The Impossible has Happened

INTRODUCTION

Gene Roddenberry died on October 24, 1991, a few weeks after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first broadcast of Star Trek. He was only a couple of months past his seventieth birthday, but he had been frail for a long time, and he knew he was dying. His death came at a high water mark for the franchise, when both a hugely popular television series and a very successful series of movies were in production. To celebrate the show’s silver anniversary, the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation aired the two-part story “Unification,” which brought together Captain Picard and Mr. Spock in a full-scale crossover of the old and new shows. The following month saw the release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a movie designed as a capstone for the adventures of Captain Kirk’s crew.

“Unification” and The Undiscovered Country both included a caption dedicating the project to Roddenberry. Studio publicity stressed that before his death, the creator of Star Trek had seen the rough edits of both the TV episode and the movie, and had liked what he’d seen.

The publicity didn’t mention that Roddenberry had long been all but locked out of the running of both the movie series and The Next Generation, and that the notes he’d given the production teams had been all but totally ignored. The studio may not have known that, in fact, he’d returned from viewing Star Trek VI and—forty-eight hours before he died—instructed his lawyer to start legal action to have fifteen minutes of material cut from the movie.1

Gene Roddenberry, the man, polarized people. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who played Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, quickly fell out with him over business issues— or as Shatner put it, “He was a chiseler who wanted a cut of outside money his cast earned, demanded to be called master, and prohibited poor Nimoy from using a company pencil.”² Roddenberry battled substance abuse. He sexually harassed his secretaries, and he didn’t just cheat on his wives, he cheated on his mistresses. Despite that, many of his friends, colleagues and family members remained consistently loyal to and protective of him. From the early days of Star Trek until today, there have been fans who treat him, his work, and his memory with a reverence usually reserved for the leaders of revolutions.

In 1994, two hefty biographies of Roddenberry were published: Star Trek Creator by David Alexander, and Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek by Joel Engel. The official and unauthorized versions respectively, there are times when they don’t seem to be describing the same man. It is possible, as Alexander and Engel demonstrate over and over, to spin the same anecdote to portray Roddenberry as a saint or a monster. One man’s “money grubbing” is another man’s “fighting for his fair share.” An early episode of the original series, “The Enemy Within,” sees Kirk split into two personalities—an ineffective, caring type and a scheming, ravenous beast. It’s tempting to view Roddenberry as such a Jekyll and Hyde character.

It’s clear, though, that Gene Roddenberry was no such thing. His personality was extremely consistent for most of his life; indeed, when he started suffering mood swings a couple of years before his death, those closest to him understood it as a symptom of his failing health. You can refuse to compromise your principles and be a boorish, hypocritical jerk.

The fiftieth anniversary marks the point where Star Trek has run longer since Gene Roddenberry’s death than while he was alive. Six Star Trek movies were made in his lifetime; seven have now been made since his death. In terms of television episodes, that milestone was passed nearly twenty years ago. Star Trek has lasted so long that we can now watch the series on devices that make Kirk and Picard’s computers and personal communication devices look rather clunky.

Three television series—Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–9), Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), and Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–5) —have come and gone, as have four movies featuring the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast (1994–2002). In 2009, the movie series was relaunched with an (almost) all-new cast playing Kirk, Spock, and company. The three movies— Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016)—have made a great deal of money at the box office. And 2017 will see a new Star Trek television series. While plenty of Sixties shows have been revived, rebooted, or relaunched, on television or for the cinema, it’s hard to think of another American TV show with anything like the enduring appeal of Star Trek. It’s hard to say which show even comes second.

Clearly, though, Star Trek has had a more successful afterlife. So why did Star Trek, out of all the American TV shows of the Sixties, become such a phenomenon? And where does Gene Roddenberry figure in the answer to that question?

When they describe the show, Star Trek fans occasionally drift into a parallel universe where it was the only show that dared to tackle social issues or other difficult topics, had a multi-racial cast, inspired a devoted fan following, or was revived due to public demand. Gene Roddenberry encouraged people to think Star Trek always stood out, but this is clearly untrue. The root of Star Trek’s success is that on a week-by-week basis, it delivered some really good episodes of television, ones that many people can rewatch almost endlessly.

