A Brief Guide to Star Trek

was required every week. Hence, rather than focus on the set dressing or the ‘wow’ factor of alien environments,
Star Trek
’s core – and the main reason it has endured for over forty-five years – was to be in its unique characters.
    It is the distinctive triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy that has resulted in the
Star Trek
phenomenon living long and prospering. Each of the characters in the original series of
Star Trek
has become iconic, and that is because they are simply defined (which is not the same as being simple). The central trio are positioned at distinct points of an emotional continuum, at least to begin with. Spock is the cold, logical alien who looks quizzically upon humanity. Dr McCoy is essentially Spock’s opposite, driven by his emotions and his natural engagementwith humanity (that’s why he’s a doctor, dammit!). In between is Kirk, the leader who must strike a balance between the opposing viewpoints of Spock and McCoy, and take into account the wider welfare of his crew and the new life forms and new civilisations the
Enterprise
encounters through its explorations of the galaxy. Each is prone to extremes, and their actions are often modulated by one (or both) of the other two.
    That each of
Star Trek
’s core characters is easily summed up in an instantly recognisable iconic catchphrase is a testament to the impact of these characters on viewers worldwide. They may not have actually used any of these specific phrases that often, but they became embedded in popular culture (along with the never-uttered ‘Beam me up, Scotty’) as central to viewers’ ex -periences of
Star Trek
. When novelty group The Firm bizarrely reached number one in the UK music charts in 1987 (and became the ninth best-selling single that year) with ‘Star Trekkin’’, it was because the song was made up of nothing but phrases associated with each iconic
Star Trek
character. They were instantly recognised by British viewers who’d grown up watching the show in endless reruns throughout the 1970s. Rather than the oft-uttered ‘Hailing frequencies open, Captain’, Communications Officer Uhura gets ‘There’s Klingons on the starboard bow’, while Spock is represented by the classic ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’. McCoy gets a variation of a phrase he did often say on TV, ‘It’s worse than that – he’s dead, Jim’, while Chief Engineer Scotty is represented by the famous ‘Ye cannae change the laws of physics’. Kirk himself gets ‘We come in peace; shoot to kill’, a phrase that never appeared on the show, but summed up a popular impression of the trigger-happy captain’s approach to alien encounters (when he was not bedding alien women, of course). This approach would not necessarily work as well with the characters from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, who were harder to sum up in such simple, iconic and memorable lines.
    That these characters could be invoked in a novelty song made up of simple catchphrases twenty years after
Star Trek:The Original Series
was in production is astonishing and stands as a testament to the storytelling of Gene Roddenberry, the writers and producers and William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of
The Original Series
cast. It is this trio of characters that explains the lasting impact of
Star Trek
on pop culture worldwide.

    With an order for an initial sixteen episodes of
Star Trek
delivered by NBC in February 1966, it was down to Gene Roddenberry to draw together the stories and scripts needed to feed Robert Justman’s weekly production machine if air dates were to be maintained. The two pilots had shown just what an uphill task it would be to bring the diverse and exotic worlds of
Star Trek
to the TV screen on a weekly basis. Jefferies and Theiss were central to the task, as was Fred Phillips, who would have to handle the make-up requirements of Spock and any visiting guest star aliens-of-the-week.
    Roddenberry’s biggest and most immediate requirement by early March 1966 was for writers for the new series, with shooting due to begin at the start of June. The executive producer himself would function as an ideas and rewrite man, not an original writer, but he needed scripts he could rewrite to make them uniquely
Star Trek
. The TV writers who were to be involved in the creation of the show had to be comfortable with the fact that their work would always be subject to Roddenberry’s revisions – but not all