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| Top: Susan Olvier - Unaired pilot / Bottom: Yvonne Craig - season 3 |
I can sneer at hardcore
Star Trek nerds as well as anyone, well... al
most, Captain. The original few seasons are awesome, and still relevant, and shouldn't be just lumped in with the endless reboots that began in subsequent decades. Sneer at me now, if you must, but with pleasure robots in hot mod outfits; space drugs; space brandy in a cool bottle; space diseases that make crew members act like drunken teen trippers; cauliflower-eared hippies seeking Eden, it is perhaps still the most forward-looking and psychedelic series to ever last more than a season on TV. I love the over-the-top Shakespearian scenery chewing of Kirk contrasted with the sophisticated cool of Spock (I could do without the curmudgeon McCoy) and many of the episodes are Acidemic to the infinite power. And they're on Netflix streaming in what appears to be remastered, enhanced high-definition... the future is written, as it must be, by a show from the past.
What works in these early episodes is exactly what works in
Starship Troopers, the fantasy of a world so united and peaceful they've managed to reach out to whole new quadrants of the galaxy in friendship, but are totally ready for war; the whole idea they have the captain and a science officer landing first to sample strange new life is trippy as hell, recalling the teachings of Don Juan and the expedition to the Galapagos in
Master and Commander. The space ship exteriors, while in orbit around some cool planets, are interestingly filmed and clearly every frame was lovingly restored and even digitally made love to by some devoted tech geek so the whole thing sparkles and has minute shadows and beautiful pastel gel lights and abstract sci fi paperback planetscapes.
In the first season it's not quite at the cult of personality thing where every single cast member is a bag of mannerisms: later episodes would find Bones and his country doctor affectations, the "I'm a doctor not a band saw instructor" kind of malarkey becoming the core of the show, crankily teasing Spock about his lack of emotions like they're an old married couple; there some lessons in tolerance vis a vis run-ins with Klingons and the Romulans (who are related to the Vulcans, so a prejudiced crewman has to learn to just get along) and other cloying Stanley Kramer-esque plot machinations. But in the first season especially anything goes, and even in the other two brilliance shines far more often than not. There's no episode that truly sucks the way of, say, a lot of later X-Files episodes. But if you want to play it safe, visit the ones I describe to you now and feel that Acidemic is with you:
A memorable episode from season one is
"Miri," where the crew travel to an alternate earth that froze out in the 1960s, leaving it a small town USA ghost town (the architecture is referred to as 'ghastly' by the cranky Bones) populated only by a handful of dirt-faced scamps chanting "Bop Bop!" as they pound the table a bit like the old "one of us" from
Freaks and even creepier. The lead kid skeeved me out so much I hated the Dead End Kids and Bowery Boys forever, just cuz of that kid's (left) accent. This was and is the benchmark for all Lord Fly Amok movies, such as
Children of the Corn. If you were a kid in the 70s, you know this kid. He still scares you. Bop! Bop!
If you don't dig Kirk, and even if you do, the original pilot, "
The Cage," has a whole different crew / cast and color scheme with the exception of Spock, who abides. Their velour chalk blue uniforms with khaki green collars (above) are a perfect antidote to anyone who winces at the sight of the later ones, and there's a sexy plot, wherein Tab Hunter is abducted by near-grey baldheads and urged to mate with a hottie (Susan Oliver) who appears in many seductive scenarios (including the green sexpot atop). Damn, it's like Kilgore Trout wrote this joint!
Of course sexism is still a problem the future seems to have ignored, the women wear mini-dresses and are young and gorgeous or if older but appearing young and gorgeous through guile and trickery (and old through stage makeup). Many a growing lad, such as myself, had his first dose of hormones carbonized by Susan Oliver as the green slave dancer always seen at the very end of the credits or Mariette Hartley's awesome bod in season 3's "
All our Yesterdays." which also features a library consisting solely of metal discs that are wayyy too much like our modern DVDs (just thicker) too not be eerily prophetic. We can also bask in the relatively uncomplicated view of sex in the pre-AIDS, pre-Rush Limbaugh 60s: Hartley, then a young up and comer notes of her role:
"loved the idea that this strange man [Spock] was finally going to be schtupped and I was going to be the one to do it, and that I was going to be the one to teach him how to not be a vegetarian. So I loved the idea"
Imagine an actress using the word 'schtupped' today! She'd be crucified as a slut... such is America, still waiting for enough old white scared Christians to die off so we can finally advance a baby step towards the true liberation Star Trek evinces. Bop Bop!
Speaking of legalization and tolerance, Star Trek offers many a counterculture drug analogy: "The Naked Time" finds the gang wrestling with an inhibition-lowering disease that acts like meth or coke: Spock gets it on with the hottie nurse and Sulu and Uhura have a smoke while he shows off his Bruce Lee chest and fencing moves like a sweaty coked out mobster!
"
This Side of Paradise" finds Kirk the only member of the crew not bewitched by space poppies into becoming placid and too happy and content to do anything but loll around in the sun and love one another. Kirk tries to convince them they need goals and challenges to evolve as people, but they're too busy digging the flowers; it's not until he stirs their more violent emotions that they snap out of it. And though you can argue both sides, which is to the script's credit, it's one of the earliest examples of Kirk seeming a killjoy, especially when Spock gets the closing line "for the first time in my life, I was happy."
