The Fifty-Year Mission

At the beginning of the second season, several noticeable changes greeted viewers. Not only was DeForest Kelley’s name now added to the opening credits, there was a new face at the helm: Navigator Pavel Andreievich Chekov, played by Walter Koenig. The addition of a new cast member who would potentially lure in a younger audience was eagerly embraced by both NBC and Gene Roddenberry.

In a September 22, 1966, memo, Roddenberry alerts casting director Joe D’Agosta to the casting. “Keeping our teenage audience in mind, also keeping aware of current trends, let’s watch for a young, irreverent, English-accent ‘Beatle’ type to try on the show, possibly with an eye to his reoccurring. Like the smallish fellow who looks to be a hit on The Monkees. Personally I find this type spirited and refreshing and I think our episodes could use that kind of ‘lift.’ Let’s discuss.”

It was only later that Roddenberry reconceived the character as Russian, in deference to the success of the Soviet space program at the time. He attributed this, in a story that may very well be apocryphal, to an article that allegedly appeared in the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda, in which they took the show to task for not featuring any Russian characters.

GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)

The Russians were responsible for the Chekov character. They put in Pravda that “Ah, the ugly Americans are at it again. They do a space show, and they forget to include the people who were in space first.” And I said, “My God, they’re right.”

JOSEPH PEVNEY (director, “Amok Time”)

When Roddenberry said he wanted to put a Russian on the show, I said, “I just used a kid in a television show at Universal named Walter Koenig, who I think I heard do a little Russian. Why don’t we have him in and have him read?” He looks Russian; his face has a Slavic look to it. He looked right and was not a typical Russian cliché.

WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)

They were looking for somebody who would appeal to the bubblegum set. They had somebody in mind like Davey Jones of The Monkees. All that stuff about Pravda—you know, the complaining—that’s all nonsense. That was all just publicity. But it was a very practical decision. They wanted somebody who would appeal to eight- to fourteen-year-olds and the decision was to make him Russian. My fan mail came from eight- to fourteen-year-olds who weren’t that aware of the Cold War and what was going on anyway. At the time the whole thing of getting fan mail was so novel to me that I read every single letter I got. I was literally getting about seven hundred letters a week, so that took up a lot of my spare time.

I had become involved because I had done the part of a Russian on another show [Mr. Novak] and the casting director was the same man. I had also worked with Gene Roddenberry in a leading guest starring role on The Lieutenant and worked with Joseph Pevney on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour he directed, so my name was already known, and it was a relatively painless situation. There was only one other actor who was brought into read, and I was told I had the part before I left that day.

Joe [D’Agosta] called me in and I read the lines, and his name was Jones, not Chekov, because Davy Jones was who they had in mind for somebody to play this role. I went in and there were all the executives and Gene Roddenberry and Bob Justman and I read. When I was done, there was dead silence. Either I had knocked them into a stupor or I really fucked up. So they said to me, “Yeah, Walt, can you make it funnier.” Make it funny? How do I make it funny? So my reading was something like, “Keptin, guess what, the ship is about to blow up.” They asked me to wait in the outer lobby and there was one other actor there. an actor I had worked with on a series and we had played French Resistance fighters together. He went in and read and he didn’t come out. I waited and waited and after a while, literally, the sun started to go down and I’m still waiting. What I found out was there was another exit out of Gene’s office which bypasses where I was. So I’m waiting and waiting and waiting and another fellow comes in and says, “Are you Walter Koenig?” And he drops to his knees, puts his hand between my legs, and I said, “What are you doing?” And then I see a tape measure. He says, “I’m measuring you for your pants.” That’s the ignominious way I found out I had been cast in Star Trek.

GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)

I had lobbied in season one and Gene had written some wonderful things for Sulu into the second season’s scripts. But I had taken off for The Green Berets, which went over, and because of the delay, Walter was brought in and he got those lines.

WALTER KOENIG

I had no idea how momentous this casting was in my career. I was told that the character might recur, but there was no guarantee. One of the things that happened, fortuitously, was that George Takei was shooting on The Green Berets and was late reporting for the second season, so they brought me back mainly to fill that seat for some sense of continuity, because at that point we had not had an audience reaction. I guess I was lucky that George was unavailable.

Unbeknownst to Koenig at the time, George Takei, as he admitted in his autobiography, To the Stars, was jealous of the newcomer with whom he now needed to share the spotlight, who was also getting featured in some of the series’ most popular episodes, all originally intended for Sulu.

WALTER KOENIG

It never came to my attention. I was never aware of his animosity. He was always cordial, and it wasn’t until years later that he said how he felt about me. I should have been more aware that these parts were being lost because of my presence. But on the other hand, he was doing a movie with John Wayne, so I didn’t feel guilty. George is the consummate professional. He was disappointed and treated badly on several occasions and always bore it with enormous dignity and professionalism. And I admire him for that.

