Gene Roddenberry created three television series that were made during his lifetime: The Lieutenant, Star Trek, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He had ideas for plenty more. Many of these made it to at least some form of pilot episode (The Wild Blue, 333 Montgomery/Defiance County, Police Story, The Long Hunt of April Savage, Assignment: Earth, Genesis II/Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes, Spectre, Star Trek II); many didn’t (The Man from Lloyds, Footbeat, a show set on a cruise ship, The Tribunes). Two (Andromeda and Earth: Final Conflict) became shows after his death and one (Lost Universe) became a comics series. But, as it stands, The Lieutenant is the one time we get to see Gene Roddenberry creating and running a television show that isn’t Star Trek.
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry was named after his father and grandfather respectively. Eugene senior had joined the US Army in 1916 and served in France toward the end of the First World War. He was honorably discharged as a private, promoted to sergeant and moved back to El Paso, Texas, where he met his wife and Gene’s mother, Glen Goleman, a committed Southern Baptist. Gene, their eldest child, was born on August 19, 1921. Eugene floated between jobs on the railroad, including a spell as a railroad detective, before making his way to Los Angeles where, in 1922, he became a patrolman for the Los Angeles Police Department, a rank he held for twenty years.
The LA that welcomed the Roddenberry family, which now included Gene’s younger siblings Robert and Doris, was rapidly expanding. By 1930, the city’s population surpassed one million. It was the height of the Great Depression and the era of Prohibition, but neither appears to have adversely affected the family: Eugene senior was fortunate enough to have regular work and, like many, he largely ignored the alcohol ban. Despite or perhaps because of the hard times, it was also an era of escapism. Genre fiction exploded in print, on the radio, and at the movies. Family friends tell of young Gene devouring copies of Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, eagerly watching the Larry “Buster” Crabbe Flash Gordon serials and listening intently each week to The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, and Buck Rogers on the radio. Gene entertained an early interest in poetry, joining a writing club at his high school and continuing to write and study literature when time afforded. At the age of eighteen, he entered Los Angeles City College to study the police curriculum. There he met Stanley Sheldon, the LAPD liaison officer attached to the City College, for whom he would work eleven years later. He also met Eileen Rexroat, his future wife.
While studying at City College, Roddenberry heard about the civilian pilot training program, created to build up the country’s bank of pilots in full anticipation that the US would eventually be drawn into the war in Europe. He registered and, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, became a fully licenced pilot. A few weeks after he graduated City College in June 1941, Roddenberry became a cadet in the Army Air Corps. Six months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Roddenberry received orders to head to Kelly Field, Texas, for training. He passed the sifting process and entered advanced training, one of the advantages of which was permission to marry. On June 20, 1942, he and Eileen took their vows before the Kelly Field chaplain.1 Three months later, now with the rank of second lieutenant, he joined the 394th Squadron stationed in Hawaii to fly B-17 bombers.
While Roddenberry could be gregarious, he was something of an intellectual loner and not popular. Young, very tall (six foot three), and good looking, he often spent nights off the base alone and appears to have taken full advantage of the 2,500 miles distance from his new wife. According to Alexander, many of Roddenberry’s squadron mates were unaware he was married at the time. (For her part, back at Kelly Field, Eileen was known to pick up cadets while Gene was on duty.)2
Roddenberry estimated that, during the war, he flew eighty-nine missions in total, but the records are not accurate and it was most likely more. He narrowly escaped injury several times, notably when he had to abort takeoff as a result of aircraft malfunction.3 Not long after, the 394th was rotated back to the US and Gene was reunited with Eileen. He never returned to active duty: his skills were needed on home soil as an aircraft accident investigator with the Office of Flying Safety. He was made captain in April 1944. Meanwhile, he began writing in earnest. He enrolled with the University of Miami but a transfer to New York prevented him completing the course; later he studied at Columbia University and wrote poems, one of which was published in The New York Times.
