Classic TV Rewind · Episode 2
The Crew of the Enterprise
Season 3, Star Trek. The first season and the crew: Kirk, Spock and McCoy, Uhura and Dr. King, Sulu, Scotty on D-Day, the transporter and other budget tricks, and the best episodes of 1966 and 1967.
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Shannon Picture the bridge of the Enterprise. The captain's chair right in the middle. Blinking lights on every wall. And around that chair, a crew from all over the Earth, and one from somewhere else entirely.
Carol In 1966, that was something you just didn't see on television. People from different countries, different backgrounds, working side by side, three hundred years in the future.
Shannon And the people at those stations became some of the most famous characters on TV.
Carol Welcome to Classic TV Rewind, where we go back to the shows we grew up with, and find out what made them work.
Shannon This season, it's Star Trek. And this time, the first season, and the crew who made it.
Carol Episode two. The Crew of the Enterprise.
Shannon So, let's start at the center of it all. Three characters. Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
Carol The captain, the logical one, and the doctor.
Shannon That's it. And the writers figured out early that the show worked best when those three were in a room together. Kirk has to make the decision. Spock tells him what logic says. McCoy tells him what his heart says.
Carol And they argue.
Shannon Constantly. Spock and McCoy especially. McCoy teases him about his pointed ears and his green blood, Spock raises one eyebrow, and Kirk stands in the middle, trying not to smile.
Carol I loved those two.
Shannon Everybody did. And here's something a lot of people don't know. Doctor McCoy wasn't in the second pilot at all. There was a different ship's doctor. DeForest Kelley joined when the series began, and he and Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner became one of the great teams on television.
Carol And Spock. Half human, half Vulcan.
Shannon His mother was human, and his father was from the planet Vulcan, where everyone lives by logic and keeps their feelings locked away. So Spock is always caught in the middle. And Leonard Nimoy played that so beautifully. Very still, very calm, and every so often, a tiny crack in the armor.
Carol And the fans loved him.
Shannon The mail came pouring in. Spock became a sensation, especially with teenage girls, which nobody at NBC had expected. And remember, this was the character they'd worried was too strange looking.
Carol Now, let's go around the bridge.
Shannon Let's. At the communications station, Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. A Black woman, an officer, on the bridge of a starship, in 1966.
Carol That mattered.
Shannon It mattered a great deal. And there's a wonderful story about her. After the first season, Nichelle Nichols was thinking about leaving the show, to go back to the stage. And at a fundraising dinner, she was told a fan wanted to meet her.
Carol And who was the fan?
Shannon Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. He told her Star Trek was one of the few shows he and his wife let their children stay up to watch, and that she couldn't leave. That she was showing the whole country something it needed to see. So she stayed.
Carol Oh, that gives me chills.
Shannon It does me too. Then at the helm, Mister Sulu, played by George Takei. Sulu was one of the first Asian American characters on television who wasn't a stereotype. He was simply a good officer. Fencing, botany, a little swashbuckling.
Carol And down in engineering?
Shannon Scotty. Montgomery Scott, the chief engineer, played by James Doohan. He was Canadian, and he gave Scotty that Scottish accent because he thought a great engineer ought to be a Scot.
Carol And he really was a hero, wasn't he?
Shannon He was. In the Second World War, James Doohan landed on Juno Beach on D-Day, with the Canadian army. He was wounded that night, and lost his middle finger. If you watch closely, they often kept that hand out of the shot.
Carol I never knew that.
Shannon Not many people did. And then there's Nurse Chapel, played by Majel Barrett, who'd been Number One in the first pilot. And Yeoman Rand, played by Grace Lee Whitney.
Carol And they did all of this every week, on a TV budget.
Shannon On a tight TV budget. And that's where some of the best ideas came from. Take the transporter.
Carol Beam me up.
Shannon The famous phrase. Although nobody ever says it quite that way in the show. But here's the thing. Landing a big model starship on a different planet every week would have cost a fortune. So instead, the crew just beams down. Stand on a pad, a shimmer of light, and you're there.
Carol So the transporter saved them money.
Shannon That's the story. And the shimmer itself was simple too. Sparkles of light, filmed and laid over the actors.
Carol And the planets?
Shannon Mostly built on a sound stage. A painted sky, some rocks, and some colored lighting. A lot of colored lighting. Red planets, green planets, purple planets. It gave the whole show that bold, bright look.
Carol And the gadgets.
Shannon Oh, the gadgets. The communicator flipped open, just like a little phone. People love to say it inspired the first cell phone. The man who led that team, Martin Cooper, says it was really Dick Tracy's wrist radio. But years later, plenty of flip phones looked an awful lot like a communicator.
Carol So we all walk around with Star Trek in our pockets.
Shannon More or less.
Carol So, how did the first season do?
Shannon The ratings were only middling. But the show did get noticed. It was nominated for an Emmy as the best drama series, and Leonard Nimoy was nominated for his work as Spock.
Carol And the stories were good.
Shannon Some of them were great. There's Balance of Terror, a tense game of cat and mouse with an enemy ship, almost like a submarine movie. That's where we first meet the Romulans.
Carol And Khan!
Shannon Oh, yes. Space Seed, with Ricardo Montalbán as a genetically engineered superman from the past, who tries to take over the Enterprise. He'd come back, years later, in one of the Star Trek movies.
Carol And a lot of people say the best one is in this season too.
Shannon They do. The City on the Edge of Forever. McCoy accidentally changes history, and Kirk and Spock have to travel back to New York in the 1930s to fix it. Kirk falls in love with a woman there, played by Joan Collins. And the ending is heartbreaking.
Carol It really is.
Carol So, what's your pick?
Shannon It has to be The City on the Edge of Forever. It's a love story, a time travel story, and a tragedy, all in fifty minutes. It won a big science fiction award, too, the Hugo.
Carol And mine is Space Seed. Ricardo Montalbán is just so much fun as Khan. Charming and dangerous at the same time.
Shannon And our ratings, out of five tribbles.
Carol For the first season? Five tribbles. You can see the whole show coming together.
Shannon Five from me too. The crew, the gadgets, and the best episode they ever made.
Carol That's the crew of the Enterprise. The captain, the Vulcan and the doctor, and a bridge full of people who showed us what the future could look like.
Shannon Next time, season two. A new navigator, a famous hand salute, the fans who wrote in to save the show, and a whole lot of tribbles.
Carol That's next time, on Classic TV Rewind.