[For this exciting occasion, we've put together the reactions of several of the Journey team as well as a new phace…er…face! Come join us as we recount our experiences with this exciting new science fiction epic called Star Trek…]
by Gideon Marcus
Where No Show Has Gone Before
Last night marked an exciting new day in science fiction: the debut of a new science fiction anthology.
Science fiction on television has always been kind of a backwards sibling to science fiction in print. While there have been entertaining and even thoughtful episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, for the most part TV SF has been some of the worst schlock. Stories that wouldn't have been accepted in third-rate mags in the 50s. Shows like Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and My Favorite Martian — kiddified frivolity with zap guns and giant monsters. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials with inserts for soap commercials.
We fans had an inkling this new show would be something different pretty early on. Its producer, Gene Roddenberry, previously put out an interesting, mature show about a Marine Lieutenant called…The Lieutenant. At Westercon, one of the Star Trek pilots was previewed over the 4th of July weekend to much acclaim (we missed it as we had planned a birthday celebration at our house just 20 miles away from the convention!) There have been promo spots on NBC pitching the show, plus promotional pictures and coverage in both conventional newspapers and news 'zines. They were all quite compelling.
At Tricon, I got my first direct glimpse of the beast. The last two days of the convention, Roddenberry showed the two pilots to the show. I left the convention both hopeful and concerned.
You see, the first pilot, "The Cage", was a masterpiece. Without hyperbole, it was probably the best science fiction made for a screen (of any size) as of 1964. Brilliantly written, scored, special-effected, and directed (if just competently acted), it was also daringly progressive. Women were on equal footing with men, something I rarely see even in written science fiction these days. There were no villains, per se, merely beings resorting to desperate measures to save themselves. Call it Forbidden Planet but done right.
"The Cage" was rejected, I don't know why. Too expensive, perhaps, or maybe too cerebral. But it was liked enough that a second pilot was greenlit. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was the result.
It was a disappointment.
The beautiful sets and cinematography were gone, the cheap result looking like an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. We had a new actor in the role of captain, and while I didn't think Jeffrey Hunter stretched himself much in "The Cage", William Shatner, on the other hand, was a contortionist, playing every scene to the maximum. To be fair, he was new to the character, and the script did him few favors, shedding little insight into the character. John Hoyt, who did a lovely job as the ship's doctor in "The Cage", was replaced by a non-entity. Indeed, the only consistent cast member was Leonard Nimoy as the oddly strident "Mr. Spock", who in the second pilot, was reduced to something of a "wise Indian" role.
With pacing issues and a rather thin story, "Where No Man” augured poorly for the show, especially since it seemed more indicative of what we were going to get.
Still, a dozen or so of us gathered around our 25" color Admiral for the TV premiere of the show, set for 8:30 PM on September 8. We'd set up a signal with our friends on the East Coast, since they got to watch it three hours before us: If the show was a stinker, at 6:30 our time, they'd phone us, letting the line ring once. If the show was good, they'd ring twice. (We wouldn't actually pick up the phone — long distance calls, especially during prime time, are prohibitively expensive).
As we ate our dinner, the jangle of the telephone made us jump. What would be the verdict? The bells chimed once. We waited with bated breath. Then a second ring. Then silence. We grinned at each other.
And so, we sat through the latter half of Tarzan (also debuting on NBC that night). At 8:30 PM, the main event began.
In brief: the spaceship Enterprise is paying a visit to the planet M113 to conduct an annual medical check-up of scientific personnel based there. The only residents of the barren world are an archaeologist man-and-wife pair, the latter of whom was the old flame of the Enterprise's third medical officer in as many episodes. Said woman appears to each member of the ship's landing party in a different form, some kind of telepathic camouflage.
Said woman is also a killer, stalking humans individually and then draining them of their salt. She ends up aboard the Enterprise, changing forms and continuing her deadly hunt.
