The Fifty-Year Mission

Star Trek concluded its second season on an incredible, and unprecedented, high note, with NBC essentially acknowledging the success of the fans’ letter-writing campaign by announcing that the series would be returning for a third season. On the surface, it would have seemed that with season three, Star Trek could begin to soar, but nothing would be further from the truth as the struggles that plagued it for the first two years only intensified in year three, resulting in the Enterprise’s final year in space … on NBC in live action, at least.

GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)

At that time I told NBC that if they would put us on the air as they were promising—on a weeknight at a decent time slot, seven-thirty or eight o’clock—I would commit myself to produce Star Trek for the third year. Personally produce the show as I had done at the beginning. This was my effort to use what muscle I had. In fighting a network, you must use what muscle you have. They are monolithic, multibillion-dollar corporations whose interests are not necessarily in the quality of the drama.

It is one of the unfortunate curses of television that you can have as high as eleven or twelve million devoted fans, more people than have seen Shakespeare since the beginning, and be a failure, because at a certain time on a certain night you have to pass the magic number of fourteen million. At any rate, the fans scared the hell out of the network and they decided to keep the show on.

About ten days or two weeks later I received a phone call at breakfast, and the network executive said, “Hello, Gene baby…” Well, I knew I was in trouble right then. He said, “We have had a group of statistical experts researching your audience, researching youth and youth-oriented people, and we don’t want you on a weeknight at an early time. We have picked the best youth spot that there is. All our research confirms this and it’s great for the kids and that time is ten o’clock on Friday nights.” I said, “No doubt this is why you had the great kiddie show The Bell Telephone Hour on there last year.” As a result, the only gun I then had was to stand by my original commitment, that I would not personally produce the show unless they returned us to the weeknight time they promised. I wasn’t particularly anxious to put in a third year of fourteen hours a day, six days a week, but Star Trek was my baby and I was willing to risk it if I could have a reasonable shot at a reasonable time. And we talked it over and held fast.

We almost swayed them and ultimately they said, “No, we will not do it.” And then I had no option. I could not then say, “Well, I’ll produce it anyway,” because from then on with the network any threat or promise or anything I made, once you back down you become the coward and your muscle from then on in any subsequent projects will never mean anything.

GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)

Gene was aware that even if he had stayed with Star Trek, NBC intended to cancel the show after its third year. From another vantage point, maybe it should have been a matter of personal integrity on Roddenberry’s part. Star Trek was Gene’s creation, and the third season would be identified with him whether he liked it or not.

If the quality of the show was in some way to erode, it couldn’t help but reflect on Roddenberry. Inevitably, it would be Gene’s reputation that was at stake. Now, Gene Roddenberry’s a human being, so I can certainly understand his position. At the same time, giving myself distance and perspective, I can’t help but wish that Gene had looked at the entire picture and realized how Star Trek’s third season might finally affect his professionalism and artistic integrity.

DAVID GERROLD (writer, “The Cloud Minders”)

Roddenberry, rather than try and do the very best show possible, walked away and picked Fred Freiberger. If he was there, there would have been some of that stuff that was there in the beginning. When the show first started, there was a lot of really nice stuff there that you always wanted to see developed. I wish Roddenberry had been there in the third season to take care of his baby.

Roddenberry later addressed his departure and reflected, “I think there was a little rationalization in my decision. I think also what was affecting me at that time was enormous fatigue; I think maybe I was looking for an excuse to get out from under the fight that I had just been having for two years, but really for four. I think fatigue just caught up with me … I think I would come back and produce it the third year myself if I had it to do over. I’m not taking a backhanded slap at the people who did produce it the third year, line-produced it. Obviously when you bring a producer in and you’re going to let him produce it, you’ve got to let him do it his way. I think his way, or their way, was somewhat different than our way the first two, so it did look different. As long as the original creator stays with the show, it gives it a certain unity. When other minds become involved, it’s not that they’re lesser minds or not as clever writers, but you lose the unity of that one driving force.”

DAVID GERROLD

The fact of the matter is that you have to work with other people, and Gene’s pattern is that he doesn’t work well with anyone. If he can’t be the boss, he doesn’t want to work. Gene does not have a track record of working as a writer with other producers, so he doesn’t know how to bend. There’s no working with other people’s considerations on a story. He never learned that trick, because he’s always been the boss. He’s never, ever been an Indian; he’s always been a chief. You know what you get when you get people who have always been chiefs? You get spoiled brats.

DEVRA LANGSHAM (editor, Spockanalia)

We all felt very annoyed about Gene leaving. I mean, it’s his show and truly he loves it as much as we do. On the other hand, he’s saying, “I put myself on the line, I said if you do that I’m not going to work on the show, and if I don’t follow my word I will have no credibility.” So you can understand it … sort of. But people were definitely annoyed.

MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)

NBC didn’t like Gene Roddenberry, and they didn’t like the type of shows that Star Trek was airing. It was too controversial and too sexy, and they couldn’t get Roddenberry to tone it down. He was disrespectful to them, and it got worse, so it was just a matter of “we don’t want to do business with this guy; we don’t quite like how the show is going, so let’s maybe not pick it up.” And there’s another factor, too, back then. They weren’t getting the top sponsors for the hour, so the feeling may have been that they weren’t making as much profit off of Star Trek as another show. So they move it to Friday night—and they didn’t even want to pick it up, but there was the letter-writing campaign that made them cry uncle on the air and announce that they were picking it up, but they put it in the death slot. And they knew when they picked it up that they were determined that season three would be the last year.

SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)

Roddenberry abandoned the show, but it’s interesting that he still had a lot to do with it. A lot of people don’t realize that he was still sending memos and notes and watching screenings. But a lot of times he would watch the screening, and it would be too late to change any of the problems. You watch an episode like “Balance of Terror,” where Kirk hunches over the briefing room table and goes, “I hope we won’t need your services, Bones.” And McCoy goes, “Amen to that. You’re taking an awful gamble, Jim.” And he walks out, the doors close, and he and Sulu are just walking down the hall and all the people are running by, it’s a busy ship. Or you look at the “The Corbomite Maneuver,” when Kirk is going from the sick bay to his quarters and you hear “All decks alert, all decks alert.” That is a busy ship that looks like there’s 428 people on board. In the third season it looked like there were four people on the ship.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I found a producer, Fred Freiberger, who had produced Slattery’s People and Ben Casey, and has impeccable credits and an honest love of science fiction since boyhood. He was backed up by our regular staff of Bob Justman and the directors; the cameramen; Bill Theiss, costumer; Walter “Matt” Jeffries, art; so backed up by the regular staff. They were producing Star Trek while my function in it was judiciary, policy administration.