Roddenberry was discharged from the Army in July 1945 and joined Pan American World Airlines as a junior commercial pilot—and two years later came closer to death than at any time during the war. On June 18, 1947, he joined Pan Am Flight 121 for the flight from Karachi to Istanbul. His friend Captain Joe Hart was pilot; Roddenberry was off-duty but willing to help out. Flight 121 had experienced numerous mechanical problems en route to Karachi and these continued. The aircraft lost one engine, putting the other three under strain. When a second engine ignited, setting the wing on fire, Hart told Roddenberry to prepare the passengers for the inevitable crash landing. They were flying in the dark over the Syrian desert, miles from the nearest safe landing site, and running out of time. The aircraft crashed into the sand at 2:00 a.m., splitting in two. Those in the forward section who were not killed on impact were burnt to death by ignited aviation fuel. Seated three rows from the back, Roddenberry escaped serious injury and was able to pull passengers from the wreckage with the help of the two remaining Pan Am employees. Seven crew and seven passengers died, and eleven people needed hospital treatment; eight were relatively unharmed. Gene suffered two broken ribs.4
Roddenberry recounted the story many times at conventions in the 1970s. Some of the details sound distinctly far-fetched, but many have been verified. Among the passengers were an Indian royal—the Maharani of Pheleton—and her son, whom he personally rescued. Shortly after dawn, the crash site drew the unwanted attention of desert tribesmen who stripped the aircraft of its valuables. Roddenberry set out alone for civilization, tracing the route of telegraph wires to the nearest town and calling the emergency airfield for help. Or a couple of English passengers swam across a river to a light Roddenberry had spotted. Whatever the precise truth, Roddenberry was commended by Pan Am for his swift action and leadership. Three days after the crash, he wrote to his parents that “the real trick of the matter is that everyone performed wonderfully including the badly injured and proved what fine people average human beings are when confronted by a catastrophe involving life and death.”5
This near-death experience appears to have prompted a change in Roddenberry’s outlook. He returned to New Jersey and was reunited with Eileen. Nine months later, their first daughter, Darleen, was born. Within weeks of her birth, he resigned from Pan Am and relocated the family to California. Roddenberry claimed later that they had moved so he could become a television writer. If this is true, it was an odd decision. California was the home of cinema, not television—the majority of television programs were produced in New York, a short distance from where they had been living. Worse still, the movie industry had contracted, flooding the market with scriptwriters and other production staff. Most likely, the young family relocated to be near Darleen’s grandparents, all of whom lived in southern California. With no writing work forthcoming, and after a brief unsuccessful period as a sales manager, Roddenberry applied to join the LAPD in January 1949, following his younger brother Robert in the footsteps of their father. He completed basic training and was posted to traffic duty in downtown Los Angeles.
The next year Roddenberry got his first paid writing job, producing press releases for the LAPD. The Public Affairs Division, as it became, was led by Captain Stanley Sheldon, whom Roddenberry had met at Los Angeles City College, and included Don Ingalls, the future writer-producer of Fantasy Island and writer of Star Trek’s “The Alternative Factor” and “A Private Little War.” It was a troubled time for the LAPD, which was consumed by a corruption scandal. William H. Parker, who had worked with Gene’s father, was brought in to professionalize the police force and raise the moral standing of officers. Parker established the Association of Professional Law Enforcers; Roddenberry wrote much of its founding code of practice.
Meanwhile—television. Though still in its infancy, the medium was slowly reaching the masses, particularly after NBC broadcast the 1947 World Series. As audiences grew, the demand for programming increased and new series were created, often drawing on movie serials and radio shows for inspiration. One such series that provides a delicious taste of things to come was the children’s Saturday afternoon serial Space Patrol, which borrowed heavily from Buster Crabbe’s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials. The hero was Buzz Corry, Commander and Chief of United Planets Space Patrol, a military-exploration unit that policed the space lanes. Children and families went wild and its creator, William Moser, a former Navy pilot, turned Space Patrol into a merchandising machine.6
Closer to home, and to Roddenberry’s personal experience, was Dragnet, which made the move from radio to television in December 1951. Featuring stories “drawn from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department,” Dragnet was an obvious fit for Roddenberry and he started collecting stories from his fellow officers and turning them into treatments for episodes. Roddenberry offered his LAPD colleagues half of his earnings if he was successful. He wasn’t.
Roddenberry’s break into television came in 1953, quite by chance. Ziv Television Productions wrote to Stanley Sheldon with a request for a technical advisor from the LAPD to support their new show Mr District Attorney, which was making the transition from radio. Roddenberry was appointed and immediately took full advantage of the opportunity to pitch his own script, “Defense Plant Gambling,” which dealt with the sale of industrial secrets at a large aircraft company. It was credited to “Robert Wesley,” the pseudonym Roddenberry used to disguise the fact that he had not sought permission to write alongside his official duties (this was obtained in December 1953). Roddenberry continued to balance writing and police work for three years. In February 1954, he took the sergeant’s exam and passed at the first attempt.
Roddenberry later said that he only became a policeman to gain experience so he could sell scripts, but this is hardly plausible. Nor is Roddenberry’s oft-repeated story about arresting his preferred literary agent for speeding in order to gain an introduction. Don Ingalls said that he and Gene both took the first agent who would accept them. At other times, Roddenberry said he was “in line” to take over as chief of police.7 Since he never rose above the rank of sergeant, this seems little more than a daydream on his part.
Roddenberry was transferred to Hollywood division to serve his six months’ probation. There he met another probationary sergeant, Wilbur Clingan, who became a firm friend (and would lend his surname to one of Star Trek’s most famous creations). Meanwhile, he wrote two more scripts for Mr District Attorney in 1954, earning the equivalent of roughly a month and a half’s sergeant’s salary for each. Toward the end of the year, he wrote the treatment for a science fiction story about two alien agents living undercover in contemporary America. It eventually became “The Secret Weapon of 117,” an episode of the anthology series Stage 7. The lead was played by Ricardo Montalban. Roddenberry also pitched “The Transport” for Ziv’s Science Fiction Theater; the tale features “a device which is television, smellovision, soundvision, all rolled into one”8 and so bears a similarity to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck. Equally prescient was Ziv’s rejection of the story for being too expensive to produce. Nevertheless, Roddenberry landed three more scripts for Mr District Attorney, three for Ziv’s Highway Patrol, and, early in 1956, two screenplays for I Led Three Lives, a peculiar series that leeched off popular anti-Communist sentiment. With regular work coming in, and Roddenberry able to pick and choose, he resigned from LAPD in June 1956 to become a full-time writer.