Every artistic venture that’s the work of many hands generates arguments about what the magic ingredients were, and who deserves credit for coming up with them. Gene Roddenberry would portray himself, at times, as the sole creative force on Star Trek. But some of the most popular things about Star Trek happened despite Roddenberry, not because of him. He was frequently frustrated when directors like Nicholas Meyer, or actors like William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy, persuaded the studio to adopt their ideas and priorities over Roddenberry’s. He actively hated the second movie, The Wrath of Khan, seeing many aspects of it as a betrayal of the concept. He firmly believed Patrick Stewart was the wrong man to play Jean-Luc Picard. When he was left to his own devices, Roddenberry’s version of Star Trek could be drab, pompous, and slow-moving: we see this demonstrated with the original pilot, “The Cage” (1965), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).4

The very least generous assessment of Roddenberry’s contribution, though, is that he created the basic framework for Star Trek, and then was a key member of the team of writers, directors, actors, artists, and designers, assembled by himself, who brilliantly and efficiently established a memorable future of primary colors, beautiful women, bizarre creatures, and big ideas. Star Trek does have an X factor that distinguishes it from similar shows, and a lot of what makes it unique can fairly be described as “Gene Roddenberry’s philosophy for the show.” This by itself would be an enviable legacy for a writer.

Part of the reason Star Trek caught on, surely, is that the show was full of repetition, imitable moments, dialogue repeated so often it became a catchphrase. Fifty years on, it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a time when people didn’t know what “beaming up” was or that Vulcans have pointy ears and behave logically, no one had heard the words “phaser,” “photon torpedo,” “tricorder,” “tractor beam,” “warp engine,” or “Klingon.” These all had to be introduced to the audience. Each had to be carefully articulated and reinforced to the point that it became familiar rather than bizarre.

Gene Roddenberry would gloss this as representing his keenness to stick to “scientific fact,” and to root the series in things astronomers and physicists were talking about. It’s not a line that survives contact with the show itself for long—some of the “science” is borderline gibberish. The very first bridge scene of Kirk’s first episode manages to include the ship passing through “the barrier at the edge of the galaxy,” a discussion of ESP, Kirk ordering “neutralize warp” and “gravitation on automatic,” and a man’s eyes turning silver because he’s been struck by weird lightning. But Roddenberry did ensure that the show stuck to its own rules, that it didn’t (on the whole) cheat its audience or pull some magical solution out of its hat.

Every Star Trek fan worth their salt can tell you that the precise phrase “beam me up, Scotty” was never used in the original series . . . but the procedure for the transporter followed strict rules, and every episode portrayed it ritualistically. We’d see Captain Kirk get onto the platform with his landing party, he’d issue the command “Energize,” the operator (often, but by no means always Mr. Scott) would slide a control, a certain noise would start up, we’d see the shimmering golden “transporter effect.” We’d cut to a weird alien landscape, we’d hear the same noise and see the same transporter effect, and the actors would suddenly be standing on that alien planet. Kirk would flip open his communicator and let those remaining on the ship know he’d arrived safely. Then the adventure could start. Kids could play-act this sequence, or write or draw their own stories, using a clear template. Older viewers could identify fellow fans by casually dropping references into their conversations.

Star Trek initially ran for three years. In the end, NBC made the simple decision that a different show could appeal more efficiently to viewers. Roddenberry railed against this, so it’s worth looking at what the network put on in its place. The first season of Star Trek aired in the 8:30–9:30 Thursday night slot. It was moved to Fridays the following year, and its old slot was taken by Ironside, featuring Raymond Burr as a wheelchair-bound lawyer, which went on to run for eight seasons (and has itself been revived). There’s no convincing argument that the network were crazy to make that decision.

In 1969, then, Star Trek had come and gone. Gene Roddenberry had an idea for a TV show, it ran for three years, it ended. There were plenty of people who created television shows in the Sixties. Many, in all honesty, created ones with larger audiences and better production values. Network television is extremely competitive, it has few slots for shows, network executives want to find the next big thing and aren’t sentimental about cutting their losses. Shows come and go.

So . . . how did Star Trek come to rise above the pack?

