Donald, Jackie, Colin, Bill and Me

Donald Trump doesn't really care about the specifics of what he calls "The One Big, Beautiful Bill." He just wanted a win, something he could sign on the 4th of July, as a show.

I'm reminded of the 1st Rocky movie, where Duke Evers (Tony Burton) tells his fighter, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), "He doesn't know it's a damn show! He thinks it's a damn fight!"

It's all a show to Trump. As long as he can keep the show going, he can stay in power.

He doesn't care about the specifics, but he also doesn't care about how many people in the "United States of America" -- including those who voted for him, but in this case especially in rural areas -- will be hurt, and even die, as a result of the Big Ugly Bill's Medicaid cuts, all so he and his fellow filthy rich guys can have the biggest tax cut of all time.

He never cared about the people who bought his MAGA lies. As James Carville says of Republicans in general, Trump only wanted one thing from them: Their votes, to put him in power, and then to keep him in power.

*

In his autobiography, which he titled I Never Had It Made, and didn't have published until after his death, Jackie Robinson, the 1st black player in modern baseball, brought to the Brooklyn Dodgers by team president Branch Rickey, looked back on what he considered the highlight of his career: Standing on the foul line with his teammates, hearing the National Anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," at Yankee Stadium before Game 1 of the 1947 World Series. They had made it, and they had done it together.

But there's a big difference between having made it, and having it made. He compared that moment to his thoughts at his present time, 20 years later, after events showed him that America had not yet become the country his 1947 efforts suggested it could become, and after he had come to accept that the Republican Party, to which he belonged, no longer seemed to want him:

There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the National Anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands.

Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first World Series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey's drama and that I was only a principal actor.

As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the Anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

After the 2016 backlash against his kneeling during the Anthem before games, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, soon to be blacklisted (though never officially banned) from the NFL,  shared a similar sentiment:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street, and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote of a parallel world for the episode "The Omega Glory," one in which a planet developed the same way Earth did, until a nuclear war. According to Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the evidence shows that "the Asiatics won." But, in a world rendered primitive again, these "Koms," descendants of Communists, had finally, perhaps over 1,000 years later, had the tables turned, and the "Yangs," descendants of Americans or "Yankees," had won.

The Yangs had a Stars-and-Stripes, what Johnny Cash would have called a "ragged old flag," and a copy of the Constitution of the United States. But time had dulled their words: "We the People" had become "E pleb nista," and they no longer knew what "the holy words" meant. Captain James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner, a Jewish man from Canada, showed them.

Bill Shatner (left) as Kirk, and Roy Jenson as Cloud William.

Jenson was also Canadian.

On this Independence Day, let us recall that our "best words" were written for everyone, and both their protections and their responsibilities must apply to everyone, or they mean nothing. If Bill Shatner, a Jewish Canadian actor of the 20th Century, playing a 23rd Century starship captain from Iowa, can figure it out, then nearly all of us can.

But can we? Trump has divided us. Indeed, "E pleb nista" doesn't sound like "We the People," but it is reminiscent of "E pluribus unum," one of the nation's mottos. Translated from Latin, it means, "Out of many, one." Trump has turned us into a nation of about 340 million unums (unii?), with precious little pluribus.

For the last few years, the tradition in our family is to go from our hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey to see the 4th of July Parade in neighboring Milltown in the morning, and then return to Milltown in the evening for the fireworks.

I won't be doing that this time. As of this writing, I have already "missed" the Parade. I will not be attending the fireworks. I cannot stand and sing the Anthem. And I have not recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag since the Summer of 1988, when a previous Republican demagogue, George H.W. Bush, made it a club to use over the head of his Presidential election opponent, Michael Dukakis.

Through his efforts to end birthright citizenship, through his denunciations of anybody who doesn't support him, Donald Trump has divided America into patriots and MAGAs. And you cannot be both. You either love America, or you love Trump.

Three things have kept America free, and Trump has perverted all of them:

* The right to vote. If not for voter suppression in 2016 and 2024 -- and an attempt in 2020, which failed -- Trump would not have come out on top.

* Civilian control of the military: Trump has forced out the Generals who have told him what he cannot do, and he is giving unconstitutional orders.

* Separation of church and state: Trump has seen to it that there is one god, and he is it, and if you worship anyone or anything other than him, then this god will not have mercy on your soul.

News flash, one you won't see in any major American media outlet: Trump is no god. And he is President in name only. He holds the office and its powers, but he does not represent America.

In 2026, the year of the 250th Anniversary of our independence, we must elect a Congress that will hold him accountable. In 2028, we must elect a President and a Congress that will undo the damage he has done.

Until then, I can only echo what Jackie Robinson said. I know that I am a patriot in a MAGA-ruled country. In 2025, in 1988, at my birth in 1969, I know that I never had it made.

Those words in the Constitution: "They must apply to everyone! Or they mean nothing! Do you understand?"

Donald Trump does not understand, and he would not if he could.

Do you?

I can't answer that question for you.

Ranking the Star Trek Movies -- and The Wrath of Khan Is NOT #1

The other day, I ranked the Star Trek TV series. Now, I'm going to rank the movies. All 10 of them.

No. Not 13. The J.J. Abrams movies don't count. They may carry the name, but they are not Star Trek. There are four lights, and there are ten films.

Or, to put it another way: If J.J. Abrams had done the 2005 Honeymooners reboot, instead of a black cast led by Cedric the Entertainer, which didn't go over well but was, at the least, in the spirit of the original...

* Ralph Kramden would have been born on a lifeboat fleeing the Titanic. It would have made him just 4 years older than Jackie Gleason.

* Mayor Robert Wagner, inspecting the New York sewer system in 1956, would have been killed along with 30 others by a bomb planted by a Communist agent.

* Ed Norton, eating his lunch with Ralph in a City park at the time, would be traumatized by survivor's guilt, which brings back his Navy PTSD from World War II. Alice Kramden figures out that Norton actually is, as Ralph has so often said, a "mental case," and that his apparent stupidity is his suppression of his experiences.

