by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The only other film we got to see last night (the proprietor
had planned to show “The Menagerie” as well, but his Blu-Ray player screwed up
towards the end of the final film he did
show) was the second Star Trek
pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Unlike “The Cage,” which was Gene
Roddenberry’s own script, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was written by Samuel
A. Peeples and directed by James Goldstone after the original director, Robert
Butler, had bailed on the whole show because he thought it was too
action-oriented, too much the “Wagon Train to the Stars” Roddenberry had promised NBC and not strong enough as
science-fiction. (Ironically, one of the reasons NBC gave for rejecting “The
Cage” was it was “too cerebral.”) Though it was shot in 1965, a year before Star
Trek debuted as a weekly series, “Where No
Man Has Gone Before” was actually the third show aired, after “The Man-Trap” (in which members
of the Enterprise crew are
attacked by a salt-eating monster) and “Charlie X” (a quite similar plot to
“Where No Man Has Gone Before” in which the Enterprise has to deal with a human who’s been given mental
super-powers by an alien something-or-other). It was also never one of my
favorites among the original Star Trek episodes, at least partly because while some of the familiar Star Trek “regulars” were in the cast — William Shatner,
Leonard Nimoy and, in pretty minuscule parts, James Doohan as Chief Engineer
Scott and George Takei as Sulu (here an “astrophysicist” instead of a “helmsman,”
and also the third in command instead of Scott) — Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura
wasn’t yet in the cast, and neither was DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy. Instead,
the old character actor John Hoyt who’d played the ship’s doctor in “The Cage”
was replaced by old character actor Paul Fix, as “Dr. Piper,” and while at
least Hoyt got a nicely philosophical opening scene with Jeffrey Hunter at the
start of “The Cage” (albeit one DeForest Kelley could have played much
better!), Fix is just there and
it’s clear that Kelley, whom Gene Roddenberry had worked with on his previous
TV series The Lieutenant, was the
actor he really wanted for the
part. (DeForest Kelley had first achieved notice for the 1947 film
Fear in the Night, based on a story by noir writer Cornell Woolrich, in which he plays a young
man who actually commits a murder under hypnosis but believes he only dreamed the killing. Later Kelley noted that for 20 years
after Fear in the Night the only
parts he got offered were psycho killers until Roddenberry cast him as Dr.
McCoy in Star Trek, whereupon the
only parts he got offered after that were doctors.) The plot of “Where No Man
Has Gone Before” deals — once again — with the Enterprise receiving a distress signal from a spacecraft lost
decades before, in this case the Valiant. They’re unable to find the wreckage of the Valiant or any sign of its crew, but they essentially find
its “black box,” a large cylinder about three feet in each direction containing
in its memory banks the information about what happened to the earlier ship.
Spock figures out how to hack the recordings — at least the ones that are still
in good enough shape to be readable — and they find that the captain was doing
increasingly frantic research on the subject of extra-sensory perception. In
trying to reach the Valiant the Enterprise crosses through a series of red tendrils in space —
then have to back out again, as the Valiant tried to, when the tendrils start screwing with the
starship’s controls. Soon they realize that one of the things the Great Whatsit
does is target people with especially strong ESP, which at the moment includes
at least two people aboard the Enterprise: crew member Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood, whom Roddenberry had worked
with on The Lieutenant and who
after this show wrapped would head to England to play astronaut Frank Poole in
Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey — thereby ending up in two of the most iconic science-fiction film projects of
the 1960’s!) and psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Dehner (Sally Kellerman, three
years before her date with
stardom in the movie M*A*S*H),
who’s there to study the reactions of starship crew members under stress.
Mitchell starts growing more and more powerful — and also more and more crazy:
like the Invisible Man in H. G. Wells’ classic novel (and James Whale’s classic
film), Mitchell becomes a super-powerful megalomaniac who can shoot bolts of
energy from his hands that can incapacitate normal humans. Mitchell is shown as
an old acquaintance of Captain Kirk from Starfleet Academy — apparently
Mitchell was a student there when Kirk was one of the instructors — and he
alternately goads him into trying to kill him “while you still can” and appeals
to their old friendship as a reason Kirk should spare him. Eventually Kirk has
the idea of stranding Mitchell and Dehner on a nearby planet where there’s an
automated lithium processing plant (it’s referred to in the dialogue as a
“lithium cracking” plant, which one imdb.com contributor red-flagged as a
“goof” because lithium is an element and therefore can’t be “cracked,” but I
figured the plant either extracted lithium from the ore containing it or
processed it into the dilithium crystals later established as an indispensable
part of the Enterprise’s
propulsion system), but Mitchell catches on and there’s a fight to the finish
in which Mitchell threatens to kill Kirk and bury him in a grave he’s already
created with his mental powers. (He’s also etched a tombstone that gives his
intended victim’s name as “James R. Kirk” when Kirk’s middle name was later
established as “Tiberius” — apparently Gene Roddenberry noticed the mistake
during production but decided correcting it would be too expensive and
time-consuming.)
“Where No Man Has Gone Before,” like a lot of other early Star
Trek episodes, shows Roddenberry
challenging the social, political and especially sexual norms of the 1960’s
while at the same time not challenging them so far he’d risk losing his audience. One reason he’d
had to cancel the character of “Number One” was that neither the NBC executives
nor the test audiences for whom he screened “The Cage” accepted the idea of a woman as second-in-command of a spaceship, and throughout Star
Trek Roddenberry’s own attitudes towards
women are surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly) schizoid. On the one hand
he’s inclined to create female characters with real agency and power — like
“Number One” in “The Cage” and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner here — while on the other
hand he fills the Enterprise’s
lower ranks with so-called “yeomen,” actually short-skirted or hot-pantsed
young women who seem to be there only to provide Captain Kirk convenient and
readily available sexual outlets and to offer titillation to the teenage
straight boys Hollywood considered the core audience for science fiction (and
still does!). Roddenberry even had clashes with NBC’s censors over how little
he was costuming his women crew members. According to some reports,
Roddenberry’s attitude to sex off-camera was just as split as his attitude
on-camera; he started dating Majel Barrett while he was still married to
someone else, and later he started an affair with Black actress Nichelle
Nichols (who played Uhura) while he was also dating Barrett. Indeed, someone at
the screening quoted Nichols’ autobiography that at one point Roddenberry
suggested a three-way with Nichols and Barrett — which Nichols refused. (It
sounds like if Roddenberry were still alive and active he’d run afoul of the
“#MeToo” witch-hunters and be yet another once-powerful man driven out of the
entertainment industry.)
It was interesting to revisit these Star
Trek episodes and be “present at the
creation” of one of the most popular and long-lasting franchises in the history
of science fiction — only Star Wars
seems to have exceeded Star Trek
in the sheer size and breadth of its fandom, and the longevity of the cult
surrounding it — and to once again be present at the creation of a
science-fiction universe based on optimism. In the 1960’s it was still possible
to create mass-market science fiction that assumed the human race solved its
current problems and went on to bigger and better things, like space
exploration, whereas today it’s almost all dystopian. Most science-fiction
franchises today, including The Hunger Games and Divergent, assume that most of the human race has destroyed itself and what’s
left is eking out a precarious existence on what’s left of Earth. In these
stories civilization has collapsed so completely that neither the money nor the
technology exists even to think
about going to the moon (again), let alone exploring other planets — an all too
accurate social and artistic response to a society dominated by an
ever-greedier ruling class that will almost literally stop at nothing to
impoverish everyone else.