On the face of it, it's a stupid plot. The biology seems nonsensical, and Lord knows we've had enough monster plots on Voyage and The Outer Limits. And yet…
"The Man Trap" is beautifully put together. It's not quite "The Cage", but it's definitely not "Where No Man". The Enterprise is a somberly lit, "lived-in" vessel with hundreds of crew. For the first time, I had the impression of a real space-going vessel. I appreciated that the Enterprise appears to be the equivalent of a Hornblower-era frigate, a second-line vessel doing routine business around the galaxy. I quite like Forester's series, and given the youth of the ship's captain, the Hornblower analogy might be extended.
The three main actors, Shatner, Nimoy, and newcomer DeForest Kelley, were excellent, settled, and even understated in their roles. The supporting cast was quite good, too. George Takei, who I'd just seen in the Cary Grant flick, Walk, Don't Run, and in a couple of episodes of I, Spy, turns in a particularly pleasant, if brief, performance. Gone was the powerful woman first officer of "The Cage", but we did get a Black woman bridge officer named Lt. Uhura. So daring was this casting choice that there was some fear that she would be one of the victims of the episode's monster!
The special effects are quite masterful, from the superb optical effects of the ship orbiting the planet, to the shimmering fade out/in of the "transporter" (which beams people from the Enterprise to planetary destinations), to the blast of the phaser (no longer laser) guns.
Verdict: Star Trek is back on course. With two out of three episodes being excellent, I've got confidence that this is a show that will reward consistent viewing. You can bet we'll all gather together again next Thursday.
Rating for "The Cage": 5 stars.
Rating for "Where No Man has Gone Before": 2.5 stars.
Rating for "The Man Trap": 4 stars.
Thoughts from Galactic Journey’s editor:
by Janice L. Newman
The traveler has already said most of what I would have written about (I was the one saying, “I hope they don’t kill her off!” when Lt. Uhura was being menaced by the creature). A few additional thoughts about last night’s episode:
The cinematography was impressive. When the crew encounter the creature in the first act and each crewmember sees it as a different woman, this was done so smoothly and seamlessly that there was never any question which person’s POV we were following.
The story was nuanced. Though this was a ‘kill the monster’ story, the morality of killing a creature that is ‘the last of its kind’ is called into question, with comparisons being made to the American buffalo and the passenger pigeon. It adds to the story’s poignancy, and the viewer is left wondering whether it might have been possible to resolve the situation without deaths on either side.
Particularly exciting was seeing women in interesting roles, though their ‘uniforms’ were VERY short! I wonder why the men don’t wear short tunic and pantyhose combinations like that?
Rating for "The Cage": 4.5 stars.
Rating for "Where No Man has Gone Before": 2.5 stars.
Rating for "The Man Trap": 4 stars.
A Hippie's Opinion
by Erica Frank
Star Trek has certainly been interesting so far — even "fascinating," as Mr. Spock might say. The ship's controls seem complex but plausible: none of the "three dials and a lever" that plague cheap movie productions, and yet each console seems within the range of a trained technician's skills. Lt. Uhura even mentions being momentarily fed up with her desk work, a nice bit of "office life" banter as she tries — unsuccessfully — to flirt with Mr. Spock.
However, the Star Trek universe is showing signs of predictability. None of it is bad, so far, but if it's going to last, it'll need more variety in its settings and plots. It won't take long for these themes to become clichés.
Three rocky, dusty desert planets.
Three hostile encounters with beings with psychic powers.
Three doctors. The Enterprise seems to go through them like some rock bands go through drummers.
The psychic elements of the creature in "The Man Trap" were minimized; the focus was (understandably) on the creature's murderous habits. However, its "shape-shifting" was actually a kind of mental illusion, although more limited than we saw in "The Cage." And the fact that its victims could not rally themselves to escape, even when called, showed some kind of mind control ability that the Talosians and Mitchell both lacked.
My favorite scene in the episode: Professor Crater showed Kirk and McCoy his dwindling supply of salt, and said, "Nancy and I started with 25 pounds. This is what we have left." McCoy took a few tablets from the nearly-empty vase and tasted one. "Salt," he declared.
Dr. McCoy tastes the "salt"
This is exactly how hippies get cops to take LSD, although they normally put it on sugar cubes, not salt tablets. (LSD has no color or flavor; the active elements are too small for people to taste.) I spent the next several minutes waiting for the hallucinations to kick in.
