“Beyond the Farthest Star”
Written by Samuel A. Peeples
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 1
Production episode 22004
Original air date: September 8, 1973
Stardate: 5221.3
Captain’s log. On a routine star-mapping mission, the Enterprise is pulled off course by something Spock describes as “hyper-gravity.” It’s yanking them toward a dead star that is transmitting odd radio emissions, and which is reading almost entirely negative on Spock’s sensors.
Uhura picks up another signal, and Sulu manages to maneuver the Enterprise into orbit around the star. Also in orbit with them is an alien vessel that shows no energy readings—and which Spock dates as being three hundred million years old.
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty beam over to the alien ship, wearing life-support belts. The ship is made up of several individual pods that look as if they were spun rather than forged. Also every pod has an opening created from the inside.
Uhura stopped picking up the radio signals as soon as they beamed aboard. The boarding party continues to explore the vessel, finding a strange device that collects energy. They proceed to another pod that generates gravity and air, but which also blocks communication and has drained their phasers. That pod also has a console that looks as if it has been jury-rigged, and their presence triggers a communication from an alien being.
Something attacked the ship, and the aliens destroyed their own vessel rather than let it escape into the galaxy, trapping it in that pod. However, their presence triggers a self-destruct, causing the pod to explode. Kyle manages to beam them back, but a green energy cloud beams aboard with them.
The cloud starts to move throughout the ship, deactivating life support on two decks, freezing the self-destruct mechanism, and using ship’s phasers to destroy the alien vessel. Kirk has Spock jury-rig a containment unit on the navigation console similar to that on the pod on the alien vessel, but by the time Spock does so, the cloud has completely taken over the Enterprise.
It threatens the lives of both Kirk and Spock, and eventually Kirk gives in and agrees to do what it says. However, he tells Spock to compute a slingshot course around the star. Kirk then navigates the ship toward the sun, and the alien believes that it’s a kamikaze run and flees the ship, taking over the dead star. But then the Enterprise slingshots around the sun and continues on its way. As they move away from the star, they hear the alien begging them not to leave him alone.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The alien ship is made up of pods connected by filaments, created by an insectlike species. The being is a magnetic lifeform that has no mass, but the ability to inhabit magnetic fields, such as ships and computers and such.
Fascinating. Spock is able to plot a course for a slingshot around the sun without using the ship’s computer. Because he’s just that awesome.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy’s sole purpose on the boarding party is to complain about things.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu manages to get the Enterprise into orbit around the star rather than have the ship plummet into it. Because he’s just that awesome.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura actually picks up the star before Spock does thanks to the radio emissions from the alien ship.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty is blown away by the alien vessel. He totally nerds out about the place the whole time he’s on board.
Forewarned is three-armed. Though he has no dialogue, this is the first appearance of Lieutenant Arex, the new navigator. Either an Edoan or a Triexian, depending on which tie-ins you believe, Arex is the first fully non-human crew member to be seen on the Enterprise, a benefit of doing an animated series.
Channel open. “Obey me!”
The words spoken most often by the alien cloud.
Welcome aboard. Recurring regulars James Doohan, George Takei, and Nichelle Nichols provide the voices of, respectively, Scotty, Sulu, and Uhura, with Doohan also providing all the other voices (including Kyle). This would be standard operating procedure going forward—while the three stars only provided the voices of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, virtually all the other characters were voiced by Takei, Nichols, Majel Barrett, and especially Doohan.
Trivial matters: Since Samuel A. Peeples wrote “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Gene Roddenberry thought it would be fitting to have him also write the first episode of the animated series, and so he suggested that D.C. Fontana call him up and see if he wanted to write something.
Just as James Blish adapted the live-action series episodes into short-story form, Alan Dean Foster did likewise for the animated episodes, in the Star Trek Log series, which was published by Ballantine rather than Bantam, who had all other prose Trek rights. This episode, along with “Yesteryear” and “One of Our Planets is Missing,” was adapted in Star Trek Log 1. Unlike Blish, however, Foster did much longer adaptations, adding significant material, and also embedding more inter-story continuity across the adaptations. Foster would later go on to write the stories that were told both in audio and comic book form by Peter Pan Records, received the story credit for The Motion Picture, and wrote the novelizations of the 2009 Star Trek and of Star Trek Into Darkness.
The life-support belts debut in this episode, belts that project a force field that allow the wearer to move more freely than they can in environment suits.
To boldly go. “Don’t leave me alone!” This is a surprisingly dry start to the animated adventures. The potential here is great, but it’s mostly left untapped.
For starters, the opening is almost soporific as the Enterprise is drawn toward the dead star in the most unsuspenseful scene ever. A lot of this is probably due to the actors not being used to voiceover work (only James Doohan had any experience doing such, as he started out on Canadian radio), as the voice work is awkward in many spots, with the added stiffness of the Filmation animation.
The storyline also feels a bit derivative, treading over territory already better mined in “Charlie X,” “The Changeling,” “The Squire of Gothos,” and “The Immunity Syndrome,” among others. The ending, where the creature begs the Enterprise crew not to leave him alone, is a surprisingly heavy and nasty end to a story on a Saturday morning cartoon, but nothing is actually done with it—we get no reaction, no regret, no wishing they could have found a way to work with the creature instead of being threatened by it, like what we got in “Charlie” and “Gothos.” Which is too bad, because the pathos would’ve been welcome. As it stands now, the ending is just awkward.
Having said that, we do get the wonderful alien ship, which provides the best parts of the episode. Part of it is Scotty geeking out over it—and Doohan’s greater experience with voice work means he actually conveys that much better than any of the others manage—and part of is the superb visual of the ship. It really looks alien, the first of many examples of the show taking advantage of the format to really give us some nifty looking aliens and alien landscapes and, in this case, alien construction.
Still, this is a rather limp opening to the animated adventures.
Warp factor rating: 4
Next week: “Yesteryear”
Keith R.A. DeCandido wishes everybody a happy Thanksgiving.
First time ever watching the animated series and it did feel like they filmed an early draft of a story, rather than a story. It’s also left to the viewer’s imagination just why the alien destroyed the other ship– maybe it was just to prove to the Enterprise crew that it was in charge.
The automatic bridge defense unit has got to be the most obvious red flag ever invented, in a sort of meta way. The Enterprise never had automated defenses before, even in situations where that would come in handy. This time it does. I wonder if anything will go wrong?
Finally, it occurs to me that this (somewhat) foreshadows the calculation Spock will do in Voyage Home. It gives a bit more context to Kirk’s confidence there.
I’m still disappointed that Lt. Arex didn’t appear in any of the JJ Trek movies — certainly, the technology exists now.
Also, as an aside, I’d be happy to see this rewatch lead to a rewatch of other Saturday morning classics — Land of the Lost, Thundarr, Dungeons & Dragons, Blackstar, etc. Although I suspect that most of those rewatches would consist of squinting between your fingers at the screen while quietly whispering, “The horror; the horror.”
hoopmanjh: ghoulish though this may be, Anton Yelchin’s death may open the door to Arex appearing in the fourth Bad Robot film……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
KRAD: Yes, that’d be one good response to a tragic situation.
The animated series were the first Star Trek episodes I ever saw. I have fond memories of fighting with my brother over whether we watched this or whatever was on opposite it (Scooby Doo maybe?). I do worry if I watched them again they wouldn’t live up to my memories of them.
I’m one of the thousands of Los Angeles area residents for whom this was not the first animated episode. George Takei was running in a special election for LA city council and the network was afraid that airing an episode with him in it would force them to give equal time to the other candidates. Whichever local station had the syndication rights for TOS stopped running the show during the election as well, because there weren’t enough episodes without Sulu for them to maintain their normal schedule. We Angelenos didn’t get this until December.
On top of the actors having to adjust to voice work, I wonder if the writers still had to adjust to the shorter time frame and different pacing of a half-hour show. Of course, that doesn’t really explain the plodding pace of the first act here.
