Lost Federations E-Book

A.J. Black

• Herausgeber: Polaris
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 789

Beschreibung

SPACE. THE FINAL FRONTIER. THESE WERE ALMOST THE VOYAGES OF THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE. We think we know the history of Star Trek. Born at the height of 1960s popular culture, the five-year mission of Captain James T. Kirk and his crew faced early cancellation, bounced back with a series of beloved movies in the 1980s and gave way to a fleet of successful sequels and spin-offs that kept on exploring strange new worlds. In Lost Federations: The Unofficial Unmade History of Star Trek, author A. J. Black tells a different story. This is an alternate history of the franchise, one filled with roads not taken, from early 1960s feature-films and spin-offs, the original sequel Star Trek: Phase II in the 1970s, via epic planned movies such as Planet of the Titans and into many untold episodes, arcs and character stories from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, all the way through to the modern era. Bringing together pre-existing material over decades for the first time in one space, plus some new reflections from Star Trek writers and analysis of how it all fits into the wider cultural trends of the last sixty years, Lost Federations invites you to boldly explore a history you may not already know . . .

Leseprobe

This edition first published in 2022 by

POLARIS PUBLISHING LTD

c/o Aberdein Considine

2nd Floor, Elder House

Multrees Walk

Edinburgh

EH1 3DX

www.polarispublishing.com

Text copyright © A.J. Black, 2023

ISBN: 9781915359117

eBook ISBN: 9781915359124

The right of A.J. Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The views expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or policies of Polaris Publishing Ltd (Company No. SC401508) (Polaris), nor those of any persons, organisations or commercial partners connected with the same (Connected Persons). Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers, or other information or content expressed by third parties are not those of Polaris or any Connected Persons but those of the third parties. For the avoidance of doubt, neither Polaris nor any Connected Persons assume any responsibility or duty of care whether contractual, delictual or on any other basis towards any person in respect of any such matter and accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by any such matter in this book.

This is an unofficial publication. All material contained within is for critical purposes.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, EdinburghPrinted in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For every writer of Star Trek.

You gave us the final frontier.

Thanks to Ronald D. Moore and Andre Bormanis for sharing lost stories, and their time. Thanks to Peter Burns for his ongoing support, and to Jonathan Melville for helping me improve the work. And thanks to my wife Steph, endlessly supporting me as I boldly go.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Prologue: Secret Histories

1: Star Trek Is . . .

2: The Man of Tomorrow

3: These Were Almost the Voyages: The Original Series

4: The Motion Pictures: Part I

5: The Lost Years: Phase II

6: Where No One Had Gone Before: The Next Generation

7: The First and Final Adventures: The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country

8: The Rifleman in Space: Deep Space Nine

9: Damn Fine Cups of Coffee: Voyager

10: The Motion Pictures: Part II

11: The Beginning: Enterprise

12: Uncharted Frontiers: The Animated, Video-Game and Live-Action Pitches

13: The Motion Pictures: Part III

14: Strange New Shows: The Age of Discovery

Epilogue: Where No Franchise Has Gone Before

Bibliography

Illustrations

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The crew of Star Trek: The Original Series. Alamy

The animated version of Captain Robert April, the original Star Trek captain, from The Animated Series.

Robert Lansing as Gary Seven, the intended star of Gene Roddenberry’s spin-off, Assignment: Earth.

Concept painting by Ralph McQuarrie of a prospective design for the USS Enterprise for the unproduced Star Trek: Planet of the Titans feature film. The Art of Ralph McQuarrie

First draft image of the script for Phase II’s intended premiere, ‘In Thy Image’, by Harold Livingston, when it was still known as Star Trek II.

Xon intended for Phase II.

Sketch art for a young James T. Kirk and Spock from the abandoned Star Trek: The First Adventure, in the late 1980s.

The U.S.S. Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Alamy

Deep Space Nine aka Terok Nor, the former Cardassian space station setting of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Alamy

Quark on the Ba’ku planet in 2375 in Star Trek: Insurrection.

Genevieve Bujold as Captain Nicole Janeway filming ‘Caretaker’, the pilot of Star Trek: Voyager.

The main cast of Star Trek: Voyager from the first season. Alamy

The main cast of Star Trek: Enterprise from the first season. Alamy

James T. Kirk and Spock as their ‘Abramsverse’ versions in 2009’s Star Trek reboot. Alamy

A poster for the animated series, Star Trek: Lower Decks.

The reunited crew of the USS Enterprise-D in the final season of Star Trek: Picard.

PROLOGUE

SECRET HISTORIES

LATE IN THE sixth season of the second Star Trek spin-off series, Deep Space Nine, a startling revelation takes place.

In the episode ‘Inquisition’, after the station’s chief medical officer Dr Julian Bashir is accused of being a spy and interrogated by a sinister Starfleet Intelligence officer named Luther Sloan, amidst a devastating galactic war the United Federation of Planets are facing, we, Bashir and the rest of the crew discover that Sloan in truth works for Section-31, a black operations intelligence unit within Starfleet who have existed for over two centuries, secretly as part of the Federation’s founding charter.

It was, and indeed remains despite subsequent series including Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Discovery expanding on the Section-31 mythos, a deeply controversial concept within the franchise Gene Roddenberry created in the mid-1960s because, ostensibly, it operates directly in contradiction to the future historicity of what we understand to be Star Trek. It suggests lurking beneath Star Trek’s veneer of openness, hope and a belief in the triumphant power of the human condition lies a cynical foundation of fear, anxiety and falsehood. It suggests a secret history we might never entirely appreciate.

This feels relevant as a touchstone because, while the creation and establishment of Star Trek since the original pilot episode, ‘The Cage’, first aired in 1965, has been well documented over half a century, there has long existed if not a secret then without question an alternate history to the story of a series that began as a quirky addition to a bright, colourful canon of 1960s American television and grew into one of the world’s most dominant, recognisable intellectual properties and franchises.

‘The Cage’ itself, of course, became something of a lost artefact in Star Trek history. Roddenberry’s first attempt at bringing his concept of future humans exploring the galaxy and ‘boldly going’ where no one had gone before on the USS Enterprise, featured Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike and an entirely different crew around Leonard Nimoy’s Mr Spock. It was rejected by studio NBC for several reasons, as Roddenberry explained: “The reason they turned it down was that it was too cerebral and there wasn’t enough action and adventure. ‘The Cage’ didn’t end with a chase and a right cross to the jaw, the way all manly films were supposed to end. There were no female leads then – women in those days were just set dressing.”