He got a lot of work—multiple episodes of West Point, Boots and Saddles, The Detectives, Whiplash, and The Lawbreakers. He became the most prolific writer on Have Gun—Will Travel, writing two dozen episodes (more than he’s credited for on Star Trek). Occasionally an interviewer would refer to him as the creator of that show, and—to the annoyance of Herb Meadow and Sam Rolfe, the actual creators— Roddenberry would consistently never correct them. As the titles of the series suggest, Roddenberry was writing Westerns and cop shows, with the occasional foray into series about the military.
By 1963, Gene Roddenberry was an established TV writer. He could afford to buy a family home in Beverly Hills, and was in a position to pitch his own shows.
The Lieutenant ran for one season on NBC from September 1963 to April 1964; its twenty-nine episodes were made, in black and white, by Arena Productions, a television division of MGM run by Norman Felton, whose big hit at the time was Doctor Kildare, a show for which Roddenberry had written one episode. The story centers on a newly minted Marine lieutenant, William T. Rice. The lead actor was Gary Lockwood, whose best-known role is as Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of two astronauts not in suspended animation on the Discovery mission to Jupiter (he’s the one who is killed, not the one who goes through the stargate at the end).
Roddenberry wrote the pilot script. Writers Guild rules stated that anyone writing the pilot episode of a TV show was automatically one of the creators of the show, and Roddenberry would have been keen not to share that title with anyone else. He would not be credited as writer again until the last episode, but wrote “The Alien,” the fourteenth episode, under his pseudonym Robert Wesley. Watching the series, it’s clear that Roddenberry was heavily rewriting other people’s work. He was not happy with the quality of the scripts he received, and rarely invited a writer back for a second episode.
Each week saw the Lieutenant faced with a particular problem—in early episodes, that included one of his men taking advantage of their old friendship; being accused of an inappropriate advance towards a woman he tried to help in an alleyway; and being sent undercover to assess whether a drill sergeant was being cruel to recruits. Each issue was tackled with at least a degree of nuance, with plot twists and complications arriving at the end of each act. In most episodes the Lieutenant’s character arc was similar; he learned that it’s tough being in command, that a degree of imagination is necessary, but it’s unwise to go soft on the men under you. If there was an overarching moral, it was one familiar from Roddenberry’s other work: that difference should be celebrated, but that progress ultimately depends on differences being put aside for the greater good.
The Lieutenant was repeated at least once on US cable channel TNT in the Nineties, and released on DVD in 2012, but it’s an obscure show that would be all but forgotten now if Gene Roddenberry hadn’t been involved. Even Roddenberry’s authorized biography, written before the repeat run, allocates only two pages to it—and just eleven lines to Roddenberry’s contribution, most of the rest being a discussion of Joe D’Agosta’s role as casting director (this was D’Agosta’s first time in the position he would later hold on Star Trek).9
Most discussion of The Lieutenant has been by Star Trek fans, many of whom have only heard of it second hand. Now it’s available on DVD, a few fans have started to explore the series, but naturally enough, they’ve tended to see it through the lens of Roddenberry’s better-known show. The star, Gary Lockwood, has a very prominent role as the main guest star in Star Trek’s “second pilot,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” but even without him, the majority of episodes include a face familiar from Star Trek. It’s something of a parlor game to match the guest cast of The Lieutenant to the Star Trek episode they would go on to appear in. A quick scan of the cast list demonstrates that The Lieutenant hired a number of actors whom Roddenberry and D’Agosta would go on to use in major roles in Star Trek—Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Ricardo Montalban, and Walter Koenig among them—and it was often here that Roddenberry worked with them for the first time. Other links are equally easy to spot. The text on the back of the DVD box set points out that the “T” in Lieutenant William T. Rice stands for “Tiberius,” the same as James T. Kirk, but astute fans will already have spotted that the name is also echoed in that of The Next Generation’s William T. Riker.
Not counting the Star Trek connections, there are before-they-were-famous roles for actors such as Bill Bixby, Linda Evans, Dennis Hopper, Rip Torn, Katharine Ross, and Ted Knight. One episode features Madge Cummings, who shortly afterward went on to play Aunt Harriet in the Adam West Batman series. The most notable feature of The Lieutenant’s cast, though, is that Rice’s commanding officer, Captain Rambridge, is played by Robert Vaughn, just before he took on the role that would make him world famous, that of Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–8). Vaughan had been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his first major screen role (in 1959’s The Young Philadelphians) and was one of The Magnificent Seven (1960) but he was not a star name in 1963. He had enough clout to be paid the same as Lockwood for The Lieutenant, despite only being in a scene or two of most episodes. He’s charming and makes the most of what are often rather perfunctory lines.