These days, people are more accustomed to the animation tics of Filmation. The freeze and pan or zoom, the excessive reuse of cels and sequences and so on. But at the time it looked really bad, even to 11-year old me. There were plenty of Saturday morning cartoons with low frame rates, but this was a horse of an altogether different color. Get used to the camera freezing, tilting and zooming on Kirk, accompanied by a musical sting, because we’re gonna see it a lot.
Arex or Jaylah would be great to fill that empty seat in the next movie. Though I seriously doubt we’ll get another movie any time soon, despite what Mr. Abrams said.
One additional Trivial Matter: this episode got a shout out in Christopher’s Buried Age.
“I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy’s sole purpose on the boarding party is to complain about things.” Because he’s just that awesomely grumpy!
I rather like this one. I think it’s an effectively tense and eerie story, though maybe I’m informed by Foster’s adaptation of it; growing up, I read the novelizations of the episodes a lot more often than I got to see them. Granted, Peeples is revisiting the same well a bit much (what is it with him and stories about questing beyond the edge of the galaxy?), and it’s a bit meandering from one set piece to another (black star -> alien ship -> invading entity), but I still think it works. The alien ship in particular is a tour de force of the design work that was Filmation’s greatest strength, and this was a great debut episode for showing off the spectacle that animation made possible.
It also shows how TAS was trying to tell adult-oriented stories while still being suitable for Saturday morning audiences. A lot of this story is about death — the entire crew of the alien ship killed themselves to protect the galaxy from the entity, and Kirk was willing to do the same. But the death was offscreen, in the distant past, or else was a future potential that never manifested. In all of TAS, there are only two episodes with onscreen deaths, only one involving sapient beings. But we’ll get to those.
“This would be standard operating procedure going forward—while the three stars only provided the voices of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, virtually all the other characters were voiced by Takei, Nichols, Majel Barrett, and especially Doohan.”
Yeah, about that last bit — Doohan gets credit these days for a lot more TAS voices than he really did. In the original Star Trek Concordance, Bjo Trimble listed a lot of voices as “Unknown,” but in the ’90s edition she just slapped Doohan’s name on all of them, and Memory Alpha followed suit. But I’m pretty certain those voices are not by Doohan. Many are a voice I recognize from other Filmation shows, and I have reason to believe it’s Lane Scheimer, the son of Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, but I’m not certain. (I keep meaning to ask Andy Mangels about it — he’s one of the world’s leading experts on Filmation. But I wanted to rewatch the series first and double-check my list of the voices I attribute to that actor. I haven’t gotten around to that before, but I’ve decided to watch the episodes along with this rewatch.)
@1/dunsel: I think it’s obvious why the entity destroyed the alien ship. It had been the entity’s prison for 300 million years. It was sheer revenge.
I looking forward to this re-watch of the animated series because I don’t think I’ve seen them all. This gives me a great excuse to watch more tv on Sunday afternoon. H&I (tv network) started them over this weekend. I agree the first episode is kind of clunky but, there are new aliens on screen. I like next weeks episode much better.
Christopher: In this case, it’s definitely Doohan doing Kyle and the insectoid captain and the bad guy alien.
Cheerio: If there isn’t a new Trek film in three years, I’ll be stunned. Seriously, the movie made twice its budget in theatres (counting foreign box office, and their money is just as good), and Trek remains a viable franchise, and will likely become more so with Discovery.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@13/krad: Yes, the original Concordance does give Doohan credit for all those roles, and Kyle and the magnetic entity are both easily recognizable as him. (Interesting that Doohan just gave Kyle a generic upper-class Englishman voice, eh what old chap, rather than trying to emulate the delivery of his former co-star John Winston. I guess he was more an accent guy than an impressionist.) As for the insectoid, it’s hard to tell whose voice it is because it’s so distorted. I’m usually good at recognizing voice artists’ various gradations of their voices by commonalities of timbre, rhythm, and the like, but I can’t hear anything recognizable in the insectoid’s voice, so I just have to take the original Concordance‘s word for it. The attributions I don’t trust are the ones that were “Unknown” in the original Concordance and uniformly marked as Doohan in the revised one.
There was also the engineering crewman who said “Yes, sir” when Kirk ordered the cutter beams. That sounded a bit like the “Unknown” voice I suspect of being Lane Scheimer, and it’s just the kind of bit part that the various Scheimer family members tended to do in Filmation shows. But it’s too small a sample to rule out Doohan.
Part of the problem is that the only ones who were credited were Doohan, Takei, Nichols, and Barrett. Heck, Barrett got credit in this one and she didn’t even do any voices for it (Chapel wasn’t in the episode, and Uhura was the only female voice in the cast for this one).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
#13
I hope I’m wrong, Keith. I enjoyed Beyond quite a lot. But the box office for it was lower than Into Darkness. Of course, what that means to Paramount is anybody’s guess. They could simply write it off as ‘fatigue’ like so many other big movies underperforming this year. We’ll see.
Ah, TAS. The only Trek series I haven’t seen. I’m taking the opportunity of this rewatch to get to know this series for the first time, so everything here will be brand new to me.
As for this first episode: It’s frustrating. Throughout the episode I was torn between loving the exotic stuff (the really alien alien ship, for example) and cringing at the cringy stuff (like the bad science and the awkward pacing).
That ending, though… Oh boy. Not only nasty (by ordinary Trek standards) but also very abrupt. The final scene with Kirk re-iterating the fact that they’re on a mapping mission, felt completely amateurish and out of place.
Anyway, this will no doubt be an interesting ride. On to “Yesteryear” (which is one of the few animated episodes I do know)
@15/krad: Yeah, ’70s and early-’80s animated shows tended to have a single unchanging end title sequence across a whole season, rather than tailored for each individual one. Which means that for Filmation shows, they listed just the main ensemble of 4-6 voices while a number of bit players (usually various Scheimers or other staffers’ family members) went uncredited, and for Hanna-Barbera, they’d list the dozens of actors who worked on any episode in the entire season, without differentiating by episode.
My basis for identifying the mystery voice in TAS is that I think it’s the same voice as a certain major character in Filmation’s Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, and Lou Scheimer and Andy Mangels’s book about Filmation says that character was played by Lane Scheimer under a pseudonym. Although, having recently seen Filmation’s first half-hour adventure series Journey to the Center of the Earth on El Rey Network, I’m thinking it’s possible that the mystery voice could’ve been Pat Harrington, Jr., who split the male voice work on that show with Ted Knight. Knight played Carter Winston in “The Survivor,” so maybe Harrington could’ve been involved too. I’m going to be listening for that voice to see if I can get a better sense of who it might’ve been.
Speaking of Uhura, I think it’s nice that she got a fairly major role in the first act. She wasn’t just reporting on plot points, she was waxing philosophical about the wonders of the alien ship, getting a line that would probably have gone to Kirk or McCoy on TOS. This show generally served Uhura and Sulu better than TOS did, giving them more substantive roles. That’s one of the reasons I think TAS deserves recognition. (I’m deeply disappointed that the revised Star Trek Encyclopedia still excludes it. It’s just about the only Trek reference source these days that does.)
Like OmicronThetaDeltaPhi, I’ve never seen TAS and plan to watch it alongside this rewatch.
I agree that the alien ship is beautiful but the story feels flat, and that there should have been some reaction to the creature’s misery in the final scene.
I will miss the characters’ facial expressions. On the other hand, I like how all their faces look different, and are fairly recognisable, despite the simple drawing style. Sulu commanding the Enterprise during the landing party’s absence was nice. Did he ever get to do that in the second or third season?
What’s “negative star mass” supposed to be?
I’ve only watched a couple episodes of TAS only recently, and never saw it when I was young and watching the live-action Trek series, so these will be totally new to me. I’ve been looking forward to this.