NBC sought to have Roddenberry remove the soon-to-be-iconic character of Spock – as his pointy ears and demeanour were considered somewhat ‘satanic’ – and replace his future wife Majel Barrett as Number One, the measured, intelligent second-in-command to Pike. Given the rare opportunity to shoot a second pilot, Roddenberry refused on the former but relented on the latter. Spock and Number One were conceptually melded for ‘The Man Trap’, the newly filmed pilot that replaced Pike (as Hunter rejected the chance to return) with William Shatner’s Captain James T. Kirk and a whole new crew. The rest, as we know, is history.

‘The Cage’, however, was never broadcast at the time. Portions of the episode were inserted into ‘The Menagerie’, a two-part story in Star Trek: The Original Series which explored Spock’s relationship to Kirk and the earlier crew of the Enterprise, thereby making events of ‘The Cage’ canonical in Star Trek history. The original pilot did not re-emerge for two decades, until an early VHS release in 1986, crafted from a 16mm black-and-white print Roddenberry held. It was combined with the original print, a print earlier cut apart to fashion ‘The Menagerie’, before a year later the full colourised version was pieced together and ‘The Cage’ was finally broadcast late in 1988 as part of a tie-in with the new, and successful, sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

It is now, thankfully, in wide circulation thanks to the age of Blu-Ray and 4K box sets, not to mention streaming services, and has rightly taken its place as the Rosetta Stone of Star Trek. Pike was revived by J. J. Abrams in his 2009 Star Trek reboot film, while sequel series Star Trek: Discovery revived both Pike and Number One for an extended arc that reintroduced a younger Spock, served as a sequel to ‘The Cage’ and prequel to ‘The Menagerie’, and set in motion storylines that would lead to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, with Anson Mount’s Pike and Rebecca Romjin’s Number One as main characters in their own Enterprise-set prequel to The Original Series.

What the story of ‘The Cage’ demonstrates, nonetheless, is how easily Star Trek’s narrative can fall prey to what scholars have described as ‘the unmade’, or as noted professor of unmade studies James Fenwick terms it, ‘unproduction studies’: “The unmade seems to be an integral part of how the media industries work. One reason for this is because of the nature of the creative process: ideas mutate and evolve, stories and scripts are developed and redeveloped, revised, and edited, to the point they become wholly new ideas and stories unrecognisable from the original idea. Draft one of a script will likely be very different to the final draft of the script. However, beyond this particular aspect of the creative process, there is clearly an expectation amongst producers and screenwriters that most projects will never be produced, particularly if they become stuck in ‘development hell’, a process in which a project (not necessarily even a screenplay, but maybe just a film title, a planned adaptation or an elevator pitch) becomes trapped in a perpetual cycle of creation and revision for many years and usually leads to it eventually being abandoned, or even just left in a purgatory state.”

Many of these states can be attributed to a range of projects across the history of Star Trek, from the mid-1960s when The Original Series was first in production through to the 21st-century era of cinematic and televised Star Trek. Some were simply ideas, such as Roddenberry’s ‘The Cattlemen’. Some were fully developed scripts, such as the original draft of what became the Original Series episode ‘Assignment: Earth’. Some were turned later into book or comic series adaptations. Some made it as far as pre-production before collapsing in on themselves, in the case of 1970s Original Series adaptation movie Planet of the Titans. Some were inches away from going into full production, as was the case with Roddenberry’s first intended sequel series Star Trek: Phase II. Some are almost mythical. Many have been discussed and explored over the decades by a range of writers and scholars fascinated as much by the Star Trek that never made it to the screen as the Star Trek that we have fallen in love with across numerous generations.

This is Star Trek that fits Fenwick’s ‘unproduction studies’ mould of “exploring a shadowy archival world where little makes sense within the framework of existing canonical film history”, or in this case film, TV and computer gaming history, given Star Trek’s trans-media reach particularly since the 1990s.

Canon has always meant a great deal to audiences who have engaged with Star Trek over the last half-century and more, the idea of a consistent world of constant universal in-world history that subsequent narratives pay attention to and respect. For instance, the placement of Discovery within the 23rd century Star Trek timeline was deliberate; set a decade before The Original Series, it allowed the series to explore events – such as a Federation-Klingon war mentioned in an Original Series episode – in the same era without contradicting what came before but would be set, from a narrative perspective, later. Audiences learning that Spock had a human sister, Michael Burnham, raised on Vulcan by his parents, raised canonical eyebrows given earlier Star Trek productions – albeit set later – made no suggestion of this in Spock’s backstory. This was for a very good reason – Discovery, nor Burnham, had been invented yet.

The origin of ‘canon’ in fictional terms, given the term applies to numerous ongoing fictional universes outside of Star Trek, is sourced directly from the Biblical canon – the set of religious texts considered scripture, as opposed to the Apocrypha, or non-canonical texts. It is a rigorous application of structure and chronology that comes, ostensibly, from the higher power behind such events. Thereby the term was first applied to fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th century for his Sherlock Holmes adventures, and Roddenberry would later exist as the God-like arbiter of what was and was not considered canonical Star Trek storytelling, as his assistant Richard Arnold declared in 1991: “As long as Gene Roddenberry is involved in it, he is the final word on what is StarTrek . . . And when he says that the books, and the games, and the comics and everything else, are not gospel, but are only additional Star Trek based on his Star Trek but not part of the actual Star Trek universe that he created . . . they’re just, you know, kinda fun to keep you occupied between episodes and between movies, whatever . . . but he does not want that to be considered to be sources of information for writers, working on this show, he doesn’t want it to be considered part of the canon by anybody working on any other projects.”

Roddenberry as arbiter naturally changed after his passing in 1991. Rick Berman, one of his primary producers on the second era of StarTrek from 1987 onwards, nominally became the authority – Peter to Roddenberry’s Christ, to continue the tortured Biblical analogy – alongside numerous denominated head writers who steered the direction of many of the spin-off and sequel series to come: Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Jeri Taylor, Brannon Braga, etc. Following the end of that era in 2005, the torch passed through Bad Robot Productions and J. J. Abrams’ stable of creatives to the modern era steward under Paramount-CBS – Alex Kurtzman, who at the time of writing serves as the latest chief creative figure, alongside numerous studio executives and consultants, deciding the nature of canonical Star Trek.