The show found its audience a couple of years after it was canceled, in “syndication”—when the seventy-nine episodes made between 1966 and 1969 were repeated across America by local television stations, often five days a week in the early evening. Likeminded viewers watching those repeats began coalescing into local fan clubs, which began connecting up to other groups. Star Trek fans started showing up to science fiction conventions, and when some SF fans became a little snooty about the new arrivals, Star Trek fans began organizing events dedicated solely to celebrating their show. Many of these were huge, attracting five-figure crowds that could overwhelm the organizers and venue owners.

The show, like most shows, had received letters when it was being broadcast from people who enjoyed it, who were inspired by it, who fantasized about meeting the characters, or who just wanted to thank the people who’d made it for cheering them up when they were down. With most shows, correspondence usually died down fairly soon after the show had ended. Roddenberry was aware that syndication had brought a new influx of fan letters, but again this was perfectly normal. By 1972, he had chanced upon the Star Trek conventions. He was astonished to find himself being cheered and applauded by thousands of people, to be lauded as the creator of something unique and inspiring.

It was now that Roddenberry did something unprecedented, and that Star Trek became the phenomenon we’re familiar with. He saw the nascent fandom forming around the show, and deliberately nurtured it by creating the story of the making of Star Trek, a narrative just as elaborate as the space saga that encompassed the Romulan War, the Organian Treaty, and the age of Surak. Roddenberry spun a yarn about the production of the show, the goals he had while making it, and the fights he had with NBC to maintain the integrity of his work. In many places, this myth of the show bears very little resemblance to what actually happened.

Key to the legend was the idea that Star Trek was a “failure” on first broadcast. Early fans, egged on by Roddenberry, concluded that the show was just too smart for television, and that the “network executives” were risk-averse ignoramuses who wanted to dumb everything down, or perhaps the method of calculating ratings was fundamentally flawed. Wherever the fault lay, this argument ran, the truth was that Star Trek was ahead of its time, dangerous, “too cerebral” for network television, and its fans were therefore particularly insightful people. Unsurprisingly, Star Trek fans lapped up this version of events, coming to see the show’s cancelation as fundamentally unjust, a wrong that had to be righted.

Star Trek was not a huge success on first broadcast, but the truth of the matter isn’t very dramatic. Shown on NBC, it did OK in the ratings, but not spectacularly. It was a show that was relatively expensive to make—while heroic efforts were made to send the Enterprise to planets where people replicated periods in Earth history (and so existing props and costumes could be used), every episode also included many optical and model effects. NBC were initially minded to end Star Trek at the end of its second season (in spring 1968), but were persuaded to bring it back for one more year, after a letter-writing campaign by fans. Tellingly, Roddenberry was replaced as producer, and a number of key writers left with him. Equally tellingly, everyone involved felt the last season saw a drop in quality. The series ended in June 1969, a month before the first moon landing.

Shows had a natural life cycle and weren’t expected to last forever. Lost in Space and Batman were both huge hits, but only lasted three seasons. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. lasted four. Television executives were constantly hunting for the next big thing, just as they do now. Gene Roddenberry didn’t think he’d be working on Star Trek for the rest of his life, and was coming up with pitches for new shows even as he worked on the series.

Many of the viewers who found the show in syndication were hungry for more. Over the course of seventy-nine episodes, the lore of the show built up. There were a handful of recurring guest characters; there were references back to previous stories. We learned a little more every time we met the Vulcans, Klingons, and Romulans. Like the Sherlock Holmes stories, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or the pantheons of superheroes of the Marvel and DC universes, the world of Star Trek was more than the sum of its parts. Fans soaked up this information, memorized it, filled notebooks with lists, typed up their thoughts, and published fanzines. Their knowledge became almost a form of currency in Star Trek fan circles. There was soon enough material to fill any number of books about the episodes, the planets and their inhabitants, the future history, and the technology. Blueprints, star charts, and catalogs of starships were published. Star Trek fans were able to buy encyclopedic volumes listing every aspect of the show’s fictional universe. There were soon even technical manuals spelling out exactly how to build a phaser, transporter, or warp core.

Star Trek rewarded attentive viewers. A great deal of the background went unexplained in the series. If you watched closely, you could infer, for example, that blue Starfleet uniforms were worn by science and medical people, that the infamous “redshirts” were worn by security men and engineers. Other things were (for a long time, at least) ineffable mysteries. What was James T. Kirk’s middle name? What was the precise meaning of the NCC-1701 registration number borne by USS Enterprise? While we’re on the subject, what did “USS” stand for? Fans could have fun arguing about these, or speculating how a Vulcan man and a human woman could possibly have a child, or why the Federation didn’t use cloaking devices like the Romulans did.

