A Brief Guide to Star Trek

those who say things like “If it were not so cerebral . . .”, and such garbage. [I] am wide open to criticism and suggestions, but not from those who think answers lie in things like giving someone aboard a dog, or adding a cute eleven-year-old boy to the crew.’ Later,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
would come close to the ‘cute eleven-year-old boy’ in Roddenberry’s own creation of the youthful wunderkind character of Wesley Crusher, while
Star Trek: Enterprise
would include Porthos, the captain’s dog, among the ship’s crew.
    Despite this combative attitude, Roddenberry did admit (quoted in
Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages
) that as a producer he’d perhaps failed to deliver what he’d promised. ‘They probably felt that I had broken my word. In the series format I had promised a
Wagon Train
to the stars action/ adventure, science-fiction style. But, instead, ‘The Cage’ was a beautiful story, but it wasn’t action/adventure. It wasn’t what I had promised. Clearly the problem with the first pilot was easily traced back to me. I got too close to it and lost perspective. I had known the only way to tell
Star Trek
was with an action/adventure plot. I forgot my plan and tried for something proud.’
    With ‘The Cage’, Roddenberry’s storytelling ambitions had trumped his years of practical production experience. According to him, it was only the prospect of the US landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, as pledged by President Kennedy at the start of the decade, that made NBC pay con -tinued attention to
Star Trek
beyond ‘The Cage’.
    In approaching a potential second pilot episode, Roddenberrywas willing to tone down the Spock character, a compromise as NBC has originally wanted him removed altogether. Ironically, the alien Spock would turn out to be the only character retained from ‘The Cage’ in the ongoing
Star Trek
series. Indeed, he would go on to become one of the most iconic characters in the history of television and one of the most loved of all the
Star Trek
characters.
    ‘They rejected most of the cast [of “The Cage”] and asked that Spock be dropped too,’ Roddenberry recalled. ‘I said I would not do a second pilot without Spock because I felt we had to have him for many reasons. I felt we couldn’t do a space show without at least one person on board who constantly reminded you that you were out in space and in a world of the future. NBC finally agreed to do the second pilot with Spock in it, saying, “Well, kind of keep him in the background.”’
    Once again, the network requested a trio of potential story outlines for the second pilot. Roddenberry himself had originally written two of them (‘Mudd’s Women’ – heavily rewritten by Stephen Kandel – and ‘The Omega Glory’, a take on the politics of the Cold War), while the third was ‘Star Prime’ (later retitled ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’), written by Roddenberry’s pulp fiction source, Samuel A. Peeples.
    NBC thought Peeples’ ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ offered a better showcase for the potential of
Star Trek
than any of the ideas put forward by the show’s creator. Born in 1917, making him four years older than Roddenberry, Peeples would go on to write one other
Star Trek
episode (for
The Animated Series
), and he contributed to the storyline for the second
Star Trek
movie,
The Wrath of Khan
. However, having written hundreds of television episodes in his time, he knew how good drama worked, and he brought that to his script for
Star Trek
’s second pilot.
    One aspect of ‘The Cage’ NBC had disliked was the casting of Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike. By 1965, the actor was also reluctant to commit to a potentially long-running TV series, so when his option was not picked up for the second pilot, it came as a relief. This move allowed Roddenberry and Peeples to develop a different kind of captain for their
Enterprise
, and tobuild the drama around a key relationship between the captain and his antagonist, Gary Mitchell (
2001: A Space Odyssey
’s Gary Lockwood).
    Roddenberry modelled his new captain more closely on Horatio Hornblower: a flawed hero, or at least a hero who believed himself to be flawed. Given that, according to Robert Justman, NBC saw Hunter as ‘wooden’, Roddenberry sought out an actor with a more dynamic range and a more expressive approach to television acting.
    Roddenberry first approached Lloyd Bridges (father of