The producers could've given us a wild psychedelic color extravaganza instead of four more murders. I think we've been cheated.
I don't mind "psychic powers can make people callous or predatory" stories; they're a science fiction staple. I'm hoping we also get some episodes where extra-sensory perceptions lead to more harmonious communities or solve problems instead of creating them.
I enjoyed the episode despite a bit of hand-waving past some plot details. (For example, tasting the salt instead of using a science lab to confirm its identity. The result would've been the same, and this saved time.) The acting was great; I believed these were starship personnel facing a citizen who'd allied himself with a hostile alien. I'm looking forward to more of the series.
4 stars.
Who the %&@$ is Captain Kirk?
This first episode didn't give me a good idea of who Kirk is or what his past is, even though I'm pretty sure Kirk is supposed to be the main character of the show. (This is something I also felt was an issue with "Where No Man Has Gone Before".) "The Man Trap" centered more around McCoy, which is fine – I like the implication that with each new episode, a different member of the crew will be at the center of the plot – but for a first episode of a show, I wish they'd spent a little more time getting the audience acquainted with Kirk. When Kirk's life was threatened, I didn't feel any tension since I knew they weren't going to kill him off in the first episode, and his being captain isn't enough for me to root for him.
Pike, the captain in “The Cage”, was better established as a character in the first 20 minutes of his episode than Kirk was in both his pilot and the first episode combined. We know Pike is tired. We know he’s considering retiring. We know he’s from Earth. Kirk? I don’t know anything about him besides his pretty face.
I am left more frustrated than intrigued about his character. Why should I care about the success of this man if I don’t know who he is or what he’s about?
The good story alone in “The Man Trap” convinces me to give this new captain a chance, though I hope the lack of Kirk’s background is something that is remedied sooner rather than later.
This is a great episode, but not a good introduction. 5 stars, despite my complaints.
Home Town Hero
by Tam Phan (Secret Asian Man)
“The Man Trap” is a refreshing debut after the whiplash that resulted from starting with “The Cage” and going straight to “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. In the first few minutes of the episode, we’ve already seen clever camera work, stunning special effects, and a pleasantly paced plot.
It’s a bit concerning that we, yet again, have a new doctor, though I did like his friendship with Kirk, echoing the relationship of Pike and Boyce from "The Cage". The two recurring characters, Kirk and Spock, seem to be the only staple in the show thus far, but perhaps the continued diversity of the cast will prove to be an asset. This is an anthology show, after all.
Seeing Lieutenant Sulu, played by Asian actor George Takei, is nothing short of inspiring. He didn’t contribute much to the plot, but he was an officer with clear officer duties and that is not inconsequential. With at least as many scenes as any of the other supporting actors, I suspect that means the “green thumbed” lieutenant will be a highlight of the show in the upcoming episodes.
Hopefully this show continues to impress. It would be a shame to fall back down after such a great start, but we won’t know until next week.
Rating for “The Cage”: 5 stars
Rating for “Where No Man Has Gone Before”: 2 stars
Rating for “The Man Trap”: 4 stars
From the Young Traveler
by Lorelei Marcus
"Man Trap", though a moodier tale than what I usually prefer, executes every piece of the episode in a superb manner: the acting, direction, and production are all 5-star quality.
Rarely have I seen such a diverse, well-written, and interesting show on television — Star Trek is truly the I, Spy of the science fiction genre (is it any surprise both are Desilu productions?)
It's definitely getting HI-LITED in my TV Guide!
5 stars for this episodes, and high hopes for what's to come.
(And don't forget to tune in in three days at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings) for the next episode of Star Trek!)
Meanwhile, those of us who weren't at the convention get thrown into this thing blindly with the first episode actually broadcast on out TV screens. It's a bit disconcerting; clearly "The Man Trap" isn't an introductory episode or pilot, so we have to figure things out from scratch.
Anyway, some random thoughts.
I hope "Star Trek" doesn't turn into a monster-of-the-week series.
The visuals are very nice, even when you can tell they're cheap. Good use of lighting and such. (Definitely need a color TV for this show, I think.)