More significant, though, a lot of the energy of early Star Trek fandom focused on what hadn’t been shown in the television series. Clearly, there was room for new Star Trek stories. A show that could go to any planet, tell tales that were tense thrillers one week, murder mysteries the next, and out-and-out comedies the week after, had the potential to run and run. In reality, while the third season included some striking episodes, many betrayed a sense of diminishing returns. The budget had been cut, and a lot more of the action took place on the Enterprise itself. The show was starting to look tired.

The fans engaged more imaginatively with the show than the production team had. They started to consider what might have happened next to the planets the Enterprise crew had just freed from tyranny, or to guest characters who’d briefly visited the ship. Distinct strains of fan fiction emerged, reflecting the psyches of early Star Trek fans.

There were far deeper issues which the original TV series touched on, but left all but unexplored. Fans were fascinated with, say, Uhura, a beautiful black woman who served as a bridge officer. This was a powerful statement at a point in American history when racial tensions had boiled over. Uhura was clearly an inspiration and role model for black viewers, and for women and girls. But the problem was . . . Uhura never really got to do very much except tell Captain Kirk that hailing frequencies were open. She, like Sulu, never even had a first name.

The way Gene Roddenberry told it, it was a fight even to put an African-American face on screen, and the studio were constantly cutting her lines. There is at least some evidence that in Uhura’s case this is true. Roddenberry, though, toured the convention circuit in the Seventies telling fans that, yes, of course Uhura had potential, and her mere presence was a powerful statement that he fought tooth and nail to preserve. It was a line that gained wild applause at conventions. When he had the chance to redress the balance ten years after the TV series ended, as co-writer and producer of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Uhura was given . . . thirty-seven lines in the whole movie. She’s not in shot for twelve of them, and six are “Aye, sir.”

In the decade between Star Trek’s last television show and its revival as a movie, as fans came to explore this world in their fan fiction and essays, a consensus view of Star Trek emerged. Initially, the conclusion was that the show was appealing because it was sexy, a little dangerous. This soon broadened into the idea that Star Trek was progressive. At a time when prominent idealistic politicians were being gunned down, when civil rights campaigns were exposing structural inequalities and certain groups were seriously advocating a race war, when the US Army was bogged down in Vietnam, and where an atomic war between America and the Soviet Union looked inevitable, Star Trek portrayed a tolerant, rational, meritocratic, secular, scientific society. As the civil rights movements of the Sixties passed from current headlines of protests and riots to a folk memory of old battles won and lost, Star Trek fans began to present their show as a bellwether of those turbulent times. The series now represented an endgame to the idealism of those movements. In the future blacks, whites, Asians, men and women, Russians, and Americans would all work together for the common aim of exploration and discovery. They would come in peace, without prejudice, and wouldn’t impose their views on others. Advanced technology would allow all material needs to be met and, freed from the material needs of the past, a generous, tolerant society would emerge.

This, though, is a far more idealized world than the one depicted in the series itself. The original Star Trek television show is optimistic, it’s inclusive, but it’s not explicitly utopian. We see a few officers on one ship, out on the frontier. Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, forcefully reminded the writers that Starfleet was the spiritual successor to NASA, not the US Air Force. Gene Roddenberry’s preferred analogy was that his Starfleet was more like the Coast Guard than the Navy, but in practice the Enterprise we see is essentially doing the sort of things a US Navy patrol would do in the Pacific in the Fifties and Sixties (Roddenberry had served in the Air Force). The Star Trek universe has seen recent wars, and many in the Federation are in the line of fire of rival space powers, pirates, slavers, disease, and natural disasters. The history of Earth between our time and Kirk’s encompasses “the Eugenics Wars,” the era of the brutal dictator Colonel Green, and atomic holocaust. The Federation may have utopian ideals, but it’s not reached the promised land.