Vaughn seems to have signed onto the show with the promise it was a larger part, and soon asked for his role to be expanded. Studio bosses clearly agreed. A couple of later episodes feature him more heavily; in “The Alien,” Vaughn’s character takes delivery of a Korean orphan he and his ex-wife planned to adopt before they separated. He struggles to cope, and starts a relationship with a woman with an eye to them marrying so they can adopt the boy (the woman is played by Madlyn Rhue, who would play the Enterprise crew member seduced by Khan in the episode “Space Seed”—both her characters, oddly, are keen military historians). It’s the episode written by “Robert Wesley,” and it relegates Lieutenant Rice to a handful of scenes, while demonstrating Vaughn’s abilities at comedy and as a romantic lead. One of a number of reasons The Lieutenant wasn’t renewed was to free Vaughn up to star in his own series, which would also be produced by Arena Productions. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964–8) was to be built around Vaughn, indeed it had the working title Solo, after his character.
Roddenberry, forty-two years old, and in charge of his first television show, began wearing suits and sports coats in an effort to look more professional but, as Engel puts it, “many of them were made of primitive synthetic fabrics and the producer sometimes looked more like a cheap pimp than Beau Brummell.”10 Rather less comically, Engel reports Buzz Kulik, one of the show’s directors, as saying of Roddenberry that “he was really out of it, to a great extent, because of his drinking and personal problems.” Kulik and his wife overheard a number of loud arguments between Gene and Eileen Roddenberry, with Eileen confiding to Lorraine Kulik that Roddenberry was physically abusive.11 The Lieutenant was budgeted at $117,000 an episode,12 but would have cost far more without the cooperation of the US Marines. Many exteriors were filmed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, and the Corps let the series show off military equipment like helicopters and flamethrowers and loaned real Marines to appear on screen going through drills and exercises. All of this was provided for free. In return, the Corps wanted to be presented in a favorable light, and Roddenberry claimed he was given a long list of topics that he was to avoid. He certainly received detailed notes on each specific script. The price of their involvement was that if the Marines wanted changes, the script had to be rewritten no matter how implausible the notes were. One comment asserted that a scene of a Marine cadet being injured during training had to go, because such a thing could never happen. Roddenberry knew that was nonsense, but amended the script. A lot of episodes feature odd little caveats that would appear to be either a result of notes from the Marines, or included to head off trouble, such as here from “To Set It Right,” where Private Cameron, who is black, identifies his colleague Devlin as someone who attacked him when they were at school:
CAMERON: When someone hits you with a chain, Lieutenant, you know who did it. I was just another nigger that didn’t know his place.
RICE: I told you to knock off that kind of talk, Private.
CAMERON: Sir, you asked me for fact, I was just quoting what Devlin said to me once.
RICE: Uh-huh. Has anyone ever said that to you since you joined the Marine Corps, Private?
CAMERON: No sir. I like the Corps fine. Until a few minutes ago. I even liked Boot Camp, sir. I didn’t see one ounce of prejudice there.
As the first episodes were being made, Roddenberry felt confident the show would prove to be a new Doctor Kildare—it used the same basic format of a young, idealistic character darting around various roles in an institutional setting, dealing with some serious real-life issues. There was the novelty that it was a show about the role of the military in peacetime, rather than a war story. NBC had high hopes for the show, too, but when they viewed the first episodes they were disappointed, and their nerves weren’t steadied when some of the early reviews declared the show was nothing special. It did surprisingly well at first against the stiff competition of The Jackie Gleason Show on Saturday night, though, and so was given some leeway.
In The Lieutenant, we see some familiar Roddenberry touches and themes, strengths and weaknesses—and the start of a pattern when recruiting leading men. Gary Lockwood was the first lead Roddenberry cast—square-jawed, conventionally attractive, athletic, and slightly older than the character he’s playing. Lockwood performs Roddenberry’s lines with a straight bat. It’s his first show as the lead, and he is notably more confident in the role by the end of the show, but at the start he’s far too solemn and stolid. There’s evidence Roddenberry wasn’t entirely happy with the performance; Lockwood said his producer kept “trying to get the directors to loosen me up; make me smile and do all kinds of boyish things. And it’s not my style.”13 This is not to say that Lockwood does a bad job. His is almost certainly a true-to-life depiction of a Marine lieutenant, but he’s not quite warm enough. When he smiles in the opening credits, it’s presumably meant to be disarming, but it looks rather disconcerting and forced. As Variety’s review of the first episode put it, “Lockwood has the looks, a special pensive quality and the basic acting ability . . . but the character he portrays will have to give off more heroic magic.”14
Roddenberry’s leading men are all accomplished character actors, with long and varied careers. Often, though, something in his work seems to bring out a certain stiffness in them, and they end up as a weak point where the solid core of the show should be—that “heroic magic” is missing. It’s a charge that could be leveled against Jeffrey Hunter as Pike (the captain of the Enterprise in the first Star Trek pilot), Robert Lansing as Gary Seven in the “backdoor pilot” “Assignment: Earth” (Roddenberry also cast him as the lead in The Long Hunt of April Savage), Robert Foxworth in The Questor Tapes (who has the excuse he’s playing an android, but Brent Spiner was quickly able to tease out a great deal more as the very similar character Data in The Next Generation), and Alex Cord as Dylan Hunt in Genesis II. It’s easy to imagine Stephen Macht, Roddenberry’s first choice to play Picard in The Next Generation, following suit.
