Pilot 02/Episode 03: Where No Man Has Gone Before.

Alright, so despite this airing as episode 3, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" served as the second pilot for NBC, and according to the internet, canonically comes before the rest of the series. So in essence, this episode shows Shatner's first crack at being Captain Kirk which is why I've decided to watch this episode before the rest of the series.

So let’s try this again, pilot #2 is go and right from the bat I feel like I’m watching Star Trek when I’m met with “Captain’s Log, Stardate 1312.4” in an all too familiar voice.

Nice.

It’s amazing how much Shatner brings to this show—and unlike seemingly everything else about the show he comes in swinging as all out Kirk. He doesn’t stumble over the awkward dialogue, his overtly dramatic pauses make an appearance, and the dude hams it up like a mother fucker. That and he can charm the pants off of you.


However, the rest of the cast still isn’t quite up to standard at this point in the show's production. While Scotty and Sulu make their first appearances, the doctor in this episode manages to be even less interesting than the drunken one from the first pilot. Spock’s character remains essentially the same as before except they play up the fact that he’s an alien by giving him hammy lines like “your Earth emotion.” The conversations he has with Kirk feel very much like EXPOSTION CONVERSATION with several awkward lines involving Spock’s half-Vulcan heritage thrown in for good measure. It certainly doesn't come off as natural, as it would be akin to having an Asian friend point out that he’s Asian in the middle of a conversation about the weather or gas prices. To top it off he seems to have a tendency to flatly shout when on the bridge, and even though he's an alien, and aliens tend to look weird, his eyebrows are dumb looking.

The episode begins with Kirk and crew discovering the logs of a destroyed ship (think little black box, except huge and in space. Also, it lights up). After examining the damaged tapes (ha!), they discover that the former captain frantically began to search the ship’s logs on ESP and then orders the ship to self-destruct. Dramatic shit. Then to get things going the ship flies through an energy field that causes the first instance of instrument panels exploding and throwing stunt men around. The instrument panels exploding is something I’ve never been able to understand about Star Trek. You’d think they would put surge protectors on those things or something.

As they fly through the field two crew members, helmsman Lieutenant Gary Mitchell and Dr. Dana, light up quite literally like a fourth of July sparkler before passing out. Lucky for them they survive unharmed—except Mitchell whose eyes begin to glow and becomes an insane telepath with a chronic god complex. He also has this big booming voice that kind of makes him sound like Moses. However, saying that his eyes glow feels like a bit of a stretch, considering that pretty much look like they were turned into balls of aluminum foil. But I guess you do what you can when it's 1965 and you're working on a TV budget.

In any case, after Mitchell starts making cups fly around and shoots Kirk and Spock full of electricity, Kirk (Note: When writing this I unwittingly wrote my own name instead of Kirk’s here. I am deeply bothered.) decides that it might be a good idea to maroon him in a matte painting, where Mitchell and Kirk’s stunt people have their final battle from far away. They flip around a lot though, so it's still pretty rad.

Now from what I understand, NBC turned down the original pilot because it was slow, cerebral, and boring—Roddenbury apparently decided to counter this by making the next pilot involve explosions, telekinesis, and a Captain who isn’t afraid to punch someone in the face. Kirk even carries a huge phaser rifle for no other reason than it being awesome. It should also be said that Kirk has a tendency to be a bit rash with his strategy, considering his secondary solution to killing Mitchell was bombarding the surface of the entire planet.

I agree with NBC. I don’t want to see any more of Captain Pike, I want more of this:

YES!

This is Star Trek:

Kirk and Spock play Space Chess:

BRZZACK:

Behold, ACTING:

He's Dead Jim:
Production Episode #1

Death Count: 12.
9 dead flying through the force field.
Lieutenant Kelso, Telepathically strangled.
Lieutenant Mitchell, Crushed by a huge rock.
Doctor Dana, Killed by Mitchell in telepath duel.

Total Star Trek death toll: 12.

On the next episode...

Something bad probably happens to this guy.

Pilot 01: The Cage.

Alright, time for the pilot and seeing the first adventure of Captain James T. Ki--Wait a second, who the fuck is this guy?


That is not the brave Captain of the starship Enterprise, that is... Who is that? The actor playing the very not Captain Kirk is Jeffrey Hunter. Hunter played several secondary roles throughout the 50s and 60s, appearing in films like The Longest Day with every other actor at the time, and most notably John Ford's The Searchers. If you don't recognize Hunter from The Searchers that's okay, because in the above picture he hasn't been painted a slight shade of brown to make him look half Indian.

