Star Trek: All Things Trek

[Ickles]

Anybody else watching the new season of Discovery so far? It's definitely not my favorite contemporary Star Trek series (SNW, for the win!) and some of the last season or 2 have kind of been a mess but it's the last season and I'm a weird completist so I thought I'd given a whirl and so far I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. It's not perfect and there's still some cringe factor but generally much more into the story arc thus far.

 

[Cappy]

I’m debating giving Disco another try. I stopped watching about halfway through season 3. It’s been a while since I’ve sat down and tried to engage with it, so I don’t feel super comfortable discussing it in any critical context.

I will say that I really want to like Discovery. It has some amazing performers and wonderful VFX. My problems stem more from the conceptual/writing side of things — STD kind of feels like the product of a bunch of executives and producers throwing a bunch of disparate ideas around, and it gives the show a very inconsistent feel. I find it hard to connect with it for more than a few eps at a time.

 

[Dom]

On the subject of The Cage… I do find it to be remarkable as a bit of sci-fi pop culture from the 60’s. It’s (kind of) philosophical, and Jeffrey Hunter’s portrayal of Pike is one of a world weary man haunted by recent failures. It feels incongruous to Shatner’s swinging 60’s Captain Kirk — although Kirk displayed depth in TOS, notably in eps like Balance of Terror and City on the Edge of Forever — it never felt as grim or as riddled with self-doubt and reflection as Hunter’s Pike (Although Kirk got fleshed out way more in the movie era).

The Cage is an interesting piece of TV. It's got shades of the brilliant Ikarie XB-1, which was blatantly one of the major inspirations for Star Trek. Even the sets resemble designs used in Star Trek down the years. The bridge is reminiscent of the Enterprise designs from the early 1970s films and the corridor designs can be seen in Star Trek to this day!



I think the idea was that Pike was meant to be more relaxed and 'Kirk-like' normally, but the combination of Jeffery Hunter's low key, intense performance and a story that puts Pike at a crisis point means we only see the more relaxed 'normal' Pike at the very end of the episode. Pike's story is very much what Kirk probably went through after City on the Edge of Forever (and that story is told in Diane Carey's excellent 'giant' Star Trek novel 'Final Frontier'.) Shatner would actually have been knocked it out of the park in The Cage and would have been better than Jeffery Hunter. And for all that The Cage is a terrific, cerebral piece of TV, Where No Man Has Gone Before is in a whole other league and is a phenomenal start to the series. It's gobsmacking that they ended up launching the regular TV show with The Man Trap.

So yeah, The Cage does have value, but perhaps it functions as a better set up for Strange New Worlds than TOS.

Ultimately, The Cage isn't canon, though: it's only a rejected pilot, released on home video as a curiosity and later shown on TV as the same. Only the material that appears in The Menagerie is canon.

And anything the grifters at Secret Hideout make isn't canon either!

 

[Cappy]

I am very fond of Where No Man Has Gone Before — it successfully combines elements of horror, suspense, sci-fi, plus a ton of action at the end. And it’s all held together by a great thru line, of Kirk trying to save his friend Gary Mitchell. Man Trap is mostly forgettable imo, I have no idea why that was the first one aired. I’m currently reading the classic “The Making of Star Trek” book from like 68 or so, so hopefully that will shed some light on this. It was most likely due to some executive’s whim, if I had to guess.

And yeah, I think Shatner would’ve done a better job in the Cage than Hunter, but it does feel unfair to compare them as performers. I’ve seen countless hours of Shatner over the years, both as Kirk and other characters, but I’ve only ever watched Hunter’s acting in The Cage and The Searchers (with John Wayne and Hank Worden of Senor Droolcup fame!). That being said, I do think Shat is a great actor, and it’s unfortunate that he is primarily remembered for his goofier moments, like the Gorn fight or riding on the hood of a perp’s car from TJ Hooker. He brings such depth and pathos to Star Trek 2 and 6, and he does an excellent job selling the reality of some of the more outlandish stuff from TOS. With a lesser performer at the lead, Star Trek could have easily turned into something closer to Lost In Space.

 

[Dom]

I am very fond of Where No Man Has Gone Before — it successfully combines elements of horror, suspense, sci-fi, plus a ton of action at the end. And it’s all held together by a great thru line, of Kirk trying to save his friend Gary Mitchell. Man Trap is mostly forgettable imo, I have no idea why that was the first one aired. I’m currently reading the classic “The Making of Star Trek” book from like 68 or so, so hopefully that will shed some light on this. It was most likely due to some executive’s whim, if I had to guess.

Inside Star Trek, by Robert Justman and Herb Solow is the best insider book on the series. The Man Trap is terribly low key and a bit 'Outer Limits' with the salt vampire monster. Where No Man Has Gone Before is such a scorcher and feels odd in its position in the broadcast run. I was very confused when I saw it as a young child, because the episode opened without the narration, the uniforms and ship look different and many of the characters are changed or replaced. The fact that so many characters die and the ship gets smashed up means it makes sense that the ship and her crew complement looks different in the next episode. It's even feasible that there was time dilation involved when the Enterprise limped to Delta Vega and they got back to main Federation space some years later from the Starfleet's perspective (not that that's anywhere official - just me imagining!)

And yeah, I think Shatner would’ve done a better job in the Cage than Hunter, but it does feel unfair to compare them as performers. I’ve seen countless hours of Shatner over the years, both as Kirk and other characters, but I’ve only ever watched Hunter’s acting in The Cage and The Searchers (with John Wayne and Hank Worden of Senor Droolcup fame!).

