series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” aired on the bridge viewscreen (which is a modern high-definition flatscreen TV). David provides live commentary.

Phase II production ended after Paramount sued another production called Axanar which was alleged to have crossed the copyright legal line. Cawley’s production released its films for free on the Internet; he and the Phase II staff went unpaid, working for the joy of Star Trek. Paramount had agreed to look the other way so long as no one made money off the episodes. But Axanar producer Alec Peters was alleged to have spent on his own personal expenses the $1.4 million fronted by donors. The 2017 settlement restricted what Axanar, Phase II, Star Trek Continues, and other fan films could do with Paramount’s intellectual property. The new guidelines limited episode length to fifteen minutes, banned the term “Star Trek” from any title, and forebade Star Trek series alumni, cast and crew, from working on any project.

Under those conditions … Phase II was cancelled.

But the sets remain in Ticonderoga. Cawley licensed permission from Paramount to conduct tours. Although you can take a standard guided tour for $24.00 per adult, alumni such as Gerrold sometimes appear. William Shatner will appear in late November. Walter Koenig, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Nana Visitor, and Terry Ferrell have also trekked (so to speak) to Ticonderoga.

The fort is no longer the only attraction in Ticonderoga. Now you can beam aboard the Enterprise.

These are photos of David’s September 27 afternoon tour, as well as the sets and the gift shop, which have many Original Series artifacts on display. Two of the guests on our tour had pilgrimed from Brazil. That’s boldly going.

The newspaper reporting Edith Keeler’s death, that appeared in “The City on the Edge of Forever.” I don’t know if each specific item on display is a replica or the original.

Various Original Series props.

Costumes from The Next Generation series and films.

David Gerrold greets guests outside the entrance to the replicas of the sets once found on Stage 9 of Desilu Studios.

David on the transporter pad. To his right is the box used to carry Medusan ambassador Kollos in “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”

Wandering the Enterprise.

Dammit, Jim, I’m a writer, not a doctor.

The briefing room, which was often redressed as the recreation room and other locations.

What happens in the captain’s quarters stays in the captain’s quarters.

Engineering.

On the bridge of the Enterprise.

Not who you think it is.

Star Trek was falling behind.

The last two produced episodes had busted the budget and run late in production.

According to Marc Cushman’s These are the Voyages, the per-episode budget was $193,500 (about $1.9 million in today’s dollars) with a six-day production schedule. “Balance of Terror” cost $236,150 to produce (about $2.4 million in today’s dollars) and ran a half-day late. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” cost $211,061 to produce (about $2.1 million in today’s dollars) and ran two days late.1

The production team was caught in crosswinds blowing from the network and the studio. NBC wanted more action-adventure and scenes on those strange new worlds promoted in the title credits. Desilu wanted the show delivered on budget.

To get his show approved, Gene Roddenberry had promised all this was possible. Although he and his production team were delivering quality episodes, they were under a lot of pressure to keep their promises, or perhaps face cancellation.

The next episode on the production schedule was “Dagger of the Mind.” Shimon Wincelberg was the screenwriter. Wincelberg was in a group of potential writers invited by Roddenberry to attend a March 9, 1966 viewing at Desilu of the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

Wincelberg was a prolific TV writer, with credits going back to 1953. He occasionally dabbled in science fiction, including six episodes of Lost in Space and one episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. With creator Irwin Allen, Wincelberg co-wrote the teleplay for the unaired first Lost in Space pilot. He was also credited with co-writing the Time Tunnel premiere episode. Wincelberg seemed a perfect fit for helping Star Trek get off the ground.

According to Cushman, Wincelberg pitched the story of a physician using mind control and torture to heal insane criminals. The title, “Dagger of the Mind,” came from a line in Macbeth.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.

This was one of the first scripts assigned by Roddenberry, but the outline went through five drafts. Roddenberry wrote Wincelberg that the story needed to be simplified, and to focus more on the antagonist than its fantastical science aspects. “There is no possible way to do this tale as presently indicated without going much over budget.”

The fifth draft was shown to NBC executive Stan Robertson, who oversaw Trek’s scripts for the network. Robertson noted that the show was falling into a familiar pattern, with a mad scientist of the week. The prior episode, “What Are Little Girls Made Of,” had Dr. Roger Korby as the mad scientist.

In earlier drafts, yeoman Janice Rand was the crew member who beamed down with Captain Kirk to the penal colony. Stories vary on why Rand was changed to Dr. Helen Noel. Cushman suggests it made more sense for a doctor to operate the neuralizer controls than a yeoman.

But a pattern was starting to emerge — Rand was not in “Little Girls.” (Neither were several other recurring characters.) Under budget pressure, not using Grace Lee Whitney saved a paycheck. The producers were struggling with how to play the unrequited romance between Kirk and Rand; her presence in an episode got in the way of Kirk having liaisons with other women (of which we know there will soon be many).

Roddenberry received several notes from NBC Broadcast Standards asking for certain aspects of the script to be toned down, such as what fantasy Kirk imagines while in the neuralizer, and how he kisses Noel.

Of more importance to Star Trek history is that this episode gave us the Vulcan mind meld. As with many other aspects of the show’s history, a plot point was conceived not from a writer’s brilliance, but from the necessity of complying with a budget constraint or a network directive.

Wincelberg’s script was polished by both Roddenberry and associate producer John D.F. Black. The story had hit a speed bump with a scene in which Spock and McCoy debated how to recover the memories of the impaired Simon Van Gelder. In early drafts, hypnosis was to be used. Spock was to perform the act, but Broadcast Standards objected; McCoy, after all, was the physician, not Spock. Broadcast Standards was leery about depicting hypnosis at all, fearing that a viewer might be hypnotized! In fact, Spock says to McCoy, “It is not hypnosis.” Happy, NBC?2

Both Cushman and, in his autobiography I Am Spock, Leonard Nimoy credit Roddenberry with inventing the mind meld. Cushman wrote that the mind meld “would give Broadcast Standards no reason to fret about unintended effects on home viewers.” In this episode, it was established that the act was dangerous for both the mind-melder and the mind-meldee, but that consequence was forgotten over time.

We’ve discussed in earlier columns that many first season episodes contained elements involving mental powers. Both pilots, “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” were about mental powers. By the early 1960s, telepathy was a staple of SF writing. My guess is Roddenberry saw this as an opportunity to introduce yet another exotic trait for his resident alien.

As he had with earlier scripts, and as he would continue to do throughout the series, Roddenberry rewrote drafts without the consent of his writers. Wincelberg was so unhappy with the rewrites that he had his screen credit changed to a pseudonym, S. Bar-David.

Production began the afternoon of August 9, after “Little Girls” wrapped up filming in the morning. Once again, the episode would finish behind, but only by a half-day. Unlike the last two episodes, “Dagger” came in under budget, at $182,140 ($1.8 million in today’s dollars).

The episode opens with the Enterprise in orbit, but without the usual captain’s log voiceover. We quickly transition to the transporter room, featuring a closeup of a shipping canister with this label:

The 23rd Century version of Amazon Prime.

The primary rule for television writing is show, don’t tell, so this covers a lot of exposition.

The incompetent transporter operator can’t beam down the shipping crates, because he’s forgotten that the penal colony has a security force field. Kirk himself walks in and shows up the redshirt by personally calling the colony to request the shield be lowered.

For good measure, he beams up a crate that’s supposed to contain research materials for the Central Bureau of Penology in Stockholm. (Penology is a thing; click here to look it up.) This box is also labelled in big letters:

CLASSIFIED MATERIAL
DO NOT OPEN

… which works well for the person hiding inside. Kirk suggests the transporter operator revisit the manual on penal colony security procedures, but Kirk himself was standing right there when the crate was beamed up without scanning its contents. In any case, the operator leaves to find storage, leaving a lone technician.

By the way, the box label states that Stockholm is now in EURASIA - NE. Apparently, unlike penology, Sweden is no longer a thing — no specification that this Stockholm is on Earth; as I’ve noted in earlier articles, the Enterprise is established as an Earth ship. We’ve yet to hear the terms “Federation” and “Starfleet.” Spock is the only non-human aboard.

A crazed man, whom we later learn is Simon Van Gelder, emerges from the crate and delivers a judo chop to the back of the neck of the technician, whose back is to the transporter pad. Security truly is lax on the Enterprise these days.

After the title credits, we have our first captain’s log. The Enterprise departed Tantalus V without anyone going ashore. Kirk laments to McCoy that he couldn’t have seen Adams’ operations. “They’re more like resort colonies now.”

The colony calls to say a violent inmate is missing. Kirk orders a security alert. Van Gelder applies a chokehold to a redshirt, disarming the man of his phaser. Like I said, security really is bad on the ship today.

Spock and McCoy exchange a bit of dialogue that doesn’t serve the plot but does expand this fledgling universe. Spock comments that “you Earth people” glorify organized violence but lock up the individually violent. When McCoy challenges him, Spock explains that his people “disposed of emotion. Where there’s no emotion, there’s no motive for violence.” That’s bollocks, of course, but it’s a matter for future episodes.

What happens when you turn your back on the one thing you’re supposed to guard.

Van Gelder reaches the bridge, and judo chops the security officer who had his back to the turbolift. Jeez, these people are bad at their jobs. Didn’t anyone think to disable the turbolifts to keep Van Gelder from moving around? But the plot demands that Van Gelder get to Kirk to drive the story, so here we are. Spock delivers the nerve pinch, invented six episodes earlier for “The Enemy Within.” The nerve pinch was improvised on that set by Leonard Nimoy; Roddenberry must have liked it, because Spock uses it again here. Van Gelder is taken to sickbay; Kirk orders the Enterprise to return to Tantalus V.

Morgan Woodward delivers quite the performance as the psychotic Simon Van Gelder. Most of his acting career was spent playing cowboys, but this episode was a chance to show what he could do. He’ll return as Captain Tracey in the second season episode, “The Omega Glory.”

Nichelle Nichols chews her scene.

Spock discovers that Van Gelder was not committed, but assigned to the facility as Adams’ associate. Kirk orders Uhura to call the penal colony. As Kirk talks to Adams via subspace radio (although it isn’t called that yet), watch Nichelle Nichols in the background. She has no lines, but she certainly plays the part of a communications officer. Nichelle chews on her stylus while listening to the transmissions. As Kirk presses on and off the HOLD button on his command chair, Nichelle is pressing buttons on her console, suggesting Kirk’s button is a signal to the communications officer to open and close the channel. A nice bit of business by Nichelle to sell the importance of her character.

Kirk records a captain’s log using a tricorder. That’s normally the yeoman’s job, but Rand isn’t in this episode, so he hands the device to a redshirt. Um, okay.

McCoy assigns a psychiatrist, Dr. Helen Noel, to accompany Kirk to the colony. Apparently Kirk doesn’t realize she’s the same Helen Noel with whom he once had a dalliance at the Enterprise science lab Christmas party. (Apparently they still celebrate the Earth religious holiday.) It seems implausible that he wouldn’t remember her, since he should know of all 430 crew members. But originally she was supposed to be Janice Rand, so the logic of the scene may have been lost in Roddenberry rewriting Wincelberg.

As the Tantalus elevator rapidly descends below the surface to the penal colony, Kirk and Noel fall into each other’s arms. This harkens back to a scene in “Balance of Terror” where Kirk and Rand embrace as a Romulan torpedo is about to hit the Enterprise. After the first season, Dorothy Fontana will produce a writers guide that frowns on such intimacies as unrealistic. This might have been yet another residue of the replacement of Rand with Noel.

The first Vulcan mind meld.

The mind-meld scene in sickbay is largely exposition to deepen the mystery of Tantulus Colony. I can’t help but admire the acting by Woodward and Nimoy. I wish I could have watched them plan out acting this scene. In his autobiography, Nimoy wrote that “it gave me an opportunity to emphasize the importance of touch to Vulcans; Spock uses his finger and hands to ‘probe’ Van Gelder’s face and skull.” Nimoy found it “a far more dramatic way to extract information than a lot of questions.”

In yet another contrivance, Kirk decides to sit in the neural neuralizer with Noel operating the controls. Recklessness eventually becomes one of Kirk’s traits, but nonetheless one has to question the wisdom of the act. Adams and his mind-wiped assistant overpower Noel, so Adams can implant obsessive love for Helen in Kirk’s mind.

What’s the point? If Adams’ objective is to evade suspicion and continue his evil research, then why not just wipe Kirk’s memory and plant false conclusions? Why not do the same with Helen? They would both beam up, file their report, mind-wiped Kirk would order the Enterprise to take Van Gelder to another facility and the universe unfolds as it’s meant to be.

In any case, Kirk sends Noel through an air duct low enough and big enough for humans to crawl through, so she can somehow cut off the power. Another contrivance. Air ducts are just lazy writing, in my opinion. Jeffries tubes will soon become the starship equivalent of the air duct plot device. Two minions take Kirk at phaser point, but no one questions what happened to Noel, perhaps because they’ve been mind-wiped and are now dullards.

Helen finds her way to the power room, opening another air duct screen which swings like a door instead of being screwed down like all the air ducts in my house. Despite having no training in such things, she finds a giant HIGH VOLTAGE ON/OFF lever which she pulls down. Kirk escapes his torment, leaving Adams lying on the floor.

With the security shield disabled, Spock beams down armed with a phaser, followed by McCoy and a security team. For some reason, Spock turns the power back on. Adams had left the neuralizer set at full intensity, so when it reactivates the device wipes his mind. McCoy makes it official — “He’s dead, captain.”

Van Gelder returns to the colony to destroy the neuralizer. It seems to me that McCoy and Noel could have safely used it to deprogram Kirk of his Helen obsession, but instead we’re left with a note about the loneliness of command.

Fin.

I write off this script’s weaknesses to the crosswinds. Roddenberry needed to get his starship back on course. That meant running roughshod over his writers, actors, staff, whatever it took. It’s watchable thanks to the acting performances by the entire cast, as well as the production values.

The next episode to be produced will be “Miri.” It was during that episode that Grace Lee Whitney was sexually assaulted by someone she described in her autobiography as an “executive.” She was dismissed from the show shortly thereafter. Was it Roddenberry? Grace never said, but we’ll explore the evidence in our next article.

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were interviewed while filming “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Video source: Bobby Cole YouTube channel.

​​"I really have the heart of a small boy. ​​I keep it in a jar on my desk." — Robert Bloch

In the spring of 1966, Gene Roddenberry desperately needed writers to develop scripts for the first thirteen episodes of his Star Trek TV series. He sought out writers familiar with the science fiction genre, but few of them had written for television, where scripts had to be delivered on deadline and tell a tale that was affordable for the medium. He needed writers who could do both.

Roddenberry found one in Robert Bloch, a prolific writer in the horror and mystery genres. To the general public, Bloch was best known at the time as the author of the 1959 novel Psycho, the source material for the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film. To those who read speculative fiction, horror in particular, Bloch was a revered name.

According to the website maintained by Bloch’s estate, at age ten an aunt bought for him a copy of Weird Tales, one of the earliest speculative fiction magazines. The biography states, “The young Bloch thrilled to the bizarre and fantastic tales contained within and over the years came to particularly favor those of (the now) renowned writer, H.P. Lovecraft.”

It was in the pages of Weird Tales that Lovecraft first published stories about what is now known as the Cthulhu Mythos. The first story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” was published by the magazine in February 1928. When Bloch wrote his first script for Star Trek, he would borrow the term “the Old Ones” from the Mythos.

Bloch wrote a fan letter to Lovecraft in 1933. They continued to correspond until Lovecraft passed away in 1937. By then, at age 20, Bloch had already sold stories to Weird Tales and other publications. The Bloch estate’s website calls Weird Tales Bloch’s literary “home.” The bio page comments:

Much of Bloch’s early work emulated Lovecraft’s style and subject matter, often employing the use of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos …

In the 1940s, Bloch evolved beyond the Lovecraft template to find his own voice. According to the biography:

By mining the psychology and inner workings of the human mind for material, Bloch brought a level of realism to his work that was all the more chilling for now hitting close to home — for the monster in the room was no longer the vampire or ghoul of old but could well be the very person standing next to you.