* Inspired by Senator Joe McCarthy, Ralph and Ed come up with a "crazy harebrained scheme" to avenge the Mayor and the sewer workers, involving technology that shouldn't have happened for another 60 years (our time).

* Not only does it work, but they are hailed as heroes. Ralph wins the Mayoralty in a special election, and defeats Nelson Rockefeller for Governor in 1958.

* Free of his repressed memories and his mental block, Norton re-enlists in the Navy, and graduates from Officers' Training and Flight schools.

* In 1969, U.S. Navy Commander Edward Lillywhite Norton says, "That's one small step for a man... one giant leap for mankind!" And President Ralph Kramden makes the phone call from the White House to the astronauts, saying, "Norton, didn't I tell you, long, long ago, that you weren't just 'the man from space,' but that I was gonna send you to the Moon?"

(Ralph never threatened to send Ed to the Moon in a line that made it to air. He did do it in a line that was cut, as The Official Honeymooners Treasury showed.)

If you are a Honeymooners fan, and you find this ridiculous, you would be right. Well, that's how true Star Trek fans feel about J.J. Abrams' "Bad Reboot."

Four lights, ten films:

10. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, 1989. Okay, we got it: In Star Trek, the even-numbered movies are good; the odd-numbered movies are not. This one wasn't helped by the fact that, after Leonard Nimoy directed the 2 previous films, William Shatner wanted to direct one.

He never directed in Trek again. As time, asndthe various Trek TV series, went on, we saw episodes directed by Nimoy, his son Adam, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Avery Brooks, Alexander Siddig, René Auberjonois, Andrew Robinson, Tim Russ, Robert Duncan McNeill, Roxann Dawson and Robert Picardo. Between them, they directed 105 episodes, topped by Burton with 28. Frakes directed 21, and also directed the 8th and 9th movies. But Shatner? Never again.

Was this movie that bad? It didn't have to be. The idea of the Enterprise crew meeting God -- or someone, or something, claiming to be the God of the Bible -- had been kicked around since Trek creator Gene Roddenberry considered the 1st movie in the mid-1970s, with a project he called "The God Thing." But, when finally tried here, it was not well-executed, and, in the end, it was unsatisfying.

Seeing Spock forced to choose between his blood brother (well, half-brother), Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill), and his brother-in-arms, Kirk, was a great idea. But the campfire scene near the beginning was stupid, and so was the idea of pilot Sulu and navigator Chekov getting lost. And did we really have to turn the Enterprise-A into a joke that had yet to "earn her name"? (Of course, given a fair chance, she did earn it.)

The supporting characters? Their situations were mixed. Chekov got to sit in the Captain's chair for the 1st time. Sulu's piloting skills were on display. But Scotty was alternately terrific and silly: That bump on the head (a ripoff of a Stormtrooper scene in Star Wars) should have been beneath him, or so to speak. And Uhura, well, maybe it was exploitative for her to do a nude scene, and at age 56, Nichelle Nichols had to be in shadow. But she made it work, and it was clear she was in control of the situation.

On a scale of 0 to 10, this film had the potential to be a 9. With a bit less silliness, it could have been a 7. Instead, it was a 4. Still, it was better than any of the Abrams films. With that in mind, let's move on.

9. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979. Once people saw the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, with all its flaws, people saw Star Trek: The Original Series' red skies, papier-mâché boulders and rubber-masked aliens, and realized, "Hey, they could have done a lot better. They just didn't have the budget for it."

So when Paramount Pictures gave Gene Roddenberry the big budget to make a movie around Star Trek, he... copied 2001. The bad parts. The weird parts. The long, wordless, classical-music-backed montages that made the film at least 15 minutes longer than it needed to be. The hard-to-define enemy. The weird new lifeform at the end. And, of course, one thing 2001 didn't have: The new uniforms, described as "space pajamas."

The length, 2 hours and 12 minutes, led to this film being nicknamed Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. The trip into a "heart of darkness," and Francis Ford Coppola's also-long film earlier in the year, led to this film being nicknamed A Spockalypse Now. And V'Ger's similarity to the robotic opponent in the 1967 episode "The Changeling" led to this film being nicknamed Where Nomad Has Gone Before.

If you didn't like this movie, here's a suggestion: Just fast-forward through the montages. You'll save about 20 minutes, and the movie will be a lot better.

8. Star Trek: Insurrection, a.k.a. Star Trek IX, 1998. Yes, it's an odd-numbered movie. But the biggest problem is that it was a movie. When you wait 2 years to see the next movie, you want it to be terrific. Insurrection wasn't. Had it been a 2-part episode of ST:TNG, it would have felt a lot better.

The good parts include continuing the process, begun on Deep Space Nine (the film takes place right after the end of the Dominion War) and "completed" in Star Trek: Picard, of Starfleet drifting away from its ideals, and Jean-Luc Picard reminding them of what those ideals should be. The good parts also include some humor, Riker showing his space combat chops, the restoration of the Riker-Troi romance, and a rare but good love story for Picard.

The bad parts include a genuine threat from an enemy we had never seen before. Had we already known the Son'a, and how dangerous they could be, it would have been different. Instead, this was their introduction, so it was like, "Who the hell are these guys?" And since DS9 was coming to an end, Voyager was still in the Delta Quadrant, and Picard hasn't yet mentioned them, we've never seen them again. So it's like, "How big of a threat can they be?" So this was a very unsatisfying film.

7. Star Trek: Nemesis, a.k.a. Star Trek X, 2002. The last of the TNG crew films (so far) seemed to break the pattern: It was an even-numbered film, and it was horrible. That's the conventional wisdom.

Well, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Just as The Search for Spock, Generations and Insurrection are better than they get credit for, so is Nemesis. The big argument against this film is Data's "death" (a word that, after Picard, we can now put in quotation marks). People hated it. They tend to overlook that it is a sacrifice comparable to Spock's in The Wrath of Khan, completing the arc of the character being TNG's analogue to Spock, even if Spock had spent much of his life rejecting Data's quest to be more human.