Looking at the television pilots Roddenberry went on to make in the Seventies, we might assume that he wanted shows with bizarre science fiction settings to have a solid, grounded lead performance. The premise of Genesis II is that someone from our time (give or take) ends up in a post-apocalyptic future with bizarre new customs. That character is the audience identification figure, so he has to play it straight when he’s confronted with some new weirdness, and to be an everyman with integrity and decency when he’s called on to defend the innocent. But this doesn’t give Alec Cord much to work with, and he comes across as sullen and restricted. Lockwood’s performance is equally hemmed in. Rather than this being a consequence of the science fiction setting, it seems that, whether he was writing police shows, Westerns, science fiction, or stories about military men, Roddenberry wrote his male lead as a solid, masculine presence—and a little boring.
Seeing Jeffrey Hunter in the first Star Trek pilot, or Gary Lockwood playing either a Marine lieutenant or a Starfleet officer, it becomes obvious just how much of a contribution William Shatner makes to the success of Star Trek. It’s something of an understatement to say that Shatner’s performance is not naturalistic in places. Many places. It’s clearly a choice, though, with the actor working against the solid, businesslike nature of a lot of Roddenberry’s scripts, finding interesting words to emphasize and odd places to smile or shrug. When he was approached to appear in the second pilot for Star Trek, Shatner was shown the first attempt:
“I saw a lot of wonderful things in it. But I also saw that the people in it were playing it as though ‘we’re out in space, isn’t this serious?’ I thought if it was a naval vessel at sea, they’d be relaxed and familiar, not somewhat pedantic and self-important . . . I wanted it to be lighter rather than heavier. So I consciously thought of playing good-pal-the-Captain, who, in time of need, would snap to and become the warrior . . . I guess the way I work as an actor—I say ‘I guess’ because I don’t consciously have a methodology—is to ask ‘how entertaining can this be?’”15
It’s a style of acting that was mocked and widely parodied for a long time, but Star Trek is lurid, deliberately bordering on the absurd. Shatner’s performance works extremely well with the “pedantic and self-important” material Roddenberry was prone to supply. Kirk, especially early on, shares Lieutenant Rice’s unease at being in command. He never lets on in front of his men, but he’s troubled. He understands that decisions he makes could result in the deaths of his crew, or provoke wars that will see civilians killed; he understands that his enemies can be justified in their actions, and that there are situations where he must reach decisions quickly and live with the consequences. Shatner instinctively saw that a solemn, over-serious performance would weigh Star Trek down.
Robert Vaughn and William Shatner have similar acting styles, the same sort of commanding presence, but oozing charm, and with a hint that both the actor and character are having more fun than they’re allowed to let on. For Planet Earth, Roddenberry’s second stab at the Genesis II concept, Dylan Hunt was recast. John Saxon is a familiar face from Seventies movies, probably best known for playing opposite Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973), and he brings a physicality to the role that’s very clearly a homage to Shatner’s performance as Kirk. Planet Earth’s a lot more entertaining than its forerunner, mainly thanks to its lead actor.
The Lieutenant had a very specific role in the story Gene Roddenberry told his fans about himself. The foundation myth of Star Trek was laid out in the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek:
[Roddenberry] decided he had to make it appear on the outside like a Trojan horse, the series idea would conceal a few surprises. Roddenberry was determined to break through television’s censorship barrier and do tales about important and meaningful things. He was certain television’s audience was not the collection of nitwits that networks believed it to be. By using science fiction yarns on far-off planets, he was certain he could disguise the fact he was actually talking about politics, sex, economics, the stupidity of war, and half a hundred other vital subjects usually prohibited in television.16
The way Roddenberry told it, The Lieutenant proved how hard it was to discuss controversial topics on TV, and as a direct result he drew up Star Trek, calculating that the science fiction nature of the show would trick his bosses. It’s one of the lines that fans have heard many times, one of the things they “know”: that Star Trek is a clever, allegorical show that grasps controversial topics that nothing else on television could touch.
It’s not, though, an argument that holds up very well in the face of the evidence. The allegories in Star Trek are hardly impenetrable. However dim the network overseers were, they probably spotted that the aliens in “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” whose faces are black on one side and white on the other, and who have been locked in a war between those who are black on the right side and those who are black on the left, is a commentary on race prejudice. There aren’t all that many “political” episodes of Star Trek, if we use the word to mean ones that deal with difficult, specific contemporary issues.