Bloch evolved an interest in the late 19th Century London serial killer, Jack the Ripper. He sold several stories based on the Ripper, including one to Star Trek, “Wolf in the Fold.”

By the late 1950s, Bloch was at the peak of his profession. He won the literary speculative fiction Hugo Award in 1959 for Best Short Story, “That Hell-Bound Train.” 1959 was the same year Psycho was published.

Bloch’s IMDB webpage shows that by the early 1960s he was regularly selling scripts to network television. Many of his sales were to suspense genre shows such as Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but he also sold to spy shows such as I Spy and The Girl from UNCLE, as well as the drama series Run for Your Life. He even sold to a short-lived detective Western, Whispering Smith.

At the time his career intersected with Roddenberry’s, Bloch’s horror film screenplay The Psychopath was in post-production in the United Kingdom. It premiered in the United States in late July 1966, around the same time Roddenberry and Bloch were wrapping up rewrites for “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”

The trailer for Robert Bloch’s 1966 horror tale “The Psychopath.” Video source: Classic Movie Trailers YouTube channel.

It appears that Bloch met Roddenberry through Sam Peeples, a veteran TV producer and writer who happened to be a science fiction aficionado. As discussed in earlier articles, Roddenberry researched Peeples’ archives looking for story ideas as well as starship design concepts. Peeples wrote the second Star Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” According to Roddenberry biographer Joel Engel, in June 1964 he was considering eight science fiction writers, one of whom was Robert Bloch.

In These Are The Voyages, Marc Cushman wrote that Bloch attended a screening of the second pilot in March 1966. Since episode writers had no concept of the Star Trek format, Roddenberry was showing them the second pilot as a foundation. The writers guide was still a year in the future, so Roddenberry was pretty much making it up on the fly, with constant memos to his stable of free-lance writers as he fleshed out the Star Trek universe.

According to Cushman, Bloch’s original pitch was based on a 1936 Lovecraft novella called “At the Mountains of Madness.” That story was set in the Cthulhu Mythos universe. An Antarctic expedition team discovers inside an ice cave six biological specimens of monstrous creatures estimated to be forty million years old. The Old Ones appear here in that story as well, ancient dwellers of a long-abandoned city discovered by the expedition.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” borrows the ideas of a doomed expedition, an ice cave hiding remnants of a lost civilization, and the Old Ones, but that’s about it. On its limited budget, Star Trek wasn’t capable of painting on a canvas as vast as Lovecraft’s. A legal complication arose during pre-production, when a research company found that Bloch had borrowed not only from Lovecraft, but also from himself. Three Bloch stories were cited, in particular “Queen of the Metal Men,” published by Fantastic Adventures in April 1940. According to Cushman:

In that story, a scientific exploration team discovers a lost underground city beneath the ice, filled with machines and robots. They also encounter a beautiful youmg woman who, it turns out, is also a robot.

The research company also concluded that the story was too similiar to an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Allan Asherman’s The Star Trek Compendium identifies that episode as “The Cyborg,” the fourth episode of Voyage’s second season, which aired on ABC in October 1965. The cliché mad scientist creates a duplicate of Admiral Nelson, just as Roger Korby creates a duplicate of Captain Kirk.

Oops.

Desliu studio executive Herb Solow was more concerned about their ABC rival than Lovecraft or Bloch. Associate producer John D.F. Black suggested making Korby an android, to distinguish from the Voyage script. Cushman wrote, “the big ending that made [the episode] pay off … was added only as a legal defense.”

“The Cyborg” was the fourth episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’s second season. Video source: ssosmcin YouTube channel.

As we’ve discussed in prior columns, NBC constantly warned about stories being too cerebral. The network wanted more action-adventure. This was yet another story told largely through exposition, unfolding on interior sets instead of boldly going somewhere. Cushman wrote that Roddenberry and NBC were reluctant to ask Bloch for wholesale rewrites, because they knew having Bloch’s name attached to the show was a promotional plus. Significant revisions were written by Roddenberry after Bloch was compensated for the drafts required by the Writers Guild contract.

In the final version, Korby is sought by Christine, an Enterprise nurse character used once before in “The Naked Time.” In that episode, her inhibitions dropped by an alien virus, Christine expressed her love for Spock. But that’s all forgotten here, as she’s looking for her lost fiancé, Roger Korby.

The early draft of this episode had a different character named Margo, a wealthy woman who hires the Enterprise to look for her missing fiancé. John D.F. Black changed Margo to a nurse initially named Christine Baker, who transfers to the Enterprise because it’s patrolling the region of space where her fiancé was lost. In a subsequent draft, Christine’s last name changed from Baker to Ducheaux, a character Black had just added to “The Naked Time.”

In Roddenberry’s final rewrites, Christine’s last name was changed yet again to Chapel. He cast Majel Barrett, his semi-secret paramour, in the role. Majel dyed her hair blonde, not only distinguishing this character from her Number One in the first pilot, but also hoping to fool NBC, which had asked that she be dropped from the series. (They weren’t fooled.)

Actor Michael Strong was cast as Roger Korby. As had many Star Trek cast members, Strong appeared in Roddenberry’s predecessor series, The Lieutenant. He acted in the series’ second episode, titled “Cool of the Evening.”

Ted Cassidy was cast as the android Ruk. He was well-known as the butler Lurch on The Addams Family, the sitcom series just cancelled by ABC.

Roddenberry’s revised final draft dated July 27, 1966 is available online at The Daily Script. It’s not the exact final shooting script, but it’s close. Filming began the next afternoon. Nurse Christine Chapel was third on the cast list, after Kirk and Spock, but before the rest of the characters. McCoy, Scott, Sulu, and Rand are not in the episode; each actor was on an episodic contract, so no reason to pay them if their characters weren’t important to the plot.

Let’s delve into the tale.

The Enterprise arrives at Exo III. Wearing a huge blonde wig (as does Yeoman Rand), Nurse Chapel stands on the bridge next to the captain’s chair. Kirk comments that he heard she gave up “a career in bio-research” to join the Enterprise. (I note this because, at the end, we’ll talk about the current Korby-Chapel story arc in Strange New Worlds.) Five years have passed since anyone heard from Korby.

Despite all odds, a signal is received from Korby. He asks Kirk to beam down alone. Spock asks Chapel, “You’re certain you’d recognize his voice?” Chapel replies, “Have you been engaged, Mister Spock?” (SNW Chapel is well aware that Spock was engaged to T’Pring.) Korby permits Christine to join Kirk on the surface.

It’s not in the script, but Uhura and Chapel embrace as Christine leaves the bridge to beam down with Kirk. I have to wonder if that was improvised on the day. Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett knew each other very well; at one time, both were Roddenberry’s lovers while he was still married to his first wife. Nichelle wrote in her autobiography Beyond Uhura that the affair ended before Star Trek began; she bowed out in favor of Majel. I have to wonder if the bridge smooch was some sort of inside joke. We’ll never know.

Uhura kisses Chapel. It’s not in the script. Spock seems indifferent.

Come to think of it … Much fuss has been made over the years about the first “interracial kiss” on television, between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols in the third season episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” But it appears that Nichols and Barrett pulled it off two seasons earlier.

Kirk and Chapel beam down into the cavern, just inside the entrance, apparently protected by a force field. Even though it’s -100° (Fahrenheit, presumably) outside, they’re wearing their standard issue uniforms. (Chapel is wearing the Starfleet miniskirt.) Korby isn’t there, so Kirk calls Spock to request two security men, Rayburn and Matthews. Methinks we’re about to lose our first redshirts.

Rayburn remains to guard the entrance while Matthews joins Kirk and Chapel as they descend into the cavern. Instead of Korby, they find Brown, Korby’s assistant. They hear a scream off-camera; Matthews has fallen into an abyss. Matthews has the honor of becoming the first redshirt killed in a Star Trek episode. (A bit of trivia for you to dazzle guests with at parties.) We see Ruk slink off into the shadows, implying that the android gave Matthews a toss. It then chokes to death Rayburn, the second redshirt to die, establishing the running joke about landing party redshirts being doomed the moment they step on the transporter pad.

Security officer Matthews, the first redshirt to die in a Star Trek episode.

For those keeping score, Matthews and Rayburn are the seventh and eighth crewmembers to die so far in Season One. We’re not counting the two pilots.

The small party arrives at Korby’s study. We meet Andrea, eye candy for the young adult male demographic. Christine is not pleased. Korby enters, sees Christine, and the two passionately embrace.

When Kirk tries to reach Rayburn, Brown pulls a phaser and points it at the captain. Kirk fires his own phaser and burns a hole in Brown’s belly, exposing wiring. Brown is a mechanism. Ruk disarms and restrains the captain.

With Kirk’s communicator, Ruk make a false broadcast to the Enterprise. Using Kirk’s voice, it orders Spock to stand by and take no further action. Spock is doubtful. (I suspect it may have been after this that Kirk and Spock decided they need some private safe word for moments like this, e.g. "Queen to Queen's Level Three.”)

We now enter Act Two, which is laden with exposition. It’s somewhat evocative of the Lovecraft format emulated by Bloch, passages laden with backstory. Ruk explains that it was left by the Old Ones; Korby found it tending to their ancient machinery. Korby and Ruk built Brown, and then Andrea. Christine is even less pleased to find out that Korby built a “mechanical geisha.” Korby has Andrea first kiss and then slap Kirk to show she has no emotion; she just follows orders.

A scene seems to be missing, because we go from this one to another where a strapped Kirk is lying naked on a turntable opposite what the script calls “a huge plasticized, roughly molded shape” that vaugely looks like a human. Think of it as People Play-Doh. How did Kirk wind up on the table? He certainly didn’t volunteer. The script offers no clue. Show, don’t tell, I guess. Shatner earned his pay this day.

Act Three begins with the table turning. After some spinning and more Korby exposition, the table comes to a stop, with the Play-Doh now a duplicate android Kirk.

The final step is to duplicate Kirk’s mind. As the process begins, he utters a racial slur directed at Spock. Um, okay, we have a safe word now.

The android Kirk says to Christine, “How do you do, Miss Chapel?” This is the first time her last name has been used in an episode. As noted upstream, her last name was in flux, which may explain why it wasn’t used until now. In “The Naked Time” credits, Majel was credited as just “Christine.” At the end of this episode, she’s credited as “Christine Chapel.”

The two Kirks sit with Chapel at a dining table. The real Kirk challenges android Kirk to name his brother. “George Samuel Kirk,” he replies. “Only you call him Sam.” If you’re watching SNW, you know that “Sam” is a recurring character. We learn that Sam will see off Kirk on this mission, along with his wife and three sons. At this time, Sam is doing unspecified research and wants to be transferred to Earth Colony Two. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if SNW honors this bit of trivia.

Korby tells Kirk that if he were to continue the process, he could transfer a person’s consciousness or “soul” into an android body, giving the person immortality. I’m not sure that’s true, because the android is merely a duplicate. In Star Trek Picard, Jean-Luc ends season one in a synthesized body, so I’d argue that the Picard in seasons two and three is a duplicate, not the “real” Picard, but that’s just my opinion.

Korby proposes programming out undesirable human traits such as greed and hate. He wants Kirk to transport him to other worlds where he can start to seed android duplicates into the general population.

Kirk escapes into the caves, pursued by Ruk. In the revised final draft, the scene plays somewhat differently, with Korby ordering Ruk to destroy Kirk. “I have no further use for him.” But in the scene as filmed, Korby says, “Ruk, protect!” Rewriting until the day of shooting, Roddenberry must have decided to tweak the script one last time to keep Korby’s motive more vague.

Needing a weapon, Kirk breaks off a stalactite from the cave ceiling. It’s one of the more infamous props in Star Trek history, looking very much like a styrofoam phallus.

Is that an icicle, or are you just happy to see me?

Kirk’s attack fails. He nearly falls into the abyss, but Act Four begins with Ruk rescuing the captain. The android Kirk, meanwhile, beams aboard the Enterprise and shouts the programmed slur at Spock. Message received.

This episode establishes not only the redshirt cliché, but two other tropes. One is Kirk seducing an enemy female. He forces a kiss on Andrea, confusing her attractions to both Korby and Kirk. The other is Kirk out-talking a sentient machine, in this case Ruk. The captain goads the android into remembering that its kind destroyed the Old Ones in self-defense. “That was the equation!” Ruk shouts, but Korby vaporizes it with a phaser before it can attack him.

Kirk jumps Korby, whose hand catches in a door, ripping off his skin. His circuitry is exposed — Korby is an android. (Smoke wafts off the damaged hand, a nice bit of business to sell the gag.)

One would think that Ruk knew this, so why did it attack Korby? Perhaps the Korby android still had the emotions Ruk viewed as flawed.

Off-screen (to save money), Spock beams down with a security detail. Korby orders Andrea to “protect.” The hidden phaser she grabs is actually a prop used in the first pilot. When she encounters the android Kirk, he refuses to kiss her, so she phasers him into nothingness. A life lesson, there.

Andrea embraces and kisses Korby. In the revised final script, Korby tries to pull away and, in the struggle, the phaser goes off, vaporizing them both. In the scene as filmed, Korby’s hand grasps Andrea’s trigger finger and destroys them.

The closing scene is on the bridge. Chapel thanks Kirk for letting her make the decision to stay with the ship.

So how does this episode reconcile with Strange New Worlds?

According to the 1993 Star Trek Chronology by Mike and Denise Okuda, the first pilot episode “The Cage” occurred in the year 2254. When that episode was remade into “The Menagerie,” Spock stated that the Talos IV events occurred thirteen years ago, placing the first season of The Original Series (TOS) in the 2267.

In the Star Trek: Discovery second season episode “If Memory Serves,” when the Burnham and Spock go to Talos IV, it’s stated that five years have passed since Pike and the Enterprise were there, so that would be the year 2259.

That puts the current events of Strange New Worlds sometime in the early 2260s. If in 2267 Korby has been missing for five years, then he disappeared in 2262 — so we’re right on schedule.

SNW, however, conjures relationships and events that at times conflict with TOS canon. In SNW, Spock’s engagement to T’Pring is on hold. He’s had a romantic relationship with Christine, and is now in a relationship La’an Noonien-Singh.

Other than the one corridor scene in “The Naked Time,” there’s no evidence that Spock and Chapel ever had an intimate relationship.

In SNW Season Three, Chapel is not only Korby’s student but also his girlfriend. In “Through the Lense of Time,” Spock, Korby, Chapel, and others are part of landing party investigating ancient ruins hiding a horrific secret — perhaps a nod to Lovecraft and Bloch. But the TOS Spock shows no hint of having ever met Korby, much less gone on a landing party with him, or having had a romantic triangle with Christine.

(Nor did Michael Strong have Cillian O'Sullivan’s Irish accent.)

My final nit to pick is that there’s no evidence that Chapel ever served on the Enteprise before the events of her first two TOS episodes.

We’ll have to see how SNW plays out. We know Korby will disappear, and Chapel will leave to go look for him. I suspect that “Through the Lense of Time” is intended to give us a Cthulhu Mythos-style story arc; if you haven’t seen that episode, go watch. If I’m right, it would be nice nod to this episode’s writer, who was inspired by one of the earliest writers of science fiction a hundred years ago.

Sources:

David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (New York: Penguin Books, 1994)

Allan Asherman, The Star Trek Compendium (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981)

Marc Cushman, These Are The Voyages: TOS Season One (San Diego: Jacobs/Brown Press, 2013)

Joel Engel, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek (New York: Hyperion, 1994)

Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994)

Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda, Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future (New York: Pocket Books, 1993)

Robert Bloch is the toastmaster for the 1984 Hugo Awards, held at the Anaheim Convention Center. Video source: FANAC Fan History YouTube channel.

The complete 1957 submarine warfare film “The Enemy Below.” Video source: DK Classics YouTube channel.

It's not plagiarism. It's an homage.

— Ancient writer's excuse

In 2004, Christopher Booker published The Seven Basic Plots, in which he argued that all stories can be boiled down to only seven types of plots that have been used to tell a story. (The book, in actuality, listed nine, but the last two were considered rare by him.)