MARC CUSHMAN

Everyone says Fred Freiberger was a show killer, when, in fact, he had a wonderful track record in Hollywood. He was the guy who got Wild Wild West up and running. I’ve read in books and I’ve read in articles that Fred produced the last season of the show, but he actually produced the first season. He was the producer who got that whole show and somehow did the magic act of taking a western show, a spy show, elements of sci-fi, and blended it into a hit. He did very well with Ben Casey and a couple of different shows.

FRED FREIBERGER (producer, Star Trek)

I was familiar with Star Trek only in that I had seen the first pilot they had done. I had met Gene Roddenberry at the beginning to talk to him about producing the show at the start, but I was going to Europe on a vacation that I had planned. I mentioned to Gene that the pilot was terrific, and if the job was still available when I got back, I was interested. By the time I came back he had gotten Gene Coon and I was off doing other shows. Then, when third season came along, my agent brought me into Gene’s office and he said he would like me to produce the show. Gene Coon had done the first season, John Meredyth Lucas did the second, and I assumed he wanted to change producers every year.

My first meeting with him was uncomfortable. Something like thirty people from the network came in, and I was amazed at the contempt with which Roddenberry treated them, and I could see they didn’t like him at all. I’d thought to myself, “Holy shit, what have I gotten myself into?”

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, Star Trek)

Because of the budget cut in the third season, we were reduced to what I call a radio show. We couldn’t go on location any longer because we couldn’t afford it. We had to do shows that we could afford to do. It was quite difficult, and that did affect what the concept was. Certain concepts just couldn’t be handled. We didn’t have the money.

Forget about what the actual numbers are, but in those days, in the first season each show cost $193,500. That was good money in those days. The second season was $187,500. The third season was $178,500. So that was an enormous drop. The studio had deficit financing situations, and every time you shot a show you lost more money. In those days, they didn’t think they had a chance of syndication, especially since everybody knew the third season was it.

FRED FREIBERGER

Joining the show wasn’t a daunting situation, it was a question of going in on a show that was being successfully produced with a lot of people involved who were very loyal to the show. You can walk into another show and it can be daunting for you. You get into a situation where everybody knows each other and they’ve been together for some time. I was more concerned with improving ratings, because the show had about a twenty or twenty-four share. Today that would be a hit. In those days, even if you had a thirty share, you were very iffy. It was the loyalty of the fans that kept it on when NBC threatened to cancel it. And they did keep it on—it was impressive for NBC to succumb to that.

In all three years, the ratings remained the same no matter what went on. It kept the same fans. Our hope was to improve the ratings, and we tried different kinds of stories. But the ratings always stayed the same. Always. It’s always all about ratings. And the situation wasn’t helped by the cutting of the budget. That hurt us badly.

GENE RODDENBERRY

If demographics had come in a year earlier, we would have had a twelve-year-run.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

They just cut it down to the bone to cut their losses. And we were on Friday nights at ten. If your audience is high-school kids and college-age people and young married people, they’re not home Friday nights. They’re out, and the old folks weren’t watching. So our audience was gone.

SCOTT MANTZ

You went from $193,500 per episode to $178,000, so you lose $15,000 dollars per episode, but you lost more than that because some of the stars got raises. And that came out of that budget. So if you think about it, the fact that they got maybe half of a good season is lucky.

FRED FREIBERGER

We had to do at least four of the shows completely on the Enterprise. There were a lot of restrictions, but that’s no excuse if the stories aren’t very good. It’s a question of judgment and you have to go with what you think. That’s the way television works. I think, on balance, we did some pretty nice stories and some that didn’t come out so good. Some shows you’re happy with, some you’re disappointed with, and others you’re ashamed of. That’s the way it goes, but you’re a pro, you accept those things, you understand them, and all you can do is make sure that everybody does their best.

MARC DANIELS (director, “Spock’s Brain”)

Fred Freiberger and I didn’t agree on what the director’s role was. There are many writer-producers who don’t consider the director a partner. They consider him, shall we say, an employee. This is particularly true in episodic TV. They just want you to do the work, get the shots, and forget the rest of it. I didn’t particularly care for that kind of thinking.

MARGARET ARMEN (writer, “The Paradise Syndrome”)

I wrote Star Trek for Gene Roddenberry and Fred Freiberger, and I suppose they were looking for two different types of stories. Working with Gene was marvelous, because he was Star Trek and he related to the writers. Fred came in and to him Star Trek was “tits in space.” And that’s a direct quote. Fred had been signed to produce and was being briefed. He watched an episode with me, smoking a big cigar, and said, “Oh, I get it. Tits in space.”

You can imagine how a real Star Trek buff like myself reacted to that. It didn’t sit well with me at all. But I got along well with Fred and with him I did “The Paradise Syndrome.” Of course, Gene was the executive producer in an advisory capacity and he really had the last say on okaying story ideas. So I think it was actually Gene that accepted that one, because I feel “The Paradise Syndrome” was one that Fred would have let gone by.

In “The Paradise Syndrome,” a lushly photographed episode shot primarily on location, Kirk loses his memory and is mistaken for a Native American deity by the planet’s indigenous population, while the Enterprise attempts to prevent an asteroid from colliding with the planet.

MARGARET ARMEN

It turned out well, and Gene insisted that it be done. Fred thought the sponsors wouldn’t like it at all, but it happened that it was the only one that they did like of the first group he presented. I didn’t really know if Fred ever realized that Star Trek was a series about people. Fred was looking for all action pieces. That’s why he wasn’t crazy about the script for “The Paradise Syndrome,” because there wasn’t enough violent and terrifying action in it. He didn’t realize that the suspense would come from the characters, their relationships and so forth. There was some action in it, but there were no monsters and that sort of thing. So Fred was looking primarily for action pieces, whereas Gene was looking for that subtlety that is Star Trek. Action, but with people carrying the story.

