Last night’s “feature” at the Vintage Sci-Fi screening (http://sdvsf.org/) was a group of four episodes from the second season (1967-1968) of the original Star Trek which the proprietor picked because they were the highest-rated episodes from the season on imdb.com: “Amok Time” (September 15, 1967); “Mirror, Mirror” (October 6, 1967); “Journey to Babel” (November 16, 1967); and “The Trouble with Tribbles” (December 29, 1967). I must confess I can’t be critically objective about the original Star Trek because the series was too much a part of my childhood; my mom, my brother and I would watch them together on our old black-and-white TV (which makes it weird to see them in color, especially the rich, vibrant colors of the CBS Home Video Blu-Ray restorations) and we even had pet names for them — “Mirror, Mirror” we referred to as “the bearded-Spock episode.” I also saw “Amok Time” at a Star Trek convention in San Francisco in 1976 to which my brother took me (though on the last night I played hooky to go to the Cento Cedar Theatre to see a revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie, the 1929 Blackmail) and at which Harlan Ellison was the guest star (and naturally they also showed “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the great episode Ellison wrote for the first season of Star Trek). Ellison, who takes as much glee in puncturing people’s illusions in person as he does in his stories, recalled that when he first showed his Star Trek script to William Shatner, Shatner counted the lines his character, Captain James T. Kirk, got, and also the number Leonard Nimoy got as Mr. Spock: he insisted that he have more lines than Nimoy because “I can’t compete with those ears.”
“Amok Time” was the only episode of the original Star Trek that took place on Spock’s home planet, Vulcan — whose backstory was largely created, not by Gene Roddenberry or any of his writers,but by Nimoy himself. In his prospectus for Star Trek Roddenberry had called Spock’s home planet “Vulcanis” and had made its inhabitants inherently logical and emotionless; it was Nimoy, writing a backstory for his character, who came up with the idea that Vulcans had once been as emotional as humans, they had nearly destroyed their planet in wars and it was to keep the peace and prevent any future conflicts that Vulcans had learned the discipline of logic as a guide to all (or almost all) their actions. Roddenberry incorporated Nimoy’s concept of Vulcan into his prospectus and his writers — in “Amok Time” the script was by Theodore “Tad” Sturgeon, one of the best science-fiction writers of the era — ran with it big-time, concocting various reasons for Spock to lose his veneer of logic and become more … well, human. In “Amok Time” Spock suddenly starts behaving erratically and losing his cool all over the Enterprise, and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley, who starting in the second series got opening-titles credits alongside Shatner and Nimoy) notices that his heart rate, blood pressure and other vital signs have sparked way up even for a Vulcan. Spock demands that Kirk give him immediate shore leave on Vulcan, and Kirk defies a direct order from Starfleet Command to do so.
It turns out that Spock is literally in heat: it seems that one of the few things Vulcans do that isn’t logical is select their mates. During his childhood Spock was committed in an arranged marriage with T’Pring (Arlene Martel) in a ceremony he describes as “less than a marriage, but more than a betrothal,” and now he’s being driven by sexual desire and needs to go back to Vulcan to consummate his marriage. It also turns out that Vulcans have an elaborate and surprisingly primitive ritual called “kunat kalipifi” (I’m totally guessing at the spelling here) by which the woman in this coupling can either accept or reject her husband, and if she rejects him she gets to pick another man to fight her fiancé and she gets awarded to the winner. The ceremony is officiated by T’Pau, a member of the High Council that rules Vulcan (“I had no idea Spock’s family was this important!” Kirk says) and the only person who ever turned down an appointment to the High Council of the United Federation of Planets. T’Pau is played, in one of the strongest and most vividly etched performances in Star Trek history, by Celia Lovsky, the wife (by then the widow) of Peter Lorre. The ceremony takes place on a weird sort of blasted heath in the middle of a mountain range with two stone bridges providing the only access — given that we’ve been led to believe that Vulcan is a highly developed planet the sheer primitiveness of the setting is a surprise — and T’Pring picks Captain Kirk as her champion to duel Spock. They duel with the traditionally specified weapons, the lirpa (a sort of jousting stick with a hammer at one end and a scythe-like blade on the other) and the an hung (a woven cord with which one of the opponents can strangle the other). Kirk agrees to participate in the duel even though T’Pau offers to let him out of it since he’s not a Vulcan, and it’s only in the middle of the fight that T’Pau informs him that the duel is to the death.
