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            Of course I must provide a caveat to the title, as this won’t be the final time I will be talking about the franchise ever, hardly that! What it means is that in terms of continuity, this is what I plan to be my final participation in covering, however distantly, any new activity in the Star Trek universe. Though there was a time where I thought, in the right hands, the series had virtually unlimited storytelling potential and need not go away, frankly it is played out, continually crushed under the weight of its own legacy.

            Legacy. There’s a word circling around quite a bit these days, especially in entertainment media. It’s also a buzzword many fans are using in calling for Picard season three showrunner Terry Matalas to make another spinoff series, this one likely to follow the exploits of Captain Seven, now commanding the Enterprise 1701-G (formerly the Titan-A). We’ll forget for a moment that there was already a game called Star Trek: Legacy (a shallow but not too bad experience that tied three generations of heroes into one story). Seven of Nine was one of my favorite characters in Star Trek: Voyager, indeed she was and is an inspiration in my personal life. Of course I like the idea that her character was allowed to shelve her Borg past and reclaim her identity. Of course I think it’s a great idea to see another woman potentially get to sit center seat in another Trek series. I like that she was at least mostly brought back from her abysmal treatment in Picard seasons one and two. I also tremendously appreciate that someone with creative pull over at CBS had enough decency to not leave the Enterprise-D rotting on Veridian III, to reunite her with her crew and ultimately receive a proper retirement with her sisters. It was from that place, one of closure, where I was inspired to write this piece.

            Look, it’s no secret whatsoever that I have largely detested virtually every bit of Star Trek produced under the banners of J.J. Abrams and Alex Kurtzman. I’ve written better scenes than either of them one-handed, typing into my phone’s notebook while walking along a country road in a foreign nation while trying to get away from my abusive partner. They can shove their mystery boxes into their black holes because they suck. Maybe they have other talents but producing good scripts is not one of them. Maybe in person they’re nice guys, who knows, I don’t hate them as human beings, but their work is shoddy. Also now, if you are someone who likes one of the Kelvin movies, or Discovery or Lower Decks or any other spinoff, it’s whatevs, I’m not gonna hate you for it, I’m merely going to disagree with you and direct the conversation elsewhere. Unlike the cadre of folk who love to hate new Trek because they are wearing their bigotry barely under their skin (oh you know those types, the ones who think they’re clever by dropping “woke” as an insult, obviously ignorant to its meaning, and cry foul every time they see someone not white, male, and/or straight leading their stories), I’m not interested in fostering animosity or attacking the cast and crew who did the best they could on these shows with the material they were given. The fault lies with the corporate suits, the clueless producers, and everyone else in authority who signed off on the abysmal writing and production direction that completely spat on everything the franchise had built up since the 1960s. As Angry Joe expressed so astutely during his Picard season two review, “we agree with the [progressive] message, but you [the producers of Trek] are making the message look bad!” Regardless of how you feel, one only need look to the drastic overhaul and course correction the Picard series made from seasons two to three as evidence of how far off-track the franchise had gotten, that clearly enough people among the powers-that-be noticed this and admitted through action that some serious work needed doing to win many fans back and get the show feeling at least a bit like bloody Star Trek again. Season three still suffered from too much lingering mystery box mentality, still leaned back on too much banal writing that made all of Starfleet aside from our core heroes look like morons, still relied too much on dark sets and “ooh look how actiony this is” shaky camera work, still refused to divorce itself entirely from the Abrams aesthetic, however it managed to reign everything in just enough to finally treat our legacy characters with some gorram respect. Someone in charge finally remembered that in much of spacefaring science fiction, especially Star Trek, the ships are characters too. Someone remembered how important good music is to cinematic storytelling. Someone at least remembered to pay lip service to exploring the galaxy and seeking out new life, that we may better understand our own. Someone had the decency to end their story with a sense of hope and the possibility of a better tomorrow.

            That, my friends, is where I want to leave Star Trek and where I believe firmly that it ought to stay. Despite all of the attempts at revitalization, the franchise has been spinning its own wheels since Enterprise, utterly unable to escape the weight of its own history or the sheer number of conflicting ideas meddling in the same pie. Trek has always had a problem with internal consistency from jump and that will only ever keep getting worse. Virtually every kind of Trek story has been done and done to death. It never helps that the people running it can’t seem to make even one season of a new show without having to fall back on recycling legacy characters such as Kirk and Spock, and no offense to the actors who are hired, but anyone brought in to play an old character will always feel like parody to me. It’s disrespectful. Of course CBS, like all corpos, is a money hungry machine and will never leave Trek to rest. Capitalism is, after all and among so many other things, the death knell of artistic integrity. If there is profit to be made, good storytelling and a positive message must be sacrificed to the gods of capital. I don’t like it but I’m not naive. Thus, this is where my course is changed to a new direction. In my heart I will always love Star Trek (pre-CBS, mostly), but it’s time to move on. I posit that, like the Enterprise-D, let it rest while it still has some dignity, to be enjoyed by future generations while giving those same children room to tell their stories. Maybe I’m a teensy biased there, since yeah After Terra would be among those stories, but there are hundreds, thousands, millions more stories waiting in the wings, from an endlessly diverse group of human experiences. Or to sum it up another way, using Picard’s final episode as an analogy, instead of diluting an existing legacy further (Enterprise-G? Come on, even back in First Contact the Enterprise naming convention was becoming a gag) why not let the Titan get her own history to build and flourish, nurtured by the children who inherited what the heroes of the twenty-fourth century fought to save. Literally and metaphorically, that would of course mean letting go, regardless of how many dollars were at stake.