I like the fact that this seems to be a well-established universe, even though we're only given hints here and there. (The "bible" for this series must be pretty complex.)
The racially mixed crew is a nice touch. It could be more so.
The women in miniskirts is kind of corny; witness most cheap "sci-fi" movies of ten or fifteen years ago.
The monster costume wouldn't be out of place on "The Outer Limits."
I like the actors and their characters. I hope they do more stuff with the interesting alien Spock. (Why name him after the famous baby doctor?)
I like little background stuff, like the botany lab with the moving plant. (Reminds me of Cleopatra the meat-eating plant on "The Addams Family." Did they use the same puppet?)
We were making Cleopatra jokes, too! But no — Cleopatra is a leafy elephant trunk. Gertrude is a hand in a leafy glove.
Unlike the contributors, I didn't have a chance to see either pilot, so I don't have anything to compare this to except whatever else is on TV. It certainly stands out from everything else that's on the air now. That said, I'm not sure I could go all the way to four stars.
My biggest problem was that we weren't really given a reason to care about any of the main characters. Most importantly, knowing nothing about Dr. McCoy made it hard for me to empathize with a lot of what he was going through (perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I'm used to seeing DeForest Kelley play a heavy in Westerns). If this episode had come along later in the season when I knew who these people are, it might have been better.
Complaints aside, I'd like to call out three people who made this better than average television. First is the script writer, George Clayton Johnson. He's previously written some very good (and very bad) episodes of the Twilight Zone and has had some short stories covered here at the Journey (all in Gamma, alas). Anyway, he's proven he's got the chops. Let's hope he's a regular writer for this show.
Second is director Marc Daniels. He did a superb job, as Janice noted. That's to be expected, I suppose. He has years of experience, going back to I Love Lucy and before. He's even sometimes credited with coming up with the three camera technique, freeing the early days of live television from a single fixed camera angle. Another name I hope to see a lot of on this show.
Finally, but certainly not least, Vince Howard, who played the creature when it was trying to get Lt. Uhura. I was struck by how well he copied the mannerisms of actor Bruce Watson when he as the creature in the form of crewman Green. Not just the knuckle chewing, but something about the eyes and mouth. It was easy to believe they were the same being in different guises. An excellent job in a small role.
Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing more of this show. But if they just fly around and fight a new monster every week it will pale quickly. Fingers crossed.
A nice feature of "Man Trap" is that we see the crew as a whole responding well to the crisis they are in – individual characters may be in great danger, but it seems clear that the crew as a whole has great resilience, which is just what you would hope to find in a future starship.
I really appreciated that, too. A competent crew keeping its head. It's clear that the folks writing have some military experience (or at least knowledge of procedures).
P.S. Is anyone else reminded of A. E. Van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" who attacked the crew of the "Space Beagle" and drained them of their phosphorus (or potassium, depending on which version of the story you read), until the captain and the extremely logical science officer defeated it?
I watched this on a portable black and white TV, and expect to see the series on the same set — there's no talk in this little house about getting a -color- TV. Here in Coos Bay, Oregon, we only get one TV channel (unless you have cable — not even something it would occur to me to wish for), and it's a good thing that channel is NBC, with The Man from UNCLE, and now my new favorite, Star Trek. "New favorite," yes, based just on the "NBC Week" glimpses that have been fascinating me, an 11-year-old sf fan, and this one premiere teleplay. There's something funny with my memory, though. I was so absorbed in the show that I'm not sure I was home alone when I watched it. It sure seems like I was! But if I was, where were my folks and my little sister?
I was there when the pilots were shown at Tricon. Roddenberry introduced both.
The reaction of the fans was that The Cage was better than Man Trap.
However most the talk was about production design and world building. Almost all of us had seen Forbidden Planet real-time in 1956 on the big screen. As 'literary' SF fans we had been hungering for an 'adult' Space Opera like that. While the budget of Star Trek showed it's spirit was with the prose form. In at the level we Tru Blu knew.
(After years of Queen of Outer Space or Cat Women of the Moon and even more ghastly fare this promised to be , at least, part way to the kind of sophisticated Space Opera we knew on the page.