FRED FREIBERGER

Star Trek had to change just by the nature that there was a different producer in place. This is the nature of this business. If people come in to produce a show—Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon—that show has to be shaped in terms of what they think. Writers have fragile egos. They come in and submit something. You generally know your show better. You change that show. You rewrite that show. You make suggestions. The professional writer who has been in the business and knows what it is, changes it. Some of them will accept the fact that some good suggestions are made. They have to if they want to stay with the show.

That is the nature of television. That’s the nature of Broadway in spite of the Dramatists Guild contract which says they can’t change any words. They just say to you, “We can’t change a line, I think our backers will pull out of this,” and so they get their way. Who’s kidding who? With a novel, if you won’t do what the editor says, unless you have a fantastic, powerful name, you just will not get that thing published. That is the essence of the procedure between staff on a show and writers.

DAVID GERROLD

I understand Freddy Freiberger’s problems a lot better now than I did then. Oddly enough, I have a respect for the man that I don’t think he realizes. He’s able to do something that not a lot of people can do: He can bring in a show on time and under budget. He can do the job. There are people who crumble under that kind of pressure. As a producer, I’m sure his decisions were correct for what he was doing. I think his biggest weakness is that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. He doesn’t allow the shows he’s working for to have fun.

FRED FREIBERGER

Our problem was to broaden the viewer base. To do a science-fiction show, but get enough additional viewers to keep the series on the air. I decided to do what I would hope was a broad canvas of shows, but I tried to make them more dramatic and to do stories that had a more conventional story line within the science-fiction frame. The first show was “Spock’s Brain,” the second one was a more conventional kind of show, almost a fairy tale, “Elaan of Troyius.” I tried to do something a little different there.

I also tried to do shows like the one I personally loved, “Spectre of the Gun.” I thought that came out pretty well. Those are the kind of things I tried to do: good stories with different kinds of elements, such as romance or surrealism. I did one in which Kirk fell in love with an android. I wanted to do good stories with interesting twists to them. When you come into a series, you try to do shows which won’t diminish a series, but will help a little. In some cases it doesn’t work out.

“Elaan of Troyius” was an example of the new approach. The crew seemed happy with the idea. You assume these things, though you never know who’s saying what behind your back. With that episode we were trying to do a variation of Taming of the Shrew, and added the element of her teardrops being an aphrodisiac.

It was fun, but part of the reason we did that one was because the network had told us that they had done a survey and discovered that although there were a lot of female science-fiction fans, women generally are terrified of space. They needed stability, they needed surroundings; they’d rather be in valleys than on tops of mountains. So we tried to get the women, which is why we did a romantic story. We tried to reach that audience we couldn’t reach otherwise, but we didn’t succeed.

MARC CUSHMAN

People would be surprised to know that Gene gave out the first sixteen script assignments for the third season, and he gave a lot of memos as they were being developed. He would come in for screenings and give Fred memos on the episodes, things to change and so forth. So he was definitely involved, but as the season progressed his involvement became less and less because he was off making the film Pretty Maids All in a Row for MGM.

FRED FREIBERGER

When Gene Coon left, he left with three assignments from Gene Roddenberry, which I honored.

GLEN A. LARSON (creator, executive producer, Knight Rider)

The reason he had assignments for the third season was that at first Gene Roddenberry wouldn’t let him leave because he had a contract. The only way they’d let Gene out is if he continued to write for the show, and he did so under a pseudonym. He would be in there typing away while we were supposed to be doing It Takes a Thief, but that was great because more of it fell on me and I became an instant producer. Roddenberry knew they needed Gene, and didn’t feel they could function without him, so he had to promise to make script commitments.

FRED FREIBERGER

Gene Coon was a lovely, talented guy who came up with certain stories and said do what you want with them, because he couldn’t get involved. He worked as much as he could with us and he was a complete gentleman and completely professional about the whole thing.

The first of Coon’s commitments, writing under the nom de plume Lee Cronin, was “Spock’s Brain,” considered by many to be one of the worst Star Trek episodes ever filmed. In it, a race of beautiful, short-skirted, buxom alien women steal Spock’s brain, and it’s up to Kirk and a zombielike Spock to retrieve it. What audiences fail to appreciate today is the fact that organ transplantation was very much in the zeitgeist when the series was being produced, with the first successful heart transplant taking place in 1967. This still can’t explain—or excuse—such execrable and laughable dialogue as “Brain and brain, what is brain?”

DAVID GERROLD

I suspect that “Spock’s Brain” was Gene L. Coon’s way of thumbing his nose at Roddenberry or something. If not Roddenberry, he was thumbing his nose at how seriously the show was taking itself. I suspect what had happened is that they were a little panic-stricken because there weren’t a lot of scripts to shoot.

The history of Star Trek is management by crisis. I think somebody called up Gene L. Coon and said, “We need a script in a hurry, can you do it?” and he did it under a pen name. I don’t think he deliberately set out to write that show seriously. I don’t think there’s any way you can take that episode seriously. You’ve got to take it as an in-joke. What’s the stupidest science-fiction idea to do? What if somebody stole Spock’s brain? Gene L. Coon had that kind of sense of humor to do that kind of impish stuff. He had an irreverent sense of humor, and I think he wanted to poke Star Trek because someone was taking it too seriously. Maybe it was his way of not buying into it.

DOROTHY FONTANA (story editor, Star Trek)

Gene Coon was under enormous time pressure and forced to write these Star Trek scripts between other assignments. It wasn’t like being on a series where you could devote all your time to that series. The writing suffers because of that.

GLEN A. LARSON

If you’re not producing, somebody else takes it and does the rewriting. Knowing Gene’s attention to detail and his work ethic, I would imagine that somebody rewrote him. It would be interesting to be able to see his first-draft scripts.

FRED FREIBERGER

Besides Coon, Dorothy Fontana had two assignments, and David Gerrold had none. I gave him one [“Castles in the Sky,” later renamed “The Cloud Minders”] on the strength of “Tribbles,” but it’s one of those things that happened that didn’t work out too well. We tried it, and if it doesn’t work, you bring in other people. Any pro accepts that and understands it. Nobody enjoys it, but that happens when you’re doing a show. It doesn’t mean it diminishes their talent, it just happens. That’s the nature of television. Some people don’t understand that and it’s too bad, but if you’re a pro, you do.

