Star Trek and History (51 page)

In 1967, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson published a dystopian science fiction novel called
Logan's Run
, about a futuristic society whose youthful inhabitants live in pampered ease and comfort until age twenty-one, whereupon they are willingly euthanized. In the 1976 movie, set in a postapocalyptic domed city, they are executed in a public ritual when they turn thirty, which, it is promised, allows some of the most lucky or agile to be granted “renewal.” In fact, no one ever survives, and Logan, a member of the Sandmen—the police force that tracks down “runners” who want to live beyond their allotted time—manages to escape along with a woman named Jessica and to reach the world outside the dome. At the crest of the counterculture whose slogans included “Don't trust anyone over thirty,” the writers, both nearing forty, ruminated on environmentalism and consumerist conformity alongside marked ambivalence about the youth rebellion. MGM's version, starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter, proved only moderately successful with critics and audiences. Still,
Logan's Run
marked an important transition for Hollywood science fiction because the protagonists ultimately free the city from its oppressive system, and the movie ends on a hopeful note, far different from most examples of the previous decade.
Star Wars
(1977) came soon after, banishing dystopian themes in favor of traditional heroes and familiar genre resolutions—the “optimistic” features
Star Trek
had long provided. Indeed, the enslaving world of the domed city is just the kind of false utopia that Captain Kirk would have similarly condemned and destroyed.

As Logan and Jessica search for a possibly mythic refuge called Sanctuary while pursued by the Sandman Francis, Logan's former friend, the novel opened opportunities for further episodic adventures. In fact, a movie or TV adaptation was in the authors' minds from the start. While Nolan had published fiction extensively, Johnson was a successful TV writer with several sales to
The Twilight Zone
and a recent script, “The Man Trap,” that became
Star Trek
's first aired episode. The
Star Trek
influence was apparent in the CBS series
Logan's Run
in any case. Nolan backed away from the TV version early on, but not before creating the duo's android companion Rem, played by Donald Moffat, an officious if friendly automaton the writer frankly described as “my metallic Mr. Spock.”
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Moreover, when veteran producers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts began the TV version, they made a key hire in choosing D. C. (Dorothy) Fontana as their story editor. Fontana had been
Star Trek
's story editor in the second season and wrote several of the show's popular episodes, including the introduction of Spock's parents in “Journey to Babel.” She had continued in a similar capacity on NBC's animated
Star Trek
that aired on Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1974. Fontana, too, had made convention appearances, and among fans she was second only to Roddenberry in admiration and respect as a creative talent behind the show.

The
Logan's Run
series suffered backstage reshuffling and creative differences before it even went on the air, which suggests ongoing conflicts over the tone and approach of the show between producers, writers, and the network that were never satisfactorily resolved. Still, without the expensive makeup that hobbled the
Planet of the Apes
series, the show's costumes, props, and sets created a distinctive look. Typical of prime time shows of the period, however, it was shot in a glossy, high-key style often at odds with the downbeat tone of its themes. Similarly, alongside the scene-stealing Donald Moffat, Gregory Harrison and Heather Menzies were bright-eyed, well-scrubbed innocents, which made the characters less complex or sexy than their big-screen counterparts. Even so, Fontana gamely solicited scripts from writers who had worked on
Star Trek
, including noted science fiction author Harlan Ellison and David Gerrold, creator of what most fans considered
Star Trek
's most popular episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Both Ellison and Gerrold came up with provocative stories for
Logan's Run
, but they ultimately used pseudonyms due to their dissatisfaction with the final versions. In the era of superhero shows such as
The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman
, and
Man from Atlantis, Logan's Run
was also aimed at a young audience, suggesting that network decision makers retained older, more circumscribed attitudes toward science fiction despite the genre's proven range.