The crew of the Enterprise-E is facing a threat that is even worse than that of Khan, the TOS-era Klingons, or the Borg, and more intentional and insidious than the comparable one posed by V'Ger: Total annihilation at the hands of renegade Romulans. And, with a great deal of thought and ingenuity -- including Picard mirroring Riker in "The Best of Both Worlds" by out-thinking a "Picard" who claims to know his every move -- they beat it. I liked this movie, even with Data's "death" giving it something of a downbeat ending.

6. Star Trek: Generations, a.k.a. Star Trek VII, 1994. As the baton was handed off to the Next Generation crew, the Roman numerals were dropped, so this would not be officially known as Star Trek VII.

Seeing that the new Enterprise-B was commanded by Captain John Harriman, and that he was played by Alan Ruck, only 8 years removed from playing Cameron Frye, the neurosis-saddled best friend in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, one could be forgiven for thinking of a catchphrase from Star Wars: "I've got a bad feeling about this!" And we never did see Harriman redeem himself. (I'm choosing to not accept the 2006 fanmade miniseries Star Trek: Of Gods and Men as canon.)

Of the original crew, only Shatner (Kirk), James Doohan (Scotty) and Walter Koenig (Chekov) agreed to return, although Jacqueline Kim played Ensign Demora Sulu, taking her father's place as Helm Officer of the Enterprise. The story leading to what appeared to be Kirk's death was a good one, even if it made Harriman and his crew look weak by comparison. (Certainly, they were, through little fault of their own, grossly under-prepared.)

We jumped 78 years to see... a "tall ship" named Enterprise, sailing on the ocean, manned by Picard and his senior officers, dressed as Napoleonic Era sailors? Holy Holodeck, Batman! Okay, it was cute, now get on with the story.

The movie tries to be TWOK, by making both Picard and Kirk alternately cheat death and face death. And this ends up not working. It makes Dr. Tolian Soran, the villain played by Patrick Stewart's fellow West Yorkshireman Malcolm McDowell, somewhat sympathetic, while reminding us that he is still incredibly evil and must be stopped. But the fact that it takes Kirk and Picard, Starfleet's 2 greatest Captains ever -- we didn't yet know about Jonathan Archer -- to do it is wrecked by how clumsily it was carried out.

And Kirk's death scene was really unworthy of the character, right down to the dumb joke it inspired: "After all the times there was the Captain on the Bridge, we had the bridge on the Captain."

There was a warning in this film, though, even if it took 26 years for us to realize it. Kirk tells Picard never to give up the Captain's chair on the Enterprise: "While you're there, you can make a difference!" As we have now seen in Star Trek: Picard, 14 years after that sequence (from his perspective), he gave up that chair, in order to make a new difference, and it didn't work, and he fell into a depression that lasted another 14 years, before the events of the new show.

Does that retroactive warning carry resonance now? Absolutely. Does it make this film better? Slightly. Enough to make it a good film? Well, it's not a bad film. But it could have been considerably better.

5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 1984. After the box-office and emotional success of TWOK, this was going to be a letdown, no matter what, even if we all knew that Spock was going to be restored to life by the end. Although we didn't expect the destruction of the Constitution-class USS Enterprise, which, if you think about it, was the greatest character in Star Trek, over even Kirk and Spock.

(Unlike the death of Spock, a twist every bit as big as finding out that Darth Vader was actually Luke Skywalker's father 2 years earlier, that gut-punch had not been leaked before the release. Promos said, "Join us, for the final voyage of the Enterprise." But we didn't expect to see the old girl blown up.)

And there were some ridiculous things. The "katra" concept, the deus ex machina idea that went on to restore Spock's life. The alien with whom McCoy tries to negotiate a ride to the Genesis Planet. Killing off Dr. David Marcus (Merritt Buttrick), the brilliant young scientist that Kirk found out in the previous film was his son. Kirk's reaction, "You Klingon bastard, you killed my son!" The fight between Kirk and Klingon Commander Kruge. And the Vulcan priestesses wearing what appear to be negligees. Given the usual modest dress of Vulcans, this was, as the saying goes, highly illogical.

And Christopher Lloyd, as Kruge, trying to out-ham Shatner, which even Ricardo Montalban hadn't been able to do, though God knows he tried. I have to admit, it produced a great exchange: Kirk: "Look around you! This planet is destroying itself!" Kruge: "Yes! Exhilarating, isn't it?" Surely, that role, rather than that of Jim Ignatowski on Taxi, was what got Lloyd cast as Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future.

But this movie gets a bit of a bad rap. While Chekov got to scream in each of the 1st 2 movies, and he had a big role in TWOK, most of the supporting cast had pretty much been little more than that: Supporting. This time, Scotty, Sulu, and even Uhura got to be a part of the heroic process. As Spock's father, Ambassador Sarek, Mark Lenard had great interactions with Kirk and the Vulcan elder T'Lar, played by the legendary Judith Anderson.

And, of course, continuing the theme of TWOK, Kirk is still facing the consequences of his various actions over the years, and facing death as never before. "At what cost?" Sarek asks. "Your ship. Your son." But Kirk understands, illogical though it may be: "If I hadn't, the cost would have been my soul."

TSFS was a letdown, but it is not a bad movie.

4. Star Trek: First Contact, a.k.a. Star Trek VIII, 1996. Not only is this easily the best of the films with the Next Generation crew, it is their Wrath of Khan, because it forces Picard to deal with his experiences with the Borg. They hurt him more deeply than Kirk had been hurt by anything, even his previous experiences with personal defeat and personal loss.

And watching Dr. Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard) show him that he's turning into Moby-Dick's Captain Ahab, followed by him showing her that Ahab was fighting for personal vengeance and that he's fighting for that and more, showed Patrick Stewart at his finest.

Showing the aftermath of the Star Trek Chronology's World War III -- a nuclear exchange in 2053 resulting in 600 million dead, as opposed to Spock's earlier claim that the war killed 37 million, or roughly half as many as actually died in the real-life World War II -- leading to the 1st Warp 1 flight finally gave Star Trek an "origin story."