This one’s pretty clunky, but a pretty solid action piece. I like how Sulu and Uhura don’t feel like background characters here. The highlight is definitely the alien ship, and the aliens who had occupied the ship maintain the TOS s3 theme of truly alien aliens. I’m very interested to see what else they came up with in the animated series, free of budget constraints of costumes, sets, and makeup.
I’ve heard good things about next week’s episode, “Yesteryear.” Looking forward to diving into it.
I was 8 when the series premiered, and haven’t seen it since. I have a few flashes of memory of the animation here and there, but that’s it. What I remember are the Alan Dean Foster novelizations. I read all of them when I was in 6th grade (11 or 12) and really getting into SF. Read Dune, the Foundation series, and some of the other Star Trek books. Also some books recommended by a librarian that, in retrospect, were in no way appropriate for a 12 year old. I liked “Grendel”, but it was definitely not a book for a 6th grader. Neither was Welcome to the Monkey House.
I think my biggest problem with this episode — and one of my problems with TAS’s concepts in general — is the idea of the force field belts. Using a force field as a spacesuit is a dumb idea, since if anything disrupts the power, you’re dead. It has no safe failure mode. (I have the same problem with force field “doors” on brigs.) It’s also hard to believe a transparent force field can shield against all the radiation in space. Not to mention visible light. Real spacesuits need shaded visors because the Sun is so damn bright without an atmosphere in the way. Maybe FFBs are only for use in deep space where there’s no bright star in proximity? (Which might work, since their only other uses are underwater in “The Ambergris Element,” on a frozen planetoid some distance from Beta Lyrae in “The Slaver Weapon,” and on an asteroid in “The Pirates of Orion.”)
And I used to complain about the lack of any evident air tanks as well, until someone pointed out to me (just a day or two ago, in fact) that the life-support gear in “The Squire of Gothos” has belt-mounted air tanks about as compact as the “power packs” on the rear of the FFBs here. And the spacesuits we see in later productions also seem to have more compact air tanks than present-say suits do (and no tanks at all were in evidence in the “Tholian Web” suits, unless they were in the sides of those bizarre helmets). So at least it’s consistent, more or less.
It’s also a bit coincidental. They never had FFBs before, but now they suddenly have enough for the entire crew to instantly switch over to them when life support shuts down, and are conveniently still wearing them on the bridge when the phaser dome shoots at them? That’s quite a lucky break.
I saw TAS for the first time ever this year. If anything, I actually enjoyed this opening episode quite a bit. It took immediate advantage of being animated and managed to tell a mostly solid lost alien entity story. It certainly felt much more rooted in hard sci-fi, something that TOS rarely did. Simple, but effective. The shorter runtime certainly helped. A story like this one would have dragged back in the live action seasons.
If there’s any issue in this one is that the story is really about the alien being. None of the main characters have any significant development. Of course, with the show being directed at younger audiences, Fontana couldn’t even afford to spend that much time developing any kind of interpersonal crew conflict (this reminds me of how meaningful the X-Men animated series in the 1990’s became precisely because of the consistent conflicts between characters).
As for the animation, while it’s certainly low on the frame count, with a tendency to reuse animation poses every other scene, I still didn’t have much of a problem with it. That’s probably related to the fact that I pretty much grew up on Hanna-Barbera cartoons (plus Filmation’s own He-Man and the Masters of the Universe). I’m certainly used to the limited animation. I even embraced the show’s designs and color scheme.
The voice acting, on the other hand, is definitely noticeable. You can tell most of the actors aren’t quite used to it. I had more of a problem with the music score. It’s not bad, but it feels limited compared to previous TOS efforts, and you can tell they really skimped the budget. The same jeopardy score is reused for every single episode. This wouldn’t have bothered me so much in a Hanna-Barbera production. In Trek, however, it becomes way too evident.
Eduardo Jencarelli: Not just across episodes of The Animated Series — I’ve been watching Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (another Filmation series) and I’m pretty certain the exact same jeopardy score popped up there as well.
@13 @16
I think part of the reason Beyond did less well in theaters was Into Darkness’ problems. I know I went to see Into in the cinema, but given the horrible, horrible, story in it I basically quit the franchise. I didn’t see Beyond, I just put the good reviews it got down as the usual uncritical praise that comes from the usual suspects (you know, the ones who keep on saying Agents of SHIELD is getting better, every week) who pour scorn on anyone who dares to say their favourite franchise is less than perfect. By the time I sorted through their noise and found out it actually was not made of complete suck (and if the people that made the commercials had skipped the motorcycle sequence and the Scotty leaping from a falling shuttle craft shot had skipped those, then that process would have been a lot shorter) it was out of the cinema and I had to wait for the DVD/Digital Download release.
I think Beyond will have what they call in the industry “a long tail”, which is a very Star Trek thing itself, but its relatively lower numbers are due to poor marketing which made it look like the same braindead flick that Into was, and people who had basically quit the franchise after Into’s failures, just not being willing to trust it. If Beyond had been the direct sequel to 2009 then the franchise would have gone from strength to strength. People were hyped for a “real” Trek movie following the dumb 2009 Origin Story stuff and then got the themepark version.
Which brings me to the animated series, made up of scripts deemed too sucky for Season Three of the live action show. Time to treat that like Into Darkness, Threshold, and A Night in Sickbay. What animated series? Wouldn’t it be great if they one day made one?
@23/Eduardo: Contrary to popular belief, TAS was not directed at younger audiences. It was specifically intended and promoted as the first adult-oriented animated series on Saturday morning television. It did have to be toned down for that time slot, with less violence and sexuality, but otherwise the writers tried to write it on the same level as TOS. I mean, as I said, this is a story driven by a horrible past tragedy, the members of an extraordinarily advanced ancient civilization destroying themselves and their ship to stop an evil force from spreading. This is a story (the first of at least two in TAS) where the captain is willing to kill his own crew to save others. There’s some dark stuff here.
And yes, Filmation did use a recurring library of music cues for each show, and it did recycle cues from show to show. Some of the TAS music cues actually originated on the previous season’s Lassie’s Rescue Rangers, particularly the action cue that begins here at about 18:20 when Kirk says “You have shut down life support systems and endangered members of my crew.” That one (and other Lassie cues) showed up on a number of Filmation shows, including Shazam, Isis, and Tarzan.
I’ve never minded the reuse of Filmation’s music, because these are the shows I grew up watching as a small child, and so I came to love the sound of the music. TAS’s action cues still thrill me to this day, no matter how many times they’re reused.
The music to TAS and basically all of Filmation’s shows from about 1970-82 was credited to “Yvette Blais and Jeff Michael,” but those were pseudonyms. “Blais” was Ray Ellis, the same composer who did the ’60s Spider-Man animated series (though not the composer of its famous theme song), using his wife’s name as his pseudonym. (He’d actually been scoring Filmation shows since at least 1968, under different pseudonyms.) “Michael” was Filmation co-founder and co-producer Norm Prescott, using his sons’ names as his pseudonym. I’m not sure why they didn’t use their real names, but it may have been for some kind of union-rules reason.
I definitely remember the jeopardy music from the Filmation Tarzan series. I think it was used in their Batman series, as well. Both of those series were played and re-played many times on Saturday mornings in the mid-70’s. I don’t remember seeing the Star Trek animated series in the 70’s, though. I would have been too young and not interested at the time.
The force field belts always struck me as odd, too. Since the freedom to depict new ships, new equipment, exotic aliens, etc. was one of the benefits of the animated format, I’ve always kind of wondered why the animators didn’t draw space suits similar to the “Tholian Web” designs.
@27/cosmotiger: Filmation relied on a “stock system” based on the reuse of a finite number of standard character poses and movements that could be quickly put together into an animated sequence, which let them save time and money on character animation and devote more of what little they had to background art and the like. Within the constraints of that assembly line-like system, it was simpler to use their standard character poses with a yellow outline quickly sketched around them than it was to draw a whole new set of character poses and movements in spacesuits. This is also why they have standard uniforms even underwater in “The Ambergris Element.” Except for Spock in “Yesteryear,” I don’t think we’ll see a single costume change for any of the regulars throughout this entire series, aside from accessories like force-field belts or headbands or breathing masks.