In the 1960s, British producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson created several inventive children's shows featuring marionette puppets in science fiction settings, including
Supercar, Fireball XL5
, and
Stingray
, which had played well in the United States. In 1973, Associated Television (ATV) chief Sir Lew Grade assigned Gerry Anderson to create a live-action science fiction series that would feature strong production values and appeal to this burgeoning market. Thus,
Space: 1999
was born as a high-budget venture starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, lately starring in CBS's
Mission: Impossible
, and featuring Barry Morse, best known as the detective pursuing David Janssen on
The Fugitive.
Although it immediately established its own identity,
Space: 1999
would both benefit from
Star Trek
's syndication success and be measured against it.

Set in 1999, the show's opening episode explains how the personnel of Moonbase Alpha, led by Landau's commander John Koenig, become unwilling voyagers when nuclear waste stored on the moon explodes, hurling the satellite through space. Stories describe the Alphans' attempts to survive as they encounter strange alien life-forms. While
Space: 1999
has always drawn mixed reviews, the show's visual effects, especially its accomplished miniature work depicting the base's
Eagle
transport craft and assorted alien vessels, garnered near universal praise. Given science fiction's traditionally low prestige, reviewers on a deadline could always get easy laughs by mocking cheap sci-fi with threadbare sets and effects. With the examples of
2001, Planet of the Apes
, and others in mind,
Space: 1999
seemed designed to circumvent this problem from the outset.

Moreover, as Gerry Anderson explained, “You know straightaway . . . that [the series] is going to be costly. If it's going to be costly it has to do well in America.”
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As the syndication market was becoming increasingly lucrative following the enactment of the FCC's Financial Interest and Syndication (Fin-Syn) rules in 1971, the British producers made a strong, well-coordinated push to sell the show across the pond.
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ATV's marketing subsidiary, Independent Television Corporation (ITC), blanketed U.S. stations with an oversized color brochure depicting an
Eagle
transporter flying over Moonbase Alpha, including assurance that the show was “custom made for American television. From its very inception all the elements necessary for a successful American TV series have been incorporated . . . American stars, American directors, American writers, American talent of the very best.”
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It initially sold in 155 U.S. markets. ITC's concerted previewing and marketing pitches positioned
Space: 1999
as a network-quality show of such promise that in the fall of 1975, numerous affiliates of all three major networks preempted or delayed what they perceived as weak network programs in favor of the British series, a relatively rare occurrence that can put affiliation agreements at risk. Subsequently, station programmers that ITC committed sought to leverage a prevailing trend. Said
Broadcasting
:

Some stations, such as KRON-TV San Francisco, are going after the
Star Trek
cult in particular. KRON-TV, an NBC affiliate, is doing a mailing to the 6,000-plus names on the mailing list of the Trading Post in Berkeley, Calif., a store dealing solely in
Star Trek
memorabilia, and is thinking of holding a special preview in Berkeley for the Trekkers. In Cleveland, WUAB is scheduling
Star Trek
as lead-in to
Space: 1999.
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The still-growing
Star Trek
fan base and the publicity and promotion around
Space: 1999
meant that reviewers, fans, and general audiences inevitably compared the shows. Many press reviews claimed the British series would be just what
Star Trek
fans were waiting for; others predicted that same group might be disappointed. Both claims proved accurate. The two shows had been conceived only about a decade apart, but that period was a watershed. Where the
Enterprise
was envisioned as “
Wagon Train
to the Stars,” the active vanguard of civilization exploring a limitless frontier, Moonbase Alpha became a vulnerable island in space evoking the malaise of post-Imperial Britain and post-Vietnam America alike—cast adrift and lost, economies faltering. For American viewers, the principal cast of
Space: 1999
would have been perceived against the backdrop to their earlier TV roles: as part of the original
Mission: Impossible
team, Landau and Bain had smugly celebrated the CIA intrigues and Cold War mind-set that laid the groundwork for the Vietnam debacle, and Barry Morse was the policeman who had obsessively hounded an innocent man on
The Fugitive.
In their
Space: 1999
roles, these now-compromised guardians of the traditional order were left floating in space, with only limited control of their destiny.