There’s an attempt to make sure that not every single crew member we see is a white man, but all but two of the bridge crew are, and the show soon expands the roles of Spock and McCoy at the expense of the rest of the cast. Roddenberry said that he’d originally wanted half the crew of the Enterprise to be women. The pilot episode had a female second-in-command, played by Majel Barrett, Roddenberry’s future wife (and, at the time, one of his mistresses). When the network demanded changes, she was dropped. In the broadcast show, Uhura was the only female bridge officer, and the only other regular female characters were Yeoman Rand (dropped after eight episodes) and Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett again, in fewer than a third of the episodes). The uniforms in the pilot episode were unisex, with the women wearing trousers. The series, famously, put the women in very short skirts, makeup and elaborate hairstyles. There’s little evidence to suggest that the future portrayed in the original series had seen much progress for gender equality.

Many of Star Trek’s early fans were women and teenage girls. The few years between the cancelation of the series and its initial success in syndication saw an explosion in the women’s liberation movement. Star Trek might easily, and with justification, have been condemned as a show in which scantily clad women took on mainly subservient roles, so serving as an example of everything that was wrong with the portrayal of women in television drama. Instead, fans of the show began extrapolating the future of the feminist movement, bringing in readings of the show informed by novelists like Ursula Le Guin. A secular, meritocratic world where women were sexually liberated, and could be scientists and explorers, became a vision of a galaxy where the battles of feminism had won. In other words, Star Trek’s young, thoughtful, creative audience had recast the show as something far more interesting than the television series had ever portrayed.

Gene Roddenberry was a fairly shameless self-mythologizer. In “candid” interviews conducted by close colleagues, even during private conversations with intimate friends, he repeated claims that he must have known weren’t true. The creator of Star Trek told fans in the Seventies that they were very clever for spotting what he’d done: the show wasn’t escapist adventure with a dash of optimism for a future powered by technological progress which occasionally dabbled with light political analogies, it was a vehicle for conveying complex humanist values with an important message for our times, disguised as space opera because that was the only way to get such powerful political messages onto network television.

When he came to create Star Trek: The Next Generation in the mid-Eighties, Roddenberry insisted that the show was utopian, that every detail had to support a vision of a future where humanity had solved its problems—not just its technological, but its social problems. Somewhat to the annoyance of some of his other writers, the new Enterprise crew never argued among themselves, they gathered around a conference table and agreed on a course of action. The ship had a counselor, who sat at the captain’s side on the bridge and offered advice about the psychology of the aliens they encountered. The Klingons were now allies, the crew brought their families along, the women wore trousers, now—and (for a few episodes, at least) some of the men wore miniskirts.

It would be very tempting for a new biography of Gene Roddenberry to try to triangulate between the true visionary and secular saint of David Alexander’s authorized biography and the irredeemably flawed human being who only ever had one good idea depicted in Joel Engel’s unauthorized account. The “official” version is that Roddenberry’s true intent was revealed only when it was freed from the imperatives of network television; the “unauthorized” reading is that Star Trek fans took an old show and injected elements that elevated it into something remarkable, and Roddenberry was able to swoop in, say that had been the plan all along, and demand his cut.

But there’s another way to look at Gene Roddenberry. As Star Trek endured (and his subsequent projects floundered or outright flopped), Roddenberry naturally began to ask himself why this one show had sparked such passion in its fans. It was a question he’d never had the time to consider while he was making the show. Roddenberry listened to the fans, compared Star Trek to the shows and other science fiction around it. The answer he formulated was that the appeal of the show was its idealism: it was progressive, it looked to the future, it saw humanity maturing. It had a very simple, very powerful message, one that’s surprisingly uncommon in science fiction: the future can be better than the present.

As numerous people, friends and foes, would note, there was a massive discrepancy between the selfless future envisioned by Star Trek and the way Eugene Wesley Roddenberry lived his life. He dreamed of a future free of personal jealousy, but needed to jostle to be the alpha male both professionally and privately. He had Dr. McCoy advocate holistic treatments and alternative medicine but he himself popped pills and abused cocaine. He said the future would not be materialistic, but the moment he had enough money, he bought a mansion in Bel Air, as well as a new Rolls Royce with the vanity plate GENE R.

Gene Roddenberry knew he wasn’t perfect. His creation, he came to understand, gave him the purpose and platform to be a positive force in the world. Just as the fans in minority groups, the kids who were bullied at school for being nerdy, or who felt different, responded to the tolerant, inclusive, purposeful message of Star Trek, so too did its creator. By the mid-Seventies, Gene Roddenberry had started to see how Star Trek could redeem him.