Star Trek at 60: why Kirk and Spock still rule the cosmos

Even if you have never watched Star Trek, you have definitely heard of Captain Kirk and Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer of the Starship Enterprise. Star Trek is now celebrating its 60th anniversary, which is incredible for a show that was cancelled after just three seasons and 79 episodes. The fact that the main characters from the first version are still household names today is a testament to its strange and unexpected later success.

I’m too young to remember Star Trek when it first came out in 1966, and in any case, it wasn’t shown on Irish television. But later, in the 1970s, it did turn up in this part of the world, and I seem to remember it was shown on RTÉ on a Saturday morning, meaning it was aimed squarely at a young audience. I absolutely loved it. It was being aired in Ireland when there was still huge interest in the moon missions and all things Astronaut. The first moon landing had taken place only a few years before and now we had a series, set a few hundred years into the future when space travel was vastly more developed and we had learned how to traverse the stars.

Imagination

As Captain Kirk would announce at the start of every episode, just before the tremendous theme music kicked off: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilisations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

I didn’t even have to look this up. I remember it by heart, as do millions of Star Trek fans (‘Trekkies’) all over the world.

The show fired my boyhood imagination. The only other science fiction series I can recall from that time was Doctor Who, and I thought Star Trek was far better. For a start, Star Trek’s special effects, although very ropey by today’s standards, were light years ahead (pun intended) of Doctor Who’s. But then, Doctor Who had a miserable BBC budget while Star Trek had a much bigger American one.

This combined two of my three favourite interests at the time, namely science fiction and Greek mythology”

Star Trek introduced us week by week to new alien races, including friendly ones like the Vulcans who were ruled by logic and eschewed emotion, to the war-like Romulans and the even more war-like Klingons. The Vulcans greatly appealed to me because I fancied that I was a logical sort of chap, and Spock was my favourite character from the series.

My favourite ever episode involved the Enterprise arriving at a planet ruled by, of all people, the Greek god, Apollo. This combined two of my three favourite interests at the time, namely science fiction and Greek mythology. (The third interest was dinosaurs. Yes, I was a nerd). Apollo turned out to be not a god, but a very powerful alien. I was happy with this explanation.

I loved watching the characters beam down to and up from new planets. I loved watching the Enterprise fire its laser beams and photon torpedoes at enemy ships. I loved when the Enterprise hit ‘warp speed’. I loved when Captain Kirk and his crewmates would land on a new planet and another adventure would begin. The new planets were always either sets, or else looked suspiciously like California, where, of course, the series was made.

Crew

But above all I loved the characters themselves and the interaction between them. Captain Kirk was the man of action with a string of romances across the galaxy. Spock, as mentioned, was the man of logic. On the bridge of the Enterprise we also had Uhura, the communications officer, and one of the first black women ever cast in a prominent part in a major series.

We had ‘Scotty’, the chief engineer, called ‘Scotty’ because he was, well, Scottish.

The original Star Trek is set in the 23rd century when planet Earth is united and separate nations no longer exist”

Also on the bridge we had Sulu, who was Japanese, and Chekov, who was Russian.

The doctor was McCoy, also known as ‘Bones’. He was emotional and would often clash with the logical, unemotional Spock and attack him for not showing emotion when he thought it was called for.

You may have noticed that the crew of the Enterprise was, what we would call today ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’.

But this is largely because the original Star Trek is set in the 23rd century when planet Earth is united and separate nations no longer exist. The vision of the United Nations is complete (although this is never made explicit) and now we have a United Federation of Planets, which is an interstellar government, spreading its message of peace throughout the universe and bringing alien races together. But it also has Starfleet, of which the Starship Enterprise is part, and this exists to traverse the universe, but also to fight when necessary.

Religion

In the future, or within the United Federation of Planets at least, money no longer exists and the Seven Deadly Sins don’t seem to exist anymore either, not among humans anyway. No one seems to be greedy or self-seeking. It’s never explained quite how we achieved this. Somehow or another we simply became more enlightened, and all without religion.

Star Trek still has its very loyal fan base which is always hoping that the magic formula of the original series can be rediscovered”

But Star Trek is actually more religious than it realises because its vision of a semi-utopian future in which sin has been more or less vanquished (except among races like the Klingons), and a message of peace and love is being spread through the universe is nothing if not religious. It is, in fact, a heavily Christian-influenced vision, even if the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, might not have recognised this fact. Roddenberry was an atheist, but his humanist vision was far more Christian than he knew.

The original Star Trek was cancelled despite having attracted a decent-sized audience. But the audience was not big enough to justify the budget, and so the studio bosses axed it.

But then, after it began to be shown again on TV in the 1970s, its fans demanded that it be revived, and so in 1979 the first Star Trek movie came out with the cast from the original series.

Then other series and movies began to be made, starting with the very successful Star Trek: The Next Generation. The successor series, and movies, have been extremely uneven in quality, if truth be told, like a lot of the Star Wars movies, but like Star Wars, Star Trek still has its very loyal fan base which is always hoping that the magic formula of the original series can be rediscovered.

Can it be? I don’t know. But I am very glad we have the original series at least and can look back on that with nostalgia. Happy birthday, Star Trek, and thanks for the memories.