"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." - "Star Trek" opening credits narration
Star Trek: The Original Series: Season One DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
As I write this review, it has been 37 years, 11 months, 3 weeks, and 4 days since Star Trek's premiere on September 8, 1966 - give or take a few days for leap year and heretofore unknown disruptions of the space/time continuum. Over the ensuing years, the series has inspired countless books, films, TV shows, toys, and other consumer products. In short, Star Trek has become a pop cultural force to be reckoned with. Yet until the DVD release of Star Trek: The Original Series: Season One, I never really saw an episode. I know, I know. Don't get your phasers in a tizzy. I'm an uncultured philistine who should be cursed with a plague of Tribbles. It's just that I always thought that "Star Trek" meant hammy acting, cardboard sets, and hokey aliens. I now know that it is all those things - and much, much, more.
Even if you've been living under a rock for the past forty years, you are pretty much aware of what Star Trek is about. From my dark, damp, craggy home, I knew that in the distant future, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) is the adventuresome commander of the starship Enterprise. Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is his pointy-eared, emotion-challenged, half Vulcan first officer. Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) is the ship's wry medical officer. The rest of the crew is a veritable Benneton ad: Asian chief navigator Sulu (George Takei), African-American communications officer Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), and burr inflected engineer "Scotty" Scott (James Doohan), as well as Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett) and Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney). Together they roam the universe, boldly going where no man has gone before (to paraphrase the famous opening credit sequence).
At the risk of being sacrilegious, I somehow always associated Star Trek with another '60s sci-fi relic, the somewhat goofy Lost in Space. But while Lost in Space is simply about the weirdness and novelty of space as filtered through movie serials, my new exposure to Star Trek reveals that this series is more concerned with ideas. Sure, the Enterprise crew occasionally comes across a monster that looks like the plastic vomit you might find in a joke store ("The Devil in the Dark"), but its stories are thoughtful, intelligent meditations on what it means to be responsible humans in our vast universe (which, of course, can be further boiled down to being responsible citizens of Earth when related to our own lives).
Creator Gene Roddenberry gave Star Trek an unbridled optimism about humanity. In the world of the series, humans are capable of overcoming their base instincts in order to do what is right. When we fail, we accept responsibility. It proposes that flawed individuals can come together to create a more perfect society. This is clearly illustrated in the show's two main characters, Kirk and Spock. Kirk represents brute force. He is brawny and passionate, sometimes willing to act with little forethought simply on the basis of intuition. Dispassionate Spock represents the rational and scientific. Facts and logic are his guiding force. Only by working together, thus balancing emotion and strength with detachment and temperance, can humans hope to thrive.
This equilibrium is implicit in most of the episodes, but becomes explicit in "The Enemy Within." When beaming up from a newly explored planet, a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two separate beings. One Kirk is passive and soft almost to the point of being addleheaded. The other Kirk is an aggressor who drinks liberally, attempts to rape the female crew, and is wildly violent. We know this Kirk is evil because he wears heavy kohl eyeliner and sweats profusely (no one ever claimed the series is subtle). Dr. McCoy soon verifies that the two halves cannot exist on their own. If they are not recombined, both Kirks will die. Needless to say, by then end of this standout episode, the halves are reunited, making Kirk whole again and re-achieving the vital balance so strongly endorsed by the series.
Another fan favorite is "Space Seed," which introduced Ricardo Montalban as Khan. The Enterprise crew stumbles upon an ancient Earth vessel, the Botany Bay, which contains a large number of cryogenically frozen humans. When Kirk and his away team board the ship, Khan's pod deactivates, waking him from his centuries long slumber. As it turns out, the ship houses genetically modified humans that were bred to be "a group of Alexanders, Napoleons" in the 1990s. The shrewd, barbaric supermen (and women) began to conquer the Earth, leading to a catastrophic "eugenics war." On the verge of being defeated, Khan (who once ruled one-quarter of the Earth) secretly gathered many of his compatriots and launched the Botany Bay. Khan is a manipulator and a tyrant - Jim Jones re-imagined as Superman - and he is able to revive his crew and take over the Enterprise with the help of Kirk's gullible, impressionable historian. His plot eventually fails because the historian's underlying decency and humanity - traits that the barbarous Khan does not have and therefore underestimates - do not allow her to stand idly by while the Enterprise crew is killed. Again, someone with a disproportionate amount brawn is defeated by humanity. Continuing the idea of compassionate force, Kirk does not execute Khan and his mutinous cohorts. Instead, he sends them to a harsh, abandoned planet where they can rule a society of their own making.
Time and again, the series comes back to these themes in ways big (the excellent "The City on the Edge of Forever," in which Kirk must sacrifice a woman he has come to love - guest star Joan Collins - so that history as we know it will remain unchanged) and small (the suspenseful "Balance of Terror," in which Kirk must instantly switch from kindly marriage officiate to red alert-mode warrior in the face of a Romulan attack).