In the pilot Hunter plays Captain Christopher Pike, the unremarkable captain of the USS Enterprise whose clean chin and chisled hair leads a team of adventurers you don't recognize to the far end of the Galaxy. Basically the pilot episode feels the same as every other episode of TOS; it has the bad costumes, the poorly constructed sets, the broad technological terms , and most importantly, women painted green. The main difference between the pilot and the rest of the series falls solely on the crew and their lame ability to lull the viewer to sleep. There's the frigid female first officer, the ship's doctor whose only perscription is alcohol, and several young nameless actors who stumble around the set and stiffly say things about technology that they don't seem to understand. It really felt as if most of the cast read their lines phonetically. "Sen-sores read a dis-tress sig-nal from the Tal-oas sys-tem, Cap-tan." At least Spock is there.

In the episode, Pike goes on a reluctant rescue mission for a crashed spacecraft on an unexplored planet where he gets captured and put into a zoo by a race of telepaths with pulsating heads the size of basketballs. What is it with telepaths and pulsating super brains? Last time I checked brains don't pulsate. Look it up for yourself, nothing on that page mentions anything about pulsating.

The episode trudges along with various escape attempts with a couple of crappy looking monsters thrown in to make things interesting. Pike's cell also makes a delightful *boing* whenever he crashes against the space glass. The telepaths torture Pike throughout the episode by surrounding him by beautiful women, sending him to a pleasure world, treating him to a picnic, and having him fight a 7 foot Viking wearing a silly hat and one furry shoe that sounds like a drowning dinosaur. Cruel. Oh, they also send him to a smoldering lava/acid world for a few seconds, but being held prisoner can't always be picnics and sex slaves.

By the end of the episode you find out that the girl prancing around Pike for the entire episode actually is a survivor of the crash, but is actually just extremely busted looking. Which is perhaps the cruelest joke played on Pike by the telepaths--They try to hook him up with an ugly chick. At least they seem to understand how superficial humans can be--but it still basically makes the entire plot of the movie like the 1999 gem She's All That. Save for the fact that there's no prom, it takes place in space, and it doesn't involve Freddy Prinze Jr. Although it might as well with Jeffrey Hunter running around.

I can see why NBC scrapped the pilot based solely on the characters. Captain Pike isn’t so much a character as he is a pretty face. Every so often when a scene changes I think that Pike might actually be Kirk, but then my hopes quickly melted when I saw Pike’s empty stare yet piercingly… hypnotic blue eyes. The entire cast seems hopelessly stiff and they have a complete lack of cheek that the later episodes has in droves. Even Nimoy doesn't seem comfortable in his pointy ears. Pike comes across even worse, and he feels like the antithesis of charisma. He almost seems angry to be in the show--funny considering that his pent up rage ends up saving him from inprisonment. He's reluctant to go on a rescue mission, he isn't interested in the green chick, and he's pretty much just kind of a dick. Captain Pike sucks and I hope something bad happens to him.


.... ooooh.

This is Star Trek:

Lots of dumb things happen in Star Trek, here's a small collection of dumb things that happen in this episode:

When two twentieth century tennis players walk down the coridor of the Enterprise:

When Spock and Pike pick space flowers together:

The back of the telepaths' heads look like butts:

Where Many Nerds Have Gone Many Times Before.

I am not a nerd.

Well. Okay, I am--but I am not this dude. I have seen my fair share of science fiction and anime, played my share of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, and I even read half of a Star Wars novel once. But I have never been down on discussing warp core coolants or how LaForge's visor thing works--I'm still not. I don't care.

That being said, I still know enough about Star Trek to get by with the lower level nerds. When I was growing up I would watch Next Generation episodes with my grandfather after school, so I became familiar with Jean-Luc Picard, Lieutenant-Commander Data, transporters, phasers on stun, and that lanky nerd kid that I never liked. I knew that the series started in the 60s and that my father would watch it in college, I knew that Deep Space Nine was boring, and I knew that Wrath of Khan was better than that one with Spock's brother and that God alien at the center of whatever. Really, the only thing I couldn't figure out was why two generations of hardened construction workers like my grandfather and father enjoyed something as relentlessly nerdy as Star Trek.

Still, despite my familiarity, I've never been able to fully immerse myself into the Star Trek universe. That's where this blog comes in. Starting from now, I will be watching every episode of every Star Trek series in order and writing about every episode here. It's going to be long, it's going to be hard, and, most of all, it's going to be pointless. I'll try the best as I can to give an outsider's opinion on each episode, and point out some of the weirder things that have come out of Star Trek. Like this:

or this:
What the hell are these things? What purpose could that goddamn horn possibly serve? In any case, after 347 episodes when I'm halfway through Season 4 of Deep Space Nine, this shit will probably seem normal. Also, I can't promise that I won't be able to tell you how fast a proton torpedo can go through a worm hole at that point; by then I very well may be in line to get René Auberjonois's autograph for the third time.

So hopefully after roughly 528 hours of TV show, eleven feature length films, and twenty-two animated episodes I will be able to look myself in the mirror. Jesus Christ, how do you nerds to this?