By the 2020s, and the ever-evolving trans-media landscape of modern intellectual property, this no longer simply covers what we see on screen. Books, games, comics and other applications are now assuming, if not a full canon status, then a quasi-canonical position within the Star Trek framework. Kurtzman even legitimised the long assumed non-canonical The Animated Series, which ran from 1972–1973, produced by Roddenberry and featuring most of the original cast, by including references to elements of that series that had never featured in Star Trek anywhere else. This was after Roddenberry decades earlier had ‘decanonised’ it within his own deific definition of Star Trek. The nature of canon is likely to consistently evolve as Star Trek itself does.

If, therefore, so-called ‘unmade Star Trek’, by the very nature of never coming to pass on screen or indeed in any other format, cannot be considered as canon, it must by definition fall into the bracket of Fenwick’s ‘shadow world’; a secret history, explored to varying degrees over the years, which points the way toward an entirely different, potential canonical story for Star Trek and, in part, the history of science fiction on television and in cinema itself. While perhaps lacking the all-consuming cultural dominance in the late 1970s as George Lucas’ Star Wars achieved in cinematic terms, Star Trek stands as one of the defining cultural artefacts of the mid-20th century in how it shaped American social, political and cultural trends amidst two decades of significant national tumult.

Nichelle Nichols, who played a trend-setting black television character in the Enterprise’s Lieutenant Uhura, tells a story that underlines this reach from when she attended an NAACP fundraiser in the late 1960s and was told a big fan of the show wanted to meet her: “I thought it was a Trekkie, and so I said, ‘Sure.’ I looked across the room, and there was Dr Martin Luther King walking towards me with this big grin on his face. He reached out to me and said, ‘Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan.’ He said that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch. [She told King about her plans to leave the series.] I never got to tell him why, because he said, ‘You can’t. You’re part of history.’”

History might have played out very differently had, for example, ‘The Cage’ been accepted by NBC and the series progressed from there. On the bridge of Pike’s Enterprise, there was no Uhura and no Nichelle Nichols, indeed there was no black officer on the bridge pointing the way on American television, during the powder keg era of Civil Rights, for black representation in an idealised future.

This book, in part, will seek to understand how history and culture might have been altered had the secret, or at least often under-reported story of the ‘unmade’ Star Trek future, ended up coming to pass. How might Roddenberry have pushed the needle in the national conversation about animal rights in the 1960s had he made an intended feature film called ‘The Cattlemen’? Might Star Trek had achieved the same cinematic science-fiction dominance in the 1970s if ‘Planet of the Titans’ had come to be, and how might that have affected the post-American New Wave transformation of the auteur filmmaker into what became the high-concept, blockbuster, franchise-driven Hollywood landscape that still exists today? Would the advent of serialised television have been prefigured by unrealised long-form attempts at storytelling on established, formulaic Star Trek series such as Voyager or Enterprise?

The history of unmade Star Trek is not simply the story of untold wonders but larger unrealised possibilities that might have shaped trends, the fate of actors who subsequently became iconic and the reach and appreciation of a television series which, perhaps like no other in television history, has reflected and continues to reflect our hopes, our anxieties and our beliefs, across transformations in rights and freedoms, through wars and genocides, and giant leaps for man, woman and those who are not defined by gender. As Ira Steven Behr said: “The theory I’ve always heard says that when the western died, science fiction filled the gap. We could not dream in the past anymore, so we started to dream in the future.”

Star Trek helps us dream. And Lost Federations, this book, hopes to dream again of what almost was, what could have been and what we can only imagine. Let’s see what’s out there . . .

ONE

STAR TREK IS . . .

‘A ONE-HOUR dramatic television series. Action-Adventure-Science Fiction. The first such concept with strong central lead characters plus other continuing regulars.’

In March 1964, two years before the first season of Star Trek arrived on the airwaves, Roddenberry put the finishing touches on an initial ‘bible’ for the series he intended to use to pitch the show. It was called ‘Star Trek Is . . .’ and it contained what stands as the original documented intention for what became Star Trek. The quote above stands as the first description he ever gave of what he intended Star Trek to be.

One of the first people to read it was Dorothy Fontana, Roddenberry’s secretary at the time who would later go on to pen some of Star Trek’s finest episodes and rank as a pioneer of female science-fiction writing for television under her pen name D. C. Fontana: “There was nothing like it on television at that time. It had lots of possibilities and you could see the stories. They’d begin to pop into your mind automatically.”

Roddenberry’s initial pitch contains characters and concepts that would surface in the eventual series, but others have passed into deeper Star Trek lore. His original name for the ship that was immortalised as the USS Enterprise was the SS Yorktown, with a naval moniker that more deliberately evoked the Hornblower influences, a name borrowed both from a Second World War aircraft carrier and the decisive final battle of the American War of Independence at the end of the 18th century (the USS Yorktown would later be referenced in Art Wallace’s ‘Obsession’ in the second season; appear, briefly, captained by tennis pro Vijay Amitraj in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and serve as the name of a gigantic space colony in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond). The SS Yorktown was designated as a ‘United Space Ship’, a large, bulky cruiser with a crew of several hundred designed to embark on the aforementioned five-year mission.

Star Trek staff writer John D. F. Black explained the thinking behind this: “There was a reason for it being five years. Sure, the Navy – and this, in a sense, was the U.S. Navy in space – will send you on a tour of duty, but not for five years. Truth is Gene was hoping the show would last five years! If you could get five seasons done, you were assured a long run in syndication.”

So much for those plans! Roddenberry nonetheless had visions of a show designed to have the science-fiction grandeur of the classic 1956 film Forbidden Planet, itself based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but he was also inspired by Space Cadet, a late-1940s pulp novel by Robert A. Heinlein, one of the seminal American science-fiction authors of the mid-20th century: “Space Cadet is a very humane book. It deals with not only the problems of science – about space travel and technology and so on – but of the need we have to act in a conscious responsible manner with all this technology . . .”