That was nice, but at a horrible cost. Would Gene Roddenberry, who had died 5 years before the film's release, have accepted that such a cataclysm was needed to bring humanity together to achieve such a utopia? Only he knew for sure.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the film centered around the Borg Queen's attempt at the psychological seduction of Data. She was willing to give him what he said he always wanted, the chance to be fully human. He saw through that, knowing that anyone who served the Borg could not be human at all, let alone fully human.

But, more than that, he showed that, because he wasn't fully human, he was incorruptible. Maybe he was better off, no matter what he wanted. Certainly, the people of the Federation were better off for him not being fully human.

3. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982. What? Not Number 1? No. I will explain.

The stakes for this film were huge, after the failure of ST:TMP. Director Nicholas Meyer liked the idea of revisiting "Space Seed," an episode of the original series, in which Ricardo Montalban played Khan Noonien Singh, a threat from the late 20th Century. (UPDATE: The later series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds moved Khan's reign up to the mid-21st Century.) (A long story, in more ways than one.) Kirk thought he had ended Khan's threat.

He was wrong, and he has to confront that threat aboard the Enterprise, with mixed results. Part of the dynamic of this film is that, unlike in the 1967 episode, where Kirk and Khan physically fought, Shatner and Montalban were never together, only communicating across reaches of space, including Shatner's iconic "Khaaaan!" yell -- which, as we would soon learn, was a ruse.

Even more iconic is Spock's sacrifice, which becomes one of the greatest death scenes ever filmed, in any genre: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." And one of the greatest funeral scenes ever filmed, with Kirk's eulogy for his First Officer and best friend followed by Scotty playing "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes as a prelude to Spock's body, with a photon torpedo tube serving as his coffin, being fired onto the Genesis Planet.

The theme of the movie is the changing of Kirk's character. All through the 3 seasons of the original series, and the 1st movie, he's a bold, sometimes even reckless, commander, a man who once proudly (in "By Any Other Name") proclaimed, "Risk is our business." And, because Hollywood, especially 1960s TV, trucked in happy endings, he always got away with it.

In this film, it's even mentioned that the Kobayashi Maru scenario, a test of character given to Cadets at Starfleet Academy, an example of which begins the film, had only been beaten once, about 30 years earlier, by Kirk himself. He reveals that he cheated.

He had always cheated death. He had never truly faced death, until losing Spock -- "No, not like this," he admits. He had lost his time-displacement girlfriend Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) in the episode "The City On the Edge of Forever." He had lost his amnesia-induced wife Miramanee (Sabrina Scharf) in the episode "The Paradise Syndrome." But he had only known those women a short time. He had known Spock for at least 20 years by this point, and they had become as close as brothers.

Clearly, if it had been himself making the sacrifice, whatever physical pain he felt, the sense of loss would have been less than it was with Spock. Finally, after 30 or so years in Starfleet, the bill for Kirk's successful gambling with life and death had come due.

That is what makes TWOK, for so many Trekkies, the greatest film of all: Not just the great story, and the great adventure, against the man that Spock, in Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness, would describe as "the most dangerous enemy the Enterprise ever faced"; but the development of Kirk's character, and Spock's, too. It was a recognition that Spock was truly the more popular character, and also a recognition that Kirk had done so much, and had faced so little hardship, and now had to face it.

Of course, this isn't true. Anyone who saw the 2nd pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," knows that not only did his original First Officer, Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood), die, but that Kirk had to kill Mitchell himself. Anyone who saw the episode "Obsession" knows that Kirk bore some guilt over an incident on the USS Farragut 11 years earlier. Anyone who saw the episode "Operation: Annihilate!" saw Kirk find the dead bodies of his brother Sam and his sister-in-law Aurelan, and almost also lose his nephew Peter.

And he lost a lot of crewmen: The fanmade series Star Trek Continues, which pretended to finish the five-year mission, had Kirk, played by series creator and main writer Vic Mignogna, admit that he'd lost 73 people under his command in those 5 years, a number that was about to rise to 75.

So it's not really fair to say that Kirk "never had to face death." In fact, when he had to sacrifice the Enterprise late in TSFS, he asks, "My God, Bones, what have I done?" McCoy tells him, "What you had to do, what you've always done: You've turned death into a fighting chance to live."

Which is what Spock did near the end of TWOK. Half-human and half-Vulcan, he was able to reconcile his human need to save his crewmates with his Vulcan way of figuring out the most logical way to do it. Kirk understood: "Of my friend, I can only say this: Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human." That line, and the sacrifice that inspired it, were both so great, the guy who runs the YouTube page CinemaSins took "sin points" off for both.

So, yes, TWOK is a great movie, not just a great Star Trek movie or a great science fiction movie. But, I submit to you, that it is not the best Star Trek movie.

2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 1986. Concluding the trilogy that began with TWOK, Star Trek has an adventure where they travel back in time, to what was then our present. The producers always liked that, because it allowed them to use already-present studio sets and location shots, and save money on set building and special effects. (This had previously been done with "Miri," with Spock saying the parallel world looked like Earth would have in 1960; "Assignment: Earth," set in 1968; and "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," set in 1969.)

It was fun watching the Enterprise's "Magnificent Seven" struggle with our era: The need for money, the struggle with public transportation, the need to solve their 23rd Century problem with 20th Century materials and methods, and Kirk eating pizza (crust-first) and drinking beer, as if those things aren't still around in the late 23rd Century. (Surely, they were.)

The environmental message was a bit preachy, especially in the Reagan Eighties. But, you know what, we needed to be preached to. We'd spent 2 movies watching Kirk deal with the consequences of his actions over 30 years. And even if we hadn't, we deserved to have Kirk, Spock, and marine biologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) lecture us on how to deal with the consequences of our actions over 300 years.

Finally, we got something we didn't get in any of the 1st 3 Trek films: A very satisfying ending. TMP's ending was weird, TWOK's was depressing (if fitting), and TSFS's was half-uplifting and half-depressing. It had been 27 years since Star Trek gave us a definitive, no "Yeah, but... " win for the good guys. And we got it.