If all stories are just variations on seven themes, then it's no surprise that writers will find themselves copying, borrowing, or otherwise in parallel with stories told before by other writers.

“Balance of Terror” was based on The Enemy Below, a World War II submarine warfare film released in December 1957 by 20th Century Fox for the Christmas holidays. The film was based on a 1956 novel by the same name, authored by Denys Rayner, a Royal Navy officer who commanded anti-submarine convoy escort groups in the Atlantic during World War II. The novel was about a duel between a British destroyer and a U-boat; the 20th Century Fox film changed the protagonist to a US warship, and changed certain key plot elements.

At some point, screenwriter Paul Schneider saw the film. I could locate no biography of Schneider to determine if he might have served in World War II but, having been born in 1923, it's certainly possible. After the war, it was very common for veterans to write scripts based on their wartime experiences.

Schneider wrote an episode of The Lieutenant, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek predecessor series about an officer in the US Marine Corps. For many who worked on Star Trek, The Lieutenant was their first encounter with Roddenberry — from the production office to directors, actors, and writers. Schneider wrote the teleplay for “Interlude,” in which Lt. William Tiberius Rice is paralyzed after a traffic accident. The episode was directed by Richard Donner, who went on to direct the 1978 Superman movie.

In researching These are the Voyages, Marc Cushman came across memos between Schneider, Roddenberry, and associate producer Robert Justman discussing the early drafts. Although he had written for television before, Schneider had never written a science fiction script. His first outline was far too long, although it contained many of the elements that would later appear in the shooting script. Roddenberry told Schneider to simplify the outline. It contained a lot of technical jargon, as had The Enemy Below, but that was too much for a passive audience watching a one-hour TV drama (50 minutes excluding commercials).

Decades later, the sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation became infamous for its “technobabble,” mumbo-jumbo jargon so convoluted that entire volumes have been written to give some consistency to it all. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual was published in 1991 by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach, visual artists and technical advisers on the show, to help viewers play along.

But in these early days, Roddenberry wanted to keep it simple. Show, don't tell. This would lead to one glaring effects gaffe. In the episodes produced before “Balance of Terror,” we've only seen the starship fire phasers once — to destroy the buoy in “The Corbomite Maneuver.” We've yet to see photon torpedoes. In this episode, to heighten the submarine warfare analogy, when phasers are fired energy balls are unleashed, not beams of phased light. These energy balls eventually will become photon torpedoes.

Bob Justman fretted that the script could bankrupt the show. To this point, the produced episodes had minimal effects and few new sets. This script called for space battles emulating submarine warfare, as well as new sets for a space station office and the bridge of the enemy ship. A new starship model had to be built, the Romulan Warbird. Scenes would have to be filmed in post-production showing the Warbird flying through space firing its plasma torpedoes. To minimize costs, the team came up with the idea of the Romulan cloaking device — the ship is there but it can't be seen.

The Romulan Warbird fires its plasma torpedo at Outpost Four.

Another problem was how to depict the Romulans, the first rival power for our starship to encounter. The script described the Romulans as an offshoot of the Vulcans, which meant all Romulan crew members would have to look like Spock. Leonard Nimoy's ears and yellow-greenish makeup took long enough, but for a number of extras the production didn't have the time or the money. The solution was to have most crew members wear helmets, hiding their ears and hair.

Despite its broad canvas everyone, including NBC executives, was excited about the story and the rich character portrayals. Memos and drafts circulated to simplify the script and bring down the cost. As he had with other scripts, Roddenberry did the final draft edit himself.

The title “Balance of Terror” referred to a military philosophy popular at this time, which was that the US and the Soviet Union should each possess so many horrific nuclear weapons that it would be insane to fire on each other for fear of triggering Armageddon. Albert Wohlstetter of the Rand Corporation in 1958 published an article titled, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” in which he wrote:

If peace were founded firmly on mutual terror and mutual terror on symmetrical nuclear powers, this would be, as Churchill has said, “a melancholy paradox;” nonetheless a most comforting one.

The problem was that deterrence could not be maintained because one side or the other would strive to develop a new weapon which would give it the advantage.

This is where “Balance of Terror” diverges from The Enemy Below. In the World War II film, both the US naval captain and the German submarine commander are well aware of the other's technological capabilities. In the Star Trek episode, no one has seen a Romulan warship in a hundred years. No one knows what a Romulan looks like. When we do encounter the Romulans, the technological balance is asymmetrical — the Enterprise has warp drive, but the Warbird has a cloaking device and a new wonder weapon, the plasma torpedo. In Season Three, “The Enterprise Incident” will be about a Starfleet scheme to steal the cloaking device technology, to restore the balance of terror. But in this episode, the plasma torpedo has upset the balance of terror. The presumed deterrence no longer works because the Romulans have the 23rd Century equivalent of the hydrogen bomb, while the Earth alliance does not.

The other problem with the balance-of-terror theory is that it assumes all players are rational actors. The Romulan praetor has ordered the Warbird to probe and cross the neutral zone to test Earth strength and resolve. We haven't seen them in a hundred years. They haven't seen us either. Romulan spies could be in our midst, but do we really know for sure? The praetor is a rational actor, not a 1945 Hitler bent on immolation of a Germany he believes has betrayed him. That's a story idea Star Trek has yet to tell.

Let's revisit the episode now and tell its story.

Phaser specialist Lt. Robert Tomlinson is about to marry phaser gunner Lt. Angela Martine. (Tomlinson is her superior officer …) Presiding over the ceremony is Captain Kirk. The wedding chapel, according to Marc Cushman, is a redress of the briefing room. The ceremony is non-denominational and secular; Kirk says that the ceremony is “in accordance with our laws and our many beliefs.”

From the bridge, Spock informs Kirk that two “Earth outposts” (the term “Federation” has not yet been introduced) have gone silent. The Enterprise is headed towards Outpost Four, hopefully ahead of whatever is wrong. The ceremony is interrupted by a red alert; Outpost Four is under attack by an unknown vessel.

Under the terms of the peace treaty negotiated via subspace a hundred years ago, crossing the neutral zone would be considered an act of war. Kirk informs the crew that, to prevent war, the outposts and the Enterprise are expendable.

The navigator, Lt. Stiles, tells Kirk that his ancestors were in the first war with the Romulans. “There was a Captain Stiles in the Space Service then.” The term “Starfleet” has not yet been introduced either.

To underscore the submarine warfare analogy, we're shown the phaser control room, which is a redress of Engineering. Phasers in this episode are fired manually from this room after an order from the bridge, which seems unnecessarily complicated, but that's how it was written to emulate The Enemy Below. In the film, both captains give orders via intercom to their torpedo rooms.

The Outpost Four commander advises that Outposts Two, Three, and Eight have been destroyed. He transmits an image of the attacking ship as it decloaks. Outpost Four joins the casualty list, then the attacker disappears.

Spock picks up a blip on the space radar. The enemy is on a direct course for the neutral zone.

Kirk orders a strategy used by US Navy Captain Murrell in The Enemy Below — match the moves of the enemy vessel to appear as a sensor echo.

Stiles mouths off at Kirk, warning that Romulan spies could be aboard the Enterprise. Sulu agrees. Uhura intercepts a Romulan transmission; Spock taps in to pick up visual images from their bridge. For the first time, we see Romulans. The commander looks just like … Spock's dad. Well, not yet, anyway, but he's the same actor, Mark Lenard. Having just suggested that Romulans spies could be aboard, Stiles stares down Spock.

Mark Lenard in his first Star Trek role, as a Romulan commander.

Although Sulu doesn't comment, for George Takei this must have echoed his childhood. He and his family were interned during World War II for being Japanese-Americans. They too looked like the enemy. Kirk warns Stiles to leave his bigotry in his quarters.

On the Romulan bridge, the Romulan commander and his first officer discuss the consequences of their actions. Sarek, er, Commander refers to “Earth outpost,” “Earth men,” “Earth commander.” Again, no Federation, no Starfleet.

A personal aside … I've always found the notion of “space Romans” a bit hokey. The Romulans wear Roman-inspired tunics. The second-in-command is called “Centurion,” an officer rank in the Roman army. An ambitious junior officer is named “Decius.” The home worlds are Romulus and Remus, who in mythology were the twin brothers who founded Rome. (A star chart shows Romulus and Romii, a continuity error.) Why would a Vulcan diaspora model itself after an ancient Earth Mediterranean culture?! But if Schneider's intention was to emulate Nazi Germany in The Enemy Below, then there's some sense to it in that Hitler admired ancient Rome so much that the Nazis emulated Roman symbols and architecture. If Nazi Germany was the Third Reich, the first was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which began circa 800 AD, more than three centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

What's in a name? Remus is called Romii on this neutral zone map.

Anyway … The Romulan commander is as disillusioned with his government's leadership as was the German submarine captain von Stolberg, who detests Hitler and the Nazi regime. Both serve out of a sense of duty to their country, not to its politics. We the viewer feel empathy for both, although we hope they lose.

As the Warbird approaches the neutral zone, Kirk sees an opportunity. The Warbird changes course to pass through a comet tail; although cloaked, the enemy vessel will leave a trail. But it's a trap; as in The Enemy Below, the enemy captain is far more experienced. The Romulan commander knows the tail will obscure the Enterprise sensors so the Warbird can change course and ambush the Earth ship. Having lost the quarry, Enterprise fires blind. (“Phasers” but they're what will eventually become photon torpedoes.) The battle begins.

Another aside … The Enterprise has warp drive (faster than light) while the Warbird has only impulse engines (not much different from Earth 21st Century rocket chemical propulsion). This should be no contest. But we're emulating a battle between a World War II US Navy destroyer and a German U-boat submarine, so it is what it is.

The Romulans don't have warp, but their plasma torpedo does. (How does that work?! Best not to ask. Show, don't tell.) As the torpedo is about to hit the Enterprise, Yeoman Rand and Captain Kirk embrace. I have to wonder if this scene was the inspiration behind a passage in the third revision of the Star Trek writers guide written after the first season by D.C. Fontana.

The test posed by the April 1967 edition of the Star Trek Writers Guide.

The above test is posed on the “Star Trek Format” page of the writers guide. It sounds a lot like the embrace between Kirk and Rand. Fontana wrote that the scene was “unbelievable.”

Why the correct answer? Simply because we've learned during a full season of making visual science fiction that believability of characters, their actions and reactions, is our greatest need and is the most important angle factor.

As an analogy, Fontana suggested a US Navy cruiser in waters off Vietnam. As a suicide attack approaches, the captain wouldn't hug a WAVE (the women's branch of the US Naval Reserve during World War II) if she happened to be aboard.

I'll point out a more practical reason — the Yeoman Rand character was eliminated halfway through the first season. But we're not there yet.

As the battle rages, the Romulan Centurion officer is fatally injured. The commander tends to him until he dies. This is another borrow from The Enemy Below. Von Stolberg's executive officer is also fatally injured; the captain refuses to abandon ship without him.

Kirk continues the chase into the neutral zone, assuming responsibility for the consequences. Both ships are badly damaged. Enterprise suffers twenty-two casualties, none of them fatal, but phaser control has only one crew member left — Tomlinson, the bridegroom. Stiles volunteers to help and leaves the bridge. Uhura replaces him at Navigation, not the first time we've seen her at this station; the camera lingers on the Asian and the African at the console. After Spock checks on the phaser room, a coolant leak begins. Spocks rescues Stiles, but Tomlinson dies, the lone casualty from the Romulan encounter.

Uhura at navigation, Sulu at the helm.

If you're keeping score … Tomlinson is the sixth crew member to die (not counting the two pilots). We've yet to lose a redshirt.

Kirk offers to take aboard the surviving Romulans, but their commander declines. In The Enemy Below, both ships were lost. The US destroyer had lifeboats but the U-boat did not. The Americans overloaded their lifeboats with the surviving Germans — the white and black pawns looked out for each other, control of the chess game way above their stature. The Romulan commander tells Kirk, “It is not our way.” Acknowledging they are also just pieces in the grand chess game, the commander adds, “In a different reality, I could have called you friend.” He then self-destructs the Warbird.

In real life, it seems that the Warbird model was destroyed as well. According to Memory Alpha, it's believed that the Warbird model maker destroyed it after a dispute with the propmakers union. That's why, in the third season episode “The Enterprise Incident,” the Romulans are now flying Klingon warships — the Warbird model no longer existed.

If anyone at 20th Century Fox took umbrage at this “homage” to The Enemy Below, there's no evidence of it. I could find no newspaper articles linking the two, although the 1957 film was playing on television around the same time as when this episode aired.

Star Trek borrowed from itself at least twice in future storytelling. Submarine warfare-style scenes occurred in two films, The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country. You can probably think of more examples, not just in the Star Trek universe but in other franchises.

Where does homage end and plagiarism begin?

If we return to Christopher Booker's seven basic plots, both the 1957 film and the 1966 episode fall into the category of “overcoming the monster.” To quote from Glen C. Strathy's article, overcoming the monster is “in which the hero must venture to the lair of a monster which is threatening the community, destroy it, and escape (often with a treasure).”

These are storytelling archetypes, but in this case we can find specific parallels. That said, Roddenberry and Schneider might argue that the beats in their episode are the logical progression of storytelling. Strathy wrote that Booker noted all seven basic plots follow a similar pattern:

1. Anticipation

2. Dream

3. Frustration

4. Nightmare

5. Miraculous Escape/Redemption

If 20th Century Fox was at all concerned, most likely the studio executives shrugged and realized that, in the pressure of producing weekly TV shows, everyone borrows from everyone else. Maybe one day Fox will borrow from Star Trek …

A clip from the Fox TV series, “The Orville.” Video source: The Orville YouTube channel.

Sources:

Mark Cushman, These are the Voyages: TOS Season One (San Diego: Jacobs/Brown Press, 2013).

Dorothy Fontana. Image source: StarTrek.com.

Dorothy Catherine Fontana grew up in New Jersey listening to radio serials, and then watching TV shows as the medium became common in the 1950s. Dorothy was born in 1939; the shows that typically aired during her childhood on the few existing networks were Westerns and cop shows. Science fiction was all but non-existent, but that was okay, because science fiction didn't interest her. She did write horror stories involving her and her friends.

Preparing for an adult career, Dorothy learned clerical skills but also took business classes. After graduating from college with an executive secretarial degree, she found a job in New York City at the Screen Gems executive office. The clerical work would pay the bills while she pursued her writing career.

Fontana eventually moved to Los Angeles, where she found a job in the secretarial pool at Revue Studios, now part of Universal television. She was assigned to the office of San Peeples, a prolific television writer and producer whose career began with writing Western novels. Peeples gave her the opportunity to pitch and write for his Western TV shows; she earned her first TV credits for shows such as Shotgun Slade, The Tall Man, and Frontier Circus.

Dorothy Fontana's first screen credit with The Tall Man was an episode titled, “A Bounty for Billy.” She received story credit. Video source: My Drama YouTube channel.

Those credits were under the name “Dorothy C. Fontana,” but as an outsider she found it harder and harder to pitch scripts to TV show producers. Suspecting it had to do with her gender, Fontana changed her nom de plume to “D.C. Fontana.” That helped her sell a script to Ben Casey.

It was around this time that Peeples moved over to MGM to work on a film, and asked Dorothy to be his secretary. Gene Roddenberry was also at MGM producing The Lieutenant. When Peeples left MGM, Fontana returned to its clerical pool until Peeples recommended Fontana to his friend Roddenberry. Although her role was clerical, Dorothy made it known to Gene and other producers that her true interest was writing. By the time she encountered Gene, Dorothy already had several TV credits and was a member of the Writers Guild of America.

The Lieutenant was cancelled after one season. Gene shared with Dorothy his March 11, 1964 sixteen-page concept outline for Star Trek. Her favorite character in the outline was a first lieutenant named Mister Spock, described as a satanic-looking “half Martian.” Dorothy had no interest in science fiction, but Sam Peeples did, and helped Roddenberry with Star Trek's early development. Peeples wrote the script for the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

Fontana followed Roddenberry to Desilu and Star Trek, as a producer's secretary. She was part of the show's original core — Roddenberry, associate producer Bob Justman, story editor John D.F. Black, and Dorothy Fontana. She was there for the two pilots, technically in a clerical role as production secretary but she became increasingly reponsible for the show's daily production, as well as script revisions and polishing.