DAVID GERROLD

I went in to meet Fred Freiberger with the attitude that I had to prove myself to the new producer. I said, “I know how well ‘Tribbles’ turned out. I know I can do it, I’ve got my credential, everyone who saw ‘Tribbles’ loved it, the episode turned out well, I don’t have anything to be embarrassed about.” I walk in, Freddy Freiberger is looking at me, and his very first words are, “I saw ‘Tribbles’ this morning,” because he was having episodes screened for him. The polite thing to say is, “Not bad,” or “Well done,” or “Good job.” His words were, “I didn’t like it. Star Trek is not a comedy.” From that point on, our relationship never recovered.

So he tells me Star Trek is not a comedy, and I’m thinking, “It’s not? The two scripts I worked on, ‘I, Mudd’ and ‘Tribbles,’ the reason I had specifically been asked to work on ‘I, Mudd’ is that they wanted it to be funny.” Gene L. Coon said to me, “You know, ‘Tribbles’ has given us a new insight into our characters. Our characters can be funny, but we can still have things at stake.” Joe Pevney said, “I’ve been arguing that Star Trek could do funny stuff, and I was right.”

MARC CUSHMAN

Fred was left alone in the second half of the season, but during the first half he was making the show that Roddenberry wanted it to be. It was Roddenberry’s mandate to get rid of the humor, and to have Kirk instead of referring to Scotty as Scotty, like he was in the second season, he would say, “Engineer.” Instead of calling Mr. Spock Mr. Spock, he would say, “Science Officer.” He wanted more formality. Not every line, but usually in the teaser and the beginning of act one. Roddenberry sent out a memo to Fred Freiberger saying that they were in a new time slot and there would be people who had never seen the show before, so they had to establish who these characters were, their rank, their position.

So in the teaser instead of Kirk saying “Mr. Spock” he wanted him to say, “Science Officer, what’s your opinion?” and things of that nature. Well, we fans who had been watching it for two years are suddenly asking, “Why is he talking to them like this?” And we’re not getting episodes like “Tribbles” and things of that nature, so we’re blaming Fred Freiberger.

But these are all memos from Gene telling Fred that he wanted to get back to the way it was when it was first on the air. “I want it more military, I want it more serious, they’re professional astronauts, they’re military in outer space, and they should talk that way.” It was getting too chummy for his taste. Kirk shouldn’t be friendly with his crew; he’s the captain and things like this, because Roddenberry had been in the military and captains don’t get chummy with their men. He always had a problem with Gene Coon for doing that.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

As far as I could tell, the atmosphere on the show behind the scenes was still the same in the third season. I got on fine with everyone, as always. I got on fine with Fred Freiberger, as always. He was a nice man. I think he did what he did as best he could do it. I never had any harsh words. I don’t think I ever had an argument the entire three seasons with anyone. I would disagree with Gene Roddenberry at times and fight with him on certain things that I thought we ought to do or should not be doing, but in the end if Gene said it was yes, it was yes. If he said no, it was no. Whether I felt he was right or wrong, if that’s what he wanted to do, that’s what I would do. After all, it was his show. I had wonderful feelings working with those people. It just wasn’t the same without Gene in a hands-on position that third season.

MARC CUSHMAN

Things did change behind the scenes. Gene Roddenberry had thrown up his hands in the middle of the third season, Dorothy Fontana left, and Bob Justman left. So you had some of the most talented people from Star Trek that were leaving. The concepts were still interesting, but you didn’t have Gene Coon, Gene Roddenberry, or Dorothy Fontana finessing the scripts. And they didn’t have the money to really put into them. They were all vital elements of Star Trek. And when you take them out of the mix, it’s like having The Beatles and taking away John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “Okay, we still have George and Ringo. We’re still The Beatles.” No, you’re not. You’re still good, but not as good, and that’s what you have with the third season.

SCOTT MANTZ

The director of “The Empath,” John Erman, brought the episode in on time and budget, and the cast tells him, “Well, you’ll be back.” And the director said, “Nope, I’m never working with you guys again.” Ouch! That’s what season three was like.

DOROTHY FONTANA

I was becoming too associated with Star Trek and wanted to prove that I was able to write other shows. In fact, when I left I did several westerns, dramatic contemporary shows, and so on. I had to prove to other producers that Star Trek wasn’t all I could do.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

I felt I was in prison and I had to get out. I just didn’t want to take it anymore, because I was so unhappy with what was happening with the show. We couldn’t make the kind of shows that we wanted to make because we couldn’t afford them, and I felt that the content of the shows was going downhill. I finally asked for my release and left. I left a lot of bruised feelings at Paramount. They pleaded with me not to go. I said, “Fine, I won’t go. Just take me off the show, and I won’t take any other jobs, and I’ll come back to you on anything else you want me to do in the spring.” They didn’t want that, and I said, “I’m leaving. I just don’t want to stay anymore.” I went to work at MGM.

It was my feeling that the show wasn’t what it ought to be. There was also the feeling of disappointment over the fact that I was made coproducer instead of producer. I know that doesn’t mean anything to people not in the industry, but in effect I had been line-producing the show since the beginning, even though my title was associate producer. When the third season came around, instead of producing the show, Freddy was brought in with the title of producer and I was made coproducer to him. The studio felt, as all studios do and I can’t blame them, they wanted a writer to be there to do the work of story and script.

On the other hand, I felt that I could produce the show with someone there to do the writing. Of course there’s a lot of ego in that. I was much younger and ambitious. I can’t blame the studio, but in the meantime I was unhappy about that and I didn’t like the way the scripts were turning out. There was no excitement, or there wasn’t enough excitement. And when they had good concepts, they kind of got whittled down and weren’t as magical as they ought to be.

RALPH SENENSKY (director, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”)

I always felt that with the production staff of the last year, the tenor had changed. In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” there were some cuts made in postproduction that, for my money, were schlock, horror cuts. They hadn’t been in the script, were not in the concept, and were thrown in by Fred Freiberger. He kept cutting back to this box, or container, with lights flashing. You didn’t need it. That’s underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Because they weren’t planned cuts, they became arbitrary and rather like jump cuts, which I’ve always resented. That was the third season’s problem. The real tightening of the budget was the first thing, and then, probably having to do with those budgetary cuts, the caliber of the writing went down.