How good was this movie? My grandmother, who was already 42 years old when Star Trek debuted in 1966, was not a fan of the show. But even she liked this movie. It may not have been better-made than TWOK in terms of writing, drama or special effects, but it didn't have to be better-made. It was better.

It also established the pattern, which held until 2002: In Star Trek, the even-numbered movies are good; the odd-numbered movies, not so much.

1. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, 1991. Designed to be the valedictory for the original crew, this is the best Trek film of them all. It was a story worthy of the man quoted throughout its script, William Shakespeare.

Like TWOK, Kirk has to face the consequences of his actions. And, by now, we were into the 5th season of The Next Generation, so we knew that we had to reconcile some things, including the fact that, by the time that show began -- 71 years after the events of this movie -- the Klingon Empire had ceased to be the Federation's marquee enemy. And, being the original series' analogue for the Soviet Union, we had an allegory for that country's collapse and reform into the Russian Federation, and the end of the Cold War.

But, just as some people didn't want the Cold War to end, so, too, were there people -- on at least 3 sides, as it turned out, counting the Romulan Empire, the original series' analogue for Red China -- who had an interest in the Federation-Klingon conflict continuing.

That could have been done in a very hackneyed way. But, with Nicholas Meyer, director of TWOK, returning to direct, and also writing the screenplay with Denny Martin Flinn (and contributions by Nimoy), they avoided the pitfalls, and forged a great story.

This movie had, if not "it all," then, a lot. A detective story. A prison break. Redemption for TSFS's maligned USS Excelsior, now commanded by Captain Hikaru Sulu (finally getting a command and a first name). DeForest Kelley as McCoy and George Takei as Sulu each giving the best performance of his career. Great performances as Klingons by David Warner and Shatner's old friend from Shakespeare productions in their shared hometown of Montreal, Christopher Plummer. A thrilling space battle. A good resolution of the film's underlying conflict. And a fine "commencement address" by Shatner at the end.

The Undiscovered County, not The Wrath of Khan, is the best Star Trek film.

Fascinating Star Trek Trivia

March 29, 1968, 50 years ago: Star Trek airs the episode "Assignment: Earth." Robert Lansing plays Gary Seven, an interstellar "James Bond" (or, if you prefer, "Jim Phelps" of Mission: Impossible, which would later include Trek's Leonard Nimoy), whose alien superiors have given him technological knowledge far beyond that of a 20th Century human.

Lansing would be the only guest star to be mentioned in the opening credits of a Trek episode, rather than in the closing credits. A young Teri Garr (misspelled "Terri" in the closing credits) plays his unwitting assistant, a young Secretary named Roberta Lincoln.

This was supposed to be the backdoor pilot for a show featuring Gary and Roberta, as Trek creator Gene Roddenberry thought the show was about to be canceled, and he thought he needed a fallback show.

It turned out to be the other way around: Assignment: Earth was not picked up, and, after initially canceling it, NBC acceded to the wishes of the show's ardent fans, and brought Star Trek back for a 3rd season.

In this episode, Nimoy, as Spock, tells Captain James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner, "Current Earth crises would fill a tape bank, Captain. There will be an important assassination today, an equally dangerous government coup in Asia, and, this could be highly critical, the launching of an orbital nuclear warhead platform by the United States, countering a similar launch by other powers."

Just 6 days after the episode aired, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and a malfunction resulted in the failure of the unmanned Apollo 6 mission. Indeed, the footage used for this episode’s fictional missile launch was of a previous unmanned mission, Apollo 4.

So we have a definitive date for this episode, the only one of the 23rd or 24th Century Star Trek series for which this is true. Even "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" – in the past for this crew but the future for the world below – gets no more specific than that "next Wednesday" will be the launch of the 1st mission to land men on the Moon, and the launch of Apollo 11 did take place on a Wednesday, July 16, 1969.

The deviation from the history that we know is on the coup in Asia: The closest parallel was the "17 July Revolution" in Iraq, 3 months later, in which Saddam Hussein ended up second-in-command.

Also on March 29, 1968: Lucille Frances Ryan is born in Auckland, New Zealand. We know her by the stage name she took after her first marriage: Lucy Lawless. The former star of Xena: Warrior Princess, now appearing on Ash vs. Evil Dead, has never appeared in any form of Star Trek, but she did play a Cylon in the rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica.

*

We are now in the process of celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek -- specifically, what is now usually called Star Trek: The Original Series (or ST:TOS): September 8, 1966 to June 3, 1969.

This trivia is limited to TOS, and doesn't include Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-74), the movies (1979-94), or appearances by the TOS characters in later series (as very old people or in flashbacks):

* James T. Kirk (William Shatner) defeated a seemingly unbeatable computer in 6 episodes: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", "The Return of the Archons," "The Changeling," "The Apple," "The Ultimate Computer" and "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." ("That Which Survives" doesn't count.)

* Kirk got his shirt ripped in 8 episodes: "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (the 2nd pilot), "The Naked Time," "Miri," "Court Martial," "Shore Leave," "Arena," "Amok Time" and "The Gamesters of Triskelion." But only in "The Savage Curtain" was damage done to his pants.

* Spock (Leonard Nimoy) said the word "fascinating" 74 times, plus once more in each of the 1st 2 movies, and once more in the Next Generation episode "Unification, Part II." Zachary Quinto used it once in the despicable J.J. Abrams reboot. Data (Brent Spiner) used it once on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but his early use of "intriguing" didn't catch on. Tuvok (Tim Russ) used "fascination" once on Star Trek: Voyager.

* In contrast, only 35 times did Spock use the word "illogical." And it wasn't until "The Omega Glory" that he used the specific phrase "highly illogical."

* The phrase "Live long and prosper" was used 4 times: By Spock in "Assignment: Earth" and "Is There in Truth No Beauty?"; by T'Pau in "Amok Time"; and by the simulation of Surak in "The Savage Curtain."