His original assemblage of characters retained facets, and in some places names, that continued into ‘The Cage’ and the series beyond. The Yorktown’s original, intended commander was one Captain Robert April, described by Roddenberry in the document as “Colorfully complex, capable of action and decision which can verge on the heroic – but who lives a continual battle with self-doubt and the loneliness of command.” April was a name Roddenberry had used before in a two-parter he wrote for the Western series Have Gun, Will Travel, which ran for over 200 episodes over six seasons between 1957 and 1963, where April was a prison chaplain. For ‘The Cage’, he was later re-named and re-tooled into Captain Christopher Pike, and then for the series, of course, Captain James T. Kirk, but April remained a part of deeper Star Trek lore.

After The Original Series, April first appeared in animated form in the final episode of The Animated Series. In ‘The Counter-Clock Incident’, he is described as the original commander of the Enterprise for a five-year mission in the 2240s, a decade before Pike and two decades before Kirk, suggesting the mission planned in ‘Star Trek Is . . .’did indeed take place. ‘The Counter-Clock Incident’ presents April as a distinguished, older white Admiral with white hair, but the canonical status of The Animated Series remains disputed to this day. Elements of the show have been incorporated in the 2017-onwards era of the franchise, yet simultaneously counteracted, with April a good example of that fact.

As of writing, the most recent spin-off series, Strange New Worlds, which focuses on Pike’s own five-year mission in the 2250s before ‘The Cage’, includes Admiral Robert April as a character, only he is a black man. Discovery’s Season 2 premiere, ‘Brother’, establishes that Pike was April’s first officer and inherited command of the Enterprise from him, further cementing that Roddenberry’s initial, intended five-year mission took place. Several of the crew in ‘Star Trek Is . . .’ described around April, also, carried over into future projects.

Roddenberry lists April’s second-in-command as ‘Number One’ as early as the 1964 pitch document, describing her as: “a mysterious female, slim and dark, expressionless, cool, one of those women who will always look the same between years 20 and 50 . . . is probably Robert April’s superior in detailed knowledge of the multiple equipment systems, departments and crew members aboard the vessel.” Be in no doubt that he was describing Majel Barrett, an actress who he met and cast in an episode of The Lieutenant and, despite him being married at the time with children, became his mistress. Barrett went on to become the ‘First Lady of Star Trek’ when she married Roddenberry, immortalised as the voice of the Starfleet computer system in the 1980s era onwards, the comedic and flirtatious Lwaxana Troi in The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and especially as the original incarnation of the mysterious Number One in ‘The Cage’. The role would be inherited by Rebecca Romijn in Strange New Worlds and given the canonical name, Una Chin-Riley (her forename christened in honour of Star Trek novelist Una McCormack).

The document also named the ship’s chief medical officer as Dr Philip Boyce, given the nickname ‘Bones’, “humorously cynical . . . enjoys his own weaknesses; [and is] the Captain’s only real confidant . . . considers himself the only realist aboard, measures each new landing in terms of relative annoyance, rather than excitement”. This sure sounds like the Bones we would come to know and love! Roddenberry knew DeForest Kelley, who would ultimately play Dr Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy in the series (though not ‘The Cage’) after they made a TV pilot called 333 Montgomery Street together and he was always the first choice for Star Trek’s famously irascible MD.

Moreover, the document describes a South American navigator called Jose Ortegas, with a fiery Latin temperament, a man “painfully aware of the historical repute of Latins as lovers – and is in danger of failing this ambition on a cosmic scale”. Though he was eventually loosely adapted into a lieutenant called Jose Tyler (played by Peter Duryea) who appeared only in ‘The Cage’, the name was partly adopted for the character of Erica Ortegas (played by Melissa Navia) in Strange New Worlds, also a navigator and equally possessed of a similar fiery temperament.

It also lists the captain’s yeoman as a woman called Colt who “serves as Robert April’s secretary, reporter, bookkeeper, and undoubtedly wishes she could also serve him in more personal departments. She is not dumb; she is very female, disturbingly so.” As a descriptor, this has arguably dated poorly since the early 1960s – and with one hand in Roddenberry giving Number One a sense of modern agency, the other takes away – but it suggests the intention to have a beautiful female in April’s thrall to satisfy more of a romantic audience demographic, and arguably she serves as the template for Grace Lee Whitney’s recurring crew member Janice Rand in the series and several big-screen adventures.

The only character to survive the document largely intact is Mr Spock, described here as ‘First Lieutenant’ and right-hand man to the captain, not to mention generally taking care of the ship’s functions. Though he suggests the first view of him can be frightening with “a face so heavy-lidded and satanic you might also expect him to have a forked tail”. He describes him as “probably half-Martian, he has a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears”. On first blush, though this suggests Roddenberry had in mind the idea of Spock being half-alien from the very beginning, the satanic description and complexion suggests a more devilish, perhaps even trickster character in line with the alien creatures Star Trek would often encounter during Roddenberry’s involvement, such as Trelane or later Q.

However, Roddenberry also adds “but strangely, Mr Spock’s quiet temperament is in dramatic contrast to his satanic look”, which hints at the stoic ocean of Vulcan calm he will develop into via ‘The Cage’ and eventually arrive fully formed with the series. Roddenberry describes him as April’s physical and emotional equal, with a “cat-like curiosity over anything the slightest ‘alien’”, with the suggestion being that the triumvirate which will become central to Star Trek – that of Kirk, Spock and Bones – would have existed in this initial five-year mission with April, Spock and Number One.

Roddenberry in his document, having established the Yorktown and the initial crew, opened a wide timeframe for when the series would be set, before settling on the middle of the 23rd century: “The time is ‘somewhere in the future’. It could be 1995 or 2995. In other words, close enough to our own time for our continuing characters to be fully identifiable as people like us, but far enough into the future for galaxy travel to be thoroughly established.”

He goes on to discuss the make-up of the Yorktown as a vessel, and from a production standpoint how the sets involved could be utilised. Drawing from the Blair General Hospital setting used by Dr Kildare in Dodge City, in the Western series Gunsmoke, Roddenberry suggests the Yorktown be established as a vessel where the camera can rove, intercepting main, secondary or guest characters as a means of telling the story. “The interior construction is utilitarian rather than exotic with a few appropriate indications of advanced controls and instruments. There are galleys, recreation rooms, a library, a hospital unit, and scientific laboratories, in addition to expected items such as the bridge, communication room and crew quarters with a slight naval flavour.”

