Growing up, I didn't have a lot in common with my dad. He fixed copiers and was good with his hands; I played video games and had a hard time remembering my left from my right. Plus, he was into sports, and I didn't really give a crap-I've tried to watch football, but it always seems like the waste of a good nap (although given how often I've seen Dad fall asleep in front of a game, I guess he agrees with me). Fishing was okay. Boring, but okay, and apart from getting the worm on the hook, the mechanical demands were so limited that even I had a hard time screwing them up. But you can only fish so often in a year, which means there were all these months we'd be related to each other, but still have nothing to do.
Fortunately, we both liked movies and we both liked to read, and even better, we liked some of the same stuff. Dad got me interested in Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Roger Zelazney, and Michael Crichton, among others, and while some of them haven't aged so well in my mind (as a writer, Tom Clancy makes an excellent munitions hobbyist), it put me on the right kind of path; without Dad, I wouldn't have started reading Stephen King, and who the hell knows where I would've wound up. (I suspect docks and/or sailors may have been involved.)
As for the movies, I've seen more of the Highlander franchise than any sensible person should, but the films we watched the most came from Star Trek. Dad took me to see parts four and five in theaters, we had a tape of Wrath of Khan from off broadcast TV that I must've played at least fifty times, and then there was the series that started it all. When I was a kid, The Next Generation was just coming into prominence, but the original show was still in syndication. So every Saturday night, 'round five-ish, we'd move the kitchen table so we could all see the television, and over franks and beans (bleargh), the whole family would watch Captain Kirk, Spock, Sulu, and the rest, warping around the galaxy, busting expensive computer equipment, and generally getting up in everybody's business.
Trek has come a long way from bad toupees, plywood plants, and rubber monsters. Gene Roddenberry's half-baked ideas have rattled through the collective unconscious for so long they seem nearly profound, and the cast members have all passed from characters to icons to self-parody to-something else. These days, even people who've never seen an episode know what the Enterprise is, and for the obsessives, there are the endless tie-ins and spin-offs, including four follow-up series, a ten movie franchise, and a reboot film from J.J. Abrams that's set to hit theaters this summer. The whole thing has transcended its roots to become cultural, mocked by the skeptical but impossible to dismiss completely.
But what about the actual show? Running just under eighty episodes in three seasons, it would be reasonable to assume that Trek has long since been over-shadowed by its own success; but watching it today, it's still easy to see what got people so excited in the first place. There's a pulpy vitality to the series that no amount of franchise ennui can destroy, the thrilling, endlessly enthralling feeling of making-it-up-as-you-go. As a kid, I got hooked at first because my dad liked it, and because the aliens were cool (to an eight year-old, the Horta is freaky as hell-it looks like burnt pizza, only it can melt your face off). But strip away the history, ignore the baggage, and Trek remains a terrific piece of work. Not without its share of flaws, and we'll get to those; but this is pop culture art, and at its best, transcends the campy effects and over-acting to create a universe well worth visiting.
Once we decided to do up some old-school Trek for TV Club Classic, the trick became picking where to start; do you go with the original, un-aired pilot, "The Cage," with its largely different crew (including the late Majel Barett-Roddenberry as First Officer), or do you go with the first aired episode, "The Man Trap"? I've got the season one box set, and in general, I'll be reviewing eps in the order they appear on disc; this isn't really a continuity heavy-show, and I'd rather not get bogged down in minutiae right out of the gate. That said, I'm opening with "Where No Man Has Gone Before," the second pilot, and the debut of Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk. It's actually third in the release schedule, but given how different it is from the "real" show, it makes sense to cheat a little, just this once. (As for "The Cage," we'll get there in a few weeks with "The Menagerie," a rare two-parter that essentially recycles footage from the original pilot through a process of high-tech flashbackin'.)
"No Man" introduces one of Trek's most oft-recurring villains: a being gifted with incredible powers who lacks the judgment or maturity to know how to use those powers wisely. When the Enterprise encounters a strange force field at the edge of the galaxy, helmsmen Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood) and psychiatrist Elizabeth Dehner (Sally Kellerman) get walloped by a blast of cosmic energy that gives Gary some freaky (and really painful looking) silver contacts, but leaves Elizabeth initially unaffected. Before encountering the field, the Enterprise recovered a black-box type recording from the missing SS Valiant, and as Gary develops increasingly unnerving powers (including speed reading, psychic abilities, and Trumpy's knack for doing magic things), that recording provides the only clues as to what comes next. The Valiant, it seems, had its run in with the force field, and as far as Spock can tell, when one of its own crew started making rapid jumps up the evolutionary ladder, the captain of the ship ordered a self-destruct.