Early in the season, Robert Justman had already anticipated issues with the cast responding to their new boss and sent a memo on May 8, 1968, to Roddenberry to try and address these concerns. He emphasized the importance of pointing out to William Shatner the way that Roddenberry expected the actor to work with Fred Freiberger and, more important, that Roddenberry himself was still serving as “great bird” of the series. Wrote Justman, “Bill is as rapacious an animal as any other leading man in a series, and I think it would help Freddie enormously in his relationships with Bill if you let Bill understand how much confidence you have in Fred and how much respect that you, Gene Roddenberry, have for Freddie’s creative talents and executive abilities. It also might be a good way to get a fairly close look at Bill and see what sort of physical shape he is in at the present time. Come to think of it, perhaps it would be a good idea to have this get-together before the end of this week, so that if Bill is on the pudgy side, it can be suggested that he start slimming down right away.”

Justman added, “Now that DeForest Kelley has been firmed for this season, all our cast have been locked in. Would you want to send a personal letter to each one of our seven regulars, in which you express your personal gratification at the fact that his, or her, particular talents and abilities will be once more enhancing the value and prestige of Star Trek?”

Unfortunately, unlike Shatner—who did enjoy a good relationship with Freiberger, and who in turn considered Kirk the sole star of the show—Nimoy felt slighted by him, as did many of the other cast members who were vying for screen time and were less than fond of the new producer.

JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)

Fred Freiberger was just a producer. He had no inventiveness in him at all. He was a no-talent businessman. There were so many episodes third season that were so wordy, and Gene Coon would have knocked that up, but Gene Roddenberry wasn’t paying attention either. He was unhappy that his series was going to be canceled. We had done some forty shows at Desilu, and then Paramount bought Desilu and here was this damn space show as part of the package and they couldn’t care less about it.

WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)

One day during the second season I asked Gene to have a meeting between seasons when it looked like we were going to be on eight o’clock Mondays and asked him about how my character would evolve based on his popularity. I went to his house, and he proceeded to show me some memos he had written the guys at NBC, and memos from Paramount, and all the memos were very positive, saying “Let’s involve Chekov more, he has appeal. Let’s bring him down to the planets more, involve him with members of the opposite sex.”

And it looked enormously promising. “Spectre of the Gun” was the first episode written with that in mind for third season, and it reflected what my anticipation was going to be. Immediately thereafter, our time slot was changed and everybody sort of threw up their hands and gave up on the show. They brought in Freiberger, who had no particular style, as far as I could tell, or empathy for the character. I don’t think he had any antipathy either, but he didn’t see it as being important.

FRED FREIBERGER

They wouldn’t be actors if they didn’t want more. You’re doing an ensemble show and what’s selling the show, hopefully, is the personality of the stars, the relationship between the three most important ones, Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley. You would try to give all the others something. I gave Scotty a love affair in one show. It’s very difficult, because when you have many format characters, to try and keep them going in a limited time is hard. I certainly sympathize with any of them who wanted more to do.

In one of the third year’s most infamous installments, the Enterprise comes across a band of space hippies searching for a mythical Eden. Originally pitched by D. C. Fontana as “Joanna,” about McCoy’s estranged daughter arriving aboard the Enterprise, Fontana took her name off the episode, which shared few similarities with her original pitch. One has to wonder, though, if it was Freiberger who rejected the idea or Roddenberry, who had actually dismissed the pitch as early as 1967. In a memo to John Meredyth Lucas, Roddenberry had written, “While Dorothy has come up with an interesting character in McCoy’s long-lost daughter … there is really not sufficient story in the premise. I recommend we give this one a pass while leaving the way open to Dorothy to submit a new story using this character and situation.” The script would eventually be written for Chekov and a former girlfriend and would be retitled “The Way to Eden.”

WALTER KOENIG

I read “The Way to Eden” and I thought it was all wrong. First of all, it wasn’t even my character. Chekov became very uptight and very establishment, saying, “No, no, no” and “Don’t do this.” I don’t think that was the way he would have responded. What happened was “The Way to Eden” was really written for McCoy’s daughter rather than Chekov’s former girlfriend.

As a matter of fact, prior to that I had submitted a four-page statement of how I felt Chekov could be improved and made more multidimensional without subverting the story. Freiberger’s comment was, “I read it, forget it.” I knew the character was always going to be subordinate, but instead of spending the time pushing buttons, we could have spent that same thirty seconds on Chekov in a more fruitful way.

Even though he said, “I read it, forget it,” the episode was his way of giving me something and making Chekov a featured player. But I knew it just wasn’t any good when I read it, and then the casting was terrible. They were all good actors, like Victor Brandt, but they were totally miscast. They’re supposed to be playing thirty-year-old flower children, hippie types, and they looked much rougher and much tougher than that.

DAVID GERROLD

There’s a way to say no to an actor other than “Read your memo. Forget it.” You know, “I read your memo, thank you for taking the time to let us know so much about what you want to do. It’s not quite going to fit into our plans, but I’m certainly going to keep your comments on the top of my mind when we talk about Chekov.” The actor goes out saying, “Well, he said no, but he let me down gently,” and he feels good toward the producer.

FRED FREIBERGER

When you have a second banana, like Spock, who’s probably getting more fan mail than the lead, it gets twice as murderous. They want the last line, they want this, they want that. They’re measuring each other’s dressing room. Even this kid, Walter Koenig, was always asking for more. I told the writers to put him in more. So I read Shatner’s book [Star Trek Memories], and Koenig is complaining that he’s supposed to be representing progressive youth of the decade and the producer finally gave him more to do and it was establishment shit.

So I wrote to Bill and said every time I start to feel good about Star Trek, something like this shows up. I wish somebody would whisper into that little schmuck’s ear that the producer was trying to meet what he asked for. If I disappointed him, the least he could do is understand that an attempt was made to satisfy him and not take a cheap shot. It’s that kind of stupid little stuff that drives me crazy.

WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)

I thought Fred Freiberger did a yeoman’s job. There was a feeling that a number of his shows weren’t as good as the first and second season, and maybe that’s true, but he did have some wonderfully brilliant shows and his contribution has never been acknowledged.

FRED FREIBERGER

Shatner’s a pretty creative guy. When I say creative, I mean he’s willing to try anything. He loved “Turnabout Intruder.” I was, frankly, a little concerned when Gene Roddenberry came up with a story where Kirk changes places with a woman, but Shatner absolutely loved the idea. When I originally read it, I had said to Gene Roddenberry, “I wonder what Shatner is going to say about this.” Gene said he wouldn’t have a problem at all, and he was correct. When I mentioned it to Shatner, he just loved the idea. He was a Shakespearean actor and I have great admiration for him.