If we want to see Roddenberry’s true original intent, we could refer to the pitch document, a fifteen-page description of the premise, characters, and selling points of the show which he wrote in March 1964. The document includes twenty-five brief summaries of potential stories. About half are recognizable as stories which ended up being made, and a Star Trek fan could identify many of these by their working titles (“The Next Cage,” “The Day Charlie Became God,” “President Capone,” “The Mirror”) and others by the summary: (“a planet which duplicates famous Humans, and then forces them into gladiatorial combat,” “some ‘hanky-panky’ occurs when escorting a cargo ship of women to a deep space colony”).
What we see in the pitch document is a mixed bag which includes a number of stories that might be termed “philosophical,” or that present moral dilemmas. “The Perfect World” is a prototype of “The Return of the Archons,” which asks how a society might maintain order without becoming authoritarian. It’s an important question, but an eternal one. “A Question of Cannibalism” has the crew visiting a colony planet and learning that the “cow like creatures raised on the ranches there are actually intelligent beings.” “Charlie X” is about how terrible it would be if one man’s wishes came true. “The Radiant One” features a beautiful woman whose embrace is irresistible but deadly (it may have been the basis of the broadcast episode “That Which Survives”). These aren’t stories ripped from newspapers in 1964 and given a science fiction makeover, they’re all stories the Ancient Greeks told. The question at the heart of the episode “Reason”—“can a robot be capable of emotional feeling?”—is one that fascinated Roddenberry, and he would go on to revisit it many times, but it’s not one of the hot-button civil rights issues of the Sixties.
There are, generously, two “timely political” stories proposed in the pitch document. In “The Pet Shop” the ship visits a world where “women are the masters, and men are women’s pets.” The concept of “Kongo” is essentially the same, but it’s set on an antebellum world where blacks keep whites as slaves. Again, while women’s rights and race relations were political issues in the Sixties, these are more general stories about worms turning. The message is no deeper than “you wouldn’t like it if things were the other way around, would you?”
Other proposed stories seem to be simple adventure/survival yarns with no allegorical or satirical content. “To Skin a Tyrannosaurus” would have seen a crewman forced to survive on a primeval world with only a sling and a club. In “Camelot Revisited,” the crew would have found themselves “engaged in lance and sword play to preserve their own skins.” Perhaps the pitch document itself was a Trojan horse, and Roddenberry secretly planned to deal with far more controversial topics, but this isn’t what happened when Star Trek made it to the air.
Watching The Lieutenant, then watching Star Trek, the conclusion is inescapable: the average broadcast episode of The Lieutenant is far stronger stuff when it’s tackling timely, controversial topics than the average episode of Star Trek.
“Balance of Terror,” the first Star Trek episode to feature the Romulans, “addresses the issue of prejudice.” A new character, Lieutenant Stiles, displays hostility toward Romulans and explains he lost relatives in the last war with them, a century ago. When it’s revealed that Romulans look like Vulcans, Stiles immediately accuses Spock of being a Romulan spy, leading to exchanges like:
KIRK: Well, here’s one thing you can be sure of, Mister. Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There’s no room for it on the bridge. Do I make myself clear?
STILES: You do, sir.
It’s a subplot, and one that’s dealt with quickly and neatly—there are a couple more incidents where Stiles is suspicious of Spock and receives reprimands, but at the end of the episode, Spock risks his life to save Stiles, and Stiles is shamed into being won over:
STILES: I’m alive, sir. But I wouldn’t be. Mr. Spock pulled me out of the phaser room. He saved my life. He risked his life after I—
SPOCK: I saved a trained navigator so he could return to duty. I am capable of no other feelings in such matters.
It’s a message about the dangers of intolerance, but an extremely broad one. The story is as simple as can be: a character overcomes his prejudice against a whole group by seeing an individual from that group acting in a way that surprises him.
In terms of the narrative conventions of the show, it’s essentially false drama. Even the least savvy viewers would know it was extremely unlikely the regular character Mr. Spock was really a Romulan spy, and would be rooting for him, not Stiles, a character we’ve never seen before and won’t see again. In “Balance of Terror,” the main plot says something quite interesting about the nobility of the enemy, and how military men share many values and concerns, regardless of which side they’re on—the Romulan captain has come to see a kindred spirit in Kirk, and he dies with a line oft-quoted by fans: “I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend.” It’s a good episode, an extremely entertaining hour of television, and the main plot sees some great writing and performances . . . but “Balance of Terror” is not a deep treatise on the roots and consequences of prejudice, the likes of which American TV had never seen before.
In The Lieutenant, “Mother Enemy” has a similar main plot to the subplot of “Balance of Terror”—a Marine (played by the future Mr. Chekov, Walter Koenig) who wants to progress to officer training faces prejudice from his colleagues when it’s learned that his mother is a prominent member of an American Communist group. In “To Set It Right” a “Negro” Marine starts a fight with a fellow Marine from his home town who he knows to be a racist. Both stories are the main plot of the episode, and the problems are explored from a variety of angles. The two Marines who face prejudice are themselves aggressive and less than honest with the Lieutenant when questioned. Lieutenant Rice is forced to face his own prejudices and limitations, and to reconcile his own standards with the demands of military regulations. He misjudges situations and makes mistakes as he goes. In “To Set it Right,” he admits he’s never known any “Negroes” his own age, and later struggles a little with terminology when he talks to Norma Bartlett, Private Cameron’s fiancée, played by Nichelle Nichols.