DOROTHY FONTANA (story editor, Star Trek)

In the first and second season I think we went from strength to strength, because, basically, we knew our direction by the sixth show in terms of the actors who filled out the characters. We had begun to know them as the characters and began writing for their strengths. I think the stories just got better, although you always have a clinker or two. On the whole, I think our batting average was awfully good during the first two seasons.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, Star Trek)

One of the problems we did have in the second season is that once you solve anything, the thrill is gone. The thing that’s motivated me in working in the television business was getting the challenge of a new show and finding out if you could do it. My feeling was once you knew you could do it, I wanted to try something new. So, yes, the original magic, the original excitement, tends to pass on once you solve the mysteries of it. But there was still the camaraderie.

We had another problem in the second season that was highly intensified during the third. In the second season we were cut down on how much we could spend per show by a sizeable amount of money. Despite the fact that there had been cast escalations, so our cast costs were higher. This in turn had an effect on the kind of shows we could do. It was even worse the third season when we got cut down again despite more cast escalations.

RALPH SENENSKY (director, “Metamorphosis”)

There wasn’t any money. If you saw the soundstage we shot on, you’d be amazed. One of them was the starship interiors, which filled the entire stage, and it wasn’t that big a stage to begin with. The other one was the stage where we built everything else we needed. For example, on “Metamorphosis” we had the Enterprise shuttle, the Galileo, on the soundstage. We were supposed to have a spacecraft and sell the idea of a huge, huge planet. If you remember the wide shots we did, the spacecraft looks so small that you would think it was a model.

This was achieved by our cinematographer, Jerry Finnerman. We literally had the spacecraft at one end of the stage and the camera’s as far back as it could go on the other end of the stage. Jerry shot it with a nine-millimeter lens just to give it that scope. You see it today, I think it’s marvelous. But you couldn’t use the nine-millimeter with actors because it distorts. That’s an example of the budgetary limitations. Rather than fight it, you try and find a way to use the imagination and rise above it.

Unfortunately for Lucille Ball, the crushing deficits incurred by Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, both shows that would go on to enduring legacies and prove immensely profitable for Paramount, forced her to reluctantly sell the studio she and ex-husband Desi had built on the back of her wildly successful sitcom to Paramount, her studio’s neighbor at Gower and Melrose. At the time, Paramount was actually more interested in the real estate Lucy owned than the television series the studio was producing.

MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)

Paramount took over at the halfway point of the second season and started tightening the budget. Paramount’s attitude to Star Trek was “You’re not going to ruin us like you ruined Desilu.” Lucille Ball lost her studio because of Star Trek. She had gambled on the show, and you can read the memos where her board of directors is saying, “Don’t do this show, it’s going to kill us.” But she believed in it. She moved forward with it, and halfway into the second season she had to sell Desilu to Paramount Pictures. And once Paramount Pictures came in they said, “We’re going to run this like a business. You’re not going to go over budget anymore.” Lucille Ball gave up the studio that she and her husband built, it’s all she had left of her marriage, and she sacrificed that for Star Trek.

RALPH SENENSKY

Desilu was like a family. Herb Solow, who was the head of the studio, used to come down and talk with you on the soundstage. He didn’t seem like the other studio heads who never seemed to talk to you. Herb went out of his way to help you. Can you imagine a studio working like that?

When Paramount bought it, a kind of corporate mentality took over. In a way I think that’s why I resent Paramount having such a hit in Star Trek, because if they had their way, they would have killed it off. It survived in spite of them, and now they have this bonanza making them all of this money.

MARC CUSHMAN

Lucy’s instincts were right about Star Trek, that it would become one of the biggest shows in syndication ever. The problem was that her pockets weren’t deep enough. They were losing fifteen thousand dollars an episode, which would be like five hundred thousand dollars per episode today. The board was saying, “We’re not a big studio. We can’t afford this, it will break us,” and she kept thinking, “No, somehow we’ll get through it, we’ll get them to live within their budget, somehow it’s going to work out.” You know, if she could have hung on just six months longer, it would have worked out, because by the end of the second season, once they had enough episodes, Star Trek was playing in, I believe, sixty different countries around the world. And all of that money is flowing in. It’s just that she couldn’t last those extra six months.

She was several million dollars shy of being able to hang on, and you couldn’t go out and get bank loans like you can today. And you can’t keep going on credit cards, so she had no choice but to sell. She actually took off and went to Miami. She ran away because it was so heartbreaking to sign the contract. They had to track her down to get her to do it. There’s a picture of her cutting the ribbon after they’ve torn down the wall between Paramount and Desilu, and she’s standing next to the CEO of Gulf and Western, which owns both studios now, and the frozen expression on her face is she’s trying to put on a brave face for the photographer, and trying to fake this smile for the camera, and you know it’s just killing her. But she was right. One hundred percent. The two most rerun shows in the history of TV are I Love Lucy and Star Trek.