SCOTT MANTZ

“Turnabout Intruder” is a bad episode. I mean, right after the opening credits Kirk goes, “Believe me, it’s better to be dead than to be alone in the body of a woman.” Who would get away with saying something like that today? Nobody. It is such a dated and sexist episode. But as bad as it is, and as much of a travesty as it was to end Star Trek with that episode, Shatner’s performance is pretty incredible.

WALTER KOENIG

To me, the most heinous violation Freiberger perpetuated was casting Melvin Belli in “And the Children Shall Lead.” That infuriated me, because Melvin was a friend of his evidently, and it’s one thing to cast friends who are actors and another to cast friends who are not actors. He was a lawyer! Not only did it dilute the impact, whatever there was to begin with, but it took an acting job away from an actor. I was really upset after that. It was very unfair.

FRED FREIBERGER

To boost the ratings we tried to get something unusual in there, and in this case unusual in terms of casting. So we brought Melvin Belli in. It could have been a better show. I thought the idea was good, but it just wasn’t as strong as it could have been. I don’t think it boosted our ratings.

DAVID GERROLD

Everybody disliked Freiberger intensely. Leonard and Bill didn’t like him, nobody else on the staff liked him. Nobody knew what to make of him. It was a very difficult situation for everyone.

FRED FREIBERGER

The truth is, I’ve been the target of vicious and unfair attacks even to this day. The fact that at the end of the second season Star Trek’s ratings had slipped, it was losing adult fans and was in disarray, carries no weight with the attackers. The dumping was all done on me and the third season. It seemed it was now Star Trek law to lay everything on Freiberger. Every disgruntled actor, writer, and director also found an easy dumping ground on which to blame their own shortcomings. Whenever one of my episodes was mentioned favorably, Gene Roddenberry’s name was attached to it. When one of my episodes was attacked, Roddenberry’s name mysteriously disappeared and only then did the name Freiberger surface.

As an example, I read an article, which I think was in the L.A. Times, praising the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” as the first television show to allow an interracial kiss. A breakthrough. Roddenberry was lauded for this, when in fact Roddenberry wasn’t within a hundred miles of that episode.

ARTHUR HEINEMANN (writer, “The Savage Curtain”)

My feeling was that when Gene Coon left, much of the quality of the original show was lost. When Freddy Freiberger took over, I felt the show was being cheapened. The ideas during the third year weren’t as good, and it seemed as though he didn’t care as much. I don’t want to say anything against him, because he’s a nice guy, but he always seemed frantic and I couldn’t tell why. My feeling was that when he was in his frantic moments, he would make decisions that might be wrong.

DAVID GERROLD

There’s a difference between doing Star Trek and going through the motions of doing Star Trek. It was very much true on the first show. There are ten people down on the soundstage doing Star Trek, and eight of them are there to collect paychecks; they’re going through the motions of doing the show. It’s just a job to them. There are other people, like set decorator Johnny Dwyer, to whom Star Trek is a special job. Where Star Trek is a privilege and your life, it’s just this wonderful, marvelous thing to do.

With the third season, the reason that it was the way it was, is that the guy at the center, the guy who represented the vision of what the show was supposed to be, was going through the motions. He wasn’t doing Star Trek. You try and explain that to the fans, and they think you’re disloyal to the show. Where that comes from is a loyalty to what the show represents.

FRED FREIBERGER

I have no quarrel to make with the right of critics, self-styled or otherwise, to dislike my episodes and to state that dislike. What angers me is when they choose to attack my character, sometimes labeling me as indifferent or uncaring. None of that could be farther from the truth, and I’m thankful that on occasion people like Bob Justman have gone out of their way to publicly stand up for me.

MARC CUSHMAN

Roddenberry’s adversarial relationship with NBC played a large role in why there was no fourth season. There were legitimate business reasons in that they perhaps weren’t getting as much as they could have for commercial time, but mostly it was political and it was personality. And so the folklore begins, because why is a network trying to cancel a show? Well, it must be because it had bad ratings.

No, there are other reasons why networks cancel a show. They didn’t want to renew it for the third season, but the write-in campaign forced them to. In second season they put it on Friday night, which is not a good night for Star Trek, but it was still their highest-rated Friday night show. It was their centerpiece show for the entire night. The show before it, Tarzan, wasn’t doing that well, and the show after it was a disaster. People would switch over and catch the movie on ABC at the halfway point, so even though the rating came down a bit on Friday nights and it wasn’t really standing up to Gomer Pyle too well, it was beating ABC and it was, again, NBC’s highest-rated show of the night.

So normally you don’t cancel that. But at that point they just didn’t want to do business with Roddenberry. So after the write-in campaign they put it in the death slot, the single worst time of the week, Friday night from ten to eleven p.m. They were determined that season three would be the last year.

JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG (coauthor, Star Trek Lives)

Nobody wanted more third season, but everyone wanted more first season. But having syndication was what mattered most, because of the lack of any other distribution channel. Today we see webisodes made by fans. George Takei was in one. Major Kickstarter funding is being raised for webisodes. But back then there simply was no recourse, no alternate channel for fan creativity.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE (authors, Star Trek Concordance)

The third season ground down, show after show being worse than the last, until even the authors of the scripts were having their names removed or using pseudonyms in place of their real names. To be fair, there were a few good scripts in the third season, but in the main those few seemed to be almost mistakes that slipped by.

RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)

At the time, it was great just to have new episodes to watch, but even at the age of fourteen and fifteen, I knew that the show wasn’t as good as it used to be. When season three ended, I don’t remember feeling the need to start writing letters again, nor do I recall any hue and cry from my friends to do so. And looking back now, I have very little fondness for any of the season three episodes.

FRED FREIBERGER

Despite everything, morale on the show for the most part seemed okay. When they cut the budget down, you know that’s not a good sign. The last couple of shows the morale went down a little, but prior to that I hadn’t noticed. Despite that, if you’re a pro, you do the best you can right up until the last minute. Listen, three years for a show—any show—isn’t bad, especially when the ratings are so low.