The most apparent contrasts between
Star Trek
and
Space: 1999
lay in their divergent tones. Well beyond stiff upper lip, the British show was sometimes low key to the point of somnambulance. (Here the most negative reviews couldn't resist comparing the cast to the wooden puppets Gerry Anderson had previously created.) The climax of the episode “The Black Sun,” for example, finds Commander Koenig and Professor Victor Bergman (Morse) sitting around passively awaiting death and exchanging philosophical insights amid engagingly abstract visuals that suggest LSD hallucinations, as the crisis threatening the base more or less resolves itself. Clearly this approach was a deliberate choice of the producers, a stylistic departure from the overwrought space operas that had started with
Flash Gordon
and led to
Star Trek
, where old-fashioned fistfights carried the day as often as high-tech solutions. Yet it's worth recalling that the
Enterprise
crew's often witty exchanges contributed to its appeal, and that
Star Trek
's “most popular episode” was a comedy—something seemingly beyond the Alpha team. Small wonder the lively, off-kilter
Doctor Who
was already a long-running hit in Britain and had earned a cult following in the United States by the 1970s.

Yet while the judgment of critics and inconsistent ratings alike showed that
Space: 1999
's visual effects and basic premise were successful, the producers decided that some retooling might invigorate the expensive show. Not surprisingly, a familiar influence appeared throughout its revamped second season after Anderson brought in American producer Fred Freiberger, who had run
Star Trek
's final season. Freiberger's analysis of the show echoed the reaction of many reviewers: “Doesn't anybody know how to smile in 1999?”
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Besides brightening the white-on-gray color scheme of the uniforms and the interior sets that reinforced the subdued feel, he introduced new characters, including a shape-shifting alien named Maya (Catherine Schell). Although another variation of Mr. Spock, Maya actively sought to grasp human emotions and was paired romantically with Tony Verdeschi (Tony Anholt), a young crewman meant as a more traditional action hero.

Freiberger also sought more action-oriented, less elliptical stories in the new format, which Anderson optimistically claimed marked “the best of both worlds,” in comparison to
Star Trek.
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Still, the show fared no better and ended in 1977. Soon after, NBC's jokey
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
(1979–1981), starring Gil Gerard, got bumpy ratings in its first season and also readjusted its format to place Buck and his friends on a space vessel actively engaging the enemies of twenty-fifth-century Earth, another attempt to channel the
Star Trek
verve that only proved again that the past would be hard to recapture.

Battlestar Galactica
reflected less influence from
Star Trek
than from the amazingly successful
Star Wars
, although it stayed in the realm of space opera and the military-based exploration that Roddenberry used. It managed the high-quality visual effects of
Star Wars
(courtesy of John Dykstra, whose team created the miniatures for Lucas) but retained the fatalistic tone of pre-Jedi science fiction. In an unspecified century, twelve human Colonies (planets) are about to conclude a peace treaty with the robot Cylon Empire, which is actually using negotiation as a ruse to wipe out humanity. The Cylons' sneak attack destroys the entire Colonial fleet of powerful warships, except
Galactica
, led by wise Commander Adama (Lorne Greene), who manages to escape, leading a ragtag fleet of human survivors in search of a mythic refuge called Earth. Where
Star Wars
thrived on populist feel-good themes, with underdogs taking down an arrogant dictatorship,
Battlestar Galactica
portrayed a dispiriting war of attrition in which humans were steadily disadvantaged. Each episode depicts numerous Cylon ships and Colonial fighter craft destroyed in combat, the spectacle that was the show's main appeal, yet while the robotic enemy can implicitly manufacture weapons continuously, the retreating human fleet can only replace dwindling supplies of people and machines very slowly, if at all. It's an inverted Vietnam War, and “America” is the peasant guerrilla army this time.