Episodes
In terms of its writing, Star Trek is notable as one of the earliest science-fiction TV series to utilize the services of leading contemporary science fiction writers, such as Robert Bloch, Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, and Theodore Sturgeon, as well as established television writers. Series script editor Dorothy C. Fontana (originally Roddenberry's secretary) was also a vital part of the success of Star Trek—she edited most of the series' scripts and wrote several episodes. Her credits read D.C. Fontana at the suggestion of Gene Roddenberry since he felt a woman might not be taken seriously because the majority of science fiction writers were men.
Roddenberry utilized the setting of a space vessel set many years in the future to often discuss the major issues of the 1960s United States, including sexism, racism, nationalism, and global war. Although Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nancy Sinatra had briefly kissed on the December 1967 musical-variety special Movin' With Nancy, Star Trek was the first American television show to feature an interracial kiss between fictional characters (between Capt. Kirk and Lt. Uhura in the episode "Plato's Stepchildren") although the kiss was only mimed (obscured by the back of a character's head) and depicted as involuntary.
Episodes such as "The Apple", "Who Mourns for Adonais?", "The Mark of Gideon", and "The Return of the Archons" display subtle anti-religious (owing mainly to Roddenberry's own secular humanism) and anti-establishment themes. "Bread and Circuses" and "The Omega Glory" have themes that are more overtly pro-religion and patriotic.
Roddenberry also wanted to use the series as a 'Trojan Horse' to push back the envelope of NBC's censorship restrictions by disguising potentially controversial themes with a science fiction setting. Network and/or sponsor interference, up to and including wholesale censorship of scripts and film footage, was a regular occurrence in the 1960s and Star Trek suffered from its fair share of tampering. Scripts were routinely vetted and censored by the staff of NBC's Broadcast Standards Department, who copiously annotated every script with demands for cuts or changes (e.g. "Page 4: Please delete McCoy's expletive, 'Good Lord'" or "Page 43: Caution on the embrace; avoid open-mouthed kiss").
The Original Series was also noted for its sense of humor, such as Spock's and McCoy's pointed, yet friendly, bickering. Episodes like "The Trouble with Tribbles", "I, Mudd", and "A Piece of the Action", however, were all written and staged as comedies. Star Trek's humor is generally much more subdued in the spin-offs and movies, with notable exceptions such as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Several episodes used the concept of duplicate Earths, allowing reuse of stock props and sets. "Bread and Circuses," "Miri" and "The Omega Glory" depict such worlds, and three episodes, "A Piece of the Action", "Patterns Of Force", and "Plato's Stepchildren" are based on alien planets that have adopted period Earth cultures (Prohibition-era Chicago, Nazi Germany, and ancient Greece, respectively). However, "A Piece of the Action" and "Patterns Of Force" show this as having resulted from contaminations of the native cultures of those planets, either before the imposition of the Prime Directive or by violations of it.
Read more about this topic: Star Trek The Original Series
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)