While the third year of Star Trek has largely been dismissed as a creative failure by many, there are still a number of notable and beloved (or at least groundbreaking) episodes that were produced that season—no easy task, given the budget crunch and the departure of so many of the show’s previous key players. “Spectre of the Gun,” the first draft of which was written by Gene L. Coon, was a surrealistic western in which Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find themselves reliving the shootout at the O.K. Corral. In “The Paradise Syndrome,” an accident gives Kirk amnesia and has him becoming Indian god Kirok. He takes a bride in Miramanee, and ultimately becomes the victim of the people who realize he is not a deity—culminating in her tragic death and that of Kirk’s unborn child.

Then there was “Day of the Dove” which has an energy force that feeds on anger, hatred, and hostility, arming both the Klingons and Kirk’s crew with swords and setting them at one another’s throats on the Enterprise for what is intended to be an eternal battle, as none of the opponents actually die; “The Tholian Web,” in which Kirk is presumed dead but is actually trapped between dimensions; “Plato’s Stepchildren,” a disturbing episode in which aliens with telekinetic abilities torture Enterprise crewmen for their amusement—and during which Kirk and Uhura share television’s first interracial kiss; “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” a treatise on racial intolerance that focused on two survivors of a warring civilization, the source of hatred for which is derived from which side of their face is white and which side is black; “All Our Yesterdays,” which presented a very different Spock as he and McCoy are projected backward in time to a period before Vulcans embraced logic and he finds himself driven by primitive impulses, including love; and the series swan song, “Turnabout Intruder,” which has Kirk switch bodies with former lover Dr. Janice Lester.

FRED FREIBERGER

When Gene Coon wrote the original script for “Spectre of the Gun,” it took place in an actual western town. Bobby Justman and I thought about how we could help it some, and therefore we did this surrealistic kind of town to try and give it an otherworldly approach. Vincent McEveety was a hell of a creative director. I thought he did some wonderful things with it. I thought the show came out well, and that was satisfying, considering that was my first episode on Star Trek, though it aired later in the season.

VINCENT McEVEETY (director, “Spectre of the Gun”)

Even though “Spectre of the Gun” is not one of my favorites by a long shot, the effects, the wind, the stylized sets—the fragmented sets—all make it feel like a stage play. It was the kind of thing that takes a lot of imagination to relate to. However, it’s interesting that what little fan mail I get in my life usually pertains to that show. People love it, which I can’t believe, because I don’t.

MARGARET ARMEN

My thinking in writing “The Paradise Syndrome” is that these people on a spaceship for years and years have to get awfully sour, and have a special longing for their home planet and the simplicity of Earthlike nature. So I wondered what would happen if they were just hungry for R & R on an Earthlike planet, and they suddenly and unexpectedly came upon a planet which has a primitive Earth sort of idyllic civilization. I thought it was a good story, which kind of touched on man’s longing to go back to very simple things. To love in a simple, open way, and to be loved in a simple, open way. I think if Gene Roddenberry had been producing, it would have come out better, but who’s to say?

JEROME BIXBY (writer, “Day of the Dove”)

“Day of the Dove” was kind of my response to the Vietnam thing at that time. Throw down the swords! My original story was very late-sixties, and I ended it with a peace march which, thank God, came out. By the way, I first wrote Kang as Kor, the splendid Klingon commander in “Errand of Mercy.” John Colicos was in Italy at the time shooting a film. They wouldn’t give him a week off to come back and reprise Kor. He was furious. He could taste the role. So Kor became Kang, played by Michael Ansara, and he chewed the scenery. He also has referred to it as one of his favorites. Even his tousled rug was perfect, an almost boyish Klingon, tough as a ten-minute egg but genuinely likable.

MICHAEL ANSARA (actor, “Day of the Dove”)

This was the only Star Trek I had done at the time. I loved the part of Kang. I loved doing it, even though you never know how good a role is going to turn out until you see the final product. In this episode, it seemed to be the first time the Klingons were not purely “bad guys” but beings with a sense of honor and purpose. Everything I have done, even the bad guys, I try to give the character a sense of honor and believability.

FRED FREIBERGER

A shipboard show, which we needed. Considering our restrictions, I thought it came out well. It was more of a derring-do kind of show, and Michael Ansara was wonderful as the Klingon Kang.

JUDY BURNS (writer, “The Tholian Web”)

I met a student who was a physicist and told him that I wanted to write a Star Trek script which would be a ghost story based on fact. He said, “Why don’t you use the theory of infinite dimensions?” What came out was “In Essence Nothing,” which became “The Tholian Web.” At the time, if I remember correctly, the very first draft of the story had Spock as the one who disappeared. Eventually I received a classic memo from Bob Justman, who summed up by saying, “I think we can use it, but it should be Kirk out there. He would be schmuckishly heroic to stay behind on this other ship.” Besides that, there was another episode called “Spock’s Brain” in which Spock was out of it for a period of time, and they didn’t want to have him incapacitated for two scripts.

Some of the things I was a little disappointed in were caused by technical problems. Originally there were no space suits when Kirk and the others beamed over to the other ship. There were force-field belts which kept them encapsulated in a kind of mini force field, which included an oxygen bank. It kept them secure as long as the batteries held, but if the batteries ran out, which was the greatest threat to Kirk, then they die. Therefore, Kirk would have wandered around the ship looking like he looks, except for a little force-field belt. I think it would have made a better ghost story. He looks silly constantly making brief appearances on the Enterprise in that space suit. I really had a lot of qualms about that. From a story point of view it would have been better. They felt strongly that if they started something like a force-field belt, it might have ramifications down the line on other stories.

DIANA MULDAUR (actress, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”)

For “Is There in Truth No Beauty?,” we read the script and it all got thrown out. It was out of order when we shot it. I came in from Broadway and I thought, “My god, is this what film is all about?” You had no idea what you did before that scene or after that scene. But it was one of the most wonderful shows I think they made. We shot it all out of sequence and we learned our lines when we got on the set that morning as they were writing it.

FRED FREIBERGER

The big thing about “Plato’s Stepchildren” was who was going to kiss Uhura, a black girl. We had quite a few conversations on that one, because someone said, “Let’s have Spock do it,” and I said, “No, if we have Spock do it, we’re going to have all these people screaming that we didn’t have the guts to have a white man kiss her.” We went through a whole thing, but it all worked out, and Shatner said to her as he fought against the aliens’ control, “It’s not that I don’t want to, but I don’t want to humiliate you.” That’s a show I’m very proud of.