The turmoil of the second season continued with the announcement that Gene L. Coon would be leaving the series in the middle of the production year, which, as it turned out, would deal the series a very serious and potentially crippling creative blow from which it never really recovered.

GLEN A. LARSON (creator, executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [1978])

In the second season, Gene Coon decided to leave Star Trek. He had two scripts on his desk in front of him which he had to rewrite. He suddenly put his pencil down and finally said, “This is it,” and he got up and walked out. It had been an around-the-clock, very draining experience.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL (actor, Trelene in “The Squire of Gothos,” Kor in “The Trouble with Tribbles”; friend of Gene L. Coon)

It was starting to become a tremendous chore for the show to come up with anything new. Don’t forget, they were using writers from the outside, and it was becoming more difficult to get them. You’ve got to remember that we’re talking about a period when the great writers no longer were doing anything. When television was making its first inroads, you had some of these great people doing television shows.

MARC CUSHMAN

Why did Gene Coon leave Star Trek? Roddenberry was off doing a Robin Hood script, a Robin Hood TV pilot, which never got made, but he was being paid to do it, so he took off at the halfway point of the second season to go do the script assignment for four weeks. He comes back, and a couple of scripts he’d assigned while he was still there are now being filmed, and he walks onto Stage 9 and he hears all this laughter, which was not unusual because Shatner was always making jokes and there was always laughter. But this is more so than usual, and the lights are on so he knows they’re filming, so why is everyone laughing while they’re filming? And he walks over and it’s the scene from “The Trouble with Tribbles” where Shatner is opening the storage compartments and all the Tribbles are falling on him and he’s buried in Tribbles.

Roddenberry is standing there watching this scene being filmed and he’s not laughing. This isn’t his Star Trek, this is Lost in Space stuff. And so he turned and walked away and he went to the screening room and he said, “Show me the last episode that’s now being edited,” and the previous episode was “I, Mudd.” Roddenberry had given that assignment, the story was his idea, he’s the one who did the story for “Mudd’s Women” the year before and it was supposed to be more serious, a flamboyant character but still serious, and he’s watching this thing that is total comedy.

Then he watches more footage from “Tribbles” and then he takes a look at the next episode to be filmed, and it’s “Bread and Circuses,” which was also his idea, and it’s been turned into a bit of a comedy. So he starts rewriting it and he starts taking a lot of the comedy out, and he and Gene Coon have a powwow. Gene Coon comes out of that meeting and types up his resignation. That day, the day after Roddenberry returned, Gene Coon turns in his resignation.

ANDE RICHARDSON

If Gene Roddenberry said anything to him about what he was doing with the humor and everything, then why stay there and take that? He was doing fine.

I will say that after Gene was brought in, the Great Bird would do a disappearing act, sneaking in and out of the back door. Everything fell on Gene Coon, and I don’t think that’s what he signed on for. I think he thought that Roddenberry was going to be there carrying his load as well. I can’t say he dumped everything on Gene, but I got the feeling that Gene was more burdened once there was no Bird around. He never complained about anything, but you can only do that many uppers for so long and then you’ve got to wear out. And Gene was wearing out.

HARVE BENNETT (executive producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

The loss of Gene Coon was critical. Credit for the success of the show of course goes to Gene Roddenberry. There’s no disputing his genius. But it also goes to Gene Coon, the hardheaded rewriter who made a lot of things work. I think of myself as the Gene Coon of the feature movies. Fandom never understood the contribution that Coon made to that which they loved in the movies, notwithstanding Roddenberry’s genius. It’s my gut feeling, knowing all the players and the material, that whenever the name Gene Coon is on the episode as producer, they are generally the best shows.

MARC CUSHMAN

Coon wanted out so quickly at that point, he looked out his window and saw John Meredyth Lucas coming to his car, because John was working over at Mannix, and he said, “Can you get out of Mannix? I want you to take over for me.” And it was done that fast. Roddenberry had to approve Lucas so Roddenberry had him come to his house, talked, and he thought, “Okay, John is going to dial down the comedy, he’s going to make the show more like what I wanted, he’s going to make Kirk more driven.”

One of the first episodes John did was “Obsession.” It had more of the tone Gene Roddenberry wanted it to be, and so he approved him. Now, they still had all these scripts that Gene Coon had been rewriting, and even though Coon’s name doesn’t appear on the screen for the second half of the second season, almost all those scripts were started by him, he got memos from him on all the scripts, but then John Meredyth Lucas and Gene Roddenberry started rewriting them and taking the humor out, and making it more of the show Roddenberry wanted it to be. And it wasn’t quite as good as the first half of the second season. It lost a little steam there.

JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS (producer, writer, director, Star Trek)

I was on the lot shooting Mannix, and I wrote a script for Gene Coon. Gene was going to retire and suggested that I take over because I had produced Ben Casey. We talked for a while and that was it. At that time, Bob Justman was handling the production end of things. When I came in, I got into production, too, and was also directing. Gene had said, “When they hired me, they knew I was writing and that was it.” That was not the way that I produced.

DAVID GERROLD

The last six episodes were finished up by John Meredyth Lucas, who was something of a caretaker just to make sure that things moved in the right way. A very nice man, but probably someone very much under the thumb of Roddenberry. Grateful for the job, and Roddenberry said, “We’re going to do it my way,” and the last six episodes of the second season were … adequate.

ANDE RICHARDSON

When Gene left—and he didn’t tell me exactly why he did leave—he said, “I’m going to go, and when I find someplace, I’ll let you know and you can come and join me.” So I worked with John Meredyth Lucas. He was a nice guy, he did the job, but I don’t think he really sparked anything. For me, the whole situation became bleh. I just came in, did my job, collected my paycheck. The joy was gone. I had such freedom with Gene. I could read the scripts, I could tell him honestly what I thought about things, and we would talk about the scripts. In the sense of what was going on, I felt like I was contributing. That was gone after Gene left. I was glad to get the heck away from there after he was gone.

JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS

When I came on, I remember a great deal of tension between the actors. Not civil war, but a great deal of tension among the cast and the company. As a matter of fact, Gene took me out to location to introduce me as producer. We came up to the company. When they’d gotten a particular shot, we walked over and Shatner walked away from us. He would not speak to Gene or to me. They were feuding over something, though I’ve no idea what the problem was.

There was also tension among Shatner and Nimoy and Gene that had built up. It happens on every show, but it was particularly noticeable on Star Trek when I first came on. I won’t say I solved it, but I simply ignored it, went on and was on the set a great deal. I tend to be hands-on with everything. It was just a different kind of approach. Whatever had caused the tension, I’m not quite sure. Actors tend to feel that if you’re not there all the time and petting them a little bit, or at least there to hear their screams of anguish, that they’re abandoned. Eventually we all became very friendly. That doesn’t mean there weren’t complaints about someone’s part not being meaningful, but we developed a mechanism to talk them out.

DORRIS HALSEY (manager of Gene L. Coon)

Gene was happy on Star Trek for quite a while. Then both personal and professional things started weighing on him. He was having personality problems with Shatner and Nimoy. He had a very low respect for actors, except his friends. Gene also had a low threshold for boredom.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL

I don’t know anything about the relationship between the two guys, but I can tell you this: What happens to actors when they’ve acquired a position on a television show after a short period of time—they can’t help it—they become precious. And recognize that in some ways they can tell producers off, can make their presence felt. They all have ideas.

JACKIE COON FERNANDEZ (widow of Gene L. Coon)

Gene wasn’t crazy about actors. They were just too needful and too egocentric. He wasn’t. He didn’t get along with Robert Wagner either when he went over to It Takes a Thief. I would take his feelings about these actors he didn’t get along with with a grain of salt, because he didn’t care for actors in general.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL

I don’t remember a situation where Gene Coon would tell either Shatner or Nimoy how to act, nor did he suggest that he was a director, but he did have an inner sense and he might have held the line on certain things that they would have changed. Or areas where they would have liked another direction be taken, and Gene Coon perhaps debated them on occasion and they didn’t like it. But I never heard him say one bad word against anybody.

JACKIE COON FERNANDEZ

I don’t think there was a personal falling-out between Gene and Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry liked the glory more than Gene wanted in the show. He wanted more guts and less glory. Less razzmatazz. Less show business and more thought. Roddenberry wanted more flash into the quirky trappings of science fiction. Gene [Coon] was a philosopher in his feelings. There probably was a certain difference there, but not enough to disturb a friendship because they remained friends for as long as he lived.

ANDE RICHARDSON

When Gene Coon was there, we were in a groove. We were changing the world. When I would answer his phone “Coon’s Coon,” it was okay because we were going to where no one had gone before. We were making a difference. I felt that way with Malcolm [X], I felt that way with Martin [Luther King], and I had it with Gene Coon. We were making a difference. My friends were, like, “I want to be a film producer,” but I wanted to be a television producer because I wanted to do what Gene Coon had done. I wanted to put things out there for people so that they could see a different way of thinking and being. I wanted to do “The Devil in the Dark,” because we are made out of the same material; we can’t dismiss one life-form over another. We were doing something. We were doing something good. And Gene just did what he did. He didn’t do it for people to say, “Wow, that was great.” He just did his best and he did it with his heart.

JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS

If there was one element that I brought back to the show when I was producer, because it had been a little bit lost, it was Gene Roddenberry’s inspiration for the series Horatio Hornblower. That’s the thing that I kept trying to bring back. The constant warfare—frontier warfare—to make Kirk Captain Hornblower again. A lot of that stuff had gotten lost into the areas of fantasy, which is fine. But as the season progressed there’d been less and less of the Hornblower elements, which appealed to me as exemplified in “The Ultimate Computer” and things like that.

A creative problem on the show was that we loved doing pieces which had some kind of concept. That’s a terrible word to use when you’re talking to the network. You would think that high-concept would mean a lofty purpose, but to them it simply means something you can tell in one word. The network tended to want green space monsters that ate the ship each week, and we tended to want to do shows which had, what seemed to us, some kind of concept, saying something and being different. But God knows we did our share of the green monsters eating the ship.

Despite all of the behind-the-scenes turmoil and a notable change in quality once Gene Coon had departed, season two of the original Star Trek is considered perhaps the best season of the show produced. Among the now-classic episodes: “Amok Time,” in which Spock is internally driven to return to Vulcan to mate or die—and finds himself in a battle to the death with Kirk; “Mirror, Mirror,” which found Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura in a savage parallel universe aboard a very different Enterprise, where rank is achieved through assassination; “Metamorphosis,” a genuinely moving exploration of the nature of love; “Journey to Babel,” in which Enterprise serves as host for a number of aliens en route to a diplomatic conference, which also explored the estranged relationship between Spock and his father, Sarek; “The Trouble with Tribbles,” Star Trek’s first comedic episode, which pits Kirk and company against the Klingons and thousands of purring fur balls; and semisuccessful visits to a number of Earthlike planets with a society mirroring old-time Chicago (“A Piece of the Action”) and modern-day parallels to Nazi Germany (“Patterns of Force”) and the Roman Empire (“Bread and Circuses”).

JOSEPH PEVNEY

The fight in “Amok Time” was absolutely excellent and one of the best we ever did. What made it dramatically interesting is that it took place between Kirk and Spock. During this episode, Leonard Nimoy and I also worked out the Vulcan salute and the statement “live long and prosper” together.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Leonard Nimoy came in with the “live long and prosper” sign—the split fingered salute. He came into my office and said, “I feel the need for a Vulcan salutation, Gene,” and he showed it to me. Then he told me a story about when he was a kid in synagogue. The rabbis said, “Don’t look or you’ll be struck dead or blind,” but Leonard looked and, of course, the rabbis were making that Vulcan sign. The idea of my Southern kinfolk walking around giving each other a Jewish blessing so pleased me that I said, “Go!”

DOROTHY FONTANA

On “Amok Time” I don’t remember if it was Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, or [writer] Ted Sturgeon who came up with the idea of the Vulcan seven-year mating cycle, but the way we have established it, Vulcans mate normally anytime they want to. However, every seven years you do the ritual, the ceremony, the whole thing. It’s a biological urge. This every-seven-years business was taken literally by too many people who aren’t stopping and understanding. I mean, every seven years would be a little bad, and it would not explain the Vulcans of many different ages, which are not seven years apart.

When Ted was writing the episode, there were some places where we, as I recall, said to him, “Well, you know McCoy has this role in relationship to Spock, and Kirk has this role,” and Ted just put them together in a really nice blend of relationships, which is, again, what Star Trek is about. Relationships. The stories that didn’t go well were stories that were against objects without human relationships involved somewhere in the story.

JEROME BIXBY (writer, “Mirror, Mirror”)

I had already done a fiction story called “One Way Street,” which was a parallel-universe story, and I thought that would make a good Star Trek. The universe I created was a very savage counterpart, virtually a pirate ship, into which I could transpose a landing party. I submitted the outline, they loved it and I did the script.

DOROTHY FONTANA

“Metamorphosis” was a very delicate and touching love story. The idea that a man could accept a relationship with this alien, and the young woman, to save her life, accepted the alien into her body was a really lovely story and a very touching one. Gene Coon did it with great deftness and delicacy.

“Journey to Babel” came about because of the mention a couple of times of Spock’s parents. I said to Gene, “We’ve talked about them, let’s show them.” So I sat down and created two characters, especially the relationship with Sarek and the rift between him and Spock, and Amanda positioned in the middle. She was a thoroughly human woman with an all-Vulcan husband and a half-caste son, which is bound to create a lot of character problems.