McCoy saves his two superior officers from having to kill each other by sneaking an injection into Kirk — he says it’s an oxygen booster to compensate for the thin Vulcan air (this episode was made during the run-up to the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, when there was a lot of concern about how the athletes would fare in Mexico City’s thin air, so Sturgeon may have been referencing that controversy) but it’s really a tranquilizer that, once it takes effect, will make Kirk seem dead. Eventually it turns out that the whole thing was worked out logically by T’Pring, who during Spock’s long absence from Vulcan had fallen in love with someone else, Stonn (Lawrence Montaigne), and had worked out that if Spock killed Kirk, he’d be so upset at what he’d done he’d insist on being punished for it, and he’d leave her to be with Stonn; and if Kirk killed Spock, he wouldn’t want her and so she could be with Stonn. “Amok Time” is one of the best early Star Trek episodes, though it also created a major inconsistency that was shown up when “Journey to Babel” was shown later in the evening: if this elaborate ceremony is how Vulcans mate and marry, just how did Spock’s parents, Vulcan diplomat Sarek (Mark Lenard, who’d earlier played the Romulan starship captain on “Balance of Terror” in season one and thereby had already been fitted with the long, pointy ears shared by both Romulans and Vulcans) and his Earthling wife Amanda (Jane Wyatt, the veteran actress who’d played Bette Davis’s sister in Marked Woman three decades earlier), get together?
Next up on the Vintage Sci-Fi program was “Mirror, Mirror,”
in which a landing party from the Enterprise that beamed down to a peaceful planet in an attempt to arrange for
mining rights to their dilithium crystals (a key element in the Enterprise’s propulsion system) gets scrambled in an ion storm
in space and lands in a mirror-image Enterprise in a parallel universe, in which they’re ruled not
by a Federation but an Empire (the reference to Kirk having ambitions to be a
“Caesar” suggests that the big difference between this parallel Earth and the
one we know is that in parallel Earth the Roman Empire never fell) and officers
in Starfleet get promotions by murdering each other. It’s also established that
the policies of this Empire are so harsh and brutal the Nazis look like Boy
Scouts by comparison; in this
universe, if the wimpy pacifists of that planet won’t give them the dilithium
crystals the Enterprise will
simply exterminate the entire population with phasers and come in to take them.
While I was disappointed that writer Jerome Bixby didn’t show more of the
parallel-universe Kirk aboard our Enterprise — there’s just one scene in which Spock notices
immediately that there’s something “off” about the people who just beamed up
and has them taken into custody — for the most part this was a cool episode,
with the parallel version of Spock wearing a tasteful beard and Kirk having a
live-in girlfriend (Barbara Luna) in his quarters. The parallel Kirk also has a
device called the “Tantalus Machine” he looted from some other planet with
which he can instantly kill anyone he wants to get rid of just by focusing a TV
monitor on them and pushing a button. (The parallel Enterprise officers also get way cooler uniforms than the ones we know.) There’s one
scene in which Sulu (George Takei) starts chatting up Lieutenant Uhura
(Nichelle Nichols) and practically demands she have sex with him then and there
on the bridge — and I couldn’t help but joke, “In this parallel universe George
Takei is straight.”
After that the next episode was “Journey to Babel,” written
by Dorothy C. Fontana — she was billed just as “D. C. Fontana” because she knew
she wouldn’t get hired for science-fiction and action-adventure shows if people
knew she was a woman (she was part of the 2016 ConDor science-fiction
convention’s 50th anniversary tribute to Star Trek and her reminiscences of working with Gene
Roddenberry were fascinating), a trick later played by Harry Potter creator Janice Rowling — in which the Enterprise is supposed to transport a group of diplomats to a
Federation council on a planet that’s been nicknamed “Babel” because it’s
gathering a whole bunch of people (or beings) from various planets, including
some with hostilities towards each other. Spock’s parents Sarek and Amanda are
among the honored guests, but the hostility between Spock and his dad is
palpable and only gets overcome when Sarek has a heart attack on board (he’s
had three previous ones but has kept that secret even from his wife, but that’s
why he’s retiring at age 102, young for a Vulcan) and Dr. McCoy has to do an
operation — and needs Spock as a blood donor. At the same time there’s intrigue
on board the Enterprise: one of
the diplomats is murdered and Sarek is the prime suspect since they were seen
arguing before the other being died — and another alien’s forehead horn turns
out to be a fake.