ST: The Animated Series is the only Trek I never watched, and I recently began viewing it on Netflix.
What amazes me is that the corporate overlords haven’t taken the soundtrack of these 22 episodes, replete with all the voices of the original cast, and farmed them out to an animation studio for a first class, 21st century revisualization.
I’d buy the resulting product. And so would a lot of fans. Instant cash cow.
Also recently watched the entire animated series on Netflix. Overall verdict: terrible dialogue and terrible animation make for a special kind of awesome. Though there were a few strong episodes.
@29/Gerry O’Brien: You might as well ask why nobody reshoots old black-and-white movies in color, or replaces the 1933 stop-motion King Kong with CGI, or dubs dialogue tracks onto silent movies. A creative work is a product of its time, and its limitations are part of that.
Also, a lot of TAS’s limitations are not visual. I’m not sure “first class” animation would mesh well with the flat performances and the repetitive music and sound effects. I think it would just throw them into relief.
Besides, modern execs would probably equate “first class” with “3D computer animation,” and I’d hate to see TAS reduced to that kind of sameness. Indeed, 3D animation on a TV budget isn’t really all that much better-looking than Filmation’s animation in the ’70s was. Computer animation really only looks good when there’s a ton of time, money, and talent put into it. Not to mention that, while it may not have moved much, Filmation’s design work on TAS was excellent. This was the tradeoff Filmation embraced — by spending less on animation and new drawings, they were able to put more care into the artwork they did create, favoring quality over quantity. Compare their work to Hanna-Barbera’s from the same era, and the latter is less repetitive but a whole lot sloppier and uglier. I’m a big fan of the Filmation look, and the only way I’d tolerate a reanimation is if it replicated the artistic style of Filmation’s work with more movement — say, along the lines of what Filmation did in its 1979 Flash Gordon movie.
I would not object, though, to a digital remastering that cleaned up the dirty animation cels. I did find myself rather distracted by all the specks on the cels here — something that wouldn’t have been very noticeable on ’70s TV sets, certainly not the dinky black-and-white TV I watched on, but is rather more distracting on Netflix.
I don’t know how often it’ll come up in ST:TAS, but Filmation did the some of the best water animation I’ve ever seen — it’s very evident in Tarzan.
@32/hoopmanjh: Oh yeah, they recently released Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle on DVD at long last, didn’t they? I haven’t been able to get my hands on that yet, which is a shame, since I’ve been waiting so long for a chance to see it again.
@ChristopherLBennett — They released the first season (16 episodes), at least. I’m finding it to be a surprisingly credible adaptation, although it seems to be based mainly on later books of the series (after Jane kind of vanished). And they avoid Burroughs’ problematic portrayal of African natives by, well, not actually having any African natives at any point in the series (at least of the episodes I’ve watched). Plenty of lost cities, etc., though, and several of the episodes have at least been based on the actual books.
(Not the one where he discovers a flying saucer full of aliens, though.)
@27/cosmotiger: I agree that the force field belts are odd, but I generally find the treatment of environmental suits odd.
There’s one kind of suit in The Naked Time and another one in The Tholian Web. People only seem to wear them when life support is down and not, say, when they visit a planet that’s exposed to deadly Berthold rays or afflicted by contagious mass insanity. A couple of years after the relatively comfortable suits from TOS and the force field belts seen here, Spock and Kirk wear really clunky spacesuits in TMP (but they have thrusters, so perhaps that’s why). And wouldn’t it have been nice if the Enterprise had still been equipped with environmental suits or force field belts in TWOK? Then someone could have helped Spock in the reactor room instead of standing outside and watching.
@34/hoopmanjh: Yeah, the Filmation Tarzan series was one of the most authentic screen adaptations of the books ever done, aside from toning down the violence and racism and such. (And maybe updating the period? I don’t remember when it was set, but I think I remember an episode with an airplane.)
That was one thing I liked about Filmation shows — their respect for the source material they were based on. Sometimes they took some major liberties, as with My Favorite Martians or The Brady Kids, but their action-adventure adaptations were often pretty true to the source — Star Trek being a prime example. (Despite early plans to do an animated Trek focusing on teenage cadet proteges.)
@35/Jana: The white outfits that engineering personnel wear in TMP/TWOK are radiation suits, which is why Spock took Scotty’s gloves; apparently he didn’t have time to put on a full suit. And apparently the radiation in the chamber was too intense even for the suits.
The “Naked Time” suits were more along the lines of biohazard suits than environment suits, I think.
@36/Christopher: “The “Naked Time” suits were more along the lines of biohazard suits than environment suits, I think.”
I wasn’t sure about that because they say that the life support systems had been turned off, and I don’t know what that does to the air. But it would explain why they have two different kinds of suits.
Very poorly designed biohazard suits in The Naked Time. Absolutely no obstacle for people absent mindedly breaching the bio security field. Not even a little pop up warning on the visor reading “You appear to want to breach suit protection: Did you mean to do this? Press Y to admit you want to risk your insides dissolving into a pool of goo inside your skin; and N to not be a dumbass.” That would have prevented the entire episode’s drama.
There’s another aspect of production which sets TAS apart from other animated shows. As far as I can tell, none of the show’s writers had animation background at that point. Fontana, Gerrold, Armen, Kandel, Peeples, and so on. Most worked in TOS. It’s pretty rare to see writers transitioning so effortlessly between live-action and animation as it is, and this was made over 40 years ago.
@39/Eduardo: Only about half of TAS’s episodes were written by TOS veterans, and that’s counting Walter Koenig (“The Infinite Vulcan”) and director Marc Daniels (“One of Our Planets is Missing”). It’s true that most of the other writers came from live-action TV, but Len Janson and Chuck Menville, who co-wrote “Once Upon a Planet” (with Menville then soloing on “The Practical Joker”), were animation writers who’d worked on a number of previous Filmation and Hanna-Barbera shows, usually comedies, and would continue to work in animation for decades thereafter (their later efforts include contributions to The Real Ghostbusters, Tiny Toon Adventures, and Sonic the Hedgehog, with Menville also contributing the story to Batman: The Animated Series‘s “Birds of a Feather”). David Wise, co-writer of “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth,” also specialized in animation; “Sharper” was actually his debut as a writer rather than an animator, but he’d go on to have a long animation career, the biggest highlight of which was probably his stint as developer and head writer of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series.
My gracious!! Had to journey at impulse power through all that heated up hyperbole just so I can talk trash. The 1st pretty much says by context this really isn’t for kids. Go outside and play while daddy’s watching his “stories”. All cartoons that came on at Saturday morning certainly any other day wasn’t for kids. Some of that bugs bunny stuff got sort of rough. I saw one once featuring the voice and dance movements of the great Cab Calloway. It was talking about kicking the gong around. Slang for smoking opium. The imagery was damn unsettling too. Gunplay, knife fights, suicides oh no no. That’s why I didn’t want to start school. I’d miss my beloved mind twisters. I was one of the forerunners who eventually made being an odd too smart nerd deriguer. That means fashionable. Anyway The Slaver Weapon was my favourite followed by Yesteryesr. What kid but a loner geek would appreciate that one. The premise of The Infinite Vulcan was nice,but why the hell so damn tall Pavel? The Majiks of magus tu was amusingly absurd. Down on the list is the one featuring the meso America plumed serpent kulkulcan or Quetzalcoatl. The one who originally didn’t require sacrifice. The cannibal thing? The area was low in animal protein. They were not Judeo-Christian and quite hungry. Besides as all children say everyone else is doing it. Near the bottom The Terytan Incident. Perhaps children not like we brainy types would have liked that one. Peace and long life
Hmmm… I thought I had seen all the animated series episodes (wow, just found out that my brain thinks TAS refers to Batman exclusively) and don’t remember this one at all.