RICE: I didn’t mean this as an intrusion, Miss Bartlett. I’m having a few problems with your fiancé myself. I thought you might be able to help. They concern Private Cameron’s . . . ethnic background.
BARTLETT: You mean he’s a Negro?
RICE: Yes, ma’am. I, ah, I’ve been trying to reach him, to talk to him. I haven’t had much luck. He seems to be going on the assumption that because he’s Negro and, well, I’m . . . Caucasian . . .
BARTLETT: Lieutenant, if the words “white” and “black” come easier, why not use them? They’re perfectly handy, acceptable references. If you’ll stumble around embarrassed it’s just going to make both of us uncomfortable.
It isn’t at all clear what the resolution will be in either case, and while the end of “To Set it Right” is similar to that of “Balance of Terror”—the black Marine and the racist learn to get along when they have to cooperate to survive a climbing exercise—the end of the episode where they share a joke about the black soldier not needing to wear camouflage face paint on a night exercise feels far more like the start of an uneasy truce than a declaration that this is the way to end all racism. The conclusion of “Mother Enemy” is quite subtle—the Lieutenant decides the Marine whose mother is a Communist isn’t ready to be an officer, because of the young man’s conduct in the episode, not because of his mother’s political beliefs. Both he and his captain are sure it’s the best decision, but regret it. There’s no place in either episode for poetic justice, and Lieutenant Rice can’t rely on sentimental notions of “fairness” or giving his men “the benefit of the doubt.” It does matter that “Negro” and “Communist” are real things, while “Romulans” and “Vulcans” aren’t, as it places the narrative far closer to home, and forces the audience members to position themselves in the debate and not to treat it as an abstract discussion.
Was The Lieutenant canceled because it was too controversial, as Roddenberry implied?
At some point, the Marines withdrew their cooperation. Suddenly, the show was denied free access to locations, hardware, and real Marines to appear in location footage. This could only have added to the expense and detracted from the authenticity. Gene Roddenberry said this happened because the Marines objected to a particular script. The problem is that at different times, he made this claim about a number of stories. At times he agreed with Norman Felton that it was “To Set It Right” that was the culprit, and also claimed the episode had never been broadcast.17 But he said elsewhere that it was the network, not the Marines, who objected, and that the active steps he took led to the episode being shown:
“My problem was not the Marine Corps, here, it was NBC, who turned down the show flat. The studio, MGM, said, ‘You’ll spend a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars which you won’t be able to recover, and we take this very seriously.’ . . . I had only one thing I could do, I went out to [the] NAACP, and an organization named CORE, and they lowered the boom on NBC. They said, ‘Prejudice is prejudice, whatever the color.’ And so we were able to show the show.”18
What’s the truth of it? First, that Roddenberry liked to exaggerate in stories, particularly when the stories were about himself and allowed him to be portrayed as heroic in the face of insurmountable institutional opposition. “To Set It Right” was made, and although sources vary on whether it was ever shown, the fact is that it was broadcast, on February 22, 1964, exactly as scheduled. Roddenberry’s quote blurs the tenses, but a close reading would suggest NBC objected at an early stage and told MGM they wouldn’t pay for it, that MGM quite reasonably didn’t want to make an episode they couldn’t sell, but then NBC relented, then the episode was made and broadcast. We have no records of how hard fought a battle it was, or who fought it, or if the script was changed to allay the network’s concerns. Roddenberry would have been involved, and his own perception of those events and personal emotional investment in them could well have been radically different than the perception of whichever NBC executive was worried.
So did the Marines have a problem with the episode? Roddenberry says in the quote above that they didn’t, and the rock climbing sequences and some of the location work certainly appear to involve their cooperation. The end result is that a show depicting racial prejudice in the armed forces was written, approved by the Marines, made by the studio and shown on network television.
Elsewhere, Roddenberry claimed it was “Mother Enemy” that was the problem: “the Marine Corps got mad at us finally because we insisted on doing this script, based on a true story, where a young Sergeant was up for officer candidate school and he was denied because his mother was in the Communist Party. They didn’t want us to do that, but we insisted on doing it.”19
“Mother Enemy” was the twenty-seventh episode of twenty-nine shown, being broadcast on April 4, and final confirmation that The Lieutenant wasn’t going to be renewed came in mid-March. If the Marines had withdrawn their cooperation that late, it would barely have mattered, as the show was already ending. It’s entirely possible “Mother Enemy” was in production when the show was formally canceled, and so Roddenberry associated the episode with the show’s cancelation. There’s no evidence that the story content had anything to do with the show not being renewed.