JOSEPH PEVNEY

“The Trouble with Tribbles” was a delightful show from beginning to end. I had a lot of fun with it, went out and shopped for the tribbles. It was the first effort of a writer named David Gerrold and I thought he made a hell of a contribution to the show. My biggest contribution was getting the show produced, because there was a feeling amongst the people involved that we shouldn’t do it. It was a comedy and they felt we had no business doing an outright comedy. It turned out well, and Bill Shatner had the opportunity to do the little comic bits he loves to do. The premise was humorous as hell.

DAVID GERROLD

I have to be real honest here: It feels great to have written “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I remember when I wrote it, I looked at it as an honor and responsibility, and I set out to write the very best episode of Star Trek ever made.

DAVID P. HARMON (writer, “A Piece of the Action”)

I felt that our Western civilization is based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, so what I did in “A Piece of the Action” was say that suppose a ship crashed, and the people on the planet salvaged a book called The Life of Al Capone, which they treated as their version of the Bible, and from which they built their own society.

JAMES KOMACK (director, “A Piece of the Action”)

The thing that always had to be kept in mind was that Kirk and Spock were from another time while we were trying to make a picture about the twenties. You constantly have to say that it’s got to be the twenties from everyone else’s point of view, but it’s got to be future-time for Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner, and that gets a little bizarre. The joke going on around them was that they had never seen a machine gun before, they never saw pool tables or cars. We’d have to work out the jokes right there and then. You’d say, “Wait a minute, you’ve never seen that before. I’ve got to shoot something that shows you’ve never seen this before.” Spock and Kirk came down with this great intellect and they were dealing with the equivalent of monkeys. These guys had an IQ of about room temperature, and it was funny to watch Kirk and Spock stare at them, because they were just ludicrous. They had a book, they were mobsters, they were taking over cities. Their brains just weren’t working that well. That was great fun.

JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS (director/writer, “Patterns of Force”)

The totalitarian, particularly the Nazi, society had always fascinated me. How could this come about? I know the history, but how in the minds of people could this come about? I started off with the premise that I would try to explain it and explore how an entire country could get swept up in it. It’s still difficult to comprehend. Thankfully there was very little problem in terms of covering such dramatic material. Gene Roddenberry tended to do no censorship on that basis. He would come in and, if anything, would encourage even wilder statements. He was a very adventurous guy, so there was no opposition in terms of, “My God, what are you writing about?”

RALPH SENENSKY

Gene Roddenberry is a very creative man. When we did “Bread and Circuses,” I remember having a meeting with him about it, and he was going to do some writing. I went there the next morning at six o’clock to get the new material, because there were things about that script which weren’t working. Both Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon were writing on that show as we were shooting. I don’t remember what the problem was, except that we were doing the Roman arena in modern times with television. I do remember that my concern was all of that talk about the “sun,” which they talked about from early on, might not be a mystery when we got to the end. We didn’t want to tip that we were doing a Christ story from the word go. That took some doing, because it wasn’t really in the script, but they did it. They were sealing up the loose ends, because originally when they were talking about the sun, you knew right away that they were talking about the son of God.

DOROTHY FONTANA

Certainly there was a nice philosophy going on there with the worshipping of the “sun,” and then the indication that it was the son of God, that Jesus or the concept had appeared on other planets. I thought that was a nice touch. There have been other stories written with the same theme as the main point, but just adding it at the end really seems quite nice.

Fontana remained concerned for much of the second season that the show was repeating itself. In a memo she wrote on June 19, 1967, she emphasized, “Even our devoted viewers will not stay with us if we do not vary our backgrounds, themes, and adventures. We’ve touted this series as one with creative imagination and daring. Where is it?”

One of the more controversial episodes in the second season, spearheaded by Roddenberry, was “A Private Little War,” in which the Klingons are providing weapons to a primitive planet, prompting Kirk to do the same to maintain the “balance of power” on both sides, an analogue for the ongoing conflict in Vietnam.

WALTER KOENIG

That was the one episode that I thought digressed from a rather liberal, political posture. I had a very strong feeling about it. I thought that in maintaining this balance of power we were justifying the building of armaments.

In so many ways Star Trek was a standout compared to the rest of the shows being broadcast by the networks, but insofar as NBC was concerned, the show was more trouble than it was worth. Not only was there a continuing series of battles with Gene Roddenberry regarding content, but the series was not a ratings powerhouse. Indeed, it seemed that season two could very well be the show’s last. The only hope would be if the word could somehow get out to the fans, a challenge made more difficult by the fact that Harlan Ellison, who by this time had had a major falling-out with Roddenberry over his script for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” would not throw his support behind such a campaign. The show’s future was strictly in the hands of the fans.

HARLAN ELLISON (author; writer, “The City on the Edge of Forever”)

I was very optimistic about the show in the beginning, but within a couple of years that changed and everybody was laughing at me. When these people said, “Star Trek is going to be the new horizon for us; we’re going to sell more science fiction than ever before and it’s going to be the Golden Age,” I said, “No, it’s not, you fools. You’re not going to sell one more of your novels. What they’re going to sell are Star Trek books,” and this was before there ever was a Star Trek novel.

