Reviews

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    Star Trek: TOS — Charlie X (S01E02)

    ByAlex

    The premise of “Charlie X” sounds like something you’d find stapled to a bus stop in 1966. Lonely teenager. Godlike powers. Spaceship full of people he makes uncomfortable. On paper it’s disposable, the kind of high-concept Twilight Zone material that could collapse under its own gimmick in twenty minutes. What Dorothy C. Fontana does instead, in her first Trek teleplay credit, working from a story by Gene Roddenberry, is turn it into something quietly unsettling.

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    Star Trek: TOS — The Man Trap (S01E01)

    ByAlex

    There is a specific kind of irony in the fact that Star Trek, a franchise built on the idea that humanity could sort itself out and reach for something better, began its broadcast life by killing the last member of a species and then moving on to the next episode. That’s not a criticism. Or rather, it isn’t only a criticism. It’s the most interesting thing about The Man Trap, an episode that is simultaneously the wrong introduction to Star Trek and, in its final thirty seconds, one of the most honest expressions of what Star Trek was trying to be.

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    Star Trek: TOS — The Cage The Show That Almost Wasn’t (Pilot)

    ByAlex

    “Too cerebral” was the phrase NBC used when they sent it back. As criticisms go, it has aged badly for them.

    Desilu delivered a science fiction pilot in 1965 that was slower, stranger, and more introspective than the network knew what to do with. They wanted something else. What came back was Star Trek as most people know it: Kirk, action, adventure, and the formula that would carry the franchise for decades. The original pilot went into a vault. Most people never saw it.