OLIVER CRAWFORD (writer, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”)

This was originally a Gene Coon story that was brought to me. It dealt with racial intolerance, and I thought it was a marvelous visual and cinematic effect. The whole point of the story was that color is only skin deep. How could any writer not respond to that? That fit right into the times and I was very pleased to write the episode.

FRED FREIBERGER

Gene originally had a devil with a tail chasing an angel. We thought, “What an idea it would be to do black on one side and white on the other, and the other guy has it the opposite way.” That’s the stupidity of prejudice. There’s a wonderful moment when Kirk says, “What’s different about him?” and he says, “He’s white on the other side!” That was a big morality show and I liked the idea of it.

YVONNE CRAIG (actress, “Whom Gods Destroy”)

People come up to me and say, “Do you remember the fourth episode?” and I say to them I only saw two episodes of Star Trek, one was “The Trouble with Tribbles” because I just love them, and I saw mine once [“Whom Gods Destroy”]. When I was doing the scene where I was blown up, we couldn’t keep that green paint on me. It was just a nightmare, and so when I raised my arms I had what looked like Spanish moss in my pits. It was just dangling so I said to the cameraman, “Does this bother you?” And he said, “No, it’s too far away, they’ll never see it.” Years later, I thought “Oh my God, I wonder if with Blu-ray you see it all.” Well, you didn’t because they cleaned it up. I was just so grateful. But it was hard to keep the paint on, it was a mess.

When they had to audition me they said, “Can you do a three-minute dance?” and I said, “Unless you’re doing The Red Shoes, three minutes is a long time,” but I said, “Yes, I can do a three-minute dance if you want it, but you’ll probably just have to cut it to pieces, because that’s crazy.” It’s nuts, but it was fun to do.

FRED FREIBERGER

With “All Our Yesterdays,” I remember that when Leonard Nimoy read that script he came to me and said, “I’m a Vulcan, how can I be passionately in love with a woman with emotion involved?” So I said, “This is way back in time, before the Vulcans had evolved into a nonemotional society.” He accepted that, for which I was very grateful. One of my favorite episodes.

RONALD D. MOORE (coexecutive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

As a fan, whenever I watched the third-season episodes in syndication, I was always like, “Here we go. I’ve got to watch ‘Way to Eden’ and ‘Spock’s Brain’ and ‘And the Children Shall Lead,’” which was my least favorite of the entire run. Worse than “Spock’s Brain.” “Spock’s Brain” is goofy and it’s almost absurdist. I just hated those kids and wanted them all to die. It’s too bad, too, because the third season is the best-looking of the show. The lighting is really good, the special effects were as good as they were ever going to be. It was a much more handsome show. It really found its footing. There was much more texture in the photography. Everything looked good but the stories were just crap. They weren’t quite on the Lost in Space level, but they had definitely fallen from where they were.

FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)

Back when the original series was in production, you could call a number and they’d arrange a set visit. So I called the office. You didn’t have to be anyone special, they just did it, and I got an appointment to visit the set. My appointment was four p.m. on December 31, 1968, and I was told I could bring a guest. I had a fourteen-year-old friend named Marc Zicree who was a huge fan, so I made it his Christmas present. I drive us over to Paramount, we go to the office, and they walk us over to the set. The guy says, “Stay about a half an hour and then go,” and he leaves! Would never happen today. Unchaperoned, we were basically two kids watching. They were filming a scene in sick bay, the only regulars were Shatner and DeForest Kelley.

I couldn’t tell from the little bit we saw what the story was, but it turned out to be “Turnabout Intruder.” We stayed longer than a half hour because no one was chasing us out. It was also the stage where the bridge was, and all the corridors, so we walked around, and the two things that I remember distinctly were the assistant director saying, “Come on, people, it’s New Year’s Eve, last episode of the season. Let’s get this done.” And Majel Barrett, who I did not know yet, walked by me and said under her breath, “Last episode, period.” Inside I said, “No!” because they hadn’t announced it even though we all knew it was on the brink. That was how I found out the show was officially canceled.

BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

Unfortunately the very last third-season episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” was very good and it might have won an Emmy for William Shatner, but all TV shows got rescheduled for President Eisenhower’s funeral coverage. So the episode missed the Emmy-nomination deadline, because “Turnabout Intruder” was shown in the first rerun season, which made it ineligible for an Emmy.

SCOTT MANTZ

That’s how production ended. You’ve got to think about what Shatner went through during the original run of the series; his father passed away, which was something that really affected him. And then after the second season he and his wife separated. You can easily forgive Shatner if he chose to not have fond memories of Star Trek, because he went through two traumatic moments during the making of that show. One of them was sudden, the other one was probably caused by his workload and the fact that he was never around.

But as bad as “Turnabout Intruder” was, there is something somewhat apropos about the last words of the episode, “If only. She could have had anything she wanted. If only.” And then he walks off. If only … If only Paramount and NBC realized what they had.… If only Roddenberry had got his wish to have a better time slot in the third season.… Can you imagine how great those third-season episodes would have turned out with him being the day-to-day line producer like he was for the first half of the first season? If only. If only indeed.

RICHARD ARNOLD

When I was putting together the guest list for the Hollywood Walk of Fame party at the studio for Gene, I was going over the list of who was invited with Gene in his office. I asked him if there was anyone missing from my list, and he gave me a couple of names of behind-the-scenes people I had omitted. I remember [original Star Trek editor] Fabien Tordjmann being one of them. As I was about to leave, I asked him, half in jest, if there was anyone who should not be on the list. He responded, “If Herb Solow or Fred Freiberger are there, I will not be!” It was the one and only time that I ever heard him mention either of their names, and I was somewhat surprised by his response, as he was quite adamant.

FRED FREIBERGER

I have read that the fans didn’t like any of the episodes of the third season. If true, that hurts me, but there is another truth. In my travels throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, I have run into many Star Trek fans and not one of them has ever treated me with anything less than courtesy and respect. For that I thank them.

But I have to be honest. I thought the worst experience of my life was when I was shot down over Nazi Germany. A Jewish boy from the Bronx parachuted into the middle of eighty million Nazis. Then I joined Star Trek. I was only in a prison camp for two years, but my travail with Star Trek lasted decades.