            For me, it’s time to let go.

            Computer, end program.

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A revisit of a review, that was in itself a revisit of a retried pilot. Got it? Good.

Here we go, the second pilot, and the first episode featuring Captain Kirk. This episode has in many aspects aged worse than most of the series, but it serves as an interesting look at how many changes the show went through in its infancy. Of course, why this was aired nearly a quarter of the way through the first season and not used as the first episode as intended, I have no idea. I guess NBC was using the same kind of logic back then that Fox employed with Firefly in more recent times; that is, none at all.

If you watched other episodes before this one, it can seem a bit jarring. The Enterprise bridge, effectively unchanged since the filming of the original pilot, “The Cage,” looks drab, lacking in the more familiar color and character of later episodes. The uniforms here are muted yellows and blues without any red shirts to speak of. All of the women are wearing pants. Star Trek lore was barely even established at this point, as here we have Earth Base mentioned in place of Starfleet Command, and mistakes such as James T. Kirk’s name being misused late in the episode as James R. Kirk. The lack of establishment in this episode makes it feel more akin to something like The Twilight Zone, as opposed to the Star Trek that we know and love.

In a rare thing for Trek, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” deals with the capacity for humans to possess extra sensory perception, something that the characters here treat as a normal, if uncommon, reality. The interest in ESP happens when the Enterprise encounters a treacherous energy barrier at the galaxy’s edge while investigating the loss of an old starship, the Valiant. No surprise that of course the ship and crew are put into extreme peril.

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U.S.S. Enterprise encounters the galactic barrier

This move cripples the Enterprise’s warp engines, and has a profound effect on two crew members who already possessed a small level of ESP.

(Now before you all get too nitpicky—you know who you are—and ask how Enterprise, much less Valiant, could make it to the galaxy’s edge in a relatively short time with warp drive, remember not to think too two-dimensionally. One could reach the “edge” of the galaxy just as well by traveling “up” or “down” relative to the galactic center.)

Gary Mitchell, Kirk’s longtime friend, is the most drastically affected by the energy barrier. At first his new powers seem fairly innocent; he can read fast, retain information with perfect clarity, and perform minor feats of telekinesis. But it doesn’t take long for Mitchell’s growing  powers to affect his judgment, and he soon begins to view the Enterprise crew, even his friend Kirk, as a nuisance, an obstacle in the way of his development into a more advanced kind of human being. Kirk delays as long as he can to help his friend, but when it is clear that Mitchell won’t stand down, Kirk is forced to make the decision to maroon him on the only planet that the Enterprise can reach, Delta Vega. Mitchell erases any doubts about whether he can be spared when he ends up killing an Enterprise crew member while the ship is being repaired.

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Delta Vega

This leads to a confrontation between the two former friends, as Mitchell’s powers grow to nearly be on par with the Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation (worth wondering is whether Mitchell’s powers are the potential threat the Q saw in humanity when they tested Riker later on). Kirk is able to win out in the end after pleading with Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, the other crewmember augmented with the advanced ESP, to one more time look at the situation from a human perspective. At the cost of her own life, she helps the Captain defeat his former friend.

This highlights one of the more interesting morals of the episode: no matter how much a human evolves, do they ever lose their dark side? Can a human ever be rid of their base instincts? Kirk points out that for all of his power, Mitchell is not advanced enough of a life form to handle it responsibly. What we are left with at the end of this episode, is the idea that even with all of our advancements, humans still have a long way to go before we can ever be higher beings. This is deep for a low budget second pilot from the 60s.

While it will never be the strongest episode in the Star Trek franchise, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” does take some interesting chances and makes you think. It also serves as a great opening vehicle for Kirk, showing us his agonizing conflict between loyalty to his friend and his duty to ship, crew, and humanity.

FIN

Disclaimer: Star Trek is a CBS/Paramount copyright. All images in this review posting are courtesy of http://www.startrek.com, http://www.trekcore.com, http://www.imdb.com, and http://www.wikipedia.org. Images are used for informational purposes only, and no copyright infringement on CBS or Paramount Studios is intended.

Originally posted on The Uncommon Geek. Edited for a better reading experience versus what I created back in 2013.