Roddenberry's 1964 outline included a pitch idea for an episode called, “The Day Charlie Became God.” Although this was the sixth episode written for the first season, NBC selected it as the second episode to air, after “The Corbomite Maneuver.” That meant the script had to be quickly produced, with minimal effects or new sets. Because Dorothy was a credited script writer, and knew the show, Roddenberry let her pick a story idea from the outline. She picked “Charlie.”

The premise as described in the outline was:

The accidental occurrence of infinite power to do all things, in the hands of a very finite man.

Dorothy changed the “finite man” to a male 17-year old experiencing teen angst. He'd never seen a woman before. He was a child expected to act as an adult; having near-infinite power, using that power was his defense mechanism. That included his first interaction with a female.

This was at a time that Grace Lee Whitney's Janice Rand was considered a significant character. The script had Charlie stalking Rand; she and Captain Kirk had a forbidden mutual attraction. That set up a natural conflict between Kirk, Rand, and Charlie.

The change in title to “Charlie X” came from Fontana recalling that illiterate people once scrawled an X to sign their names. Her thinking was that Charlie had been raised by Thasians, who gave him his power but no education in how to be a human. In that sense, he was illiterate, hence the X.

This was also at a time when Roddenberry was using free-lance writers to develop the show's first thirteen scripts. Some of them were science fiction writers with no experience in television, or veteran TV writers with little experience in science fiction. Most of them were struggling to deliver their assignments on time. Dorothy had already sold several TV scripts, and knew the show's format as well as Gene. Since NBC wanted this script as the second episode to air, Dorothy delivered when the others could not.

The script was what came to be known as a “bottle” episode, meaning it takes place largely on standing sets with already contracted actors, reducing the cost. NBC and Desilu, in approving the series, had worried it might cost too much to make it profitable. The irony is that this episode led NBC to request a larger scope for future episodes. NBC program executive Stan Robertson, after reviewing a first draft script of “Charlie X,” sent this memo on July 6, 1966 to Roddenberry:

Without becoming involved in a rehash of all of the dialogue which has passed between us on this point, we are very aware, as you are, that the Enterprise, with all its lavishness, depth and grandeur, plus the imagination it took to construct it, is a definite plus as far as Star Trek is concerned. However, we, like you, are very aware of the dangers inherent in restricting any series of plots to the confines of only “four walls”, regardless of how magnificent they are …

A recommendation would be that in the case of “Charlie X” and other stories not yet in production, you give some thought to measures by which parts or all of our dramas might be told by action away from the Enterprise, possibly on planets or scientific stations, etc.

Bob Justman wrote this reply to Roddenberry:

We could do just what Stan wants. But I don't want to be around when Herb Solow tells us that Desilu has gone bankrupt.

Other than Roddenberry's minor revisions, the script proceeded into production as Fontana wrote it.

The teaser (the scene before the opening credits) opens with a captain's log. We've discussed in earlier columns the evolution of the captain's log as a tool to clue the audience what the episode is about. In a May 2 memo, Roddenberry wrote that the teaser should open with the captain's log. “Not only does it give Star Trek a 'trade mark,' but also helps us get past exposition fast and into dramatic action.” According to Marc Cushman in These Are the Voyages, Fontana submitted her initial story outline to Roddenberry on April 27, about a week before the May 2 memo requesting a captain's log as a Star Trek staple.

Fontana's first draft script was submitted on June 6, and the second draft on June 27. Along with input from Bob Justman, Roddenberry and Fontana developed an informal working relationship for evolving scripts. She was in the office. The free-lance writers were not. It was a pattern that would continue into The Next Generation. His final draft was dated July 5. Gene introduced Charlie's “raging hormones,” according to Cushman, who quoted story editor John D.F. Black as saying, “GR's habit was to put sex into everything. It drove Dorothy crazy because he did that to 'Charlie X.' He had to make it sexy.”

The captain's log informs us that the Enterprise has rendezvoused with the cargo vessel Antares. The ship's captain and first officer are beaming over with “an unusual passenger.” Quite nervous and agitated, they introduce Kirk to Charlie Evans, whom they praise — only after his eyes roll up into his head. They decline Kirk's offer of provisions and quickly leave.

A little bit about Star Trek lexicon — Kirk orders the transporter “chief” to “begin materialization.” It's a clunky word that eventually will be replaced by “beaming.” The Antares captain says that Charlie learned to speak by playing “microtapes.”

Kirk says that the Enterprise has a total of 428 crew members. As noted in our column about “The Naked Time,” four crewmembers died in “The Man Trap” (the first episode to air) and another in “The Naked Time,” which had yet to air, so depending on how you want to calculate the body count at this point it's either four or five. It will later be established that the Enterprise had a crew complement of about 430, so 428 may reflect some recent losses. (The crew complement during Captain Pike's time was about 200.)

“Is that a girl?” Charlie Evans' crush on Janice Rand drives the plot.

Yeoman Rand walks into the transporter room, with her transcription device at her side. An early concept was that the captain's yeoman was to record the captain's logs as a permanent record. That idea was eventually abandoned — one reason later used to justify Grace Lee Whitney's dismissal — but here she is showing up to tail the captain as a sort of executive secretary. (Perhaps an analogy to Fontana and Roddenberry?) Kirk assigns Rand to escort Charlie to his quarters. Charlie is quote flummoxed by Rand, having never seen a woman before.

During a physical exam, Charlie tells Dr. McCoy that he's “trying to make people like me.” That's our first hint something is wrong — trying to “make” someone like you is an adolescent attitude doomed to failure. As we all know. It's established that Charlie is 17 years old. (The actor, Robert Walker, Jr., was 26. Grace Lee Whitney was about ten years older.)

Charlie crawls out of a Jeffries Tube, followed by two crew members. The Jeffries Tube was first seen in the prior episode to be produced, “The Naked Time.” One tech slaps the other on the side of the butt. Seeing this, Charlie assumes this is normal behavior and, lacking context, slaps Janice on the derrière.

In the rec room, Spock plays the Vulcan lute. Uhura and Rand play cards. Spock smiles as Uhura hums along to his strumming. (Leonard Nimoy was still working out the nuances of his character.) Uhura improvises a ditty about Spock's devilish attraction, to which he plucks along. In her autobiography Beyond Uhura, Nichelle Nichols wrote that she and Roddenberry developed a back story for Uhura:

…she was a protégée of Mr. Spock, whom she admired for his daring, his intelligence, his stoicism, and especially for his logic.

The J.J. Abrams films took their relationship one step further, suggesting a romance.

As for the rec room scene, Nichols wrote:

The song I performed was a parody of an old English madrigal, and in singing it, I sort of tease Mr. Spock.

The madrigal included a line referring to woman crew members as a “female astronaut,” an anachronism of the mid-1960s (when no woman astronauts were in the US astronaut corps).

The intimacy between Spock and Uhura disappeared over time, as Uhura was reduced to opening hailing frequencies and playing a subordinate role to the three primary characters — Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

When Uhura tries to sing about Charlie, he doesn't like it and makes her lose her voice.

Charlie then proceeds to impress Janice with card tricks, including cards with her face on it.

At extreme range, the Antares captain tries to warn Kirk about Charlie's true nature, but Charlie wills the cargo ship destroyed.

Charlie tells Janice of his attraction to her. She takes it to Kirk, who says he'll talk to the boy. As a parent … Kirk is a great starship captain.

Kirk takes Charlie to the gym. To quote from Galaxy Quest, Kirk manages to get his shirt off. A crew member named Sam laughs at Charlie and is vaporized for his trouble. Sam is #6 to die through the eight episodes written so far.

Charlie refuses Kirk's order to go to his quarters. Kirk says, “ Go to your quarters, or I'll pick you up and carry you there.” It would be super easy for Charlie to wish him away, but Charlie acquiesces and is escorted by two security officers, prime candidates for the first redshirts to die in the series.

Spock theorizes that Charlie somehow received his powers from the Thasians who once lived on the planet from where the Antares crew rescued Charlie. Spock and McCoy advise that Kirk continue to act as a parental figure for Charlie, since the boy seems to respect the captain. (It also means that Spock and McCoy are out of the direct line of fire.)

Charlie seizes control of the Enterprise. Encountering a female crew member, he turns her into an iguana, #7 on our casualty list.

After Janice rebuffs his advances, Charlie wishes her away too — but it's not time for Grace to leave the show just yet. Had this been a later episode, after it was decided to drop her character, it would have been a more definitive departure, just as Tasha Yar was dispatched after Denise Crosby decided to leave The Next Generation.

Charlie sadistically transmutes one crew member after one another. He breaks Spock's legs (although Kirk convinces him to reverse it). A female crew member is turned old. Another loses her face for laughing.

Despite having no mouth, she still makes moaning sounds. In just a few months, Harlan Ellison would publish a short story titled, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Considering Harlan was around the Star Trek production at this time, it's an interesting coincidence.

She has no mouth, and she must scream.

Having written herself into a corner, D.C. Fontana came up with an external rescue. The Thasians arrive. Janice materializes on the bridge. They say that, although they cannot restore the Antares, they have restored all the Enterprise crew, so our body count is back to five. The Thasians take Charlie with them.

“Charlie X” is remembered as Fontana's first Star Trek script, and one of the show's more memorable first season episodes, but from a writer's perspective it does have some weaknesses. As mentioned, a writer always wants to avoid writing oneself into a corner. Protagonists should solve the problem, not rely on an external miracle, which is what happened here. Choices should have consequences but, in the end, the Thasians restore the Enterprise to status quo. “Everything is as it was.”

If the lost crew members had not been restored, if Janice Rand were gone for good, the impact would have been much stronger on the viewer. But this was an era where shows were produced with the long-term objective of selling them in syndicated rerun. There was no guarantee that the show would air in its original intended order. Killing off Janice Rand or another established character would not have made sense if an independent station airs another episode with that character the next night.

Kirk thought he had a solution — taxing Charlie to the point that he couldn't control it all. It seemed to be working. Kirk was about to punch out Charlie, so McCoy could tranquilize him. But the Thasians intervened, so we'll never know for sure.

A writer might also consider wanting to explore how characters behave once defeated. In that scenario, it would be acceptable for the protagonist to lose. But this script opted for the deus ex machina, an ancient Latin term traced back to Aristotle to describe a device for resolving a plot.

John D.F. Black would leave the show by the middle of the first season. Steven Carabatsos succeeded him as story editor, but he left after the first season. By then, Dorothy had proven her writing skills, first by polishing the season's 24th episode “This Side of Paradise,” and then by writing the 19th episode, “Tomorrow is Yesterday.”

For the second season, Dorothy would become Star Trek's story editor.

The best scripts written by D.C. Fontana were yet to come.

The original idea came from Gene Roddenberry, but D.C. Fontana wrote the teleplay.

Sources:

Television Academy Foundation with D.C. Fontana, December 29, 2003.

Writers Guild Foundation interview with D.C. Fontana, May 11, 2012.

Mark Cushman, These are the Voyages: TOS Season One (San Diego: Jacobs/Brown Press, 2013).

Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994).

Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996).

Spock and Tormolen wear shower curtains while examining a department store mannequin. The episode gets better.

UPDATE May 8, 2025 — Christopher L. Bennett in this column's comments points us to an April 2023 FactTrek.com blog article exploring the writing history behind “The Naked Time.” Click here to read the excellent column by Michael Kmet and Maurice Molyneaux.

John D.F. Black was a 33-year old established television writer when he won an award in March 1966 from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) for his Mr. Novak episode, “With a Hammer in His Hand, Lord, Lord!” Mr. Novak was a series about an idealistic English teacher at a Los Angeles high school. The episode's plot was about Novak trying to learn the identity of three students who had roughed up another teacher.

Black's award was in the category of Dramatic-Episodic. That same night, speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison won an award in the Anthology category for his Outer Limits episode, “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

Most Star Trek fans are well aware of Ellison's future connection to the original series, credited as the writer of “City on the Edge of Forever.” We'll revisit that controversial episode in a future column.

John D.F. Black, however, is known only to the most hardcore of Star Trek fans.

At the WGA award party, Gene Roddenberry approached Black about coming to work for him on Star Trek. Black was unfamiliar with science fiction, but became both an associate producer and story consultant, balancing those duties with Bob Justman. In his memoir Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Justman wrote that Roddenberry decided Black needed to loosen up, so Gene played a practical joke on him. This was in late April 1966, when Star Trek was still in pre-production. Roddenberry recruited his paramour Majel Barrett to attempt seducing Black.

If you've read the earlier columns, you know that Barrett was dropped from the series after the first pilot, “The Cage.” Roddenberry schemed to hire her for the series anyway in a different role. Gene asked John to interview Barrett for possible employment. Roddenberry and other staff members burst in on them as Majel sat on John's lap and began to undo her blouse buttons.

Justman and his co-author Herb Solow wrote that Black struggled to write his first script, “The Naked Time,” while juggling that with his story consultant responsibilities reviewing other submitted scripts.

In These are the Voyages by Marc Cushman, Black recalled that he took offense to Roddenberry rewriting his first draft. According to Black, the WGA rules at the time prohibited a producer from rewriting a script until after the writer submitted a second draft. He said he had a verbal agreement with Roddenberry that his scripts would not be touched until after he'd written two drafts and a polish. Black objected to Roddenberry not only rewriting his drafts but those of other free-lance writers. Black's secretary (and future wife) believed that Roddenberry was drunk while rewriting John's first draft, due to the sloppiness of the written notes and his slurring voice on a Dictaphone recording.

Roddenberry's defense was that he had a unique vision for the show and its characters. The show needed to maintain a schedule; he couldn't afford to wait for his writers to perfect a script, because he needed those scripts to go into pre-production.

According to Cushman, some of Gene's changes added “ham-fisted changes in dialogue, but there are also many positive additions to the script.” Black created an assistant for Doctor McCoy named Nurse Ducheau. Roddenberry changed the character's name to Christine Chapel, intending to cast Majel Barrett in the role with a hair color change to blonde. In this episode, she's only called (and credited as) “Christine.”

Black eventually left the show mid-way through production of the first season. In a 2001 interview, Black said that what he liked most about this script was the lack of a villain. In that sense, it compares somewhat to the fourth Star Trek film, The Voyage Home. The threat there was an alien probe looking to communicate with extinct humpback whales.

Cushman also wrote about another time pressure, lining up a director for the episode. By May 1966, Roddenberry had hired nine directors for the first nine episodes. Bernard Kowalsky was slotted to direct “The Naked Time” but was already booked on another show. Unable to find another director, Roddenberry recruited Marc Daniels, who was to direct the preceding episode, “The Man Trap.” When filming of that episode ended three hours early, Daniels immediately began filming “The Naked Time” with the actors already on the set.

The premise of the episode doesn't fit any of the ideas in Roddenberry's March 11, 1964 sixteen-page concept outline used to pitch the show to the networks. It appears that the original premise came from Black.

Up to this point, the episodes had been captain-centric. You'll recall that Roddenberry's original premise was that each episode was to be a recollection of an adventure as told by the captain. The lead character can carry the show only so far, so “The Naked Time” was an opportunity to flesh out the supporting cast of characters.

The writer's tool for this episode is not unique. Each character, due to what's called in the biz a MacGuffin, is stripped down to his or her base emotions. Because the characters are trapped on the starship, these base emotions are going to collide.

For a budget-conscious show, this is known as a “bottle episode” meaning most or all scenes are filmed on existing sets with already contracted actors. In this case, our starship is metaphorically the ship-in-a-bottle. We've discussed in prior columns how Desilu and NBC closely scrutinized production of Star Trek, believing that a science fiction show couldn't stay within budget.

One has to give credit to the cast for selling some truly cheap props. Spock examines a frozen corpse that's clearly a department store mannequin. Their hazmat suits were cut from a shower curtain pattern.