* Spock performed the Vulcan salute 7 times, the Vulcan nerve pinch 12 times, and the Vulcan mind meld 7 times -- including in "The Enterprise Incident," when he used it to fool Romulans into thinking he had killed Kirk with a "Vulcan death grip." The alternate (but not evil) Spock used it on McCoy in "Mirror, Mirror."

* Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley) made 15 mentions of being a doctor, but only used the specific words, "I'm a doctor, not a... " 5 times: A bricklayer in "The Devil in the Dark," an escalator in "Friday's Child," a mechanic in "The Doomsday Machine," an engineer in "Mirror, Mirror" (to which chief engineer Montgomery Scott, played by James Doohan, responded, "Now, you're an engineer"), and a coal miner in "The Empath."

He never used it in any of the movies, although Karl Urban used it once in each of the 3 films in the Abrams reboot. As a kid, I had a 45 RPM record of a comic-book-style story, titled "Passage to Maouv," in which the actor voicing McCoy said, "I'm a doctor, not an animal trainer!"

McCoy also said, "I'm a surgeon, not a psychiatrist" in "The City On the Edge of Forever," although he was said to be an expert in space psychology in "Court-Martial." He used his status as a doctor to compare himself with a moon shuttle conductor in "The Corbomite Maneuver," an officer of the line in "A Taste of Armageddon," a physicist in "Metamorphosis," a magician in "The Deadly Years," a flesh peddler in "Return to Tomorrow," and a mechanic in "The Empath."

And, in "Amok Time," after McCoy kept answering questions about Spock's condition with, "I don't know," Kirk asked, "You keep saying that. Are you a doctor, or aren't you?"

The phrase was never used on The Next Generation -- not by Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), Katherine Pulaski (Diana Muldaur), or anyone else. But it was used once by Phlox (John Billingsley) on Enterprise, used a few times by Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) on Deep Space Nine, and was beaten to death by The Doctor (Robert Picardo) on Voyager.

But the phrase goes back further than we thought. Like Nimoy and Doohan, Kelley appeared on the Western Bonanza, in his case 4 times. In the 1962 episode "The Decision," he played a doctor, Michael Jons (not "Jones"), in jail but currently the only man who could save the life of an injured Hoss Cartwright (Dan Blocker). Hoss' father, Ben (Lorne Greene), reminds him, "You're a doctor." Jons says, "I'm not a doctor, I'm a condemned murderer!" In a stunning coincidence, John Hoyt, who played Dr. Philip Boyce in "The Cage," plays a judge in that episode. In an even bigger coincidence, the name of the newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada -- and this was true in real life, too -- was the Territorial Enterprise.

Before that, in 1955, Kelley appeared in an episode of The Millionaire, titled "The Iris Millar Story." He played a doctor, Michael Wells, the boyfriend of the titular character, an ambitious career woman (Virginia Grey). She wants to use the money to help him build his practice so he can attract richer clients and become a man of influence. He tells her, "I am a doctor, not a politician."

And in 1933, Etienne Girardot played Dr. Doremus, a medical examiner, in the film The Kennel Murder Case. He tells the film's protagonist, private detective Philo Vance (William Powell), "I'm a doctor, not a magician." Moments later, he tells Vance, "I'm a doctor, not a detective."

* McCoy pronounced 23 people (and Tribbles, "a lot of them") dead, but he only used the specific phrase, "He's dead, Jim" 5 times: For Crewman Darnell in "The Man Trap," the unicorn dog in "The Naked Time," Scotty in "The Changeling" (Nomad had killed him, but then restored him to life), Prefect Hengist of Argelius II in "Wolf In the Fold" (an episode that also featured McCoy saying the only 2 examples of, "She's dead, Jim," of Kara the Argelian dancer and Lieutenant Karen Tracy), and Dr. Larry Marvick in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"

Of Dr. Tristan Adams in "Dagger of the Mind" and Starnes in "And the Children Shall Lead"), McCoy says, "He's dead, Captain." On 3 occasions, he pronounced someone dead as a ruse: In "Amok Time" and "The Enterprise Incident" with Kirk, and in "I, Mudd" with Scotty. And in "Spectre of the Gun," he thought Chekov was dead, but he turned out to be wrong.

* Bones never said, "Damn it" until the movies; that became a trope later on. The show aired in the late 1960s, and censors had different standards then. The only word even closely fitting the definition of a profanity in the entire series was uttered by Kirk, and the producers had to fight the censors to keep it: At the end of "The City On the Edge of Forever," he said, through his grief and trauma over losing Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) in order to preserve the timeline, "Let's get the hell out of here."

And at the end of "Bread and Circuses," he said of the planet whose parallel development to Earth differed by having the Roman Empire survive into the 20th Century, Kirk says, "Caesar and Christ, they had them both." But he used the title "Christ" as an identifier of the historical figure, not as an exclamation.

* Scotty frequently dropped Scottish words like "lad," "lass," "bonny" and "a wee bit," and called the engines "my poor bairns" in "By Any Other Name." Responding to a troublesome situation in "A Taste of Armageddon," he said, "Aye, the haggis is in the fire for sure." In "The Naked Time," he said, "I can't change the laws of physics!" But he never said, "I'm givin' her all she's got!"

* Hikaru Sulu was absent for several episodes in the 2nd season (1967-68), because George Takei was filming the John Wayne film The Green Berets.

* Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) confused things for "Russian inwentions" 6 times: The discovery of Sherman's Planet, the development of quatrotriticale, and Scotch whisky ("It was inwented by a little old lady in Leningrad!"), all in "The Trouble With Tribbles"; the phrase "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" in "Friday's Child"; the Cheshire cat for a creature from Minsk (which is actually in Belarus) in "Who Mourns for Adonais?"; and the Garden of Eden with "just outside Moscow" in "The Apple." In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, he said that Cinderella was an "ancient Russian story." (Variations on it go back to ancient Greece, but the story as we know it goes back to Naples, Italy in 1634.)

* Leningrad, of course, had its name changed back to St. Petersburg in 1991, but no one knew that would happen when the episode aired in 1967, or when Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (which also mentioned Leningrad) premiered in 1986.

