That Show I Watched

This week marks the 50th anniversary of two science fiction icons. One is me, the other is Star Trek. Since we're practically twins, I feel as though I can be brutally honest about the show, the universe, and what has become of them.

First of all, it always surprises me how unfamiliar people are with the original Star Trek series (the "Old Show"). In many of the anniversary bloviations this week I've seen writers who should know better talking about the series's swashbuckling action. That's hogwash. If you go back and look at old TV listings from the period, you see Star Trek described as "drama." There was no category for science fiction, it obviously wasn't a western, a comedy, or a cop show ��� and it wasn't action-adventure, either. The famous shirt-tearing Captain Kirk fistfights happened only a handful of times in the three years of the show's run. Most episodes required William Shatner to do nothing more strenuous than sit in a large chair and furrow his brow.

Star Trek was similar to many TV shows of the 1960s: it was secretly an anthology show. The Enterprise, Kirk, Spock ��� they were all just the frame, like Rod Serling addressing the viewer at the beginning of every Twilight Zone episode. The actual stories focused on the guest stars. They played characters caught in some dramatic conflict, and the arrival of Kirk & co. were the triggering event for the story. They were the ones who were changed by the experience; Kirk et al flew off into the sunset at the end unaffected by the past hour's drama.

When the series was reincarnated with Patrick Steward as Captain Picard aboard a bigger, computer-animated Enterprise, the shows mostly followed that same format ��� although elements of ongoing soap opera interactions among the regular characters began to creep in, following the general trend of all television series in the 1990s. But by and large, the focus was on the guest stars and their self-contained dramas, as before. Why tinker with success?

The movies required a different approach. A movie needs to feel "bigger" than a TV episode, and that meant the films had to tackle bigger subjects. And since the stars of the TV show had to be the stars of the movies, there was no way their characters could remain aloof and fly off at the end unaffected. The movies had to be about them in a way the TV episodes generally were not.

The first movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) was pretty obviously a rewritten and savagely padded pilot episode for a relaunch of the series. Much time is spent introducing characters ��� including several "first drafts" of characters who later appeared on the Next Generation TV show. The story was a fairly standard TV episode (in fact, some unkind critics pointed out that it was essentially the Old Show episode "The Changeling"), pumped up to feature length with some frankly tiresome special-effects sequences and a lot of rather pointless "character moments" unrelated to the plot.

But then, ah, Wrath of Khan, the second movie. Evidently the director, Nicholas Meyer, read Gene Roddenberry's original pitch to the network back in 1964, that Star Trek would be "Captain Hornblower in space." Meyer went to his shelf, took down C.S. Forester's original Hornblower novel Beat to Quarters, and proceeded to translate it to outer space. Hornblower became Kirk, the deranged El Supremo became Khan Noonian Singh, and since everyone was getting a little too old for Forester's romance subplot, Meyer added an old lover and a long-lost son for Kirk. To cover his tracks he threw in some quotes from Moby Dick and proceeded to make one of the best space opera movies ever.

And that success, that near-perfect Trek movie, has (I'm sorry to say) poisoned the well. All subsequent Trek movies have been variations on Wrath of Khan. Some Bad Person, usually with a personal connection to Kirk or one of the other crew, has an Insane Villainous Plan involving a doomsday weapon, and our heroes have to stop him. This often involves wrecking the Enterprise. The films have added more and more emphasis on action-adventure rather than drama.

So, now that we're both looking at the big Five-O, I have some advice for my contemporary: stop trying to be what you're not, Star Trek. You're too old to be running around acting like an action movie franchise. Get back to the things that made everyone respect you when we were young. Find some talented guest stars, throw them into dramatic situations, and see how they resolve things. Best of all, you don't even need the frame any more. Everyone on Earth knows at least the basics of the Star Trek universe. You can tell stories in that setting with no starship dropping by before the opening credits. Call it "Tales of the Federation" or something. Leave the space opera to That Other Franchise, and do what you do best.