Jeffery Hunter was a terrific actor. He's eerily effective as Jesus in King of Kings, for example, with a quiet, otherworldly presence. The film made great use of his striking eyes. One has to wonder - had he remained and played Captain Kirk in Where No Man Has Gone Before - whether he'd have gone abroad to film Cry Chicago and thus have lived on for many more years. Or would Star Trek have failed and he went abroad anyway?

When you look at that scene between Pike and Boyce in Pike's quarters in The Cage, which is a very good two-hander about decisions you make in life, you can imagine how much better that scene could have been played between William Shatner and Deforest Kelley. Indeed, Allan Asherman, in his old book The Star Trek Compendium, remarked - accurately IMHO - that the Kirk-McCoy scene in Kirk's San Francisco apartment in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan directly mirrors the Pike-Boyce scene.

However, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there's a lot of Hunter's Pike in the writing of James Kirk. Gene Roddenberry's novelisation actually features a foreword by a more serious-minded Jim Kirk that essentially says that the original TV show and cartoon series were in-universe dramatisations of the Enterprise's real adventures.

That being said, I do think Shat is a great actor, and it’s unfortunate that he is primarily remembered for his goofier moments, like the Gorn fight or riding on the hood of a perp’s car from TJ Hooker. He brings such depth and pathos to Star Trek 2 and 6, and he does an excellent job selling the reality of some of the more outlandish stuff from TOS. With a lesser performer at the lead, Star Trek could have easily turned into something closer to Lost In Space.

The trouble is that William Shatner is a very witty, funny guy and he's been around a long time. He has a great, self-deprecating sense of humour, which means he doesn't analyse his past work too deeply and is willing to laugh about his lesser moments. People have merged Shatner's onscreen and offscreen persona with his dramatic roles. Unfortunately, that's led to the Gorn fight being wheeled out regularly on talk shows, ignoring that Arena is a terrific episode. Indeed, most TV shows have embarrassing moments - TNG had many!

In the 1990s, there was a bit of a nasty thing going on where TNG was being fêted as the true 'Gene's Vision' and even the head of the official Star Trek fan club was quoted in an interview saying that people only really watched the 1960s show for its comedy moments. William Shatner, now that the original Star Trek had officially ended, also got a lot of flak from the secondary cast, particularly George Takei, who has a weird obsession with Shatner (very weird when you bear in mind that Takei only appeared with Shatner in about two thirds of the original series and five films across the next decade or so, with him being filmed on separate sets for most of STVI!) It's like me carrying a grudge about my old boss from 2000-2002, whom I often clashed with, then getting annoyed about working beside him for a couple of weeks every two years over this coming decade. I wouldn't worry now, because I'm well-established in my own right and I'd make a good amount of money of a couple of weeks' work!

I think, without doubt, Shatner's Kirk was the making of the series, especially once Gene L Coon established he Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic. I always get annoyed when people bang on about Star Trek being about the Kirk and Spock relationship. To my mind, there were four major relationships at play: Kirk, Spock and McCoy; Kirk and Spock; Kirk and McCoy; and McCoy and Spock. Their interactions were very different in each grouping. And Scotty had a pretty significant role as the lead actor of the secondary cast, all of whom were otherwise pretty interchangeable as characters. Had Star Trek continued into the 1970s, I wonder who would have remained and who would have left?

The problem is that there's a pop cultural image of what the original Star Trek was like (partly exacerbated by people blurring the real William Shatner and fictional James T Kirk) which is at variance of what it really was like. Strange New Worlds feels like a prequel to the pop cultural image - Robert Meyer Burnett calls it the 'Las Vegas show version of Star Trek.' The Mission: Impossible series also suffers from this a bit. The films (and 1980s TV series) bombastically latched on to masks, gadgets and 'Your mission, should you decide to accept it', ignoring the subtlety and variety of the 1960s stories in particular.

Absolutely, Star Trek could have ended up as Lost in Space. Showrunner Fred Freiberger never really got a handle on the third season - it's often claimed that the best third season episodes were leftover scripts from the previous two seasons - and I shudder to think how 1970s Star Trek might have gone. I can imagine long hair and big sideburns, wildly flared trousers and lots of cast changes. By 1974, it might have been William Shatner and Deforest Kelley surrounded by an entirely different cast on a redesigned Enterprise having adventures akin to Glen A Larson's Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!

 

[Cappy]

This might be random, but: Matt Jeffries, the production designer who designed the original Enterprise (plus lots of other stuff on TOS), had a brother named Phillip Jeffries who also worked in production design.

I’ve wondered if there was any chance that Twin Peaks’ Philip Jeffries was named after him. Maybe, maybe not?

 

[Dom]

This might be random, but: Matt Jeffries, the production designer who designed the original Enterprise (plus lots of other stuff on TOS), had a brother named Phillip Jeffries who also worked in production design.

I’ve wondered if there was any chance that Twin Peaks’ Philip Jeffries was named after him. Maybe, maybe not?

You never know! After all, in Twin Peaks, Philip Gerard was a one-armed man and The Fugitive had a one-armed man and a police detective called... Philip Gerard! And Piper Laurie played Sarah Packard in The Hustler. The series was full of fun references!

 

[Cappy]

The existence of the real Phillip Jeffries first came to my attention while watching the opening credits of “An Officer And A Gentleman” a few months back (edit: as Phillip M. Jeffries is the credited production designer). It’s a film that has nothing to do with Twin Peaks, aside from the fact that it takes place in a small town in rural Washington state, centers around a cadet at a military flight academy (an experience that Garland Briggs probably went through at one point, despite being in the Air Force and the film focusing on the Navy), and features Grace Zabriskie in a small role not in any way like Sarah Palmer, outside of one specific scene where she takes out the trash in a slow and painstaking manner reminiscent of Sarah’s weird malaise in The Return.

But maybe I just have Twin Peaks on my mind 24/7, ha.