In our continuing “Cultural Appreciation” efforts with the Terror Team, MLGB and I decided to introduce the kids to Star Trek. Interestingly enough, both of us grew up watching Star Trek though different versions. She’d seen almost every original series episode in re-runs, while I’d mainly grown up watching Next Generation and the original movies. The two of us agreed, though, that the best place to start was at the beginning. No, not Star Trek: Enterprise, but with Star Trek, or Star Trek: The Original Series as it’s eventually become known to differentiate from all of the later shows.
And so we began, although technically we skipped the pilot episode, “The Cage”, since it’s just kind of confusing to step from that into the actual show. For whatever it’s worth, we watched the remastered version of the show that’s currently available on Netflix. The remaster doesn’t add anything of significance, but replaces most of the exterior starship shots with new, cleaner CGI renderings. Sometimes these replacements work well, as in the opening/closing shots of the Enterprise, and other times they are a bit jarring, as in the shuttle craft launch in “Metamorphosis”.
Note: I’m going to keep doing these as we go through the subsequent shows and movies, although I think I’ll switch to writing one after each season/movie. There’s just too much to cover, otherwise.
It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking Star Trek was at the time it launched. America was still three years away from successfully putting a man on the moon, the Vietnam War was only just starting to expand in scope, and segregation had only just recently been overturned by the Supreme Court. Into that environment, came this optimistic view of humanity some three hundred years in a future where we’ve overcome our prejudices, gone out to explore the galaxy, and encountered a variety of alien races.
For its time, some elements of the show were decidedly transgressive, such as Lt. Uhura being a woman of African descent serving on the bridge crew. Other elements, such as the mini-skirt and go-go boot uniforms worn by female crew members, are much more at home with what we know think of as the ‘60s aesthetic.
When the show is at its best, it’s Kirk, Spock, and McCoy being thrown into some new situation on an alien planet, or trying to save the ship from some space bound threat. Greek demi-gods, alien parasites, and time travel are just a few of the challenges that the crew faces.
As the seasons go on, it’s a treat to see how Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley all start to play off of each other. For all the memes about Captain Kirk solving every problem by either shooting it or seducing it, there’s a lot of episodes where a more reasonable approach (often instigated by Spock) ultimately saves the day. Spock, is no all-knowing computer though, and the constant balance between logic and emotion is a thread throughout the entire series.
At its worst, some of the individual episodes haven’t aged well. The handful of episodes that drew their inspiration specifically from ‘60s pop culture were dated thirty years ago, much less fifty-five years from when they first aired. However, the highs of the great episodes far outweigh the lows of the mediocre ones.
There aren’t a lot of shows from the ‘60s that still stand up to repeated viewings. Star Trek is definitely one that does. My kids (the older ones, at least) very much enjoyed the trip through the series, which is probably the best argument I can make for whether the show holds up. In an era where we all do now have our own handheld communicators, and Siri or Alexa can answer our questions better than the ship’s computer on the Enterprise, we still want to believe in a future were humanity stops judging each other by our skin colors, looks past our differences, buries our old grievances, and reaches out towards the stars.