There was certainly never the assumption that the show would be renewed—the possibility was always that it would not. On March 12, 1964, Roddenberry wrote a letter to fellow producer Quinn Martin saying, “it does appear more and more like The Lieutenant will be picked up for a new season.”20 There were several factors that tipped the balance against it. Roddenberry had lost Robert Vaughn to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The Lieutenant would be more expensive without the cooperation of the Marines. The national mood had changed—President Kennedy had been assassinated (Roddenberry recalls they’d been filming a funeral scene when news reached the set, most likely the one seen in the sixteenth episode, “Gone the Sun”). The war in Vietnam was escalating, and while the mass anti-war movement of later years was yet to develop, a show about the Marines would have to address any number of divisive issues, and run the risk of being caught out by real-life events.
In the end, the main reason The Lieutenant wasn’t renewed was that competition for primetime slots was fierce and the show didn’t make much of a mark. There was a lack of press coverage. It’s tempting to think that the controversy over “To Set It Right” was stoked a little, perhaps even by Roddenberry himself, to get some publicity for the show, and to make The Lieutenant seem “edgy.” It was the twenty-first episode, with eight still to air. If the first season had picked up viewers and positive publicity at that point, the powers that be might have been persuaded to keep it on the air.
The following season, The Lieutenant’s early evening slot on NBC was taken up by Flipper, Kentucky Jones (produced by Buzz Kulik, about a widower who adopted a Chinese orphan), and The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, in which the near-sighted cartoon character re-enacted great works of literature.
Roddenberry said in his letter to Quinn Martin that he had been assured that even if The Lieutenant was canceled, he would be put in charge of developing a new series. The Star Trek pitch document was dated March 11, 1964, and the letter to Martin was dated March 12. Roddenberry had finished working on The Lieutenant by April, and had been commissioned to write the Star Trek pilot by May. At the time, it looked like another door was opening as soon as the first had closed. Getting Star Trek onto television would prove a far more lengthy and convoluted process.
While Star Trek didn’t debut until September 1966, Roddenberry wrote the first pilot episode straight after working on The Lieutenant. Watching “The Cage” in that context, there are some striking parallels and holdovers. Many of the preoccupations of the earlier show end up troubling Captain Pike of the Enterprise. The pilot starts three weeks after Pike has lost members of his crew on a mission, and the ship’s doctor catches him brooding about it in his quarters in an exchange that could have come from the mouths of Lieutenant Rice and Captain Rambridge.
BOYCE: Chris, you set standards for yourself no one could meet. You treat everyone on board like a human being except yourself, and now you’re tired and you—
PIKE: You bet I’m tired. You bet. I’m tired of being responsible for two hundred and three lives. I’m tired of deciding which mission is too risky and which isn’t, and who’s going on the landing party and who doesn’t, and who lives and who dies. Boy, I’ve had it, Phil.
BOYCE: To the point of finally taking my advice, a rest leave?
PIKE: To the point of considering resigning.
It’s a tone that carries through into the first season of the broadcast series, with the weight of the world now on Kirk’s shoulders. The early episodes of Star Trek include a lot of material that’s similar to The Lieutenant—the ship’s captain having to maintain discipline, and struggling with the loneliness of command, and having to resolve issues where friendship or other personal matters interfere with regulations or his duty. Although a few women serve on the Enterprise, the early episodes in particular have a very masculine feel to them. The role of the women in “Mudd’s Women,” for example, is straight out of a Western—they’re mail order brides for lonely miners.
The Lieutenant has essentially been seen only as a footnote in Star Trek history, mainly appearing in actors’ anecdotes, which usually take the form “I first met Gene Roddenberry when I was in one episode of . . .” Walter Koenig does himself a serious disservice in his autobiography Warped Factors by reducing his angry, twitchy performance in “Mother Enemy” to one sentence (“During this same period I had the principal guest role on an episode of The Lieutenant, a TV series created and produced by Gene Roddenberry”).21
The Lieutenant ran for just one season, so it was seen as a failure. When he talked about it, Gene Roddenberry needed to distance himself from it to position Star Trek as an antidote to old-fashioned shows. He had to frame The Lieutenant as typical of all the things he wasn’t able to do on television at the time. The Lieutenant is not some great undiscovered classic of a show, but neither is it a disaster. Though made with the approval of the Marines, and portraying them in a broadly positive light, it certainly doesn’t whitewash them. There are rich pickings for anyone who wants to study the depiction of militarism in American popular culture immediately before the Vietnam War, or race, or gender. “To Set it Right” deals with issues of racism in a way that’s surprisingly nuanced and interesting to watch, and nothing like as cringeworthy or preachy as we might reasonably expect it to be.
Lee Erwin was the writer of both “To Set it Right” and the Star Trek episode “Whom Gods Destroy,” and it’s absurd to suggest that his Star Trek episode, in which a group of weird alien lunatics literally take over their asylum, somehow managed to convey complex topical issues that The Lieutenant couldn’t get away with. Then again, unlike The Lieutenant, Star Trek thrives after half a century, and it’s not hyperbole to say that a billion more people have seen “Whom Gods Destroy” than “To Set It Right.” To get its message across, a show has to be on air.