Er looking at the article I know why the Cordwainer Bird reference is there but I don't think it was meant for Star Trek…. I am taking the reference here to be Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which Harlan Ellison , who wrote for that show and attached Cordwainer Bird to for episodes he had written but disapproved of.
Ellison who worked on . what he called Voyage to the Bottom of the Toilet , became more and more angry with producer Irwin Allen and at one story meeting lost it and tried to strangle Allen!
The Bird reference is indeed a reference to Voyage, which I hope was clear in context.
I have to wonder what Harlan's original script was like.
Probably good. The 1964 Outer Limits Demon with a Glass Hand was not messed with. It is the best Outer Limits episode ever done, one of the best SF stories ever to air on TV.
You know, if you're really interested in science fiction, you might want to look at "Men Into Space. " It's a few years old, so maybe you can catch the old reruns on the UHF broadcast from KOLD?
I caught that show when it was first run. It never grabbed me.
Agree. To us old SF fans MIS felt like Popular Mechanics SF. More pedestrian ZIV-Ivan Tors science fiction. I guess Tors was trying to avoid BEM-Pulpish SF (he also did the very dull Science Fiction Theater). As if he had never read more modern SF as it was on the pages of Astounding and Galaxy.
As a big Trekker, I also grok the "Men Into Space" comparison. "Trek" has been far more original, but MIS indeed was thoughtful science fiction, more scientifically accurate than even Trek. MIS proved quite prophetic in terms of the actual manned space programs that began right about the time it was canceled. The one word that most comes to mind is verisimilitude. Often, especially given its omnipresent narrator and occasional use of actual missile bases as sets, "MIS" seemed like a documentary of the future — a dramatic extension of the early '50s Colliers magazine series and the DIsney "Man In Space" documentaries. MIS relied on Chesley Bonestell artistry and design concepts borrowed from the USAF. Because it was a half-hour series with mostly self-contained stories, it didn't have time to go too deeply into characters or themes, but did a credible job anyway. And the miniature-model spacecraft were, for the late '50s, of high quality, thanks to visual-effects modelers Louis DeWitt, Irving Block and Jack Rabin, who were imported from SF filmdom. A lot of MIS spacecraft stock footage and spacesuits were to be seen in numerous later productions, particularly "The Outer Limits."
If I had to remake one of the Star Trek episodes, it would be that one. It contains all of the good ingredients for a sci-fi story. Good characters in a revolutionnarized society; a black woman at communications, an asiatic as officer, a vulcan scientific e.t with a "logic" philosophy as main way to solve problems, and that inhuman beautiful character of this lady ship Enterprise. Then the discovery of that extinguised alien civillization, asking questions about their biology, culture, spirituality, society, hopes and disapearance… So many doors of opportunity to write an imaginative script. I would dig deep in that avenue to create a more realistic logical body for the "beast", the sole inheritant of its specie (how come ?), exploring that telephatic power of his, his sensibility and need to survive. Is she so different as us ? And, as driving mean to deal with the challenges at hand, the hearth sensitive perception of the doctor, the cold mind of Spock, and the in-the-middle thinking of Kirk.
I wonder if there'd be time to fit all that. I agree that there could have been more to it, but as it is, it had us discussing the moral ramifications raised for houses afterward.
Hey, reporting in from New York City. What struck me about Star Trek is its cosmopolitanism. Talk about civil rights—not just Asian & African officers, but a whole scene staged in Swahili!
More generally, Star Trek reminded me of Forbidden Planet plus Rod Serling's social conscience. The alien isn't a monster per se; it's not malignant, anyhow, it's just responding to biological stimuli. Plus the theme of extinction adds a twist: should you preserve the last lion in existence? what if it's hunting you? And if you've read Rachel Carson (or just read about her), you already know that preservation of our ecology is a key issue of our times.
I loved seeing how the Starship Enterprise operates. I got a sense of the ship's size & power, its crew & their duties, and a liberal ethos that holds it all together. The format & approach draws on the fashion for Westerns (its closing line is even an elegy for the buffalo). But "The Searchers" & "Gunsmoke" have proved that horse operas can have substance; Star Trek aims to show that space operas can too.
That should be signed Aaron G. Oops!