The idea of interstellar space plant that makes you trip out and tap into the joy of the universe is very reminiscent of Terence McKenna's theories on the
psilocibe cubensis mushroom spores, which is just one of the many areas its eerily cognizant of:
What the mushroom says about itself is this: that it is an extraterrestrial organism, that spores can survive the conditions of interstellar space. They are deep, deep purple – the color that they would have to be to absorb the deep ultraviolet end of the spectrum. The casing of a spore is one of the hardest organic substances known. The electron density approaches that of a metal. Is it possible that these mushrooms never evolved on earth? That is what the Stropharia cubensis itself suggests...
I couldn't figure out whether the mushroom is the alien or the mushroom is some kind of technological artifact allowing me to hear the alien when the alien is actually light-years aways, using some kind of Bell nonlocality principle to communicate. The mushroom states its own position very clearly. It says, "I require the nervous system of a mammal. Do you have one handy?"(
More)
Dude, here's a genius physicist talking trans-galaxial travel with a sentient mushroom! That is
SOOO Trek, but alas, Kirk responds to the ''threat' by getting rid of the pods instead of bringing them to hospitals where they can surely cure any type of life threatening disease and prepare the terminally ill to face death with dilated eyes wide to the mystery. Drug War! All you have to do is imagine the countless chemo-therapy sufferers slowly dying miserable nausea-related deaths because their home state wont let them have medical marijuana, and there you go... when will the old power lizards let us evolve into butterflies already?
If you dig the show Ancient Aliens, or the mad writings of Phillip K. Dick or David Icke you'll want to be sure and study episode 62, "Way of the Dove," an examination of a force a feeding off the hate and violence it provokes in others; Ancient Astronaut theory is indirectly explored in #31:" Who Mourns for Adonais?" wherein Apollo, an advanced laurel leaf-sporting alien from Earth's distant past who misses human worshippers, abducts the Enterprise crew; the complex idea of 'fourth dimensional' existence as occurring at a higher frequency, or speed, than our eyes can see is masterfully concretized in "Wink of an Eye," (#66, co-starring Herb "Brain that Wouldn't Die" Ankers, dressed like a masochist houseboy client of Kathie Browne's sexy space dominatrix, below) and of course there's the eerie similarity the Gorn (abover left) from Ep #17 ("Arena") has with daemonic reptilians, at least the ones I've seen.
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| Herb Evers, Kathie Browne - "Wink of an Eye" |
An episode that would be great to watch as a come-down after a double feature of
Woodstock and
Gimme Shelter would be #75, "
The Way to Eden," wherein a group of space hippies work various angles to convince the Enterprise crew to taking them into forbidden space to an allegedly pristine planet named Eden. The hippies include Charles Napier on space guitar inviting Spock to sit in and jam with the flower people!
As Wiki notes: The group is impressed by First Officer Spock, who understands their philosophy. Spock makes an oval "symbol of peace" hand gesture and simply says: "One." The group responds with the same gesture: "We are one." They ask Spock: "Are you One, Herbert?" Spock replies that he is not Herbert, and Adam declares: "He's not Herbert. We reach!"
We reach, man it's all about connection, and that's something Star Trek is keenly aware of, which is why perhaps it's so cult-ready. We science fiction fans tend to relate to feeling isolated, and man it's lonesome out in space. In the first season especially that seems to be the over-arching symptom of the galaxy. When the Enterprise drops in on old friends it's like coming back to a ghost town more often than not. Anyone who's ever had a real bad trip can relate to this; dying of loneliness in a matter of minutes, "with not even a tormentor for company." Weird aliens, lonesome in their blues, try to abduct the Enterprise, possess its crew, or challenge them to duels, just to have a nice tormentor for company. It's a good metaphor for the healing hand of television itself, the show reaching into our suburban isolation but--especially in the days before VHS--impossible to capture. We could only try and be near a set when the rerun came on. If we missed it, we missed it, until it's televisual orbit completed a turn and it became a rerun. Perhaps one day you'd come home and a tiny Enterprise would be in orbit around your disco ball, your giant face lighting up their main screens but until then there was no way to capture a moment, let alone all three seasons... truly the future is better than Rodenberry could have imagined.
As the series progressed things got a little more intentionally campy and laden with
Wild Wild West-style anachronism: many planets, it seems, have a yen for historical costumes. There are: cowboys, Indians, centurions, 20s mobsters, Nazis, enslaved working class miners, dandy fops, Abe Lincoln, and comic relief moments like tribbles and Harold Mudd. But hey, as a kid I appreciated those nods to my generation, for Star Trek never coddles or talks down (is there any show that even comes close today, as far as allowing its characters to be uniformly brilliant and analytical?) and in its even-sided examinations of problems humanity struggles with and for which there are, as yet, still no answers, it's still as modern and timely as retro-futurism can ever be.
In the trappings of escapism we can examine truths otherwise unbearable, and that in itself makes
Star Trek vital and urgent. Just keep your love of it to yourself, lest the Trekkie stigma hit you like space leprosy even as it pulls you so deep into the strange new worlds of the show that you can never leave, nor want to. Maybe soon digital media will progress past the point of screens altogether, and we'll all be able to go go back to "The Menagerie" just like the burned-out Jeffrey Hunter gets to, first watching that unaired pilot in the Enterprise inquiry room, then 'for real.' In fact I am sure it will, as all things must.