Everybody looked at me and laughed and told me not to be ridiculous. Well, there it is. Star Trek books and that idiom, that space-opera crap, pushed everything off the bestseller list. I don’t like being right, but it was obvious to me that that’s the way things were going to go. This was a series that had the potential of being truly great. There are few series that really transcend the medium. All the rest of it was just television. That’s what, to me, Star Trek was mostly: just television.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE (authors, On the Good Ship Enterprise)

By the middle of the second season Star Trek was once again in danger, and hints of possible cancellation kept disturbing the set. We were visiting the shooting of “The Deadly Years” when cancellation was certain at the end of the second season. This episode being shot was one of the last Star Trek episodes to be aired before cancellation. But there was something we could do. Fans could play the largest game of “uproar” in the world and if nothing else, make certain that NBC and everyone connected with Star Trek knew that fans were unhappy about the cancellation.

JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG (founder, Star Trek Welcommittee)

The reaction to news about the cancellation among Trekkers was based on knowledge of the television business model: If we didn’t have a full three seasons of a show, there would be no syndication reruns. This was pre-video recorders in every home. Without a third season, we would lose it all forever. The reaction was panic. This was material to be passed down to grandchildren, not left to rot in some vault. This was historic breakthrough, not a trivial bit of failed entertainment. So the reaction went from “You just don’t understand!!!!” to “You and what army???” There was even a movement to try to buy enough Paramount stock to control the company.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

We wrote up a preliminary contact letter, ran it off on our ancient little mimeograph machine, and mailed it out to about a hundred and fifty science-fiction fans. These fans had been especially selected because they had some further contacts, either as fanzine editors, club members, or for some such reason. We even had addresses of some Star Trek fan mail that Gene helped us obtain from the fan-mail service that Paramount contracted with. We didn’t have enough money to have a letter printed, so we had to fly on the strength of the message and its urgency to get people’s attention. We used the Rule of Ten: ask ten people to write a letter and they ask ten people to write a letter, and each of those ten asks ten people to write a letter. And so on and so on.

JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

Bjo put out directions for how to write such letters, and the directions were mostly followed. The audience was educated adults more than gaga kids with no buying power.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

NBC was convinced that Star Trek was watched only by drooling idiot twelve-year-olds. They managed to ignore the fact that people such as Isaac Asimov, a multiple Ph.D., and a multitude of other intellectuals enjoyed the show. So, of course, the suits were always looking for reasons to cancel shows they didn’t trust to be a raging success.

JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

This was before Nielsen got demographic analysis down to where sponsors could use that data. The bulk of the Trek audience was college students, grad students, and recent grads. People with potential earning power that sponsors wanted, but the sponsors had no way to know that until that letter campaign produced a flood of original letters formatted as business letters.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

NBC began to get a wave of letters that rocked them off their fat complacency. Fans were not to know this for some time, so we just kept sending in letters on faith that something was happening. The first intimation our plan was working was a party where a computer systems analyst heard someone call Bjo’s name. “Are you Bjo Trimble?” he asked with a grin. Bjo asked how he knew her name. “Everyone at NBC knows your name,” he said. “You’ve cost NBC a lot of money. They had to hire extra help to keep opening that mail, sorting it, and trying to find out what the average Star Trek fan is like. Labels are everything in the TV biz. They keep running everything through our computers to see if they can come up with the definitive Star Trek fan. You know, how old, what income bracket, and so on. So far it cost them a lot of money to find out nothing at all. You guys can’t be nailed down to any one label, and it’s driving NBC crazy. Also, it rattled cages to find that someone managed to put Star Trek Lives! bumper stickers on all the limousines in the very private executive parking lot.”

ELYSE ROSENSTEIN (organizer of early Star Trek conventions)

Do you realize how many pieces of mail NBC eventually received on Star Trek? They usually got about fifty thousand for the year on everything, but the Star Trek campaign generated one million letters. They were handling the mail with shovels—they didn’t know what to do with it. Their policy was to answer everything, even if it was a form letter, and a million pieces of mail is a lot of money. So they made an unprecedented on-air announcement that they were not cancelling the show and that it would be back in the fall.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

Well into cancellation and/or pickup time for all the TV series, NBC had been so flooded with mail that they were ready to throw in the towel. Naturally they weren’t about to give GR and the Star Trek crew any relief from their worries, so everything still hung in the air until NBC made their momentous, unprecedented announcement at the end of the spring 1968 season.