Also the Enterprise is attacked by a ship they don’t recognize as anything either from the
Federation or their normal enemies, the Klingons and the Romulans, and though
the parallel wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in 1967 it does look (as Charles said) like a giant fidget-spinner
in space. It turns out that the attacking starship is from Orion, as is the
disguised alien, and the purpose is so the Orions can loot a sparsely populated
planet that’s applying for Federation membership to protect its natural
resources that the Orions want to be able to strip-mine. The best aspects of
this show are the insights it gives into Spock’s relationship with his parents
— there’s an especially moving speech for Amanda in which she recalls how the
other Vulcan kids bullied Spock for being half-human — and one nice speech for
Amanda when she gets tired of hearing Sarek and Spock argue over whether it
would be more logical for Spock to go ahead with the operation as Sarek’s blood
donor or for him to command the Enterprise since Kirk has been incapacitated by an attack from the disguised
Orion. “I’m sick to death of logic!”
Amanda laments — a feeling I was starting to share. I was struck by the fact that
when these shows were new and I was watching them as a teenager I thought Spock
was by far the coolest character and wished it were he, not Kirk, commanding the Enterprise; now the relentlessness of Vulcan logic just seems
annoying to me and I can better understand the continual exasperation of the
human characters over the way Spock treats them and approaches every situation.
The final show on the Vintage Sci-Fi program of Star Trek episodes was “The Trouble with Tribbles,” which
“made” the career of its writer, David Gerrold (much the way placing the song
“Crazy” with Patsy Cline “made” the career of its writer, Willie Nelson) and
got nominated for a Hugo Award for best TV script. (The other three nominees
were also Star Trek episodes, and
Gerrold lost to Harlan Ellison for “The City on the Edge of Forever.”) Gerrold
wrote two books on the original Star Trek, one a history of the entire series and one a memoir of how he came to
write “The Trouble with Tribbles” and what they went through while filming the
episode, and the most poignant part of his book was when he quoted a memo he’d
written at the time the script for “Tribbles” was evolving and he suggested
that the character of Cyrano Jones — played in the final version by Stanley
Adams as an unscrupulous money-grubbing trader — instead become a befuddled old
man who didn’t realize how much trouble his Tribbles would cause on a space
station or a starship. “What a role for Boris Karloff,” Gerrold wrote in his
memo — and in the book he regretted he didn’t follow up on the idea because it
would have given the great Karloff a chance to appear on Star Trek. I regret that, too, but “The Trouble with Tribbles”
remains one of the great, legendary Star Trek episodes, unusual in its comic flair (though both
Robert Justman, associate producer for season two, and Fred Freiberger,
producer for season three, disliked it because they found it was too funny, and
Freiberger turned down Gerrold’s offer to write a sequel for season three) and
the overall charm. According to imdb.com, 500 prop Tribbles were made for the
show and the sound a Tribble makes was a combination of a dove’s coo and an
owl’s screech, along with air being let out of a pinched balloon. Only a few of
the Tribbles moved or could make noise — mostly they just get held by human
characters and petted as they make That Sound — and of course the trouble with Tribbles is that
“they’re born pregnant, which seems to be an excellent time-saver,” as Dr.
McCoy explains in the exposition.
The intrigue concerns a world called
“Sherman’s Planet” which both the Federation and the Klingons want, and the
secret to the successful development of Sherman’s Planet is a hybridized strain
of wheat called quadrotriticale (a variation of the original real-life
triticale developed by “Green Revolution” scientists in 1960’s Canada). The
Federation has send a large shipment of quadrotriticale to a space station run
by Larry (Whit Bissell, the villain in the original I Was a Teenage
Werewolf), where both the Enterprise crew and crew members from a Klingon vessel are
enjoying — more or less — a shore leave that turns into a bar fight (I think
David Gerrold must have been having a lot of fun with this: “Let’s do a barroom
brawl in a science-fiction show!”) when engineer James Montgomery Scott (James
Doohan) gets riled by a Klingon’s insults to the Enterprise. Also one of the delights of this show is the
prissiness of Nilz Baris (William Schallert), a Federation official sent there
to preserve the quadrotriticale and make sure it gets to Sherman’s Planet
safely — only it turns out the grain has been poisoned by Baris’s assistant
Koloth (William Campbell), who’s really a Klingon spy in disguise and is
“outed” as such when Kirk learns that Tribbles and Klingons don’t like each
other, and every time a Tribble comes into contact with a Klingon its dove’s
coo turns into an owl’s screech. “The Trouble with Tribbles” instantly became a
fan favorite from the time it aired and remains one today — and Gerrold’s other
writings are refreshingly light by sci-fi standards in much the same way — and
it’s a welcome opportunity for everyone connected with Star Trek to let their hair down a bit, even though (like the
movie Forbidden Planet) it would have been better if Boris Karloff had been in it …
