60 Years of Star Trek: These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

Today is the 60th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek. Why only ten years ago it was the 50th anniversary!

Time flies.

I've been a fan for roughly 55 of those years, discovering it between the cancellation of the original series and its never-ending run on syndicated television. For some reason my dad had to stand in a line at either the DMV or voter registration around 1971 or so and as I tagged along, he bought me a copy of something called Star Trek 4, a collection of episodes adapted into short stories by award-winning sci-fi writer James Blish. I'd never seen the show but I found the characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy mesmerizing.

Am I the only person who became a fan of the show without ever having seen an episode? Maybe.

Anyway, when reruns finally showed up a couple of years later, I was hooked.

Since then there have been l, I think, eleven series and 13 movies not to mention documentaries, novels, non-fiction, games, and who knows what all.

I've seen it all, read some of it, and while I wouldn't inflict everything on anyone, not even myself, I will share a few of my favorite recurring characters and themes.

The City on the Edge of Forever — Harlan Ellison's screenplay, the aired episode, James Blish's adaptation.

This is the most emotionally-devastating story in the Star Trek canon — McCoy goes back in time and somehow destroys the future; Kirk and Spock follow him to Earth, circa 1930, to set things right and in the process become entangled with a social worker with an outsized influence on the course of human events.

The backstory is, if anything, even more interesting, with sci-fi great Harlan Ellison's creative battles with the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, becoming the stuff of legend. Ellison's script is poetry, Roddenberry was a cloddish buffoon, and uncredited script doctors Gene L. Coon and Dorothy C. Fontana did some of the best work of their careers getting the mess to the small screen.

James Blish, in his aforementioned adaptation, blended the two versions into a single poetic story that is almost as good as the version I cobbled together out of all three sources. No one will ever read my version, of course — I violated at least three different copyrights — but it scratched an itch and what else is fan fiction (and a heaven) for?

Tribbles — A furry, faceless rodent who will eat you out of house and home, breed at an exponential rate, and make you love it in the process. Tribbles made their first appearance in the original series episode The Trouble With Tribbles, resulting in pure comedy gold as Kirk battles Klingons, bureaucrats and a charming salesman on a tiny space station on the border of Federation space.

Tribbles appear in at least a half-dozen other episodes across several spinoffs (The Animated Series, Enterprise, Short Treks, etc.) but the absolutely essential one is from Deep Space Nine, Trials and Tribble-ations, in which the crew of that series go back in time and find themselves seamlessly integrated into original story, leading to the best explanation ever for the radical differences in the makeup for the original series' Klingons and all those ever after:

"They are Klingons, and it is a long story."

"What happened? Some kind genetic engineering?"

"A viral mutation?"

"We do not discuss it with outsiders."

Spock — If you don't know who Spock is, you're probably beyond redemption. The most complex of Star Trek's characters, the half-Vulcan Spock spans several series and movies (the original series, of course, the first six movies, the three movie reboots, the animated series, The Next Generation, Discovery, Short Treks and Strange New Worlds).

The ones to watch specifically for Spock: Amok Time, Journey to Babel and Mirror, Mirror (original), Yesteryear (animated), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the movies), and Spock Amok, Charades and Subspace Rhapsody (Strange New Worlds).

Three actors have portrayed Spock over the years. Leonard Nimoy is the best, of course, but Ethan Peck (Discovery, Strange New Worlds) and Zachary Quinto (the three rebooted movies, aka the Kelvin Timeline) are surprisingly good.

Captain Christopher Pike — I won't say Chris Pike was my favorite starship captain (that would be Kirk), but at my age, he might be the one I most relate to. He was introduced in The Cage, the series' first pilot, then seen again in The Menagerie, a two-parter in which Spock kidnaps his hopelessly-crippled first captain, hijacks the Enterprise and defends himself against charges of mutiny by revealing Pike's past.

And that was the last of Captain Pike until season two of Discovery (my least favorite Star Trek spinoff), and now on Strange New Worlds (my favorite), currently airing on Paramount+. Pike is cursed with perfect foreknowledge of the time, place and manner of his impending demise, coloring his decisions throughout. How do you carry the burden of your own mortality without losing the joy of living? That's a question I ask myself often.

Which makes Strange New World sound rather dark and dreary. It isn't. It's an absolute gas from end to end, alternating action-adventure with wild humor and even a musical, as close to the original series as the franchise has ever managed, with better acting, better special effects and infinitely more interesting women characters.

Lower Decks — I wouldn't blame you for thinking the various starships in all the Star Trek series are run by roughly eight people, but it takes a lot of manpower to crew those things (especially as Kirk runs through Red Shirts like tissue paper) and every once in a while you get to know some of them.

One of the more poignant episodes from The Next Generation was Lower Decks, following four ensigns through their day. But I'm really thinking of the animated series Lower Decks, a hilariously meta comedy following the early careers of four ensigns aboard the worst ship in Star Fleet, the U.S.S. Cerritos. They get into and out of a variety of messes, usually of their own making, all while sleeping nights in open-faced drawers in a corridor deep in the bowels of the ship. If you're having a hard time picturing that, tour a World War II submarine sometime — basically underwater coffins that prove once again that The Greatest Generation was made of sterner stuff than those of us who followed. I mean, I've been known to call in sick when I cut myself shaving ...

Also check out the crossover Strange New Worlds / Lower Decks episode, Those Old Scientists, where cartoons are made flesh, and flesh, cartoons.

This is admittedly a very uncomprehensive list. I haven't mentioned the Gorn, gangsters, Klingons, Romulans, Hortas, Sulu with a sword, the Borg, the final four seasons of Deep Space Nine or Khan Noonien Singh, which is to say, the bulk of the franchise. But the day is waning fast and a little of something is better than a lot of nothing.

Hopefully, if you're a fan, this post will spark some of your own memories. And if you're not a fan, then maybe this will serve as a starting point for your own exploration.

Live long and prosper.