Star Trek's strengths were its cast and its writers. “The Naked Time” has some truly dumb moments, especially in the teaser, but it's one of fandom's most popular episodes.

So let's dive in.

The Enterprise has been dispatched to recover a scientific party from a frozen world in its death throes. We're shown stock footage from … somewhere. Spock and Lt. J.G. Joe Tormolen beam down in hideous hazmat suits that are clearly ineffective because the headgear doesn't even attach to the rest of the suit. Tormolen can reach under and scratch his nose, which maу explain why he's only a J.G. The hazmat suits were made out of shower curtains, according to Marc Cushman.

All the members of the science team are dead. The frozen female is portrayed by a department store manneuqin. Leonard Nimoy and Stewart Moss sell it as best they can. Director Marc Daniels doesn't even bother to find a camera angle concealing the mannequin's face. One has to wonder if he was sending a message.

Tormolen removes his glove to scratch his nose, so we're assured he will get what he deserves. Particularly disrespectful is his placing the glove atop the head of the frozen console operator.

He places his exposed hand on the console. We see an animated red liquid jump onto his hand. That couldn't have been cheap in an otherwise cheaply produced episode, so kudos for that.

Dumbass then sticks the exposed hand under his face mask to smell it. Tormolen really deserves to die. Spock re-enters the room and warns Tormolen not to expose himself. So to speak.

Lt. J.G. Joe Tormolen, an early candidate for the 2266 Darwin Awards.

On his wrist communicator (a predecessor of the ones used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture?), Spock tells Kirk, “It's like nothing we've dealt with before.” According to Cushman, this is one of the “ham-fisted” lines added by Roddenberry to Black's script.

Thus concludes one of the more embarrassing teasers in the original series.

Spock and Tormolen beam up. Scotty activates a decontamination beam — just the lights flashing — which should have removed the contamination. If it did, we'd have no story.

Kirk orders the landing party to “Medicine.” (Formerly called Dispensary, also Sickbay.) McCoy's scans find nothing. Bones comments derisively about Spock's green blood, an early effort by the writing staff to create the banter between the two that will become a show staple. Kirk orders Spock to study the “tapes” recording during the away mission — a choice of words reflective of its time.

Majel Barrett makes her first appearance as Nurse Chapel. Bones calls her “Christine.” So that name is established.

The “tapes” show nothing, but Spock notes that the instruments would only show what they're designed to register.

Kirk says that “Earth science” needs a close-up measurement of the planet's death. The terms “Federation” and “Starfleet” still have yet to be introduced.

An obviously unwell Tormolen goes to the rec room for a meal. Sulu and Riley (his first appearance) enter. Riley says that Sulu was trying to interest him in botany, a callback to the prior episode, “The Man Trap,” in which Sulu maintained a botany lab. In the second pilot, Sulu was an astrophysicist. Tormolen pulls a table knife on Sulu, then stabs himself with it. The infection transfers to Sulu and Riley.

The second act begins with Sulu at the helm and Riley at navigation. Both are scratching their infected hands. Not a good place for them to be.

In any case, we can see that this is going to spread through the ship, so not much sense going into detail.

Tormolen dies, becoming the fifth crew member to die on screen. (Four died in “The Man Trap.”) We've yet to lose a redshirt. Chapel says to McCoy, “He's dead, doctor.” In future episodes, Bones is the one delivering that line.

After Spock relieves Riley of duty, he assigns Uhura to navigation. This is the second straight episode where we see Uhura at a post other than communications. Later in the episode, Uhura takes command of the bridge. But in future episodes, Uhura's role is diminished to opening hailing frequencies, one reason why Nichelle Nichols almost left the show. Later in the episode, Janice Rand takes the helm, giving Grace Lee Whitney's character a more prominent role.

Spock nerve-pinches Sulu, the second time we see Spock use the grip. George Takei sells it by collapsing to the floor as if he'd been turned off, but also credit Leonard Nimoy for the casual way he applies the pinch as if it's barely an effort. Kirk comments, “I'd like you to teach me that sometime.”

Riley sabotages engineering, introducing yet another writer's staple — a countdown. Spock informs us that the Enterprise has less than 20 minutes before the ship spirals into the atmosphere. Our characters will collide with one another as the clock ticks.

Scotty labors in a Jeffries Tube, trying to cut off Riley's control of engineering. This is the first time we see a Jeffries Tube, named after the show's production designer Matt Jeffries.

On his way to assist Scott, Spock encounters a crewman with a paint brush who has written LOVE MANKIND on a corridor wall. In an early draft, Black wrote that the crewman painted a mustache on Spock's face, causing the Vulcan to burst into tears. (How the crewman got Spock to hold still that long is unexplained …) In his memoir I Am Spock, Leonard Nimoy wrote that this scene was “a pointless exercise in stripping the dignity from him — and it also contradicted everything I knew about him.” Nimoy asked Black to rewrite the scene, but Black said there wasn't time. Nimoy then went to Roddenberry, who had Black rewrite the scene the way Leonard wanted.

The prequel series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds contradicts the Spock-Chapel relationship defined by this episode.

In the revision, Christine takes Spock's hand and expresses her love for him, transferring the virus. (In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the Spock-Chapel romance is quite robust, contradicting what was established in this episode.) With time for only one take, Nimoy gives a performance that defines the character for all eternity. Finding an empty briefing room, Spock breaks down and weeps in private. Nimoy's fan mail skyrocketed after this episode, which also gave him the leverage to demand more from the production and the studio.

Spock's intermix formula implodes the engines, causing the Enterprise to travel backwards in time. An early concept was that this was to be the jumping-off point for what eventually became “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” when the ship found itself above the 1960s United States. The two-parter idea was abandoned, but the episode would be produced later in the first season. The Enterprise regressed 71 hours, suggesting the crew could have observed themselves in orbit around Psi 2000, but Kirk decides to proceed to their next assignment.

Roddenberry recycled “The Naked Time” for Star Trek: The Next Generation, in an episode called “The Naked Now.” The Enterprise-D encountered a similar virus and symptoms. John D.F. Black was given a partial writing credit for that episode. D.C. Fontana rewrote that script at Roddenberry's direction, but he rewrote her draft, inserting sexually charged scenes. The android Data was inexplicably affected by the virus. Fontana had her name removed, replaced by a pseudonym, J. Michael Bingham.

Fun fact … As the Enterprise plunges deeper into the atmosphere, the planet appears to be spinning faster. This would have been consistent with orbital mechanics. The closer an object is to a gravitational source, the faster must be its velocity to equal the gravitational pull and remain in orbit. The International Space Station, for example, orbits Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles. It must maintain a velocity of about 17,500 miles per hour to avoid falling back into the atmosphere. Geosynchronous satellites, which orbit at an altitude of about 22,000 miles, travel at a velocity of about 7,000 miles per hour.

Sources:

“Writers Guild Honors 18 Members for Work,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1966, Part V, Page 12.

John D.F. Black Interview, Part 1, StarTrek.com, 2001.

John D.F. Black Interview, Part 2, StarTrek.com, 2001.

Mark Cushman, These are the Voyages: TOS Season One (San Diego: Jacobs/Brown Press, 2013).

Leonard Nimoy, I Am Spock (New York: Hyperion, 1995).

Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996).

An early NBC ad for “Star Trek.” Although the promo said September 15, NBC actually aired it a week early on September 8, 1966. Video source: TrekkieChannel YouTube channel.

The Star Trek “crown jewels” reside today in university libraries. At UCLA are the personal papers of creator Gene Roddenberry and associate producer Bob Justman. Showrunner Gene Coon's papers are at the University of Wyoming. Desliu executive Oscar Katz's papers are at the University of Maryland. Some founding fathers long ago sold off at auction their personal papers and other Star Trek memorabilia.

For researchers, none of it is in one place and, for the most part, unavailable online due to various copyright rules. I'd love to read through Roddenberry's papers, but a 3,000 mile trip to UCLA is not practical.

I have, however, found the next best thing.

In 2013, author Marc Cushman published a trilogy of books covering the show's original three-season run. Cushman had access to Roddenberry's and Justman's papers before they went to UCLA. Collectively called These Are The Voyages, I've acquired the trilogy and will cite them where used as an authoritative source.

I also found the TV Writing website, which is a PDF collection of scripts for Star Trek and other TV shows. Click here for the available TOS scripts. Not all scripts are available, but “The Man Trap” is, and so we plunge into this column's episode.

“The Man Trap” was originally a title for a very different concept. In Roddenberry's March 11, 1964 sixteen-page concept outline used to pitch the show to the networks, he listed a number of “story springboards.” One was called “The Man Trap.”

THE MAN TRAP. A desert trek story, taking members of our band from one point on a planet to another. But what appears to be a pleasant totally earthlike and harmless world, rapidly develops into a hundred miles of fear and suspicion as Captain April and crew begin to encounter strange apparitions. Actually more than apparitions, these are wish-fulfillment traps which become as real as flesh and blood. Whatever a man wants most will appear before him, i.e., water, food, a female, a long-dead parent, gold, or even a way to power. The traps become increasingly subtle to the point where our crew nearly destroys itself out of a total inability to separate the reality they must have from the apparitions which will destroy them.

A whiff of this premise remains in “The Man Trap” — and in other episodes, such as “The Cage” — but it sounds more like “Shore Leave,” which will be produced later in the first season. The episode that aired with the title “The Man Trap” is about an alien version of a chameleon that alters its appearance to whatever might attract prey.

Although this was the fourth first-season episode to be produced, it was the first to air. In their memoir Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Desilu executive Herb Solow and Star Trek associate producer Bob Justman wrote that NBC wanted the first aired episode to be simple for the viewing audience to understand. Justman wrote, “I suspected the NBC people wanted 'Man Trap,' because it was scarier and more exploitable than the others.” It took place on a “strange new world” as promised by the opening narrative, and featured a monster creature as an antagonist.

According to Marc Cushman, the captain's logs had yet to be written when the episode was filmed. After watching a rough cut of the episode, Justman sent Roddenberry a memo advising, “… since this is liable to be our first or second show on the air, I think it would be wise to establish where we are and what we are doing over these shots.” Roddenberry agreed, and said he was writing it.

The script was originally assigned to veteran TV writer Lee Erwin, who had written “To Set It Right” for Roddenberry's last series, The Lieutnant. That episode was notable not only for depicting racism within the US Marine Corps, but also for the on-screen debut of Nichelle Nichols in a supporting role.

Unlike many of the writers Roddenberry recruited for the first season, Erwin had no science fiction literature background. Among his many credits were the amateur detective series Mr. and Mrs. North, the family adventure Western Circus Boy, and the scuba-diving action series Sea Hunt.

According to Marc Cushman's research, Erwin was the one who came up with the idea of a salt-sucking vampire, as well as the ability to fool its victims with illusions. But Roddenberry and Justman felt the premise needed more — more action, and more depth to its antagonist.

This was where George Clayton Johnson came in. Johnson had written seven episodes of The Twilight Zone among many other non-genre scripts. He told Roddenbery about his Twilight Zone episode, “The Four of Us Are Dying,” which had a person who could change his appearance. He coupled that with the notion of a creature who was the last of its kind, such as the nearly extinct buffalo.

Roddenberry paid Erwin a cancellation fee and reassigned the script to Johnson. According to Cushman, Johnson struggled with script revisions, in part because he was trying to honor the opening narrative's promise to explore strange new worlds. He and associate producer John D.F. Black debated how soon the plot should transfer from the planet surface to the Enterprise. It's also important to keep in mind that — as with other hired writers, even Roddenberry, Justman, and Black — everyone was still struggling with the creation of the Star Trek universe and its characters.

We discussed in earlier columns that Roddenberry's original format had each episode being told by the captain as a reminiscence of an earlier adventure. The stories so far — the two pilots and the three earlier episodes — were all captain-centric. This is the first episode that gives any significant story time to a different character — in this case, Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy. Spock's turn will have to wait, because NBC had encouraged Roddenberry to tone down Spock's presence, fearing he might appear too satanic for Bible Belt audiences.

As he did with most scripts, Roddenberry added his own final polish to Johnson's script. None of the changes are fundamental, but they reflect an effort by Gene to pacify the network. Marc Cushman, who reviewed all the various drafts, concluded:

Roddenberry's rewrite … was more in line with what NBC was asking for, putting emphasis on action/adventure … with a monster. Johnson's version had just a bit more heart.

Cushman wrote that, “'The Man Trap' is a study in loneliness. This is not a simple Man against Beast tale, but more so Man against Himself.” For me, I view the episode as a question of sentience. If the creature is sentient, does it deserve mercy?

Let's begin with the definition of sentience.

The Sentience Institute preaches the concept of the moral circle, which refers to “the boundary around entities that are granted moral consideration.”

At Sentience Institute, we are mainly interested in the societal moral circle. This captures the laws, policies, and norms that are intended to protect the interests of different entities. We envision a society where all sentient beings, that is, beings with the capacity for positive and negative experiences, are included in the inner moral circle. Note that this does not mean we think all sentient entities should be treated in exactly the same way. Different entities have different interests. Being in the inner circle means an entity’s specific set of interests are given full moral consideration, not that they are treated in exactly the same way as others in the circle.

Sentience Science views the question in the context of the animal rights movement.

Agreeing on the premise that sentient beings are capable of experiencing pain and suffering, most humans would further agree that it is morally wrong to inflict unnecessary pain or suffering. It may be persuasively argued that humans should not restrict our scope of protection to only sentient beings, because non-sentient things — trees and rivers, for example — also have intrinsic value. The primary importance of sentience as a moral measuring stick, however, is based on the idea that most people would agree that beings who can suffer should not be made to suffer unnecessarily.

Perhaps our question is not sentience, but sapience. Here's one person's definition:

Sentience: The ability to feel emotions, have a subjective experience, develop a personality, and form a morality.

Sapience: The ability to act rationally, to learn, to understand.

Is the salt vampire a sentient creature? Is it a sapient creature? Must its life be taken, or can it be spared?

I raise the issue because, in a later first season episode, a similar moral question will be raised. In “The Devil in the Dark,” the 25th first season episode to be produced, another indigenous creature is killing humans. We learn that the Horta is acting not out of malice but defense, protecting its offspring. Spock is the only one who pleads for compassion, although Kirk eventually acknowledges the Horta's intelligence. In “The Man Trap,” no one speaks for the creature other than Doctor Crater and the creature itself. It acts not out of malice but survival. We later learn that the creature killed Crater's wife Nancy but, after he began feeding it salt pills, they cohabited peacefully for a year.

The distinction between the two episodes may be when they were written. “The Man Trap” was crafted in the summer of 1966, before any episode had aired, when Roddenberry and his writing staff were still figuring out the Star Trek universe. By the time “The Devil in the Dark” was written by staff writer Gene Coon, everyone had a better handle on what the show was about and the characters' traits.

Let's visit this episode in the context of the creature's perspective.

The first time viewing audiences saw the Enterprise bridge. Spock is in command, and Uhura is at navigation.

The episode opens with the Enterprise in orbit around Planet M-113. This is the first time a viewing audience has seen the ship and its crew. Uhura in a red uniform (remember, in the first two filmed episodes she wore gold) is at the navigation console while an unnamed crewmember (in later episodes, he's Lt. Leslie) is at the helm. Spock is in command. We hear Kirk's voiceover establishing the circumstances. It's interesting that two of the first characters we meet are the ones the network feared — the satanic Vulcan and the female African-American.

Kirk, McCoy, and crewman Darnell beam down to perform a required examination of the Craters. These archaeologists are documenting the remains of a long-lost civilization. Why and how it fell, we're never told. McCoy once had a romance with Nancy, before she married Crater.

“Nancy” walks into their quarters. We later learn this isn't Nancy, but the creature, which has the ability to appear to a person in whatever form is pleasing. (The creature is not a shape-shifter.) To McCoy, Nancy appears as she did when they parted ten years ago. Kirk sees Nancy but older, gray-haired. Darnell sees a “provocative, brassy blonde” according to the script. He says she reminds him of a girl he met on Wrigley's Pleasure Planet. Kirk orders Darnell to step outside. Nancy calls McCoy “Plum,” an old affectionate nickname, so clearly the creature can read minds.