No one had ever come on during prime time, even with a voice-over announcement, and told the watching public that a TV show had been renewed. So a major triumph of the consumer public over the network and over the stupid Nielsen ratings was accomplished through advocacy letter-writing. At the end of the Save ST campaign, we were told unofficially that one million letters had crossed their desks. We have no way of knowing how true this statement really was.

ANDE RICHARDSON

A guy named Thom Beck had a radio show in Pasadena called The Credibility Gap. It was a really popular show and it was all about antiwar and things like that. When I told them we were having problems with getting the show renewed, they did a whole segment on Star Trek. It got a lot of comments and a lot of press, and it helped with the renewal. It’s something that’s never mentioned, but Star Trek had definitely gotten help from a local radio station.

RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)

I knew nothing about possible cancellation at the end of season one. I don’t think very many fans did know about it. But when the write-in campaign started during season two, I became very active, along with my friend Alan. We signed up as many people in my junior high school as we could, not knowing yet that a petition would only count as one letter, and wrote letters ourselves to the addresses that Bjo and John Trimble were supplying to fans everywhere.

GENE RODDENBERRY

The letter-writing campaign surprised me and, of course, it was personally gratifying. What particularly gratified me was not the fact that there was a large number of people who did that, but I got to meet and know Star Trek fans, and they range from children to presidents of universities. One of my greatest enjoyments from the show was meeting the people we attracted and some of the relationships we formed with them.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

Gene wanted very badly to be completely involved, but we said it would only make NBC say it was a put-up job. Gene did do things like send over platters of food and drink when we were doing a collating of a mailing. He also paid for postage when we’d run out of funds, but for the most part fans paid for the Save Star Trek campaign, or it came out of our own pocket.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

Gene absolutely encouraged the campaign. Without his encouragement, I don’t think those campaigns would have gotten as far as they did. They were successful campaigns and they kept the show on the air. There was just an enormous amount of pressure exerted on the network by people who wrote in and demonstrated. It was wonderful. It was no fluke, as proved in later years when this same three seasons’ worth of episodes just kept on playing and playing and playing. There was something there.

JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS

It sounds like the usual publicity trick a company would pull, but the company had absolutely nothing to do with it. This was a spontaneous thing. Some of the most fanatic support came from Caltech, which was heaven. It was nice to know. Unfortunately, the numbers on the show were never really spectacular. They were much, much better in reruns. At the time, the people that loved it were mad about it, but there just wasn’t enough of them with Nielsen boxes.

The letter-writing campaign, which was rumored to have inspired anywhere from twelve thousand to a million letters, depending on who you believe (more likely the two hundred thousand number that NBC’s Mort Werner asserted in TV Guide at the time), culminated in a massive march on the network’s Burbank headquarters, where protestors from Caltech and elsewhere picketed on January 8, 1968, in the hopes of forcing a renewal of the series.

FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)

I met Bjo and I knew about her march on NBC, so I got my friends together and we made signs, and went to the park in Burbank where we were all congregating, and we marched on NBC. Stan Robertson from programming was there and Hank Rieger from publicity, the irony being that two or three years later, I was in college and I got an internship at NBC and Hank became my boss. I worked for him for years.

HANK RIEGER (publicist, NBC Television)

Unfortunately, I was one of the people designated by Herb Schlosser to go out and talk to the big demonstration they had in front of the studio in Burbank. They weren’t really in the mood to be talked to, but they listened, and Stanley [Robertson] said his words and I said my words, and essentially it was that we appreciated them, we heard them, we would take a look at it, and they saved the show for another year.

We had all the extra Burbank police around and a few county deputy sheriffs there in case anything happened, but it wasn’t that type of crowd where they were going to storm the place. I’m a Trekkie, too, so I was just as sorry as they were to see it go off the air. I thought that Star Trek would do better initially than it did. I was one of the many disappointed ones when NBC announced they were going to take it off the air.

FRED BRONSON

Hank and Stan came out and, of course, they accepted our petitions. They said they would be taken seriously and, as you know, it was saved, and we felt like we did it ourselves. I remember them making the announcement on the air one night, over the closing credits basically, and said please stop writing and calling.

JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

The concession from NBC was grudging, and despite Roddenberry’s best efforts, the third season bombed. But thanks to that letter-writing campaign, Star Trek went to syndication and then … and only then … the audience exploded.

GENE RODDENBERRY

We won the fight when the show got picked up for a third season. NBC was certain I was behind every fan, paying them off. And there was a group from MIT picketing the building, and a group in New York. Bless MIT, bless Caltech, bless them all. The network had a coterie of junior executives down there buttonholing all of the people, saying, “Listen, did Gene Roddenberry send you?” And they finally called me up and said, “Listen, we know you’re behind it.” And I said, “That’s very flattering, because if I could start demonstrations around the country from this desk, I’d get the hell out of science fiction and into politics.”