I think some of the animation faults that people are talking about are really apparent in Yesteryear (that’s young Spock right?). Even as a child the repeated animation bothered me.
I’m glad you are including this in the re-watch. I’m looking forward to the Kzinti episode and the Serpent’s Tooth one (although that is also a repeat of themes we have seen before in TOS).
@40/Christopher: I stand corrected. I knew I was probably going to be wrong on that count and should have done some more research on the non-TOS writers. And I should have noticed Wise. I was a regular viewer of TMNT back in the early 1990’s.
Good timing: In Kirk’s words, “The impossible has happened.” On Tuesday, Nov. 29, La-La Land Records is releasing a limited-edition 50th-anniversary set of Star Trek “musical rarities” including, for the first time anywhere (outside of YouTube), a compilation of Star Trek: The Animated Series music cues:
https://www.facebook.com/lalalandrecords/posts/10154862896393755
This is a must-buy for me, even though I can barely afford it right now. Handily, it assigns names to the TAS music tracks (not sure if they’re genuine or made up for the set), which could be handy for future discussions in these Rewatch threads.
Animated series is so awesome to watch. Its easier to watch that the live original series. I have the DVD collection of the animated series and found it on reruns on t.v. They should animate a new series to bring about a new generation to love Star Trek
Not the best start to TAS but a descent enough one. The utter alieness of the ship. The nifty new tech. New, alien crew members.. What’s not to like? Well, the story is a little thin but that’s to be expected with the new for Trek 1/2 hour format.
As far as the animation goes, sure it’s a little stiff and repetitive but the likenesses are spot on. All the returning characters are instantly recognizable. We lose Chekov but get two aliens in exchange. I hate to see Walter left out but we actually end up with a larger cast than we did in TOS. We even get Kyle back!
As fast as the life support belts, sure, you’re one failure away from death but the same could be said for environmental suits. Seeing as we never saw one fail, even when subjected to phaser fire. I’d say that they’re pretty effective and safe and no more ludicrous than some of the other tech we’ve seen in Trek over the years.
Seeing how The Ultimate Computer showed us the danger of a fully autonomous starship, I can understand why the automatic bridge defense system was discontinued. Considering how often the Enterprise was taken over in the past, why give those same people access to a remote system for disabling or killing the bridge crew. Interesting idea that would undoubtedly end up being used against the crew.
All in all, I rank it a smidge higher than KRAD, 5/10
@46/kkozoriz: “As fast as the life support belts, sure, you’re one failure away from death but the same could be said for environmental suits.”
Not exactly. If a spacesuit’s power fails, then you still have an air supply for a while, possibly long enough to be rescued or to repair it yourself. Plus you’re still inside a protective garment robust enough to shield you from micrometeoroids and at least some kinds of radiation. But if a force field belt’s power fails, even for a moment, you instantly lose all your air and shielding. So a failure is far more likely to be lethal in that case.
“Seeing as we never saw one fail, even when subjected to phaser fire. I’d say that they’re pretty effective”
We only saw them used in four instances, so that’s a hasty conclusion to draw. Safety engineering is about safeguarding against every failure you can think of, not just commonplace ones. What people don’t realize about Murphy’s Law is that it’s not just a sardonic observation about the cussedness of life, but a principle of safety design in engineering. “Anything that can go wrong will” means that, if your design doesn’t protect against a given failure mode, then it’s inevitable that it will eventually fail in that way. So you want to design a system in a way that guards against any conceivable failure mode. We can conceive of the failure of a spacesuit’s power systems — however robust the system, there may still be rare instances of malfunction, or encounters with exotic power-damping phenomena or technology out in space. And between the two options, a spacesuit power failure is less certain to kill the user than a force field belt power failure. Therefore, good engineering logic says spacesuits are better. If there are advantages to having a force field, fine — project it on top of a nice basic pressure suit. Redundancy is part of good design too.
But we’re not talking about good engineering logic, we’re talking about Star Trek.
Good engineering logic would not put the bridge in such a vulnerable spot or front it with a big window as seen in the reboot films. It would also give us seats that aren’t likely to toss people across the room when struck by weapon fire. We also wouldn’t get huge showers of sparks when a console goes dead. It would give us airlocks on shuttlecraft. It would require people to beam down to new planets in some sort of protective garment. Thankfully, we’re not dealing with reality here. We’re dealing with escapist fiction with a sci-fi twist and hopefully a little moral angle at the end.
Yes, Mr. Murphy is well known in the 23rd century and beyond but that hasn’t made Trek address those concerns in the name of good engineering logic.
Case in point, the film First Contact. Why was Worf’s suit cut and Picard’s visor cracked? Because it was dramatic. And yet there’s simple solutions to both of those problems. We didn’t get them because it was necessary to put the characters in peril.
It’s fiction, not an engineering class. No matter how thoroughly you design the tech to conform to good engineering practices, the writer is always free to change or ignore them to create their desired effect.
A life support belt will be more effective than an environmental suit until it isn’t and the other way around in revoise too </Bugs Bunny>
@48/kkozoriz: “But we’re not talking about good engineering logic, we’re talking about Star Trek.”
We can do both. There’s plausibility, which includes good engineering logic, and there’s budgetary constraints and the demands of storytelling, e.g. keeping it dramatic and entertaining and featuring the main characters a lot. Those are conflicting priorities, but that doesn’t require an either/or decision. It means that the writers must find a balance between the two.
My favourite example are landing parties. In a realistic setting, they wouldn’t include the captain, the first officer and the chief medical officer most of the time. That’s a concession to the demands of storytelling. On the other hand, they usually include others as well – security personnel, yeomen, domain experts. That makes them feel more realistic, or more plausible. In contrast, TNG away teams are both more plausible (because the captain and the doctor usually stay on board) and less so (because the same nine people do everything).
Oh, and I don’t agree with “escapist” either.
Hi Keith
If possible could you please do a quick blurb on the animated series – i never saw it, i don’t think its ever been on the air in NZ, so home come it was created after the bad ratings and shittyness of season 3 – what prompted this return? how come the actors were keen to reprise their roles? (if you know that information – but your added behind the scenes info is what i love about your reviews).
Cheers,
John
@50/John: The original series may not have had good enough ratings in first run to stay on the air, but its syndicated reruns over the next few years were a big hit. And contrary to the myth Roddenberry created, NBC’s executives always liked the show; it was just a question of finding a way to do it affordably. The animated format gave them a way to do that. As for the quality of season 3, that wasn’t a factor, because TAS was under the creative control of Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana, neither of whom had been in charge of season 3.
As for the actors, I have an old fanzine where Roddenberry says that they signed on because they were reassured that Filmation was being faithful to the show and that it wasn’t being changed or dumbed down for Saturday mornings. But a lot of them had career slumps after TOS due to typecasting, Shatner in particular, so maybe they just needed the work.
49. JanaJansen – There’s plausibility, which includes good engineering logic
Yes, and we’ve seen Trek use force fields in a number of ways. Why not as a life support belt? If we’re going to stick to plausibility then we need to get rid of warp drive, the transporter and human/alien hybrids just to name a few.
The story is often told that Roddenberry introduced phasers because he wanted the hand weapons to do things that lasers couldn’t. The problem is that he then created something with no scientific plausibility. Where exactly does all the matter go when something is disintegrated? And, as time went on, phasers became more of a Swiss army knife. Need it to do something? Toss in a couple of lines of technobabble and voila!
Now, if you look at Star Trek tech just in context to the shows, then sure, they work pretty great. But from a real world viewpoint, they might as well be magic wands. Same with the life support belts. They work just fine in Trek but not in the real world. Good thing they only exist in the shows then, isn’t it?