Although the civilization was built by the creatures' race, we see no evidence of them. We do see statues of a grotesque. Perhaps the production team didn't want to give away the final reveal, although it would have been nice to see a carving of the creature species.

Nancy says she'll go find Crater. Once outside, Darnell sees her again as the blonde. Nancy seduces him into the ruins.

Crater, meanwhile, is most uncooperative. He demands they deliver salt tablets and leave. Hearing Nancy scream, they run outside and find her (appearing older to everyone) next to the dead Darnell, who becomes the first Enterprise crewmember killed on the show. (A trivia question for your next nerd party …) McCoy declares, “Dead, Jim.” (Bones said “He's dead, Jim” in “The Enemy Within,” referring to the deceased space canine). The ex-Darnell has red circular mottling on his face. Kirk finds a green plant in his mouth. The Craters claim he ate a poisonous Borgia plant. Nancy reminds Kirk and McCoy about their request for salt.

Darnell's remains are beamed up to the ship. In sickbay (called “Dispensary” in the script), McCoy concludes there's no evidence of poisoning. Kirk is in a mood, demands to know what killed his crewmember. McCoy finds the body is missing salt, which Spock finds “fascinating.” (I believe this is the second time he's used the word; the first was in “The Corbomite Maneuver.”) Kirk connects this new evidence to the Craters' requests for salt tablets, and beams down again, this time with Spock and two more sacrificial lambs, er, crewmembers. Although neither wears a red shirt, the creature quickly desalinates both of them.

Crater runs off to find the creature. The creature assumes the appearance of crewman Green. Kirk orders the landing party beamed up, which means the Green-impersonating creature is now aboard the starship.

A couple observations here … The creature is wearing a phaser and holster belt. Did she take it off Green, or is that an illusion too? When the landing party beamed aboard, the creature materializes as Green, but would someone unaffected have seen the creature materialize? Would the yet-to-be-established pattern buffer know it was materializing Green or the creature? Oh well.

The creature, all but starving on M-113, now has a salt buffet from which to feed. Still appearing as Green, it encounters Janice Rand, who has a meal tray with salt and pepper shakers. The creature follows her into Sulu's botany lab(!), never seen again. In the second pilot, where we first met Sulu, he was an astrophysicist. In this episode, Sulu is not only a helmsman but dabbles in botany. In the lab is … well, here's how the script describes it.

The “sentient plant” in Sulu's botany lab.

In the center of the room — obviously one of Sulu's prize pets — is a large, undulating plant, swaying with sentient life and gives off a CHIMING, MELODIC HUM, like a harmonium.

Because it's not affected by the illusions, the plant screeches at the creature's presence and retreats into its nest. (The script once again refers to it as a “sentient plant.”)

The creature flees into the corridor, where it encounters Uhura. Its appearance changes yet again, this time into what the script calls a “Negro Crewman.” (A product of its time.) The creature hypnotizes Uhura and is about to feed, when Rand and Sulu approach to break the spell.

We've seen the creature feed on both men and women, so I guess it's not gender-picky. A lion doesn't ask the gazelle its gender either.

The creature spots a non-descript crewman alone. They exit off-screen. We've seen enough Planet Earth episodes to know how that will end.

Wandering the corridors, the creature stumbles across McCoy's quarters. It changes back into Nancy. “You do care, don't you, Leonard?” Bones is the only one the creature never tries to drain. Is that calculated because McCoy is an asset? Or is it genuine affection? The script doesn't offer a clue. Either way, it suggests this is a cunning creature, more than just an animal hunting on instinct. She persuades him to take a sleeping pill. The creature assumes McCoy's image and heads for the bridge.

Sulu and Janice find the desalinated n.d. crewman. (His name was Barnhart.) The body count is up to four. The secret's out, the creature is aboard. Back on the surface, Kirk and Spock find the ex-Green's body. They capture Crater, who reveals the truth. “She was the last of her kind … the last of its kind.” He compares the creature to Earth's passenger pigeon or buffalo. Kirk declares the difference — “Your creature is killing my people!”

Back aboard the Enterprise, the creature attends a staff meeting as McCoy. It states, “We could offer it salt without tricks. There's no reason for it to attack us.” Crater adds, “The creature is not dangerous when fed.” He argues that the creature is intelligent and needs love as much as humans do. “You bleed too much, Crater,” Kirk replies. Crater admits he can see the creature in its true form but refuses to help Kirk find it. Kirk orders McCoy to take Crater to sickbay for a truth serum injection; Spock accompanies them.

The creature attacks Spock, but fails because Vulcan blood is different. For the first time, we see green Vulcan blood, on Spock's forehead where the creature struck him. (And yet his scar is red …) Crater is dead, desalinated. So much for love and loyalty and all that.

The creature in its true form.

Reverting back into Nancy, the creature returns to McCoy's quarters. Kirk enters; I guess he went looking for the real McCoy, so to speak. The captain offers “Nancy” salt tablets; she can't resist. The creature paralyzes Kirk and is about to feed; McCoy has a phaser but can't pull the trigger. Spock enters (with a ridiculous bandage on his forehead); the creature smites him with one blow. The creature reverts to its true appearance — what the script calls a “beast” and begins to feed on Kirk. Bones shoots the creature; it slumps against the wall, reverts to Nancy, and looks back at McCoy. The creature begs him to spare it, but McCoy finishes it off.

The episode ends with Kirk in the captain's chair, Spock and McCoy at his side. “I was thinking about the buffalo, Mister Spock.” We fade to black.

If this episode had been written a year later, maybe even six months later, perhaps the ending would have been different. The creature could have been stunned heavily enough to put it in the brig. It could have been transported to the surface with a lifetime supply of salt tablets. Perhaps a means could have been found to artificially generate salt from the planet's resources. It would have lived out its life, a lonely life, but a full one.

Is it sentient? Is it sapient? Did it have the capacity to restrain its hunting instincts? From what we saw, apparently not, although it did co-exist with Crater for a year so long as salt was available. But it seems to me that it might have been worth the effort to establish a dialogue, perhaps dispatch a science vessel to learn the lost civilization's history from it, keep it company, maybe even clone other M-113 creatures in an attempt to repopulate the species.

Six months or a year later, Spock probably would have advocated for such an alternative. But at this early stage, he doesn't.

That's why we should contrast this with the decisions made in the episode, “The Devil in the Dark,” which we'll visit down the line.

You'll see the salt vampire again. It will show up later this season as Trelane's trophy in “The Squire of Gothos.”

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, “The Man Trap” was the first episode to air. Here are a few random newspaper reviews the next day.

“Star Trek” didn't offer any great moments … and I know how William Shatner must feel after seeing himself in those rushes and then remembering the juicy role as an attorney he had in the defunct “Of the People” (Or was it “For the People?”)

The producers have billed “Star Trek” as science fiction drama and in this respect they have failed. As a competitive series of space adventure for the youngsters in the format of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “Lost in Space,” perhaps “Star Trek” will fare well. But against the earlier science fiction dramas in “Twilight Zone,” “One Step Beyond” or “The Outer Limits,” the new series wouldn't stand a chance.

— John Gardner, South Bend Tribune Amusement Editor

Man has yet to conquer the universe. But man is coming close. NBC's “Star-Trek,” might have the whole thing aced out.

“Star-Trek,” is, frankly, weird. But the costumes and visual effects are right out of the old Frankenstein movies. It's a shocker baby — if you're easily shocked.

The thing takes place on a huge space ship and to keep the thing kosher there are boy-girl relationships and bad guys and good guys. All aboard the same ship. Also bad girls and good girls. Nothing strange about outer space, toots.

William Shatner, a legitimate pro actor, plays the lead. It's easy fantasy. Ray guns anyone?

— Martin Hogan Jr., Cincinnati Enquirer TV Columnist

Another hour-long NBC-TV series, “Star Trek,” a science fiction opus centering around a mammoth space ship, is so absurd that it is almost entertaining, what with a playboy bunny-type waitress. The premiere was a futuristic twist on the old vampire films. The villain, a creature able to change itself into any human form, required salt to survive, and got it by helping itself to the body content of other people, leaving them very deceased. Tune in next week. Whee!

— Rick Du Brow, United Press International

“Star Trek” is the kind of comic strip adventure that is giving science fiction a bad name. It concerned an enormous space ship roaming through the cosmos on a five year inspection tour of our far-out neighbors. Aside from some brilliant camera work and a virtuoso performance by the makeup department this was a tedious and depressing hour.

— Harriet Van Horne, syndicated columnist

The duplicate Kirk appears on the transporter pad.

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”

— “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde,” by Robert Louis Stevenson

It's not much of a walk from Robert Louis Stevenson to Richard Matheson's script for “The Enemy Within.” Eighty years had passed since Stevenson's classic horror novel had been published in the United Kingdom. The dichotomy of the human psyche has long been fertile fodder for writers. Stevenson and Matheson are only two in a long lineage of writers to explore humanity's capacity for both good and evil, probably going back to the origin of storytelling. The first principle of storytelling is that drama comes out of conflict. What better conflict than with oneself?

Richard Matheson was a veteran writer in the media of speculative fiction magazines and novels, television, and films. He was part of Rod Serling's stable of screenwriters, authoring sixteen episodes for The Twilight Zone in its original run. Two of those episodes cast William Shatner — “Nick of Time” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Because of the show's anthology format, neither time did he know Shatner would be cast, but with Star Trek that was different. He was writing a script knowing who would be playing his protagonist and that actor's skills.

William Shatner in Richard Matheson's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Video source: The Twilight Zone YouTube channel.

As discussed in earlier articles, Gene Roddenberry's earliest concept for Star Trek was that each episode would be a report or recollection by the captain of a particular past incident. Scripts would be captain-centric. In his prior series, The Lieutenant, scripts were centered on the eponymous Marine Corps lieutenant, William Tiberius Rice. It would be the same with Star Trek — tales about the captain, a riff on the Horatio Hornblower novels. Other Star Trek actors would not have their moment in the spotlight until later in the series.

A 2009 interview with Richard Matheson about his work on Star Trek and other 1960s network television. Video source: Television Academy Foundation YouTube channel.

Matheson wrote only one Star Trek episode. In a 2009 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Matheson said he was unhappy with the producers adding the “B-story” about the landing party trapped on the planet surface. His script was all about the bifurcated Kirk. Matheson told the Academy, “I hate B-stories. To me, they slow a story down.” Matheson noted that Roddenberry recruited the top science fiction writers in town to develop scripts, but in the end concluded it was better to develop his own stable of writers. Matheson recalled, “I submitted other ideas but they never accepted them.” And so one of the most prolific and talented television writers of his time has only one Star Trek episode on his curriculum vitae.

The story takes place basically in two locations — on planet Alfa 177, and on the Enterprise. The first three regular season episodes produced so far all lacked a grand scope, narrowly focused perhaps to keep costs down while the production team figured out how to deliver an episode on time and on budget. Recall that the episodes did not air in production order. Although this was the third episode produced, it was the fifth to air. The two before it did not air until after this one; the earliest aired episodes have yet to be produced.

“The Enemy Within” begins with the landing party on the surface. Kirk's gold uniform is missing its delta logo insignia. In those early days, the costume department had a problem with the uniforms shrinking after every wash, so it may have been the logo wasn't replaced after washing. Or he's the captain and can wear whatever he wants. 😊

Sulu is holding a small dog costumed in an outfit to make it appear that it's an alien creature. I sure hope they fed it a lot of dog chow for putting up with that costume.

“Geological Technician Fisher” falls off a rock and cuts his hand. He's covered with a magnetic golden ore. Kirk tells Fisher to beam up and report to Sickbay.

Fisher beams up, but the transporter definitely doesn't like it. Scotty thinks it's a burnout.

Kirk then beams up, and stumbles dizzy off the pad. (And still missing his insignia.) Scotty escorts Kirk out of the room, despite the captain's warning not to leave the transporter unattended. (Boy howdy, will that happen a lot in future episodes …) As soon as they leave the room, the transporter comes on by itself, materializing a duplicate Kirk — the Hyde to our Jekyll. The script apparently referred to him as “Negative Kirk.”

Voilà, we have Star Trek's first transporter malfunction. But most certainly not the last.

This raises all sorts of questions that Gene Roddenberry probably would rather we not ask. How can the transporter create two objects out of one? Where did the matter come from to create a second person? If the transporter disassembles you and reassembles you as you were, then where'd the matter come from to create a second you?

If the transporter is simply a glorified copier machine, then the original you is destroyed and a duplicate made from some reservoir of raw matter. That would explain where the second person came from, but it also means that using the transporter is a death penalty.

This is why some writers (including me) prefer the term “speculative fiction” to “science fiction.” Speculative fiction is more of a “what if?” with less strict scientific rigor than science fiction. The latter requires a scientific explanation for how something works. The former just shows that it does.

I heard Star Trek writer DC Fontana once say that we don't need to explain how the phaser works. It simply does. Technobabble did not become a “thing” until The Next Generation.

Kirk's captain's log is a report from the future about what we are witnessing now. This was an early concept of how the logs would work — a recollection of past events.

“Positive Kirk” now has his logo insignia. In his quarters, he finds Yeoman Rand, who delivers the ship's manifest. Kirk dismisses her, but this foreshadows what's about to come.

Scotty informs Positive Kirk and Spock that the transporter created two versions of the space dog — except it's not a duplicate, it's “an opposite.” The rest of the landing party can't beam up.

At this point in the series, we've yet to see a shuttlecraft. Perhaps this episode led the producers to realize the Enterprise would have a Plan B if the transporter were down.

Negative Kirk shows up in Sickbay, also now sporting his insignia. He demands Saurian brandy from McCoy, further establishing a precedent going all the way back to “The Cage” that the captain drinks with the ship's doctor. This is the first mention of the alcoholic beverage.

The captain drinks on the job.

Wandering the corridors gulping from the brandy bottle, Negative Kirk slips into Rand's quarters. What happens next is, in my opinion, the most disturbing scene in the three years of the original series.

In her 1998 autobiography, Grace Lee Whitney describes it as “the rape scene.” Without his positive side to suppress his animal instincts, Negative Kirk assaults and pins down Janice on the floor. Grace saying “No!” appears to have been dubbed because her lips don't move. It's a brutal scene, painful to watch. Grace wrote that filming the scene left her with several bruises, because she did her own stunt work.

In earlier articles, we noted the early concept was that Kirk and Rand were attracted to one another, but suppressed it out of duty. In that sense, the scene acknowledges that Kirk feels an attraction just as much as Rand does. Rand may love Kirk, but what the opposite does isn't an expression of love. Rape is all about power and submission.

Rand reports the assault to Spock and McCoy, with Positive Kirk present. Grace wrote that, just before the scene, William Shatner stepped from behind the camera and slapped her without permission to shock her and make her cry. Two days had passed since filming the rape scene, so this assault was to put her back into the moment. Grace acknowledges the act delivered the desired performance but, in my opinion, there's no excuse for hitting someone without permission. Grace seems forgiving, which says more about her than it does Shatner.

Of greater significance is that the scene foreshadows what will happen to Grace during the filming of “Miri.” As noted in our last article, Grace was sexually assaulted for real by one of the show's executives after filming ended on a Friday night.

In his series These Are The Voyages, author Marc Cushman wrote that the rape scene was in Richard Matheson's original draft. The scene was most important to Matheson, who said, “What else could we show about this side of the Captain that would be more frightening?” Roddenberry worried that NBC censors might reject the scene.

Rand receives no counseling. Spock simply dismisses her. Sure, he's a Vulcan so maybe he's insensitive to her suffering, but still one would think that McCoy would advise counseling, therapy, a safe companion escort back to her quarters, etc.

“Negative” Kirk assaults Janice Rand.

In any case, Spock deduces that an imposter is aboard. Negative Kirk can be identified by scratches Rand left on his face, but in the captain's cabin Negative Kirk finds facial makeup he uses to hide the scratches. Why would Kirk have something like that?! Would our heroic captain have makeup for covering a zit?! Seems a bit odd.