This sounds not too dissimilar to the eventual production design of the Enterprise, if perhaps less colourful, and was no doubt partly adapted for the 2001 prequel series, Star Trek: Enterprise, featuring the NX-01 Enterprise almost a century before The Original Series took place.

Roddenberry also discusses how infrequently an entire story could take place on the Yorktown itself: “Such as the tale of a strange ‘intelligence’ which has made its way aboard and is working to take over the minds of certain crewmen. Or the transportation of a person or a material which poses a mounting jeopardy to the ship and our characters.”

Already, stories are forming around the Yorktown and the characters Roddenberry was developing, and his pitch would contain a great deal more in this manner of thinking.

*

A key factor to Roddenberry’s development of the world of Star Trek and the early narratives he suggested was the idea of the ‘parallel worlds’ concept, whereby he intended for the Yorktown to visit ‘Class M’ planets with a similar level of social and evolutionary development as Earth, which he admits is in part a production concern: “The ‘Parallel World’ concept makes production practical via the use of available ‘Earth’ casting, sets, locations, costuming, and it means simply that our stories deal with plant and animal life, plus people, quite similar to that on Earth.” At the same time, this is a deliberate attempt by Roddenberry to retain the core idea that Star Trek will tell relatable human stories within a science-fiction framework, however far into the galaxy April and his crew will explore.

The document came armed with numerous episode concepts that both hinted at exciting possible Star Trek stories to come, stories that would form facets of episodes we know and remember, but also adventures that we can perhaps wonder if Robert April and his five-year mission experienced. Roddenberry’s first idea, ‘The Next Cage’, appropriately formed the basis of the very first produced episode of Star Trek: “The desperation of our series lead, caged and on exhibition like an animal, then offered a mate.”

Whether this was always intended as Roddenberry’s introduction to his world is open for debate, but what would have been a striking introduction to Captain April was certainly adapted for Jeffrey Hunter’s earlier discussed Captain Pike in ‘The Cage’. It is a wonder, however, that the title ‘The Next Cage’ was never appropriated for a sequel.

‘The Day Charlie Became God’ ended up split into two early Season 1 episodes, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ – the first filmed episode of The Original Series – and ‘Charlie X’: “The accidental occurrence of infinite power to do all things, in the hands of a very finite man.” Roddenberry dives straight into the ‘parallel worlds’ idea with ‘President Capone’: “A parallel world, Chicago ten years after Al Capone won and imposed gangland statutes upon the nation.” This served as the basis for Season 2 romp ‘A Piece of the Action’, albeit going through numerous interesting conceptual development phases as we will learn more about later.

‘To Skin a Tyrannosaurus’ is the first indication of Star Trek’s consistent interest in the devolution of mankind: “A modern man reduced to a sling and a club in a world 1,000,000 BC.” No doubt partially inspired by the original 1940 Victor Mature-starring adventure One Million B.C. (which will memorably be remade in 1966 as One Million Years B.C. with pin-up Raquel Welch in a loincloth), it would inspire the Season 3 episode ‘All Our Yesterdays’, which sees Spock falling in love with an ancient female ‘ice age’ resident of the dying planet Sarpeidon. The Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise will also explore man being reduced to baser instincts more directly in, specifically, Season 7 episode ‘Genesis’, Season 2 episode ‘Threshold’, and Season 3 episode ‘Extinction’.

Shooting for comedy in ‘The Women’, Roddenberry describes: “Duplicating a page from the ‘Old West’; hanky-panky aboard with a cargo of women destined for a far-off colony.” This will ultimately end up parlayed into the early Season 1 episode ‘Mudd’s Women’, featuring the introduction of swashbuckling pirate and con-man Harry Mudd (more on him later), but also sowed the seeds of ‘The Perfect Mate’ in Season 5 of The Next Generation, which struck rather a different tone.

‘The Coming’ ventures into religious waters: “Alien people in an alien society, but something disturbingly familiar about the quiet dignity of one who is being condemned to crucifixion.” Roddenberry’s ultimate approach to religion in Star Trek is rather atheist in nature, though he remains fascinated by the conceptual idea of Christianity, and he will offer an early parallel of a Christian society in Season 2 episode ‘Bread and Circuses’. We will return to his approach to the idea of God and worship when discussing the development of Star Trek’s feature film legacy.

He describes ‘The Perfect World’ as the Yorktown finding a civilisation like that of Earth in 1964, making good use of the ‘parallel worlds’ format, “but with some unusual exceptions – seeming perfect order, no crime, no social problems, no hunger or disease, a place of charming and completely adjusted people. In fact, so pleasant and well-ordered that something has to be wrong.” A common Star Trek refrain, discovering a society with a dark secret, and subsequently “Robert April is seized and subjected to incredible police barbarism, even more shocking by its contrast. Only slowly does it become apparent that our wanderers have stumbled upon an example similar to the novel ‘1984’, but with all the rough edges removed, i.e, completely efficient, also completely despotic communism carried to the extreme.”

Roddenberry here seems to be reacting to the police brutality he would have been witnessing in American society as burgeoning Civil Rights movements clashed with police and authority in events such as the Freedom Rides of 1961, and just a year earlier the March on Washington saw Martin Luther King deliver his immortal “I have a dream” speech to hundreds of thousands of activists. More acutely, Roddenberry is anxious about the long-term effect of Communism, long demonised in American society following the rise of the Soviet Union after The Second World War, and his reference to George Orwell’s seminal 1948 text 1984, which concerned a totalitarian future Britain, suggests the writer wished to discuss his anxiety about how undiluted socialism, and assumed utopian life, can lead to fascist brutality. These ideas would filter down into Season 1’s memorable ‘The Return of the Archons’ and the sentient, dictatorial computer Landru.

‘Mr Socrates’ was an idea eventually adapted for Season 3 episode ‘The Savage Curtain’, described as “the most unusual world in the universe, a society secretly in a telepathic contact with the earth for centuries, selecting and duplicating in intelligent, lifelike form, the most unusual intellects produced in mankind’s history”. He cites the potential use of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale, Genghis Khan, Thomas Jefferson and even Adolf Hitler, all living in the same community. “What at first seems like pure fantasy to the Star Trek principles, suddenly becomes a very real and very deadly game as they begin to realise this is a form of ‘Roman Colosseum’, that the participants are ‘Gladiators’, the stakes are life and death, and the games are about to begin.”

This is the first written example of Star Trek’s fascination with the ancient world and specific periods of cultural human history but ‘The Savage Curtain’ – which Roddenberry co-wrote with Arthur Heinemann – avoids using all of these examples and instead broadens the range beyond great human figures (in this episode particularly Abraham Lincoln) to include established icons of established alien cultures – the Vulcan philosopher Surak or foundational Klingon warrior Kahless, for example, both in the myth-making of those cultures akin to religious figures. Nonetheless, the basic elements of ‘Mr Socrates’ lie in ‘The Savage Curtain’.

Roddenberry seeks in his next tale, ‘The Stranger’, to invoke a different sub-genre altogether – horror. “After taking off from a planet, the S. S. Yorktown proceeds toward another planet in the same solar system. Not until then does it become apparent that an alien intelligence has made its way aboard with the aim of taking over the minds of key crew members, its purpose to use our cruiser to attack a rival civilisation on the other planet. Actually a ‘horror’ tale, we emphasise the subtleness of this attack on intelligence, reaching a point where mutual suspicion is endangering the entire ship.”

Though never a series that would engage in blood, gore and jump scares, Star Trek was never afraid to indulge in a more chilling horror story, often involving alien possession. ‘Day of the Dove’ in the third season has elements of this kind of tale, as an incorporeal alien intelligence pits the Enterprise crew against Klingon commander Kang and his forces, though trace elements can be found in The Next Generation Season 5 episode ‘Conundrum’, and two outings in Deep Space Nine – Season 1’s ‘Dramatis Personae’ and Season 3’s ‘The Adversary’, which shares primary DNA with Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Roddenberry includes an episode called ‘The Man Trap’, better known as one of the earliest episodes of the first season and indeed the first episode of Star Trek ever broadcast. In that episode, Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew face a strange, alien salt monster who stalks the corridors of the ship murdering people. Roddenberry’s initial pitch for an episode of the same name ends up resembling a story closer to what would become Season 1’s ‘Shore Leave’. “A desert trek story, taking members of our band from one point on a planet to another. But what appears to be a pleasant, totally earth like and harmless world, rapidly develops into a hundred miles of fear and suspicions as Captain April and crew begin to encounter strange apparitions. Actually more than apparitions, these are wish-fulfilment traps which become as real as flesh and blood . . . The traps become increasingly subtle to the point where our crew nearly destroys itself out of a total inability to separate the reality they must have from the apparition which will destroy them.”

‘Camelot Revisited’ could be considered something of an attempt at light comedy. “A planet of Hermes II, an incredible social order which is thoroughly modern in many respects but retains the knighthood, armour and other trappings similar to our Middle Ages. A touch of ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’, as our star wanderers stop briefly to investigate and then become increasingly embroiled in a web of archaic social practices, finally reaching the point where they too are engaged in lance and sword play to preserve their own skins.”

The mention there of Mark Twain’s best-known work from 1889 is the giveaway. Twain – who would later appear in several episodes of The Next Generation played memorably by Jerry Hardin – wrote his time travel story as a satire on feudalism and monarchy, caricaturing notions of Romantic chivalry. The Next Generation evokes this itself in ‘Qpid’ during its fourth season, when omnipotent trickster Q traps Captain Picard and his crew in a Robin Hood fantasy. Star Trek in later years, thanks to the holodeck in no small part, successfully manages to place characters inside historical scenarios without the need for the ‘parallel worlds’ concept, and ‘Camelot Revisited’ also evokes Voyager’s Season 1 episode ‘Heroes and Demons’, which uses Ensign Harry Kim’s holo-program to explore the Beowulf legend.

Little is given for ‘100 A. B.’ beyond its alternate title, perhaps invoking 1963’s recent Dr Strangelove. “Or, ‘A Century After the Bomb’ – a terrifying parallel as we examine what might be our own world a few decades after an atomic holocaust.”

Roddenberry completed this pitch just months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and eighteen months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. As we will see in his work on ‘Assignment: Earth’ a few years later, atomic anxiety was a key factor in his storytelling on Star Trek, and more broadly the notion of civilisations destroying themselves. Strange New Worlds’ self-titled first episode, almost sixty years hence, will begin with a similar parallel world on the brink of civil war and the use of weapons of mass destruction, with the episode very openly paralleling the breakdown of 2020s American democracy with those events. Decades on, Star Trek still worries for the future.

‘Kentucky, Kentucky’ gives us an early indication of Roddenberry’s thought process on the Klingons, a version of whom will later appear in similar fashion in Season 1 episode ‘Errand of Mercy’, which essentially utilises the same plot. “An earth colony on a planet in the Sirius group is visited by the S. S. Yorktown fifty years after colonisation. An attack by Viking-like savages has destroyed and scattered the colonists, reducing them to a ‘frontier’ log-fort life. Unwilling to risk the S. S. Yorktown, Captain Robert April attempts, with a small band, to regroup and lead the colonists in defence.”

‘Errand of Mercy’ adds the powerful alien entities known as the Organians in what by 1967 had mutated into one of several Vietnam War allegories Star Trek would embark upon, but Roddenberry here seems actively looking to channel the spirit of the Alamo and, again, as with references to the Yorktown, connect Star Trek’s future with America’s mythologised, revolutionary past.

Roddenberry suggests what could be the first mooted two-part story in Star Trek history in ‘Reason’ and ‘Reason II’. The first is described as “In the Isaac IV group, a world where intelligent life has died, leaving a perfectly functioning robot society. Long speculative problem on earth, this requires investigation and analysis, even at the risk of the Cruiser’s reconnaissance party pretending to be robots themselves. Can a robot be capable of emotional feeling? Can it be capable of reasoning in human terms? What happens when an efficient robot society discovers alien flesh and blood spies in its midst?”

While there are some similarities with what will become the Season 2 episode, ‘I, Mudd’, which brings back Harry Mudd ruling a planet of female androids, ‘Reason’ more specifically sees Roddenberry musing on concepts that will fascinate him across his time working on Star Trek and culminate in the character of Data, the android crewman seeking to understand his own humanity and perhaps achieve a level of sentience.

The second part, ‘Reason II’, picks up on these questions: “An extension, possibly the second part of the previous tale, portraying the struggle of the last human survivors, aided by our Cruiser’s reconnaissance party, outmatched and relatively defenceless as they attempt to reseize possession of their planet. Can a man, rugged and miserable, still be master?” What intrigues about this second episode is that it feels like the opposite side of the coin, in that Roddenberry is less interested in a conventional two-part story telling a narrative filled with tension and stakes, and rather wants to approach his interest in that world from a human perspective after exploring the ‘alien’ perspective of artificial life. In that respect, ‘Reason’ as a double episode might have been a fascinating approach to a bigger storyline, and perhaps more of a rounded and satisfying one than ‘The Menagerie’, Star Trek’s actual first two-part story, created simply to reconcile and canonise events of ‘The Cage’ after the fact.

‘A Matter of Choice’ is described by Roddenberry as “a starring vehicle for Captain Robert M. April,” called it “another entrapment story, i.e., a planet in which the intelligent life has achieved no great material success but instead, has learned the power to live and relive over and over again in different ways, any portion of their past life they choose”. April in this story is “presented with the chance to do those certain things all over again”.

A powerful character study in the making for whoever played April, no doubt allowing the recesses of his persona to be fully explored and learn more about him. Hints of this linger in ‘Tapestry’, from The Next Generation Season 6, one of the series’ acclaimed episodes where Picard, via the magic of Q, is transported back to his youth and a violent incident as a much less tempered man that almost resulted in his death. Such tales became ubiquitous in episodic science fiction and fantasy in the decades to come.

Roddenberry then suggests a love story, ‘The Radiant One’: “The passion of a crew member for an angelic female on a ‘Garden of Eden’ planet – the one hitch being her chemistry includes radium in lethal quantity. The man who became her lover would live six weeks to six months, no longer.” It is unknown which male crew member might have become embroiled in such a narrative from the pitch. Ortegas perhaps, given his backstory of Latin lover heritage? To have him faced with a choice between love and death would have been interesting. Braver would have been to make this a showcase for Number One, especially given the word association in the title, although it is unlikely an example of LGBTQ storytelling would have passed NBC censors at this point in television.

There are nonetheless shades of this storyline in Season 3’s ‘That Which Survives’, where a ghostly, beautiful woman on the surface of a planet threatens the crew of the Enterprise, and the memorable ‘The Way to Eden’ in the same season, not just thanks to the Edenic references but the idea of a deadly force awaiting those who find such a paradise.

‘The Trader’ is the early example of what would become quite an overused trope in The Original Series: “Satunii, a planet of incredible oriental splendour mercilessly ruled as emperor by a space trader turned renegade. Like a visit to the court of Genghis Khan.” Roddenberry certainly had a fascination with the murderous Mongol warlord, utilising him in replicated fashion ultimately in the aforementioned ‘The Savage Curtain’, but more broadly this pitch evokes the previously discussed Harry Mudd and ‘I, Mudd’, not to mention several different examples across the series where the Enterprise crew visited planets where a traveller had established themselves as a leader and created problems – ‘Bread and Circuses’, ‘Patterns of Force’, ‘The Omega Glory’, and so on.

The next story, ‘A Question of Cannibalism’, we shall return to in a later chapter as it forms the basis of a fascinating, unformed feature-film concept, but Roddenberry then enters The Twilight Zone territory with ‘The Mirror’: “Near collision with another Yorktown on an exact opposite course. Not only is it the same cruiser, it is manned by exactly the same crew. Could you face yourself after discovering survival depends upon killing yourself?”

Star Trek became very enamoured of the doppelgänger concept across the entirety of the franchise’s run, but we certainly see elements of this in ‘The Enemy Within’, a Season 1 episode where a transporter accident creates two Kirk’s – one good, one evil. ‘Mirror, Mirror’, instigating an entire, franchise-spanning sub-genre of episodes called the Mirror Universe, creates a pulp, vicious alternate reality with the majority of the Enterprise crew hamming it up as sinister doubles. On a more scientific level, Voyager later provides multiple versions of the same ship and crew facing each other down in Season 1’s ‘Parallax’ and Season 2’s ‘Deadlock’. Roddenberry was already here considering how he could explore the conceptual dualities of the self, ‘The Mirror’ sounding like a pitched game of chicken in space.

‘Torx’ very much foreshadows the plot of The Motion Picture, which we will return to in more detail in a forthcoming chapter: “The first major menace comes to Earth. An alien intelligence, claiming to be pure thought and no body, which ‘devours’ intelligence, leaving behind a helpless idiot. Near starvation for eons, it has been frantically seeking precisely the type of ‘food’ the Earth could supply in quantity.”

This of course also recalls Season 2’s ‘The Changeling’, itself an episodic prototype of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where the Enterprise encounters Nomad, an ancient probe from the earliest days of human space travel, which has mutated into a powerful machine that sterilises populations that fail to live up to its standards of perfection. V’Ger, in The Motion Picture, ends up seeking ‘the Creator’, adding a Biblical notion that both ‘The Changeling’ and ‘Torx’ avoids.

‘Torx’ also foreshadows Galactus, one of the greatest villains in Marvel comics lore; a cosmic entity who consumes planets to sustain his life force. The fact he didn’t make his debut in Fantastic Four until 1966 puts paid to any suggestion Roddenberry borrowed the idea from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s work, however. It perhaps also, on a more evocative level, presages Roddenberry’s creation of the Borg in The Next Generation, in terms of an existential threat to humankind that assimilates human consciousness to ‘feed’ its broader collective. We will see this, initially, realised profoundly in two-part Season 3 episode ‘The Best of Both Worlds’.

‘The Pet Shop’ sounds quite a surreal take on the ‘parallel worlds’ concept: “Exactly duplicating St Louis, 1910, a city where women are so completely the masters that men have the status of pets. Something of a satire on ‘people and dogs’, this story shows men treated in that fashion, caged in kennels, others clothed and perfumed and treated as lapdogs, as long as they continue to fawn, appreciate and selflessly love.” Roddenberry here is attempting to provide a level of commentary on gender roles long before they were a potent source of discussion, nodding at the earliest beginnings of an amorphous nuclear family during the post-war boom era for America, where over the next several decades women would move out of the kitchen and homestead into careers of their own. ‘The Pet Shop’ takes this idea to a heightened degree in a ‘historical’ context that no doubt would have yielded unusual, if not comedic, overtones.

He gets to explore the concept of a female-dominated society later in The Next Generation’s Season 1 episode ‘Angel One’, and beforehand in his 1972 pilot TV movie Planet Earth, but long after his passing Enterprise explores the idea of men becoming subservient due to powerful Orion slave girl pheromones in Season 4 episode ‘Bound’.

Roddenberry might well have courted controversy with ‘Kongo’, a tale we shall return to in a later discussion of ‘A Portrait in Black and White’, an episode of The Original Series that came close to being produced, in which he strays into the thorny issue of race and slavery.

‘The Venus Planet’, however, sees Roddenberry back in safer territory: “The social evolution process here is centered on love – and the very human male members of our crew find what seems the ultimate in amorous wish-fulfilment in the perfectly developed arts of this place of incredibly beautiful women. Until they begin to wonder what happened to all the men there.” In some ways, this recalls ‘The Radiant One’, in the sense of Roddenberry being intrigued, repeatedly, in the idea of a beguiling female presence that ultimately spells death and danger to male crewmen, in what could be seen as a rather suspicious and regressive view on potent female sexuality – a rebuke of a developing age of growing sexual agency among young women in Western society.

This will be explored in cartoon form in The Animated Series first season episode ‘The Lorelai Signal’, in which the Enterprise crew run aground of a planet filled with women who dominate the minds of the male crew members, forcing Uhura – as the only woman close to command – to save the day. The idea is a play on the mythological Sirens of Greek legend and is again employed as far down the line as Voyager’s Season 3 episode ‘Favorite Son’, where Harry Kim is beguiled by the female member of a planet who attempt to convince him he is biologically one of their species.

The final proposed episode in the pitch document is ‘Infection’, which might sound akin to the classic ‘killer virus’ tale, but ventures in a different direction: “A female crew member discovered to be pregnant, and the growing realisation it could be the larvae of an alien, using her body like some insects plant their eggs in other living insects.” At first glance, this recalls the body horror of later science-fiction films such as Alien, which fuses motherhood and birth with the ultimate terror of extraterrestrial replication, but Roddenberry is unlikely to have turned this episode into such a ghoulish example. It sounds like a potential showcase for Yeoman Colt in a way that ‘The Child’ ended up being for Deanna Troi in The Next Generation’s second season, albeit ending up a very different take on the ‘suddenly pregnant’ idea, one we will explore in more detail in a later chapter.

All these intended plots and character tales, many of which as we have seen would inspire classic – and not so classic – Star Trek episodes to come, are an example of how rich, even in the development phase, the concept of this series was, and how many voyages Roddenberry had in his mind to tell.

*

The story of how Star Trek came to be has filled many a volume.

Roddenberry pitched the document around Hollywood, to MGM especially, but he received little to no interest until he entered the orbit of Desilu, a production company owned by the married duo of Lucille Ball (one of America’s most beloved comediennes of the era thanks to her hit 1950s series, I Love Lucy) and her husband Desi Arnaz (the name of their company being a fusion of their first names).

Desilu had a long association with CBS and produced numerous other hit series over the years, including The Untouchables (set in 1930s Prohibition Chicago, much like Roddenberry’s above ‘President Capone’ idea) and later Mission: Impossible. Desilu brought in experienced television executives Oscar Katz and Herb Solow to help Roddenberry sell the pitch, which CBS passed on as they had well known 1960s series Lost in Space in production and considered Irwin Allen the only science-fiction purveyor in town.

Then they took the idea to NBC, pitched it utilising examples such as Gunsmoke and Wagon Train (which famously led to the description of Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the stars . . .”), and provided three-episode concepts, based on several in the initial pitch, for the network to consider as a pilot. One was ‘The Cage’, the second was called ‘Visit to Paradise’, which was renamed from the original title of ‘The Perfect World’ as described above, and which one Roddenberry biographer, Joel Engel, described as “the first of what would be several Star Trekepisodes in which man searches for God, finds Him, debunks Him, and lives more happily afterward – or kills Him off metaphorically, thus improving mankind’s well-being”.

The third was ‘The Women’, which named the character we could later know as Harcourt Fenton Mudd in ‘Mudd’s Women’, as Harry Patton, plying the trade of ‘wiving settlers’ aka galactic prostitution. Perhaps aware that a story about a rejection of conformity and authority, or a sex farce, were not the best options for a series opener, NBC chose the strange illusion and hypnotism of ‘The Cage’ and the rest is history.

Money was put up to finance ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’, at which point numerous revised drafts of the pitch – which became the ‘Writers Bible’ – ultimately blossomed into the fully formed series we know and love. Captain Robert April and his nascent crew vanished into history, into lore, dare one suggest even myth, destined as stories and lives – in that incarnation – never to be seen on screen. Not even the Yorktown as a name of the ship in question survived the metamorphosis into what we know Star Trek to be.

Before Star Trek, however, Roddenberry’s career was more successful and varied than people might imagine. And those successes factored into what would become his first attempt at a spin-off series from the show that would cement him in storytelling legend . . .

TWO

THE MAN OF TOMORROW

BEFORE, DURING AND after Gene Roddenberry’s development of Star Trek, he developed numerous pilot scripts and indeed produced episodes for series that, unlike Star Trek, never entered development or failed to proceed to series. Many of them contain connectives to his most famous creation, displaying evidence of how he carried everything from ideas to names into his fictional 23rd century.

His first attempt, The Wild Blue, which he described to Bill Dozier, head of the production company Screen Gems as an adventure story involving “quiet, ordinary and identifiable men caught up in the extraordinary background furnished by this most romantic, bizarre and flavour-filled backwash of World War II”, featured several key character names that would be carried through into Star Trek ship commanders: Pike, the name of his first Enterprise captain; Jellicoe, who would become an antagonistic, authoritarian Starfleet captain who briefly commands Enterprise in The Next Generation two-parter ‘Chain of Command’; and James. T. Irvine, the first two initials later given to Captain Kirk. His second attempt, 333 Montgomery, which cast eventual Dr Leonard McCoy, DeForest Kelley, as a lawyer, ended up with a different script and name in Defiance County, though it never went to series.

After success with The Lieutenant, about William Tiberius (a middle name he would also borrow for Kirk) Rice, a second lieutenant platoon leader at Camp Pendleton in a drama that focused on the US Marine Corps during the peace of the Cold War, which ran for one season of twenty-nine episodes and featured several eventual Star Trek alumni including Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols, Roddenberry focused his attention on Star Trek