As Trek is set in a fairly realistic setting, I expect a different amount of plauibilty than I do from, say, a Superhero movie. I can accept Superman picking up an airplane and it doesn’t collapse because that’s how it works in the comics. That doesn’t mean that I expect Trek to be follow real world physics. If it did, it would be a totally different show. as long as it’s fairly consistent with itself, then I’m good with it. Remember, the answer to the question “How fast is the Enterprise” is “As fast (or slow) as the plot demands'”. Same with environmental suits and life support belts. “How safe are they?” is answered “Perfectly, until the writer decides that they aren’t.”
@52/kkozoriz: I don’t disagree with you in general. As I said, it’s the question of finding a balance between plausibility and storytelling demands.
Warp drives, “class M” planets, humanoid aliens, and universal translators are necessary prerequisites for the stories, so that’s fine. The rest is a matter of personal taste. You’re okay with force field belts, Christopher isn’t. Me, I can easily accept human-alien hybrids and Earth-parallel cultures because accepting humanoid aliens is such a big step for me that these things feel minor in comparison. But I don’t like “Swiss army knife” technology and I enjoy when the fictional technology follows good engineering logic. So, it was mostly that one sentence of yours that I wanted to complain about.
53. JanaJansen – I’d agree with you if that particular ship hadn’t sailed almost from the start of TOS. I was hoping that the reboot would take a step in that direction but it seems to have actually taken a step backwards. Magic blood? Fix the warp drive by kicking it into position? The transporter can lock onto Kirk and Sulu while they’re falling but can’t keep ahold of Amanda when she falls a couple of feet?
Trek is Sci-Fi. That is, it has the trappings of science but it’s really just a paper thin veneer. And that’s fine. It’s primarily entertainment with a moral centre in it’s best stories. Scientific realism is way down the list of reasons why I watch it.
By the way, I keep forgetting to mention the dialogue blooper in this episode. After the entity fires the Enterprise‘s phasers to destroy the alien ship, Sulu says the phasers activated themselves, and Kirk says, “And mutual override did not work?” Clearly it was supposed to be “manual override” and Shatner misread the line. One of the numerous problems resulting from the haste and lack of consistent actor direction in TAS.
I’m sure I have heard Walter explain this but since I am blanking and this seems to be the perfect time to bring it up:
Why was EVERY ACTOR EXCEPT Walter Koenig brought back for TAS?
(I have not seen the majority of these shows and to the best of my knowledge are not currently airing on my cable channels although I believe I DID read the AD Foster versions.)
@56/Lou Israel: They couldn’t afford the entire cast. They were going to leave out Takei, Nichols, and Koenig and have Doohan and Barrett play their characters, but Leonard Nimoy protested because it would’ve left the show with an all-white cast. So they added Takei and Nichols, but they just couldn’t afford Koenig as well. Although he did participate as the writer of “The Infinite Vulcan.”
@13 – krad: Yes, our money is just as good. :)
So then, the start of The Animated Series. It started out quite well with the magnificently surreal and beautiful alien derelict ship. If only the plot remained there to explore! It then turned into a cut-down version of “Wolf in the Fold” with a malevolent alien taking over the Enterprise‘s functions but with a bit less maniacal glee over murdering the crew. As Keith said, the being’s loneliness is an interesting (and dark) angle but nothing’s done with It and it comes out of nowhere. It has no motivation; why does it want to go to the center of the Galaxy so badly?
The episode’s brevity is a blessing and a curse. A blessing because so many episodes of The Original Series were overlong and struggling to maintain pacing, a curse because there’s now far less room to explain or explore.
@59/Fujimoto: It doesn’t want to go to the center of the galaxy, it just wants to go back into the galaxy. It’s been stranded here on (supposedly) the outermost rim of the galaxy, existing in solitary confinement for 300 million years with no one to talk to and nothing to do. So it wants to go back to where there are people.
I’ve been following these re-watches in order to catch myself up before delivering into modern Trek – TV wise, I haven’t watched anything past Enterprise since it first aired, & tapped out of the new movies at Into Darkness; I’m not quite in the “JJ ruined my childhood” camp, though after his two Treks & two Star Wars catastrophes I can understand the position…(And I do keep meaning to watch Beyond, as I’ve heard good things) – and have been enjoying the comments sections for the discussion and additional information, though I find it rather amusing that now 5+ years later there are now TWO new animated series yet no new movie!
@61. vegandanimal
As you’ve discerned, I think it’s fair to say modern Trek is very divisive. Alex Kurtzman, one of the writers behind Trek 2009 & Into Darkness, oversees all the new shows and they’re very much of the same mould (that said, I like all 3 reboot movies, but none of the new shows. Go figure!)
As well as reviewing the new shows, Keith R.A. DeCandido has just started a rewatch of Enterprise, so I’d encourage you to join in with that. The conversation is fab is it’s bound to be interesting to see how our collective assessment of Enterprise has changed given its initial reception and the very different shape of Trek today.
@62/lemondetective: “I think it’s fair to say modern Trek is very divisive.”
No more than every Trek revival has been divisive. This is the classic recency illusion, assuming that what’s happening now is different from what’s happened in the past. The truth is that it’s no different. The original animated series was divisive — some accepted it and others didn’t. TMP was divisive, with many detractors. TNG was very divisive — the purists hated the idea of Trek without Kirk and Spock, and it was years before the fanbase as a whole, let alone the TOS actors, finally came around and accepted it. DS9 and VGR were divisive in their own ways — DS9 for being too daring and breaking with conventions, VGR for being too tame and clinging too much to conventions. ENT was divisive, or maybe just not widely liked at all. And so on. New Trek is always divisive, because the fans have never, ever been monolithic in their tastes or preferences. I’ve been around long enough to see the exact same complaints and criticisms get dragged out for every new incarnation, and the critics always make the mistake of assuming this new iteration of Trek is somehow uniquely worse than all the previous ones that were criticized in exactly the same way.
The only real difference is that fans have had less time to get used to the newest thing. If you look at them objectively, every Trek series has had a wealth of problems and bad episodes, but we choose to remember the good parts and gloss over the bad parts. So they look better to us in retrospect, distilled down to just the best parts that we choose to remember, than they actually were on a week-to-week basis. And that creates the illusion that the newer version has more problems or more bad episodes.
@63. ChristopherLBennett
I had a feeling you might raise that point! You’re absolutely right about the classic recency illusion and certainly there were many who were upset when TNG arrived, but I think a fair argument can be made that the recent shows have proven far more divisive, such is the tendency of contemporary discourse.
TNG took a while to find its feet but it became a bona fide cultural phenomenon by the fourth season, winning many (most?) detractors over. No matter how successful modern Trek may be, it hasn’t achieved anything like that and continues to inspire passionate division.
Part of that (I think) is due to the change of tone and nature of the new shows – far more pronounced than that between TOS and TNG. Part of it is how close these new different-flavoured shows cleave to the canon of the previous ones (TNG being wisely separated by decades from TOS, allowing it to respect the past whilst forging its own path forward).
The Kelvin films I could enjoy for what they were (and I really do enjoy them) because they were definitively separated from the Prime canon. The shows just don’t work for me though, driven as they are by melodrama, gratuitous violence, warp 10 pacing & VERY loose fantasy writing and yet deliberately bound tight to the canon. The anachronism is too pronounced.
There’s obviously a grateful audience for it, but to bring us back to the original point I do think it’s a fair assessment that said audience and many who don’t like the new show are far more visibly divided than with previous Trek.
@64/lemondetective: “I think a fair argument can be made that the recent shows have proven far more divisive”
No. The hate for Enterprise and for the Kelvin movies was probably more virulent than what I hear about the Secret Hideout shows. Yes, these days we have YouTube video makers who profit by stirring up fan outrage, but that’s artificial and isn’t about the shows themselves, just the increased toxicity of fan culture.
