A Brief Guide to Star Trek

like this and it hurts us badly.’
    Around the same time, Roddenberry outlined his frustrations with the final year of
Star Trek
in a letter to his mentor and inspir -ation John W. Campbell. ‘[
Star Trek
] is being made by someone else [Freiberger] and comes out quite different in important ways from the way I envisioned the show. The kind of creativity and imagination you saw in the first year of
Star Trek
is hard to find. Time, I think, to wash
Star Trek
out of my hair.’
    January 1969 saw the shooting of ‘Turnabout Intruder’ – the final episode of the initial run of
Star Trek
, and the last live-action
Star Trek
adventure for a decade. The series had begun airing the previous September with ‘Spock’s Brain’. Those two bookend episodes are widely regarded by fans as two of the worst
Star Trek
instalments ever made. Ratings continued to be low and NBC did not help the situation by ‘pre-empting’ (replacing scheduled episodes with other programmes) the show three times and leaving a three-month gap between the airing of ‘All Our Yesterdays’ in March 1969 and burying the final new episode at the start of reruns in June 1969. NBC had issued a press release that February listing the shows that would be picked up for the following year –
Star Trek
was not among them. The network pulled the plug on the show before the final few episodes of the third series could even be shot.
    Not only was
Star Trek
over but the show had been branded a failure by both its network, NBC, and its producer, Paramount (who had bought Desilu). NBC had cancelled the show – as they stated in a form letter sent to complaining fans – because it had failed to achieve the 30 per cent audience share the network required, even though the network’s poor scheduling of the series had contributed heavily to this failure. It was also true that the show had never cracked the Nielsen Top 20 listing of TV shows for any of its three difficult years on air.
    In financing the show Paramount had sold
Star Trek
episodes to NBC at two-thirds of their actual cost to make (known as deficit funding), so when production wrapped on the series,
Star Trek
showed as a $4.7-million debt on the Paramount balance sheet. With no more episodes forthcoming and ancillary income streams (merchandise such as model kits) unlikely to develop any further, Paramount saw little chance that the show would recover that expenditure. The only hope was that some of that money might be recovered by selling the series into syndication, which consisted of cheap reruns on affiliated local TV stations – not seen as an important outlet or revenue stream until after
Star Trek
proved a success through this very outlet in the 1970s.

    One of the main reasons that Roddenberry claimed he had developed
Star Trek
was so he could deal with then-contemporary issues (race, war, social conditions) in the guise of far-future science fiction. The 1960s was a revolutionary period for representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, as well as being the height of the Cold War and a period of social turmoil – all of which was reflected (often in disguise) in various
Star Trek
episodes. Learning from his struggles on
The Lieutenant
, Roddenberry dramatised his social comment within a fantasy context, much as Serling had done on
The Twilight Zone
. ‘The first pilot really began with the fact that TV in the days when I began was so severely censored’, said Roddenberry at a TV industry event in 1988. ‘I thought maybe if I did what [English satirist Jonathan] Swift did, and used far-off polka-dot people on far-off planets, I could get away with it.’
    Star Trek
reflected contemporary 1960s social and cultural issues in its storytelling. As the series progressed Roddenberry smuggled social issue dramas onto television disguised as science fiction action-adventure. On the TV show
Livewire
Roddenberry admitted: ‘I saw an opportunity to use the series, to really use it, to say the things I believe, like to be different is not necessarily to be ugly. I wanted to make some comments. Intelevision in those days you couldn’t talk about sex, unions, politics – anything of any meaning – I thought if I have it happen “way out there” maybe I can get it past the censors. And I did: every fourteen-year-old knew what I was talking about, but it went right over the censor’s head.’
    Of the seventy-nine episodes that make up
The Original Series
, twelve of them deal with