The two-part "The Menagerie" even allows Spock to temper his usual rational behavior with impulsive emotionalism. When his former commander, Captain Pike (played by film star Jeffrey Hunter in flashback) is crippled in a terrible accident, Spock risks court-martial by commandeering the Enterprise for a top secret mission to help his friend. These are two of the season's best episodes, which is quite surprising, considering their history. Although the series' special effects don't quite look so special when compared to those in modern day movies and TV shows, they were sophisticated and complicated for the time. Episodes of Star Trek took almost twice as long to produce as those of other series at the time. Within a few weeks of the series' premiere, the show was already behind schedule. The situation was so dire that it looked as if the producers would soon be so far behind that they would not be able to deliver an already scheduled episode. They came up with a unique solution. Several years earlier, a pilot episode (called "The Cage") had been filmed starring Hunter as the captain of the Enterprise and Spock as his science officer. Execs liked the pilot, but thought that it would be too expensive to produce on a weekly basis. A second pilot was ordered as a test to see if the series could be produced on a reduced budget. By that time, Hunter was unavailable, so Shatner was brought in to fill the role of captain in an entirely new script. Since the only thing the two pilots had in common was the character of Spock, it could not be used as a regular episode when the series was picked up. The producers decided that if they could figure out a way to somehow recycle the original pilot footage by coming up with a framing device, they could save money and buy themselves much needed time. Thus, "The Menagerie" was born. Amazingly enough, the two episodes never feel cobbled together and are actually engrossing.
Not all of the episodes are good. "Shore Leave," for example, feels like a hokum-filled reject from Lost in Space, only without Dr. Smith's prancing and preening to make it interesting. (I know - this is your favorite episode. Don't email me. I automatically concede that you are right and I am wrong. I still, however, reserve the right to laugh about you behind your back). Even the good episodes contain some supremely goofy stuff. In the otherwise fine "The Enemy Within," we are repeatedly subjected to the sight of a Creamsicle orange, synthetic fuzz-covered dog with a banana-like horn and pipe cleaner antennae. And how about the toaster cozy-esque hazmat suit worn by Spock in "The Naked Time"?
One also has to admire Roddenberry's faith that with time, humans would be able to transcend their physical, racial, and cultural differences and work together for the good of mankind. During a time when sponsors and viewing audiences alike went into apoplectic shock when Petula Clark showed affection for Harry Belafonte on a TV special, the bridge of the Enterprise was a veritable rainbow. Of course the black woman was stuck being a glorified phone operator, but no matter - big changes are made a little bit at a time.
It has become too much of a cliché to talk about William Shatner's hambone emoting as Captain Kirk, so I won't bother. He does, however, have an easy onscreen camaraderie with both Nimoy and Kelley. His relationships with these two vastly dissimilar men - and indeed their relationships with each other - bring much humor to the series. They also help to ground the series in reality, reinforcing the fact that Star Trek really isn't about green lizard-men or aliens with large, throbbing heads. Instead, it is about how different we all are as human beings, and about how we can achieve great things when we focus not on those differences, but instead focus on those places where our personalities intersect.
The twenty-nine episodes that make up the first season are arranged in airdate order on eight discs. The discs are housed in miniature translucent plastic compartments (roughly the size of CD cases), the kind that are normally affixed to cardboard to form digipaks. In this case, there is no cardboard. Instead, the plastic holders are attached book-style via a clear strip of tape along the left hand side that functions as the binding. Each disc is decorated with an individual member of the Enterprise crew. Also listed on the disc faces are the episode titles, stardates, and original airdates. The case slides into a paper sleeve featuring a picture of Spock and Kirk. A foldout brochure (about the size of a CD insert) gives plot synopses, a brief written introduction to the series, an intro to Starfleet Command, and a brief essay on "The Changing Face of Romulans." Also included are individual coupons for the Borg Invasion 4-D attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton and official Star Trek prop replicas. The plastic DVD holder and the brochure fit into an outer plastic canister. A window on the front shows through to the Kirk/Spock picture on the interior case sleeve. Being a Star Trek newbie, it is unclear to me whether this mustard yellow capsule (which splits down the middle and is hinged on the bottom) relates to the series in any way (i.e. if it is meant to look like an actual Star Trek device). On its own terms, however, the capsule is extremely well-designed. It perfectly captures the series' retro futuristic look, simultaneously of the future and hopelessly mired in the 1960s. The capsule stands upright on its own. On store shelves, it is shrink-wrapped into a disposable cardboard base on which the DVD's specifications are printed. All in all, the packaging is a winner - it manages to be a conversation piece without being overly bulky.
The DVD menus begin with William Shatner intoning "Space, the final frontier" while a computer animated Enterprise swoops by. The ship turns, and we venture into the bridge. We are now at the helm of the Enterprise, and the episode choices are listed on its view screen. Choosing an individual episode (there is no option to "play all") causes our perspective to shift. Our episode options are located on the starship's control panel. From here, we can change the audio and subtitle settings by accessing the "Communications" menu, view the "Chapter Log," view a "Preview Trailer" of the episode, or simply play the episode. The animation on these menus is cartoon-like rather than photorealistic, but it again seems perfectly in line with the series.