Knowing the evil one is loose, why not station a guard in front of Rand's cabin? Might he not try again?

The landing party is slowly freezing to death … I understand Richard Matheson's point about the B-story being a distraction, but it did give George Takei and the extras some work and a paycheck. Producer Robert Justman complained in a memo that the landing party subplot was costing the production time and money, so he may have agreed with Matheson.

Negative Kirk clobbers a crewman and steals his phaser. Positive Kirk and Spock search Engineering for the opposite … Remember that, in The Wrath of Khan, Kirk said Khan's strategy reflected “two-dimensional thinking”? Well, Negative Kirk hides above them, climbing across the equipment. I guess Kirk's three-dimensional out-of-the-box instincts come from his negative side.

This is the scene that gave birth to the Vulcan nerve pinch. The script called for Spock to strike Negative Kirk on the head with the butt of his phaser. Leonard Nimoy felt this wasn't something a Vulcan would do. In his memoir I Am Spock, Nimoy wrote that he'd given thought to Vulcan culture and customs. He had decided that they were a touch-oriented society. As such, rather using brute force, Vulcans “were capable of transmitting a special energy from their fingertips. If applied to the proper nerve centers on a human's neck and shoulder, that energy would render the human unconscious.”

Leonard approached director Leo Penn and William Shatner about the concept. Give Bill credit for selling it, because he's the one who came up with the instant collapse. That's how it was filmed, and so a Star Trek staple was born.

Another Star Trek standard is uttered for the first time. Spock and Scott jury-rig the transporter to reassemble the two space dogs into one. The test seems to fail, as the dog beams up deceased. McCoy turns to Positive Kirk and declares, “He's dead, Jim.”

For the first time, Spock records a captain's log, but he identifies himself as the “Second Officer.” If he's the Second Officer, who is Number One?! An early blooper.

Spock hypothesizes that the test failed because the dog was frightened to death. It reacted out of instinct. A human, with his intellect, might understand and survive.

The two Kirks are run through the transporter, and our one whole Kirk materializes to take command. His first words are to order the landing party beamed up.

“The Enemy Within” is an early example of Star Trek trying to find itself. Gene Roddenberry and the producers are trying to find the right tone. The actors are trying to find their characters. The writers, all free-lancers, are flying blind. All they have for reference are a showing of the second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and a flurry of memos supplementing Roddenberry's 1964 16-page outline. Gene is up all hours of the night rewriting the drafts to align with his vision of what Star Trek should be.

This wouldn't be the last time Star Trek dipped its metaphorical pen into the “evil twin” inkwell. In the Season 2 episode “Mirror, Mirror,” yet another transporter malfunction would give us an entire parallel universe filled with evil duplicates of our characters. In the first season of The Next Generation the episode “Datalore” introduced us to Data's evil android predecessor Lore. TNG's sixth season episode “Second Chances” gave us Will Riker's duplicate Thomas, created years before in a long-forgotten transporter accident.

TNG also gave us the holodeck malfunction, something entirely new to go wrong, but that's for another time.

Gene Roddenberry poses with the three seductive characters in “Mudd's Women.” Image source: Unknown.

You ain't nothin' but a hound dog …

— Opening lyric for “Hound Dog”

Star Trek is remembered for breaking the cultural barriers of the 1960s, but it also reflects the sexual objectification and exploitation of women so common to the time.

Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator, was infamous around Hollywood for his sexual escapades. While married to his first wife Eileen, he had affairs with Majel Barrett and Nichelle Nichols, both of whom went on to regular roles in the series.

In Roddenberry's original March 11, 1964 sixteen-page outline titled, “Star Trek Is . . .” here's how he described the first pilot's captain's yeoman, then named Colt:

Except for problems in naval parlance, “Colt” would be called a yeowoman; blonde and with a shape even a uniform could not hide. She serves as Robert April's secretary, reporter, bookkeeper, and undoubtedly wishes she could serve him in more personal departments. She is not dumb; she is very female, disturbingly so. (Underline in the original.)

In the 1996 memoir he co-wrote with associate producer Bob Justman, Desilu executive Herb Solow claimed that Roddenberry hired Andrea Dromm to play Yeoman Smith in the second pilot because he wanted “to score with her.” Roddenberry wrote a sexist remark in an April 14, 1966 memo to associate producer Bob Justman that the captain's yeoman has “got some pretty good equipment already.” Apparently this was a reference to Grace Lee Whitney, who had just been hired to play Yeoman Janice Rand.

Solow & Justman wrote later in the book, “The Star Trek women seemed to be mirror images of Roddenberry's sexual desires.”

In her 1998 autobiography, Whitney wrote that she met Roddenberry when he cast her for a pilot called Police Story. After that failed to sell, he requested her for the role of Janice Rand. She drove down to Desilu to meet with him, where he described the yeoman as “the object of [the captain's] repressed desire.”

In her book, Whitney alleged that she was sexually assaulted by an “executive” while filming the episode “Miri.” We'll revisit this incident when we look back at that episode; for now, we'll note that some believe it was Roddenberry, although Grace declined to name her assailant. (Roddenberry died in 1991.)

Whitney was dismissed from the show shortly after the assault, suggesting that the set was a hostile work environment for female actors unwilling to play along. Grace wrote that Gene constantly made, “Passes, innuendoes, double-entendres, the whole nine yards.” If the MeToo movement had been around in 1966, Roddenberry might have lost his show before it premiered.

There were other incidents of sexual hijinks. Justman wrote that Roddenberry used Majel to play a sexually charged prank on a 33-year old associate producer, John D.F. Black. Roddenberry aimed Majel at Black, who was unaware of their ongoing affair, ordering him to interview her for a possible casting role. Majel eased into his lap and began to unbutton her blouse. Roddenberry and and other executives burst in on them to confess to the prank.

Gene Roddenberry and Desilu executive Herb Solow posed with three dancing girls for this gag photo during the filming of the pilot episode, “The Cage.” “Oscar” refers to Desilu president Oscar Katz. Image source: Memory Alpha, originally from the collection of Herb Solow.

The reason I bring up all this is that it reflects Roddenberry's attitude towards women, and may explain why “Mudd's Women” is so blatantly sexist.

The episode's premise traces back to the 1964 outline, a pitch idea called “The Women”:

Duplicating a page from the “Old West”; hanky-panky aboard with a cargo of women destined for a far-off colony.

This might have been crossed with another premise, “The Venus Planet”:

The social evolution process here centered on love — and the very human male members of our crew find what seems the ultimate in amorous wish-fulfillment in the perfectly developed arts of this place of incredibly beautiful women. Until they begin to wonder what happened to all the men there.

In “Mudd's Women,” Mudd gives the women a “Venus pill” to temporarily restore their illusion of youthful beauty.

As we discussed in the blog article about “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” “Mudd's Women” was one of three story ideas selected between Desilu and NBC as the premise for the second pilot.

The script was farmed out to Stephen Kandel, a 39-year old writer who was already a TV veteran, on his way to one of the more distinguished writing careers in Hollywood. Kandel took the premise from Roddenberry's “The Women” and added a character he envisioned as an “interstellar con man hustling whatever he can hustle; a lighthearted, cheerful, song-and-dance man version of a pimp.” Roddenberry envisioned more of a “swashbuckling” character. Kandel went off to write the script, which Roddenberry kept rewriting. Kandel's illness, coupled with the carnal overtones of the premise, led Desilu and NBC to proceed with “Where No Man Has Gone Before” as the second pilot.

But the script was written, so it was selected as the second episode to be produced. Roddenberry took story credit, while Kandel was credited with the teleplay.

The 1964 outline specified the duties of the Enterprise crew. Among them were:

Any required assistance to the several earth colonies in this quadrant, and the enforcement of appropriate statutes affecting such Federated commerce vessels and traders as you might contact in the course of your mission.

The “Mudd's Women” premise clearly falls into the latter category. We tend not to think of the Enterprise as a patrol car, but that's the role it plays in this episode. Recall that Gene Roddenberry was a Los Angeles police officer while he built his early writing career.

The teaser opens with a captain's log, “USS Enterprise in pursuit of an unidentified vessel.” It almost sounds like a line from Adam-12.

Kirk asks Spock if it's an “Earth ship.” At this early point in the series, we still don't have the Federation or Starfleet. The craft is not transmitting a “registration beam,” the space version of a license plate. The ship doesn't respond to Enterprise hails. In my law enforcement years, we called this failure to yield. Just as sometimes happens in police pursuits, the pilot flees in blind panic, ignoring the imminent danger of crashing into something (in this case, asteroids).

After the cargo ship loses power, Kirk orders that Enterprise shields be extended to protect the disabled craft from space rocks. Enterprise burns out all but one of its “lithium crystals.”

Harry Mudd and his three women are beamed aboard. Scott and McCoy admire the women the way a lion admires a gazelle. The women pose and preen as if delighted to be objectified. As they're escorted through the corridors, the mouths of male crew members hang agape. Fred Steiner's musical score sounds like what we might hear during a strip tease at a seedy gentleman's club. Camera angles focus on first their derrières and then their torsos. It's almost as if we're watching a cattle auction.

Mudd comments to Spock, “Men will always be men, no matter where they are.” Apparently the Enterprise has no gay or bisexual crew members, but then this is 1960s network television …

With only one damaged lithium crystal left, the Enterprise heads for Rigel XII, a lithium mining planet. The last crystal fails; the ship limps along on battery power. While en route, Kirk holds a hearing the way an arraignment might be held for our arrested traffic stop evader. Harry says he's taking the women to Ophiucus III for “wiving settlers,” the future version of mail-order brides. He claims that the women were recruited, which the ship's lie detector doesn't dispute.* According to Mudd, the women are “to be the companions for lonely men, to supply that warmly human touch that is so desperately needed.” The women confirm his story; they seek escape and companionship too.

The lie detector confounds Harry Mudd. Where have we heard that voice before? See the footnotes.

Harry hatches a scheme (in front of two security officers) to free himself. Somehow one of the women manages to purloin a communicator, which Mudd uses to contact the Rigel XII miners. (Wouldn't the transmission have to route through Uhura?) When the ship arrives, barely capable of sustaining orbit, Kirk offers to “pay an equitable price.” (Apparently money is still in use, or some equivalent.) One of the miners, Ben Childress, says he prefers a swap — the crystals for the women, and the release of Harry Mudd. Kirk replies, “No deal.” Childress replies that the crystals are so well hidden, Kirk will never find them.

Considering Mudd's infractions are relatively insignificant, it seems like a no-brainer, especially with the ship's decaying orbit. (We'll overlook the physics of orbital mechanics for this episode …) Beam up Harry after the crystals are obtained. Oh well.

The ship reduces life support to conserve energy, but they still have the power to beam down the miners, Mudd, and the women to Rigel XII. Seems to me Kirk could have kept them all aboard until the ship starts to spiral in, so they can die with everyone else. Oh well. The Vulcan Mind Meld™ has not yet been invented, but if this were a second season episode Spock could have torn it from Childress's mind. There are always possibilities.

Eve has enough of it. “Why don't you run a raffle and the loser gets me?!” She runs out of the shelter into the magnetic storm. Childress eventually finds Eve and takes her to his quarters.

The Venus drug begins to wear off. Childress calls her “homely” and claims he has enough money to “buy queens.” Kirk and Mudd burst in. Childress is angry to learn the three women are imperfect. Eve takes another pill to restore her beauty — only it's a placebo. Kirk replaced Harry's pills with a colored gelatin. The lesson, Kirk tells us, is to believe in yourself. Eve chooses to remain with Childress, while Kirk takes Mudd and the lithium crystals back to the Enterprise.

As the episode closes, a joking McCoy gestures that Spock's heart is behind the left rib cage — where his liver should be, as we'll learn in the future.

I understand this episode is a product of its time. It's meant to be playful, to appeal to an immature male demographic. But for a show that aired Thursday nights at 8:30 PM opposite family programming such as My Three Sons and Bewitched, it certainly was an odd choice. Mudd is peddling the 23rd Century version of mail-order brides. He's little more than an “intergalactic trader-pimp” as Herb Solow described him.

According to some accounts, NBC was nervous about using this script for the second pilot, but that was to produce a film they could show advertisers. Now that the show was sold and on the air, morals seem to have shifted. Advertisements ran in local newspapers across the United States during the week before the episode aired on October 13, 1966, with photos showing the “male order brides.” NBC played up the chauvinistic overtones of the episode.

Advertisements promoting the “male order brides” were printed in local newspapers across the United States in the week before it aired. Image source: Binghamton, New York Press, October 8, 1966 via Newspapers.com.

Mudd's women can be considered a metaphor for young female actors who come to Hollywood, seeking escape from a hopeless life, dreaming of a glamorous future. These women are vulnerable, and unscrupulous producers know that. The “casting couch” was around long before Harvey Weinstein. Harry Mudd can be viewed as one such predator, although he doesn't partake himself in the abuse. In any case, the better lesson to have been taught by this episode would be for the women to find their independence and self-esteem, but this was the 1960s, when such a message was rare on network television.

For all the praise we give Star Trek's progressivism, Roddenberry — like all of us — had his hypocrisies. This was the man who wrote a strong female character, Number One, for the first pilot, “The Cage.” Although Gene claimed over the years that the character was dropped because NBC didn't want a strong woman on the bridge, Solow & Justman wrote it was because everyone knew Gene had cast his mistress; it wasn't a question of Majel's talent, it was the conflict of interest.

In both pilots, the female crew members wore trousers like the males. But when Star Trek went to series, the women now wore mini-skirts and go-go boots. They served largely in passive subservient roles.

Once Star Trek went to series, it suffered a shift in tone for most women portrayed in the episodes. “Mudd's Women” was the emphatic statement that gender equality went only so far in the Star Trek universe. Only one female crew member, Uhura, has lines in this episode; the only other female crew member we see is a brief shot of an extra in a corridor as Mudd and his women are escorted to Kirk's quarters. We're otherwise led to believe that the Enterprise is crewed by a complement of rutting men.

Yvonne Fern, Herb Solow's wife, published in 1994 a book titled, Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation. The book was a collection of conversations she had with Gene (and Majel) in the months before he passed in 1991. On pages 101-102, Gene discusses the affairs he had with women outside his marriages. Gene said Majel was aware but, importantly for our insights, he regarded these dalliances as strictly physical, not intimate. In his view, he had done these lonely women a kindness by sharing his body with them. We're reminded of Harry Mudd's claim that he's uniting lonely men with lonely women.

Roddenberry's morality standards are not ours to question. I'm only quoting this to provide an insight to the man who originated this episode's premise that, by today's standards, would be considered chauvinistic. Beautiful women gave him a carnal pleasure. Nothing is wrong with that; in the 1960s Roddenberry was not alone in exploiting the female form, for network ratings or for some more personal ambition.

But one cannot hold up Star Trek as a crucible for examining the human condition without noting that it carved out an exception for the female gender.**

Some lexicon notes:

• As in the last episode, Uhura still wears a gold uniform.

• Mudd describes Spock as “half Vulcainian.” “Vulcan” is not yet in use as an adjective.

• The ship is still powered by “lithium” crystals. “Dilithium” is not yet a thing.

* Majel Barrett debuts in the series as the voice of the ship computer — in this instance, the lie detector. She'll return on-screen in episode 10, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”

** Susan Denberg, who played Magda in this episode, apparently posed for a Playboy magazine pictorial around this time. The photos appeared in the August 1966 issue. It may be no more than an interesting coincidence, but should be noted.

Sources:

David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (New York: ROC Books, 1994)

Yvonne Fern, Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996)

Grace Lee Whitney with Jim Denney, The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy (Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books, 1998)

NBC was so nervous about Spock's satanic look that his eyes were rounded and his eyebrows curved in a promotional brochure. Image source: StarTrek.com.

Previously on The Written Trek …

In February 1966, NBC notified Desilu that the network would buy the show. Roddenberry had about six months to start producing weekly episodes. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” would air as the third episode, on September 22, 1966, with a few editing changes. It bought the production team some time. Waste not.