* Nobody, in any version of Star Trek, small or large screen, ever spoke the specific words, "Beam me up, Scotty." Kirk did say, "Beam me up, Mr. Spock" at the end of "The Squire of Gothos," but it was usually, "(number of people) to beam up," or something like that. The closest call was in Star Trek IV, when Kirk said, "Scotty, beam me up" -- not the other way around.

* Time travel was used in 5 episodes: "All Our Yesterdays" (to about 3000 BC and about AD 1700, albeit on a planet other than Earth), "The City On the Edge of Forever" (to 1930), "Assignment: Earth" (to 1968), "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" (to 1969), and "The Naked Time" (back 3 days). It's worth noting that, while "Assignment: Earth" took place after "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" from the Enterprise crew's perspective, the past sequence took place over a year before.

* Not the same thing, but worlds that seemed to be parallels of Earth's past were visited in 8 episodes: "Who Mourns for Adonais?" and "Plato's Stepchildren" (in each case, ancient Greece), "The Return of the Archons" (it looked like the late 19th Century), "Spectre of the Gun" (1881), "A Piece of the Action" (the late 1920s), "Patterns of Force" (the early 1940s), "Bread and Circuses" (it appeared to be the 1950s) and "Miri" (Spock estimated the world to be at around 1960).

So that's 13 episodes, and you can guess why it was done so often: It was cheaper to use mid-20th Century buildings already standing on the Paramount lot as sets. Indeed, Paramount used the same sets they used for Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show. In "The City On the Edge of Forever," Shatner and Collins can be seen walking past a building with "Floyd's Barber Shop" written on it.

Time travel was also used in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Later crews had their shares of time travel and, with the holodeck, simulations thereof.

* The Klingons appeared 7 times: "Errand of Mercy," "Friday's Child," "The Trouble With Tribbles," "A Private Little War," "Elaan of Troyius," "Day of the Dove" and "The Savage Curtain."

* The Romulans appeared 3 times: "Balance of Terror" (meaning they debuted onscreen before the Klingons did), "The Deadly Years" (in that case, only their ships were shown, not their people) and "The Enterprise Incident."

* The Orions were mentioned in "Journey to Babel," but the only actual Orion was disguised as an Andorian. That episode introduced the blue-skinned, antennae-crowned Andorians, the piglike Tellarites, and Spock's parents, Vulcan Ambassador Sarek and his human wife, Amanda Grayson.

* An "Orion slave girl" appeared in only one episode, "Whom Gods Destroy." Her name was Marta, and she was played by former Batgirl Yvonne Craig. Vina (Susan Oliver) was depicted as one in the original pilot, "The Cage," and the footage was re-used for "The Menagerie," but she wasn't actually one of them.

And, contrary to Eddie Murphy's classic routine, Kirk never actually had sex with Marta, or any other "green bitch," though he did kiss her, and Marta, delusional, called Kirk "my lover" to Captain -- excuse me, Lord Garth (Steve Ihnat).

* So how many times did Kirk get "a piece of the action"? Split into passive and aggressive forms, his aggressive form tried to rape Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) in "The Enemy Within." In addition, he kissed former girlfriends in "Dagger of the Mind," "Court Martial" and (sort of) "Shore Leave." He also had a very unromantic reunion with a former girlfriend in "Turnabout Intruder."

He also kissed women in "The City On the Edge of Forever," "Mirror, Mirror," "Catspaw," "A Private Little War," "Return to Tomorrow," "By Any Other Name," "Bread and Circuses," "Plato's Stepchildren" (Shatner and Nichelle Nichols, playing Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, had the 1st interracial lip-lock on U.S. prime-time TV), "Wink of an Eye," "Elaan of Troyius," the aforementioned "Whom Gods Destroy," "The Mark of Gideon" and "Requiem for Methuselah." So that's 17 women he kissed, averaging better than 1 in every 5 episodes.

But only in "Bread and Circuses" (with the Roman slave Drusilla) and "The Paradise Syndrome" (he married Miramanee, who later told him, "I bear your child") was it implied that Kirk had sex during the episode. (This being the 1960s, NBC couldn't actually show such a scene.)

Miramanee (Sabrina Scharf) did not use the word "pregnant." McCoy used it to describe the Tribbles. But he (or, rather, episode writer David Gerrold -- who later came out as gay, and thus should have known better even then) goofed: He said they were "bisexual," when the word should have been "asexual," meaning reproducing without the use of a partner. That may have been the 1st time the word "bisexual" was used on U.S. prime-time TV. Which leads to this:

* Despite the presence of Takei, Roger C. Carmel (who played Harry Mudd), and other actors later known to be gay, no character on TOS would have been depicted as such. But it has been retroactively suggested as such for Mudd (it would explain the earring, why he didn't seem to be affected by his charges' pheromones in "Mudd's Women," and why he hated his wife Stella in "I, Mudd"), and for Captain R.M. Merik and Proconsul Claudius Marcus in "Bread and Circuses." (The Proconsul said the matters of men would not concern Merik.)

And, in 2008, the fanmade series Star Trek: New Voyages showed Kirk's nephew Peter recovered from his attack in "Operation: Annihilate!" to become an Enterprise security officer and have a gay relationship -- both made problematic by the character's age. Craig Huxley was 12 when he originally played the character in 1967; Bobby Rice was 25 when he first played the role in New Voyages, which seemed to be taking place only 2, maybe 3 years later.

* Married during the course of the show's run were an amnesiac Kirk in "The Paradise Syndrome" and McCoy in "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." Kirk was subsequently widowed, and McCoy's marriage was soon annulled. Spock was supposed to be married in "Amok Time," but T'Pring (Arlene Martel) had other ideas.

And "Balance of Terror" began with Kirk presiding over the wedding of Lieutenant Robert Tomlinson (Stephen Mines) and Ensign Angela Martine (Barbara Baldavin), but the ceremony was interrupted, it was never completed, and Tomlinson died in the battle. Kirk never did get to perform a ship captain's prerogative of presiding over a wedding.

