by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

What place do western sensibilities have in a science fiction utopia of the future? And I mean western in the genre sense. Although, I suppose, I also mean it in the cultural imperialism sense, as well. However, that wasn’t the question that Gene Roddenberry and company were trying to ask when the original Star Trek first aired.

Which isn’t to say that The Original Series isn’t based on western storytelling ideas and tropes. Space isn’t “the final frontier” for nothing, after all. But science fiction, with its promise of a utopian society that stretches as far as man can travel, is its base genre. At least in terms of technology and presentation. (There's also a little military drama sprinkled in for fun, which we’ll talk more about later.) However, given the time period that Roddenberry was making television in, it’s not surprising that the western genre was at the top of his mind - especially where television was concerned. I mean, the most popular hour-long drama shows in the 1960s were all westerns. 

So, Roddenberry conceived of, pitched, and sold Star Trek while shows like Gunsmoke, Wagon Trail, and Bonanza were the most watched, and therefore the most profitable. Plus he’d written episodes on a lot of the popular shows, including 24 episodes on the half-hour western, Have Gun - Will Travel. So, while cowboys and military stories have since fallen out of favor in television (though we’re in a bit of a revival, for the cowboys, at least), they were some of the major drivers of dramatic television starting in the 1950s. With police, medical, and law franchises not taking over until the 1970s and 1980s - Dragnet notwithstanding. 

All of which is to say that Star Trek: The Original Series, with its modest three season run, is one of the most important pieces of genre media ever filmed. Which is, of course, one of the main things I want to explore and discuss with this column, over the next year. That’s right, baby, we’re doing another year-long exploration of something! But this time it’s TV!

I’ve been a Star Trek fan for a long time, but my knowledge is very specific and less general than I’d like. For instance, despite my mom being a huge Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, and having it on in the house all the time as I grew up, I have no actual knowledge of any plots. I have a vague approximation of the characters, which is mostly through cultural osmosis. So, I’ve always wanted to spend a few years just going through every piece of Star Trek media, in order, because that’s the kind of person I am.

Which is exactly what this column is going to be. Every month I’ll be watching a full season of Star Trek, starting with The Original Series going through The Next Generation, and even including The Animated Series. I want to give myself the whole picture, in the order people originally received it in, in an attempt to conceptualize what it is about Roddenberry’s brain child that made so much science fiction into science fact. And what continues to captivate myself and others. And I aim to do it while giving some historical context and exploring all the things I love about Roddenberry’s world… and all the things I’m iffy about, too.

Like, one of the things I’ve been really interested in over the last decade is the idea of who gets to go to space, especially in popular media. Whenever we’re introduced to a new future that’s not set on Earth (and sometimes even when it is), what organizations are the ones that run this new frontier? The answer is almost always a military organization of some kind. Which, I suppose, makes a lot of sense. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it, or its prevalence.

Since space stories that don’t follow military vessels, or personnel, are few and far between, especially in any of the visual mediums, Star Trek is no different. In this case Starfleet is technically a paramilitary organization, but when it functions the same does it really matter? Besides, it wasn’t until almost the end of the first season of TOS that it was decided it would be called Starfleet (more on that next month, though). So, for the first chunk of the series, you have a pseudo military organization running around, court marshaling and imposing their “benevolent” imperialism on all kinds of colonists, aliens, and anything else they might find on their exploratory mission. Which is certainly a choice!

And with every type of American military archetype showing up in science fiction, I want to use this column, in part, to explore my feelings about this trope. Starfleet felt like the opportune way because I’d always said if it existed, I would have wanted to join. While that’s certainly not true now, the reason I felt that way when I was younger can certainly be attributed to Starfleet’s presentation. It’s sort of like Schrodinger's military organization, at once actively operating like any military would and at once operating with NASA’s wonder and ache for discovery. Which actually means that Starfleet gets to be the height of white imperialism. And that feels icky!

One of the other things I want to examine this year, especially during The Original Series and the time leading up to The Next Generation, is the hand that Star Trek had in creating the modern idea of “fandom.” Between fanfiction (notably slash fic), conventions, and the “save our show” campaigns - Star Trek fans pioneered a lot of what is considered old hat fandom in 2022. And it was mostly done by women - something that often gets erased when talking about genre fiction. Like, there’s this infuriating TV spot for the 2009 Star Trek film that uses the phrase “This is not your father’s Star Trek,” which has always been wild to me. Not only on a personal level, because my dad didn’t care about genre media, but also because the longevity of the franchise has always been built on the backs of women. (As most things inevitably are.)

Which brings me to one of the many things I find wildly interesting about the evolution of Star Trek: The Original Series. From the outline, to the original (unaired) pilot, to what we finally saw on screen, there was one major constant: Mr. Spock. In Stephen E. Whitfield The Making of Star Trek, he laid out Roddenberry’s original pitch for the series. It is here that we know even the name of the Enterprise was once something else (Yorktown, if that’s of interest to you), not to mention the entire crew. Except for Mr. Spock - though his description of having a “red-hued satanic look” doesn’t quite make it to our final cultural memory. 

And the pitch document is beyond fascinating. Roddenberry was acutely aware of the landscape of television at the time, and where science fiction could fit into that. In fact, he pitched it as a “first,” since there had been no other hour-long science fiction shows that weren’t anthologies. Pitching the genre series as having “continuing characters” probably felt as wild a concept in the 1960s as Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll pitching Hill Street Blues as a piece of serialized storytelling in the early 1980s. And it’s just as absolutely medium defining. So, it’s remarkable that the development executives were able to look at Roddenberry’s original pilot “The Cage” and say, “No, not that, but actually could you try again?” Both “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” are wildly different from anything that had come before them, after all. 

So, because of those executives, I can write this column. I can watch my silly space show and write my introspective pieces. And Star Trek is messy, so there’s a lot to be introspective about. It’s very possible that the universe is more of a dystopia than we generally consider it to be, Starfleet is painfully colonialist in many terrible ways, and Roddenberry had his own, very specific, hang ups that were both personal and cultural failings. But Star Trek remains a beacon of hope. With four series currently airing, and a fifth on its way later this year, Roddenberry’s vision of the future remains one of the great images of it. Messy as it might be. So, I hope you’re excited for this not-quite five year mission - although maybe that’s how long it would take me to get through everything, given the whole “five shows on air in 2022” thing. I’m excited to spend the next year absolutely knee deep with some of culture’s favorite science fiction characters and figure out exactly what makes them so!