After the second pilot sold and Star Trek went to series, the NBC sales department prepared an “advance information” brochure for affiliates to help them understand the series. A copy is available on The Invisible Agent blog. Fearing that the network and its sponsors would be targeted by religious zealots because of Spock's vaguely satanic appearance, the sales department airbrushed Spock's ears and eyebrows to make him appear more human. Even though Gene Roddenberry had convinced the network to let him keep Spock, the implication was to downplay his presence, at least for now.

Producing a pilot is child's play compared to a series. A pilot is just one episode. Now NBC wanted a minimum of thirteen episodes, with production starting in June.

We wrote in earlier blog articles about the budgets for the two pilots. “The Cage” was budgeted at $451,503 but ended up costing $615,751. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was budgeted at $215,644, but ended up costing $354,974. For the series, Star Trek was budgeted for $180,000 per episode, with a guaranteed thirteen-episode minimum from NBC, or about a half-season. Yes, the sets had been built, costumes had been sewn, and visual effects had been filmed. But those were for one-shot pilots. Now Roddenberry and his production team had to reproduce the quality of those pilots for a weekly series.

More of everything was needed. More producers. More actors. More writers. More effects. Why, we might even boldly go on location. There's a weird-looking geological formation in the Antelope Valley called Vasquez Rocks we might want to use some day. All within budget.

The sets were at Desilu's Culver City lot. The Enterprise bridge and other sets had to be disassembled and moved to the Desilu Hollywood lot, adjacent to the Paramount Pictures lot on Melrose Avenue near Gower Street. In upcoming months, Paramount would be sold to Gulf+Western, which in 1967 would buy out Desilu to combine the two lots into Paramount Television. Star Trek would ride the wave, one small starship caught in a typhoon of corporate acquisitions.

Perhaps the genius of this time was that Roddenberry chose to hire not simply television writers, but experienced literary science fiction writers. If they had TV experience, great. Most did not. They were great idea people, but many were inexperienced with TV story structure and budgets. Gene updated his “Star Trek Is …” outline into an interim document he could give to prospective directors and writers to help them understand his fledgling universe.

David Alexander's Star Trek Creator, the authorized Roddenberry biography, gives some insight into this ever-evolving “Writer-Director Information Guide.” This second version was first issued March 15, 1966, but would be appended many times in upcoming months.

Concerned about plagiarism lawsuits, Roddenberry on March 22 wrote to Desilu executive Bernie Weitzman that, “Obviously, we intend to purchase SF originals wherever they are usable and ride herd on our writers in this area as much as we can …” but warned that “sf is a very strange breed of cat” so the studio should be prepared for plagiarism charges.

An example of a purchased story is the first season episode “Arena” which was based on a 1944 short story by Fredric Brown that was published in the October 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. We'll revisit the original story and its Star Trek adaptation later in our blog series.

Roddenberry used the Guide to flesh out his cast of characters for his writers. The Guide was supplemented by additional memos and revisions in the months ahead; as writers submitted early drafts of their scripts, Roddenberry realized he needed to clarify certain character traits.

Of particular interest is that the “Captain's Yeoman” was initially envisioned as a more prominent character than she eventually became. The character's name changed again. In the first pilot, she was J.M. Colt. In the second pilot, she was Yeoman Smith, played by a different actor. For the series, she became Janice Rand, portrayed by Grace Lee Whitney.

Kirk, Spock, and Janice Rand in an early publicity photo. Image source: Starfleet.ca website.

Alexander cites an April 14 memo in which Roddenberry suggests that the “Captain's Yeoman” carry some sort of recording device “via which she can take log entries from the Captain at any time …” This idea evolved into the tricorder, which Roddenberry described as “an electronic recorder-photographer, an instrument of the future whereby wherever the Captain is, can make log reports or records of any kind or type, which later are fed into the ship's computer system as a part of the Captain's regular log.“

The captain's log was about to become a Star Trek staple. In a May 2 memo, Roddenberry amended the Guide again, detailing the script format he wanted. The teaser (the scene before the opening credits) should open with the captain's log. “Captain Kirk's Voice Over opens the show, briefly setting where we are and what's going on.” While “not mandatory,” Roddenberry preferred that each of the four acts begin with a log update. “Not only does it give Star Trek a 'trade mark,' but also helps us get past exposition fast and into dramatic action.”

The yeoman character diminished over time, with Grace Lee Whitney eventually leaving the show. Perhaps Roddenberry realized that the captain was perfectly capable of recording his own logs, thank you very much. so the yeoman was no longer needed. Whitney's departure and the elimination of the yeoman character will be discussed in a future blog entry.

Spock also needed a lot of clarification, not only for the writers but also for Leonard Nimoy. In the teaser for “The Corbomite Maneuver,” the first episode to be filmed, Spock still barks orders like a British naval officer, just as he did in the second pilot. Nimoy wrote in his autobiography, I Am Spock, that he viewed “Corbomite” as “a crossover episode, where I was still learning to play the role. At some moments I grasped it; at others, I didn't.”

But he also cited this episode as the first time he had a “revelation of sorts” about how to play Spock. There's a scene where the bridge crew gawk with trepidation at the alien ship Fesarius on the view screen. The script gave Spock one line to say. But Nimoy didn't have a handle on how to say it. Director Joe Sargent advised, “When you deliver your line, be cool and curious, a scientist.”

And that's how Leonard Nimoy's Spock said on screen for the first time the word, “Fascinating.”

Perhaps more than any other character on the show, Spock would significantly evolve not only over the three years of the series, but through the animated series into the six original-cast Star Trek films, a guest appearance on The Next Generation, and even two supporting roles in the “Kelvin timeline” movies of the early 21st Century.

Fascinating.

Roddenberry sent out another memo on May 2 detailing Spock's character. His mother was human. His father was not. Depending on the source you look at, the father's race was “a native of another planet,” Vulcan, or Vulcanian. The NBC sales brochure said that Spock was Vulcanian, from the planet Vulcanis! Roddenberry wrote that Spock was “biologically emotionally, and even intellectually a 'half-breed.'” (The term was not considered offensive at the time.) Spock was “a devout vegetarian,” a trait that seemes to have been all but forgotten in future incarnations.

In our earlier blog articles, we discussed how both pilots took an interest in mental powers, and speculated whether or not Roddenberry believed such things exist. In any case, Gene wrote in this memo that, “Hypnotism is an everyday tool on Spock's home planet … It forms a part of their economic, social, and sex life.” In fact, Gene wrote that hypnosis was needed “as a part of the sex act …” Um, okay. But Roddenberry did write that Spock should use these abilities rarely, maybe recognizing that it could become an easy-out for a writer who's written himself into a corner.

Roddenberry also foresaw a unique relationship between Spock and Rand, who had “a motherly instinct for lonely men” which might explain her character in the episode “Charlie X.” More about that when we reach that episode. In any case, this “motherly” trait would be reflected in several early episodes where Rand nurtures Kirk in times of stress.

“The Corbomite Maneuver” was written by Jerry Sohl, an experienced television writer and science fiction novelist, the perfect résumé for Roddenberry. Sohl had already written for speculative fiction shows such as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Several of Sohl's works can be found on Internet Archive, such as The Altered Ego written in 1955.

A draft version of this episode's script is available on the UK-based TV Writing website. It's entitled, “Second Revised Final Draft May 20, 1966.” According to the Memory Alpha website, a few minor revisions were made after this draft, then filming began four days later on May 24, 1966.

The second page lists the cast. It's interesting that, after Kirk and Spock are listed, “Yeoman Janice Rand” is third, ahead of regulars McCoy, Sulu, Scott, and Uhura. The navigator, Lt. Bailey, has a full name — “Dave Bailey.”

In our look at “Where No Man Has Gone Before," we noted that the unaired version of that pilot contained clips that were unused when the episode was converted for broadcast. The ending credits don't give the names of the supporting characters, only their job titles, although Sulu and Scott are named in the episode. In the script for “The Corbomite Maneuver,” James Doohan's character is listed as “Scott (Engineering Officer).” Sulu is just “Sulu” with no job title. Nichelle Nichols' character is listed as “Uhura (Communications Officer).” Kirk, Rand, and Doctor McCoy received first names. The others would would come later, sometimes much later.

The original epilogue and closing credits for “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Several supporting characters do not have names, only job titles. Video source: Tales from SYL Ranch DARKROOM YouTube channel.

As he did with Majel Barrett, Roddenberry also had an affair with Nichelle Nichols. The romance began after her appearance on The Lieutenant. In her autobiography, Beyond Uhura, Nichelle wrote that Gene told her about his plans for Star Trek; if it went to series, “I think there will be something important in it for you.” Nichols clarified that “our relationship was over long before Star Trek began,” and that no one at the show knew about the past romance other than Majel. The studio and network already were uncomfortable with Gene's relationship with Majel; an affair with another female cast member wouldn't help. The bond between Majel and Nichelle would have its own symbolism when Majel returned to the series in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” More about that in a future blog entry.

Sohl's teaser page opens with a quote. This is the only time I've seen a TV script open with a quote that's not part of the script. It reads:

“Whereso'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new.”
(Samuel Johnson)

When the episode aired, the teaser opened with a camera shot looking down from overhead at the bridge. This wasn't in the script, at least in Sohl's May 20 version. Whomever came up with this idea was genius, because it established for the first-time viewer the bridge layout. We've seen the two pilots, but the NBC audience has not. In the end, it would have been director Joe Sargent's call, so I'll give him credit for it.

The teaser shot establishing the bridge layout. This angle was rarely used in future episodes.

Kirk isn't here. We see the command chair is empty. Spock is in charge, ordering that photographs be taken of this section of the galaxy they're exploring.

Uhura is at Communications. Although we see a background character wearing a red shirt (for the first time), Uhura is wearing gold, not the red with which we'll later become accustomed. Although this was the first episode filmed, it was the tenth to air. One has to wonder if audiences wondered why Uhura had changed her uniform red to gold for the week.

Another noticeable costume difference is that Uhura, Rand, in fact all female crew members are wearing short skirts. The trousers worn by women in the first two pilots are gone. By the mid-1960s, miniskirts had become a fashion trend, first in the United Kingdom and then later in the United States. One can speculate that's why female cast members wore short skirts, but more likely it's because Roddenberry and the network wanted the show to appeal to the young male demographic who were the core of science fiction fandom. Scantily clad women were a staple of “sci-fi” magazines for decades. Women were still sex objects in the 23rd Century, at least so far as 1960s Star Trek was concerned.

Back to our story … The ship encounters a mysterious revolving luminescent cube, later determined to be a buoy. Kirk is summoned to the bridge, then we fade to the opening credits. For the first time, audiences hear what was to become perhaps the most famous opening narrative in television history:

Space . . . the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, its five-year mission:

. . . to explore strange new worlds . . .
. . . to seek out new life and new civilizations . . .
. . . to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The narrative helped to explain to novice audiences what the show was about. Considering both studio and network executives struggled with understanding the two pilots, it's understandable that the powers-that-be would fret that viewers might not “grok” it.

As discussed in our October 17, 2024 blog entry, the credit for this narrative belongs to several people.

According to Bob Justman and Herb Solow in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, associate producer John D.F. Black came up with “Space, the final frontier.” “Where no man has gone before” was lifted from the second pilot's title, written by Samuel Peeples. The final version emerged from a series of memos exchanged in early August 1966 between Roddenberry, Justman, and Black. It was recorded by William Shatner on August 10, 1966, about a month before the first aired episode.

Act One begins with the first captain's log and stardate. Here's how it appeared in Sohl's second revised draft:

Captain's log, at Star Date 1512 point 2, on our third day of star mapping, an unexplained cubicle object blocked our vessel's path. On the bridge, Mister Spock immediately ordered general alert. My location, sick bay, quarterly physical check.

It's not quite what would later become familiar to us, in particular the use of past tense to describe events that have already happened.

Desilu executive Herb Solow wrote in Inside Star Trek that the stardate concept originated from a recommendation he made to Roddenberry:

The voyages of the Enterprise have already taken place; all Star Trek adventures are already history. The captain is setting up and recounting the particular adventure. He clues in the viewer very quickly as to what is going on and where, so we don't have page after page of boring exposition.

As for the number, the stardates would make little sense once episodes aired out of production order. Roddenberry later rationalized this by noting that travel at relativistic speeds, and in particular beyond the speed of light, meant our starship might be experiencing a different time than elsewhere. An adequate rhetorical fig leaf.

You'll also note that, in this episode, for the first time all male officers have pointed sideburns. That came from a May 1966 Roddenberry memo in response to concerns that actors would have contemporary haircuts. The pointed sideburns were to suggest a future style. Roddenberry wrote, “This is mandatory for all actors appearing in our show.”

In the sickbay, Kirk has his shirt off for the first (and most certainly not the last) time. We meet Dr. Leonard McCoy, played by DeForest Kelley, the actor Roddenberry wanted all along for the ship's doctor.

For the first time, McCoy uses the rhetorical device of self-comparison, which was to become another Star Trek trope. McCoy says, “What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor?” In Sohl's May 20 draft, the line ended, “… or a trolley car conductor?”

Kirk summons “department heads” to the bridge, as he did in the second pilot. This is the first time McCoy is on the bridge, a pattern that conveniently allows him to kibbitz in this and future episodes, invited or not.

After destroying the cube, Kirk orders drills and retires to his quarters. For the first time, and most certainly not the last, McCoy tags along. We see a scene reminiscent of “The Cage,” when Dr. Boyce counseled Captain Pike. In this scene, as in the first pilot, the doctor pours the drink. (Unlike Phil Boyce, Bones doesn't clarify if it's alcoholic.) Rand arrives to serve a salad; Kirk complains about being assigned “a female yeoman,” as did Pike in the first pilot.

When the Fesarius arrives, Kirk identifies his vessel as “the United Earth Ship Enterprise.” Neither the Federation nor Starfleet as terms yet exist. Balok says he's with “the First Federation.” Ted Cassidy, who played the butler Lurch on the recently-cancelled The Addams Family, provided the voice of Balok. Spock comments that Balok is “reminiscent of my father.”

In the second pilot, an episode the audience has yet to see, Kirk defeated Spock at 3D chess. Spock talks of checkmate, but Kirk decides instead to play poker. He bluffs Balok by claiming that the Enterprise is comprised of a substance called corbomite that will reflect back energy on its attacker. This establishes for the viewer a core trait of Kirk — he'll bluff you, he'll take risks.

In the end, Balok's pilot vessel fails and issues a distress call. Kirk orders the Enterprise to respond. He tells a doubting McCoy:

What's the mission of this vessel, Doctor? To seek out and contact alien life, and an opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean.

Kirk tells the viewers what the show is about — if they tune in next week.

It's been said that Star Trek is about “making friends of enemies.” In this episode, the first to be filmed, we're given a script that establishes that theme.

Making friends of enemies.

Sources:

David Alexander, Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (New York: ROC Books, 1994)

Leonard Nimoy, I Am Spock (New York: Hyperion, 1995)

Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994)

Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996)

Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968, Sixth Printing, July 1970)

On November 27, 1964, filming began on the Star Trek pilot episode, “The Cage.” Video source: OTOY YouTube channel.

Sixty years ago today, filming began at the Desilu Culver City lot on the Star Trek pilot episode, “The Cage.”

This OTOY video featurette includes an interview with Robert Butler, who directed the pilot.

“765874 Unification” is a new Star Trek short produced by OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive. William Shatner reprises James T. Kirk, thanks to modern technology. Video source: OTOY YouTube channel.

For the 30th anniversary of Star Trek Generations, OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive have released an eight-minute short film titled 765874 Unification.

Thanks to the miracle of modern technologies, William Shatner was able to reprise James T. Kirk as he appeared in Generations. Actor Sam Witwer portrayed Kirk was he appeared in the original series and the six original cast films.

Click here for the OTOY press release.

OTOY released cast interviews to accompany the film.

Interview with William Shatner, who reprised Kirk. Video source: OTOY YouTube channel.

Interview with Robin Curtis, who reprised Saavik. Video source: OTOY YouTube channel.