Classic TV Rewind · Episode 4
The Final Season
Season 3, Star Trek. The third season: the Friday night time slot, a smaller budget, Spock's Brain, Kirk and Uhura's kiss, a message about prejudice, and cancellation weeks before the Moon landing.
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Shannon Friday night, 1968. Ten o'clock. Most teenagers are out at the movies, or on a date. And the families who'd been watching Star Trek are getting ready for bed.
Carol And that's exactly when NBC put it on.
Shannon The fans had saved the show. And then it landed in one of the worst time slots on television.
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 third and final season.
Carol Episode four. The Final Season.
Carol So, what happened?
Shannon After the letter campaign, NBC had planned to give Star Trek a good early evening slot on Mondays. Then the schedule changed, and that slot went to another show. Star Trek was moved to Friday night, at ten o'clock.
Carol Which is late.
Shannon Very late, for a show with so many young fans. Gene Roddenberry was so unhappy about it that he stepped back from running the show day to day. A new producer, Fred Freiberger, took over.
Carol And the budget?
Shannon The budget was cut, too. So there were fewer trips to strange new planets, and more stories set on the ship, or on very simple sets.
Carol You can sometimes see it.
Shannon You can. But here's the thing. The cast was still the cast. Kirk, Spock and McCoy still had all their chemistry. And some of the best ideas in the whole series turned up in this last season.
Carol But we do have to mention the first episode.
Shannon (laughs) We do. The third season opened with Spock's Brain. Aliens steal Spock's brain. Literally. And Doctor McCoy has to put it back.
Carol With a remote control.
Shannon More or less. Spock's body walks around, guided by a little device, while they search for his brain. It's often called one of the silliest episodes ever made.
Carol But fans love it anyway.
Shannon They do. Even Leonard Nimoy wasn't a fan. But honestly, it's a lot of fun, if you go in knowing what it is.
Carol And then there's the kiss.
Shannon Plato's Stepchildren, in November of 1968. Aliens with the power to control people's bodies force Kirk and Uhura to kiss.
Carol And that was a big deal.
Shannon A very big deal. A white man and a Black woman, kissing on network television in 1968. It's often called one of the first interracial kisses on American TV.
Carol Were they worried about it?
Shannon The network was. The story goes that they filmed it more than one way, so NBC could choose a version without the kiss. And the actors made sure the other takes weren't usable. Nichelle Nichols said William Shatner kept crossing his eyes in them.
Carol (laughs) So they had to use the kiss.
Shannon They had to use the kiss. And Nichelle Nichols said afterward that the letters they got about it were overwhelmingly positive.
Carol And the show tackled other big subjects that year, didn't it?
Shannon It did. In one episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, two aliens have spent their whole lives hating each other. One is black on the left side of his face and white on the right. And the other is the other way around.
Carol And that's the only difference.
Shannon That's the whole point. They hate each other over something so small that the crew can barely see it. In 1969, with all the struggles over civil rights, nobody watching missed the message.
Carol Science fiction can say things a regular drama can't.
Shannon That's exactly what Roddenberry always believed. Put it on another planet, and you can talk about anything.
Carol But the ratings didn't recover.
Shannon No. In that Friday night slot, they couldn't. NBC cancelled Star Trek in early 1969. The last new episode aired on June 3rd, 1969.
Carol After three seasons.
Shannon That's right, seventy-nine episodes in all. Stations usually wanted about a hundred before they'd rerun a show every weekday. Star Trek didn't have that many. But it got sold for reruns anyway.
Carol And then, that summer.
Shannon On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon. The real space age arrived, just as the Enterprise was going off the air.
Carol That's almost too perfect.
Shannon Isn't it? But the story wasn't over. Not by a long way.
Carol So, what's your pick from the final season?
Shannon Mine is The Enterprise Incident. Kirk and Spock go undercover to steal a cloaking device from the Romulans. It's a great spy story, and Spock gets some wonderful scenes with a Romulan commander.
Carol And mine is All Our Yesterdays, right near the end. Spock is sent back to an ice age, and he starts to feel things he's never let himself feel. It's a lovely, sad episode.
Shannon And our ratings, out of five tribbles?
Carol For the final season? Four tribbles. It's uneven, but the best ones are wonderful.
Shannon Four from me too. And one extra, for the kiss.
Carol That's the final season of Star Trek. A bad time slot, a smaller budget, a kiss that made history, and a show that went off the air just as men walked on the Moon.
Shannon Next time, our last episode of the season. How a cancelled show came back, bigger than ever, and why it's still going.
Carol That's next time, on Classic TV Rewind.