If anything, I’d say the most intense and irrational fan hate I’ve seen in my life was toward the Kelvin films. To a large extent, the hate toward the Secret Hideout shows seems to me like a continuation of that lingering Kelvin hate, because of Kurtzman’s involvement and the stylistic similarities.
“TNG took a while to find its feet but it became a bona fide cultural phenomenon by the fourth season, winning many (most?) detractors over. No matter how successful modern Trek may be, it hasn’t achieved anything like that and continues to inspire passionate division.”
I don’t think that’s a valid comparison or a fair one, because you have to take the larger context into account. When TNG came along, SFTV in general was sparse and generally low in quality. (People today always talk about how bad season 1 was, but to viewers like me at the time, it was terrific, because almost everything else was so very much worse.) TNG created the boom of quality SFTV that emerged in its wake and has continued ever since, and that’s a large part of the reason for its lasting impact. But it’s also the reason that no later Trek show has been able to achieve the same level of prominence, because by now there are just so many successful SF/fantasy franchises that no single one can dominate the culture to the degree that TOS and TNG did.
Besides, I think the current crop of Trek shows are winning more people over. They’ve certainly won me over. I found Discovery‘s first two seasons extremely uneven — occasionally potent and brilliant, but generally highly problematical and annoying on a number of levels. Season 3 was good overall though still with some issues, and so far I’m liking season 4 quite a bit. It feels to me like the show has finally hit its stride and found its identity, much like TNG after a similar length of time. Picard was mixed in its quality and the reactions to it, but Lower Decks and Prodigy have both been widely praised, and there’s a lot of excitement about Strange New Worlds. I’m sure the hardcore haters continue to wallow in their hate, because they always do, but on the whole, public approval of the Secret Hideout shows seems to be on an upswing.
“Part of that (I think) is due to the change of tone and nature of the new shows – far more pronounced than that between TOS and TNG.”
I have negative sympathy for anyone who claims to be a Trek fan but is opposed to change and novelty. Trek’s literal mission statement is to boldly seek out the new and different. The reason it became a hit in the first place was because it dared and innovated and did things that had never been done before in SFTV. So anyone who’s afraid of change and novelty is missing the whole damn point of Star Trek, both what it stands for thematically and what defines it as a creative work.
Besides, the cool thing about today’s Trek shows is that they all have different tones and approaches, so it makes no sense to make a blanket generalization. They all offer something different, so even if you don’t like one or two, you might like another one better. That’s the value of a shared universe.
Quoth lemondetective: “I think a fair argument can be made that the recent shows have proven far more divisive, such is the tendency of contemporary discourse.”
Good Lord, no. I still remember quite clearly the online and in-person discourse regarding Enterprise when it debuted in 2001. It was at least as divisive as what we’re getting now from people who dislike the Secret Hideout shows. In fact, it’s mostly the same complaints, which just makes it that much more hilarious and borderline pathetic.
As Christopher said, every time there’s a new Trek, there’s a hue and cry about how awful it is, and how it’s ruining Trek, and so on, going back to when this animated series debuted (“Star Trek shouldn’t be a cartoon!”), and again in 1979 (“the technology’s all different, it must be an alternate timeline!”), in 1987 (“you can’t do Trek without Kirk, Spock, and McCoy!”), in 1993 (“you can’t do Trek if it’s not on a starship!”), in 1995 (“Trek isn’t Lost in Space!”), in 2001 (“the technology’s all different, it must be an alternate timeline!”), in 2009 (“Trek isn’t Star Wars!”), and in 2017 (“the technology’s all different, it must be an alternate timeline!”).
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@66/krad: And of course, before there were any movies and sequels to complain about, we just complained about how crappy season 3 was and how Fred Freiberger destroyed Star Trek.
@63. ChristopherLBennett
I’d argue that Game of Thrones represents a TNG-scale cultural zeitgeist, but I certainly take your point that Trek can’t dominate culture in the same way anymore.
Not opposed to change, myself. The Kelvin movies exhibit a modern style and sensibility that’s totally divorced from TOS but sits just fine with me because the filmmakers are saying (via the hackneyed device of time travel) that this is a fresh start and separate from what already existed- take it on its own terms. I’ve not watched Lower Decks, but what I’ve seen certainly makes a case for it being a totally different show that can be appreciated within and without the context of Trek whilst not having any discernible impact on the other shows.
The moment the new shows (generalisation intended – bear with me!) ceased to be credible to me was in Picard – watching Icheb being violently murdered. I found it voyeuristic and tasteless, very jarring for Trek, which was then compounded by the matter being contrived character motivation for Seven. This highlights the flaw of a shared universe – one show impinges on another by virtue of its contrasts. As a result, my enthusiasm and interest for whatever they come up with next wanes.
I was a kid when TNG aired. Both it and TOS tought me much about the world. DS9 taught me much about the darkness and nuance of life. VOY and ENT were just a bit of fun really, but they too had worthwhile things to say in the same stylistic tone of voice. I couldn’t watch Picard or Discovery if I was a child now. Its universal appeal is discarded for the sake of a narrower approach to storytelling that doesn’t afford Trek the chance to tell stories it couldn’t before or tackle new themes. If anything, it diminishes Trek as it merely apes the sensibilities of contemporary shows.
All that said, the Trek of old withered and died. New Trek is a range of shows made for a different audience with different tastes, sensibilities and expectations. It makes no difference to me, but it would be nice if they made a show that appealed to the same sensibilities as the old ones (there’s hope for Strange New Worlds).
Edit: ChristopherLBennett / KRAD, I defer to your experience and wisdom regarding the uproar each new iteration of Trek has caused. As is evident, I was far too young to have witnessed the miseries of the past!
@68 Basically KRAD, Chris (and mine!) argument is: Get Off My Tribble Lawn! While Yelling at Energy Cloud.
I quite like the variety of approaches being taken by the various series. And I’m fine for rehashing the old sensibilities–but only if it’s one series among a variety of approaches.
@68/lemondetective: “I couldn’t watch Picard or Discovery if I was a child now. Its universal appeal is discarded for the sake of a narrower approach to storytelling that doesn’t afford Trek the chance to tell stories it couldn’t before or tackle new themes.”
TOS was a pretty adult show by the standards of the ’60s, pushing the envelope on skin and sexuality. It managed to get a following of younger viewers, largely in mid-afternoon syndicated reruns in the ’70s, but that was in spite of its adult-oriented intentions. And TNG started out trying to be even more racy, when Roddenberry was in charge, as seen in episodes like “The Naked Now” and “Justice.” It was only later that it came to be seen as a more staid and well-behaved show. But DS9 went back to pushing the envelope, doing some pretty racy and adult episodes. “Rejoined”‘s lesbian kiss was seen as quite “adult” and controversial by the day’s standards, so much so that a number of markets cut that scene out or refused to air the episode at all. It was because Trek tackled daring stories and themes that it was often considered inappropriate for children. There’s nothing new about that. The only difference now is that the standards have loosened so much over the decades, so that what was considered extremely racy and adult in the ’60s (bared bellybuttons, I may swoon!) or the ’90s (girls kissing girls, we’re all doomed!) is now considered perfectly suitable for children. Trek hasn’t become any more adult than it was to begin with; it’s just that it’s advanced along with society as a whole as our prudishness has diminished.
@69. gwangung
I think we can all agree Anson Mount was excellent as Pike, right? Looking forward to SNW.
@70. ChristopherLBennett
Perhaps I was just fortunate, but there was nothing about Trek that was deemed inappropriate in my house, despite it dealing with adult themes. It felt to me like a great way to learn about ethics, identity and all manner of complex adult things and I guess my parents agreed. Lucky me.
I wouldn’t say the same applies to graphic violence though. Even the most liberal minded modern parent would surely look upon that scene and question it’s appropriateness? Same goes for Disco’s awkward Klingon sex scene.
