Black Gate

I was born in 1960, so the original Star Trek was a first-run series for me. The show and its characters were constant presences during my childhood and adolescent years, first during its original broadcast on NBC from 1966 to 1969, and then in endless syndicated reruns in the years after, all the way up to the advent of the home video age, when I of course bought the series as soon as it became available.

Star Trek, even at its best (the first two years, before the disastrous third and final season, when changes in production personnel made every week a turkey shoot) was a very uneven show. Just doing an evaluative run down of the season two episode list makes it clear how different the show was from standard network fare, and how difficult it was to write well for: excellent episode, decent, excellent, one of the best, stinker, excellent, terrible, so-so, so-so, excellent, stinker, stinker… and so on.

These evaluations are naturally highly personal and different fans will have their own judgments, but I think most people who love the series will have to admit that the truncated “five-year mission” had a lot of flat tires along the way. (Stranded one hundred light-years from the nearest filling station — that’s trouble. No, wait a minute — that’s Voyager.)

Arguably this doesn’t reflect the challenges of an offbeat show like Star Trek so much as it does the grind of network television in those days, the relentless production pressures that turned the medium into what Stephen King has called “the bottomless pit of shit.” (In looking back at the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling reckoned that a third of the episodes were pretty good, a third were only fair, and a third were just terrible… and he figured that all things considered, that was a decent ratio, or at least about the best you could hope for given the limitations of a commercial medium.)

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When I first reported on the Star Trek Continues Kickstarter a few weeks ago it was newly born. This morning it’s just reached its first stretch goal, which means that not only will there be two more episodes, but the people who devote their time and energy to creating this will be building us an engineering set as well!

If this is your first time hearing about the series, follow the link above to find a wonderful take on Star Trek that may be the closest we’ll ever get to seeing new original episodes of the quality of the best of the original series.

Here’s what I said about the second episode, “Lolani,” on this very web site, although it holds true for all three of the episodes made thus far: “… it feels like a lost episode. It’s not just the sets and the effects, which are truly astonishing in their faithfulness, it’s the pacing, and the music cues, and the fadeouts, and the story beats, and the writing — and the actors. These people understand who the original characters were and inhabit them — and I swear that this script could stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest entries in the original run.”

The staff and crew aren’t getting paid for their work:iIt’s a labor of love done in their free time. Hours and hours and hours of their free time.

I hope you’ll join me in swinging by to donate money to their new Kickstarter, which you can find here. Now that they’ve hit their first stretch goal I’m hoping in the final four days of fund raising they can get enough capital to construct a planet set so they can beam down to visit strange new worlds!

If you’re skeptical about the sound of any of this, I invite you to visit the site and try out these three fine existing episodes for yourself. If you’re a fan of the original show, you’re likely to be astonished.

Live long, and prosper.