Part One: the best known split infinitive of all time.

Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the starship, Enterprise
Its 5 year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before...

Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the great science fiction icons: the original Star Trek, which began its run on September 8th, 1966.* It is impossible to think of any other piece of popular entertainment that has had the same impact on society as this short-lived NBC series, which only managed to limp along for three seasons before being cancelled.

Why is the damn thing so popular?

For the moment, let's ignore all of the sequels, movies, spin-offs, cartoons, comic books, novels, and games: let's just look at the original Star Trek, because it paves the way for all of the others. All of the succeeding material is a bit like preaching to the choir - the original series is what creates the enormous following that allows for everything that follows. So let's jump back in time (pardon me a minor science fiction moment there) to 1966 and have a look at the original Star Trek in its natural environment.

In 1966, science fiction is thin on the ground for the television viewer. The Twilight Zone had come and gone (with a younger William Shatner featured in the episode, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet") and since then very little has come to fill the gap. Lost In Space is starting its second season, but it's already starting down the road to increasingly juvenile and camp episodes, and The Time Tunnel, an unfortunate pastiche of historical inaccuracy and movie filler shots, begins its first season. Bewitched and Batman are only marginally in the genre, and Dark Shadows is more of a soap opera than anything else.

Having listed the competition, the question becomes more one of why Star Trek wasn't more successful than it was! Full credit has to go to Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, for the breadth of his vision of the 23rd Century. Unsuspecting people who didn't know their Asimovs from their Ellisons (so to speak) were suddenly exposed to a startling array of marvels: fast-than-light warp drive, the transporter**, phasers and photon torpedoes, replicators, tractor beams, force fields, time travel, parallel universes, alien races, planet killers, androids, galactic empires, and the entire catalogue of future wonders. It must have hit unsuspecting viewers like a bomb when compared to the alternatives.

The main characters are perhaps a little one-dimensional, but the real value of the triumvirate of Spock, Kirk and McCoy is that they represent the elements of Logic, Will and Emotion that are constantly in conflict in everyone's character, but externalized and given life. Similarly, at their best the plot lines deal with topics on an almost Shakespearian level, the constants of love, hate, laughter and fear that are the mainstays of life. Are all of the episodes brilliant? No, of course not, but even at its worst Star Trek has a feeling of elemental appeal, of addressing fundamental issues and questions.

And yet, somehow, all of that is secondary to the real significance of the program. The Cold War is a very real threat in 1966. In 1962, a mere four years earlier, the Cuban Missile Crisis had poised the world on the brink of nuclear war, and the hands of the Doomsday Clock stand at seven minutes to midnight. Meanwhile, angry crowds barrage Martin Luther King with stones and bricks in Chicago, Malcolm X has been dead for just over a year, and the Watts Riots are still an angry memory.

Star Trek presented a future in which humanity, as a species, had survived - not a perfect future, but a better one, a hopeful one, and the word "hope" is the one most often used when the importance of the show is discussed. The multi-racial bridge crew represented one aspect of that hope: again, forty years after the event, it's difficult to realize how astonishing the character of Lieutenant Uhura was in 1966, where the concept of a woman of colour occupying a position of authority would still have been extraordinary - and inspirational.

"Inspirational" may be the key to all of it. If, as is the dream of every science fiction fan, we eventually make our way to the stars, some small credit for that leap should lie with Star Trek, simply for suggesting that we might be capable of making it.

- Sid

* We also celebrate the birthday of Paul Levesque, TPH courier, but since he hasn't spawned any spinoffs or sequels, there are no Paul Levesque conventions, and his fan base, although dedicated, is much smaller, some other blogger is going to have to discuss his quirky success.

** I know full well that the transporter was invented in order to save the money that would have been spent on special effects shots of the Enterprise landing on planets, but that in no way diminishes the brilliance of the idea.