Speaking of sex – even as a kid I noticed TNG era Trek had an awkward relationship with sex. The show itself seemed prudish, even when DS9 was pushing the envelope. Was that to suit the tastes of a general American audience? Sex just seemed a lot more casual on British TV shows in the 80’s and 90’s. ENT then went in the direction of a teenager who just discovered a racy magazine. So there’s lots new Trek can accomplish (and seems to be trying to) when it comes to sexual themes.
@70 TOS has some really nice beefcake due to Kirk having a problem in keeping his shirt whole.
If they can stick the landing of Strange New Worlds and it has more of an episodic bent, I will be extremely happy. Not only would it be more Star Trek, it would tell other franchise owners that you can have a lot series from the same franchise running at the same time. I know SF TV has had a number of spin-offs running along side their originator but I can’t think of any doing three, let alone five. Well, I suppose the Arrowverse and Marvels has/had several ongoing shows at the same time but that feels like multiple franchises in the same world which hits differently.
Wow, I didn’t expect too restart discussion up again, though I appreciate the opportunity to interact!
@lemondetective: I don’t mind the first of the new films on it’s face – in fact I’d long argued with my friends that if they did a reboot rather than a continuation they should embrace the modern (though I don’t think the iStore in Space esthetic is going to age well as the “classic” 23rd century design, as Dax would say) – my argument was just they should have leaned into it more i.e. old Trek was 200 odd years in the future as seen through the lens of the 1960s, new Trek should be 200 years in the future as imagined in the “present” of the late 2000s.
What irked me was the trying to smash both ideas together and use badly explained time travel as an excuse, and not being bothered to acknowledge the problems that caused within the narrative of the actual films.
As an action popcorn film it’s mostly fine, but it pretty much abandons the original characters to turn them into the pop-culture versions of them – as KRAD has pointed out in his reviews, rule braking womanising Kirk is what people imagined about later movie Kirk, and ST09 is that turned up past 11.
I’m fine with them all being different due to changed life experiences, but in that case you can’t just play the same character beats over again and have it make sense, particularly just for random unearned nostalgia (ST:ID was that done badly in overdrive for me, and TWOK isn’t even my favourite Trek film!).
Sorry for going so off topic – I’d written a lot more (too much!) about my complaints about the films logistical problems before I read @66 KRAD pointing out how people do that for every Trek, and my original point was to agree with what has previously been said about taking each version as a product of when it was produced, and appreciate it in that context but also see how it holds up now. :D
@ChristopherLBennett: it’s funny to think about the lack of Sci-Fi TV in the 80s – when TNG made it to the UK, it filled the Doctor Who hole in a way that the then weekly weekend marathon repeats of actual Who just couldn’t, and as a teen I didn’t see the problems of the early series as much as I do now (other than always hating Code of Honor – even in 1990 I couldn’t believe how racist it was, and could tell how uncomfortable the actors were in it!) – but for me it was by far the best thing on TV.
And I was already a Patrick Stewart fan from I, Claudius (the first “grown up” book I read, which I did repeatedly until it fell apart, and wore out the VHS!), Excalibur and Dune so seeing who was (to me) a big name British Actor as Captain of the Enterprise was great.
Funny my parents were very much “it’s not real Trek” when it came out, but have pretty much now completely reversed – they’ve been watching a couple of episodes of TNG or VOY pretty much every night for 20 years! Not DS9, which is a personal gripe of mine as that’s my fave Trek series to date – but I was also a big B5 fan too (I even defend Crusade as a good show overall!)
And I’ve tried to avoid the YouTube criticism scene since I found out how much money those “critics” are makeing purely from feeding the outrage machine with “this agrees with my prejudices even though I don’t watch the show” views of vids – particularly from one group who admitted their early videos were basically a joke people took way to seriously, to the extent creators have acknowledged that they have influenced new projects, but still dunk on the new stuff for not being real Trek/Wars they want.
And @krad I remember how toxic the online Enterprise talk was back then too! One of the reasons I’ve not watched it since is because I actually quite liked it at the time and found a lot of the vitriol unfounded – and as a very online Lefty* Brit in the early-mid 00s the discussions we had about it back then were wild, as it basically boiled down to the RW people going “Earth was right to go full military intervention after Alien 9/11, and the Federation was bad because it made them into Evil Space Communism!” while LW people I knew were “Enterprise shows that Trek was always just Americas ideal of a future Fascist Utopia!” with me going “hey, they’re just TV shows!!”
Closest I’ve ever been to being a “Centrist” lol
I’ll have to do a much faster binge and take @lemondetective advice to get to your Enterprise reviews :)
*I’m actually an Anarcho-Communist now, but was a Weirdy Beardy Left-Liberal then.
(Also, apologies for this being a bit all over the place and for spelling/grammar mistakes – I have tried to put it together while looking after my nieces and then deal with a couple of hyperactive dogs, and haven’t the chance to double proof read!)
I guess I’m just a TOS fan. I always seem to drift away from the later Treks after a season or two.
My real issue with 2009 and later movies is they turned the crew into teenyboppers then gave them a top of the line ship. Who Does That???? Nobody in any iteration of the real world.
My issue with the new shows is the ridiculously over the top, universe ending stakes. I’m not a fan of the way they pile on the angst either.
I guess they broke my suspension of disbelief.
I admit I gave up on the Star Trek franchise during Voyager. It wasn’t the change in concept, I actually think it was a strong concept, but the writing in the early seasons, was pretty weak and so I bailed after the episode that shall not be named. That episode, combined with the magically infinite number of shuttle crafts, at least early on, just turned me off. A few years later Battlestar Galactica did the whole moving through space with limited resources much better.
I have heard that the Voyager became better as it went on, but by that time I had lost interest. I had lost so much interest that I didn’t even have Enterprise on my radar.
Now there are plenty of quality Scifi, or fantasy shows out there, so the current Star Trek, that I have to pay for just isn’t on my radar. I’m glad the franchise continues for those who like it, but I just kind of phased out.
A lack of Sci-Fi TV in the 80s? I guess you folks never saw a little gem called… Small Wonder. ;-)
(75). Yes, that’s the case for me as well. I really want to like the new Treks, but they’re so overblown I can’t even bother trying to watch them anymore. Third Rock from the Sun was more subtle.
@76/percysowner: “combined with the magically infinite number of shuttle crafts, at least early on”
I will never understand why anyone thinks it strange that a ship with replicator technology would be able to replace lost shuttlecraft. And “Extreme Risk” literally showed us how they replace shuttles, so that really should’ve been the end of it.
Also, Voyager lost at most three shuttles in the first two seasons, at most two more in the third. Hardly infinite. The heaviest shuttle losses were in seasons 4-5, with 5-10 shuttles lost in just two years.
@75 one thing I liked about the 2009 movie was the amount of bizarre events implied by Starfleet giving the Enterprise to a bunch of near kids. The sheer disconnect between current military or bureaucratic practice and what Starfleet does is astounding. The sheer scope of fan wanker required for it to make sense is delicious.
(80). About a decade ago (geez), I had an online run-in with none other than a writer of the 2009 movie, who shall go nameless, who also presented himself as, shall we say, a ‘conspiracy theorist’ of all things 9/11 and otherwise in this fan group. Quite obnoxiously at times, frankly. Anyway, I presented to him that the plot of his movie was also a vast conspiracy to get young Kirk in command of the Enterprise.
He didn’t seem to appreciate the humor in it.
@75 & 80: I’ve always felt the 2009 movie could have been improved greatly simply by putting a 4-year gap between the Academy sequence and the attack on Vulcan. That way Kirk and the others could have accumulated a decent amount of experience to make the outcome more credible, and Chekov’s age would’ve aligned correctly with his Prime counterpart. The plot would otherwise have been pretty much unaffected. They’d already covered 25 years in the course of the film up to that point, so adding another 4 wouldn’t have been hard.
krad: “If there isn’t a new Trek film in three years, I’ll be stunned.”
That didn’t age well.
Disco Scottie: obviously, I was stunned……..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido