[BRIEF NOTE] On the 50th anniversary of Star Trek

[rfmcdonald]

The 50th anniversary of Star Trek has gotten no small amount of resonance in the blogosphere. In my corner alone, see Russell Arben Fox's recounting of five classic moments of the original series, or Paul Campos' open discussion thread at Lawyers, Guns and Money. For me, Charlie Janes Anders' "What if Star Trek Had Never Existed?", published at Wired resonates deeply.

Even trying to imagine a world without Star Trek is like visiting an alternate world as weird as any planet the Enterprise ever voyaged to. And, obviously, it’s impossible to prove a counterfactual, especially one about a show that has now had so many incarnations in TV, film, and other media. But the fact of the matter is even though the Space Age was in full swing in the mid-1960s and shows like Irwin Allen’s sci-fi hits Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space were getting attention, nothing as smart and sprawling as Star Trek had ever been seen before. Where Lost in Space was a kid-friendly show that aired at 7:30 p.m., Roddenberry’s show was a more mature version of sci-fi, one that aired in a more adult-oriented timeslot.

And if that second Trek pilot hadn’t happened for whatever reason, NBC might have filled the gap with another goofy Irwin Allen show. The network did, after all, consider picking up two Allen productions in the late 1960s: Man From the 25th Century and City Beneath the Sea. But based on interviews with over a dozen experts, one truth emerges: If Gene Roddenberry hadn’t been willing to fight for his show, and Lucille Ball’s studio hadn’t been willing to take a chance on it, nobody else might have been able to make something as visually and intellectually ambitious as Trek.

“I think that Star Trek emerged from a unique convergence of very special talents, and it is very possible that in their absence, nothing of a similar quality would have appeared,” says science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl, author of The Mechanics of Wonder, adding that it’s easy to imitate the pulp 1930s space-opera of E.E. “Doc” Smith (as George Lucas and others later did), but vastly harder to imitate the more mature space adventures of Robert A. Heinlein (the way Roddenberry did).

And that’s really the crux of what made Star Trek different, especially for American TV of the time: It showed space exploration as a serious endeavor, one undertaken by a crew of professionals. That vision had existed in print science fiction for years, but it was extraordinarily difficult to bring to the screen.

“He made a science fiction series about humans, about us,” Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry says of his father. “I think a lot of the other science fiction of the day was more fear-oriented: ‘Look at this crazy alien. Look at them attacking us.’ It was one-dimensional science fiction.”

Star Trek got those additional dimensions by unifying disparate strands. Long before sci-fi allegories like Battlestar Galactica, the show was combining 1930s pulp space opera with the rising tide of social criticism in 1960s sci-fi novels. Trek also tied together the thought experiments of The Twilight Zone with Western-style action and Captain Video-style space adventure. Without that pioneering work, it’s not hard to imagine today’s world of sci-fi movies and TV looking very different.

Without Star Trek, I cannot imagine how different my experiences, of science fiction and of pop culture and of other people, would have been. I daresay that I've been bettered by it. What else can I say but "Thanks for the shows" and hope for more to come? Discovery, at least, looks pretty promising.