* Harry Mudd was the only specific antagonist seen twice, in "Mudd's Women" and "I, Mudd." He made a 3rd appearance in the Animated Series episode "Mudd's Passion." Otherwise, every episode was "self-contained": You didn't have to have seen any previous episode to understand the one you were watching at the time.

William Campbell was one of several guest actors who appeared twice, in his case as Squire Trelane in "The Squire of Gothos" and as Klingon Captain Koloth in "The Trouble With Tribbles." Koloth and Kirk certainly acted as though they had dealt with each other before (perhaps as a nod to Campbell's previous appearance), and Koloth was intended as a regular foil for Kirk, but he never appeared on the show again.

John Colicos was the 1st Klingon commander shown, as Kor in "Errand of Mercy." Michael Ansara, then married to I Dream of Jeannie star Barbara Eden, played Kang in "Day of the Dove." Colicos, Ansara and Campbell reprised their roles, with full ridge-headed makeup, as old Klingons in an episode of Deep Space Nine, "Blood Oath."

* There were 55 characters who died on the show, including 28 red-shirted officers, 8 in gold, and 7 in blue. Dead or doomed "redshirts" have become an Internet meme. There's the joke about how a Redshirt met a Stormtrooper from Star Wars, and the Stormtrooper fired and missed, and the Redshirt died anyway.

Then there's this one, invoking George R.R. Martin's willingness to kill any character on Game of Thrones:

* Kirk appeared to have been killed and revived in "Amok Time," "The Enterprise Incident" and "The Tholian Web." So did McCoy in "Shore Leave," Scotty in "The Changeling" and Chekov in "Spectre of the Gun."

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame NBC for Canceling Star Trek

L to R: James Doohan as Scotty, Walter Koenig as Chekov,

DeForest Kelley as McCoy, Majel Barrett as Chapel,

William Shatner as Kirk, Nichelle Nichols as Uhura,

Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and George Takei as Sulu.

September 8, 1966, 50 years ago today: The TV series Star Trek first airs on NBC, with the episode "The Man Trap" -- a.k.a. "The Space Vampire."

Here's the affiliates you could have watched it on, if you were in what would now be considered a "major league" city (note that not all of these are still NBC affiliates, or operating under the same call letters):

* Channel 2: WGRZ, Buffalo; WSB, Atlanta; KPRC, Houston; KUTV, Salt Lake City

* Channel 3: KYW, Philadelphia; WKYC, Cleveland; KSNV, Las Vegas; KCRA, Sacramento

* Channel 4: WNBC, New York; WRC, Washington; WBZ, Boston; WDIV, Detroit; WTMJ, Milwaukee; WSMV, Nashville; WDAF, Kansas City, KFOR, Oklahoma City; WOAI, San Antonio; KCNC, Denver; KNBC, Los Angeles; KRON, San Francisco

* Channel 5: WLTW, Cincinnati; WMC, Memphis; WMAQ, Chicago; KSDK, St. Louis; KXAS, Dallas; KING, Seattle

* Channel 6: WFBM, Indianapolis; WDSU, New Orleans

* Channel 7: WSVN, Miami

* Channel 8: WFLA, Tampa; KGW, Portland, Oregon

* Channel 9: WSOC, Charlotte

* Channel 10: KGTV, San Diego

* Channel 11: WBAL, Baltimore; WIIC, Pittsburgh, WTVD, Raleigh

* Channel 12: WTLV, Jacksonville; KPNX, Phoenix

The series depicted the USS Enterprise, a Starfleet starship with a crew of 430, representing the United Federation of Planets, a galactic version of the United Nations, headquartered on Earth, at some unspecified point in the future.

Since they didn't want to be locked into an exact time, they obscured this with the clever use of "Stardates." Despite at least 2 episodes suggesting that the series took place around 200 years later, later series would place it 300 years in the future -- i.e., the 1st episode took place in the year 2266.

The ship's mission -- partly invoking the late President John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" -- was written by series creator Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), a former combat pilot in World War II and Los Angeles police officer, who pitched it to the network as "Wagon Train to the stars," in essence a Western in space. But with his ship's Captain, he was inspired by C.S. Forester's novels about Captain Horatio Hornblower, and he liked to call his adventures "Hornblower in space." Here is the mission, written by Roddenberry, and recited near the start of each episode by William Shatner:

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 civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, Patrick Stewart, playing the Captain of the 24th Century edition of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, adjusted it to say, "Its continuing mission" and the gender-non-specific "where no one has gone before!" Since Stewart is British, and Shatner is Canadian and thus has the British influence on language, they pronounced "civilizations" as "Siv-il-igh-zay-shuns," instead of "Siv-il-iz-ay-shuns," as Boston-born Leonard Nimoy, as Spock, said it in the movies.

The main cast:

* William Shatner (born 1931 and still alive at this writing), as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Commanding Officer. (The 2nd pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," shows his middle initial as R., but this was changed.) At the time, Kirk was said to be the youngest starship captain in Starfleet history, but a list of his commendations in the episode "Court-Martial" shows his heroism to already be long-established. His idealism and his devotion to duty occasionally come into conflict, but he always ends up doing the right thing.

He needs both Spock for his logic and McCoy for his humanity. His devotion to his crew leads to some unorthodox thinking, which always works. And women of all kinds, human and otherwise, find him irresistible -- and vice versa. (Despite Eddie Murphy's comedy routine, he did not actually go beyond kissing a green woman. At least, not onscreen.)

* Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015), as Commander Spock, First Officer and Science Officer. (He had a first name, but he said the human mouth "couldn't pronounce it.") A native of the planet Vulcan, the son of the planet's Ambassador to the Federation and his human wife, he (as we would say today) self-identified as Vulcan, and worked toward their philosophy of seeking logic and repressing emotion, but struggled with his human half: "I survive it, because my intellect wins out over both." In spite of his detachment from emotion, he and Kirk confirmed to an outsider that they viewed each other as "brothers."

* DeForest Kelley (1920-1999), as Lieutenant Commander Leonard H. McCoy (it is never said what the H. stands for), Chief Medical Officer. From Georgia (the American State, not the former Soviet "republic"), his devotion to science is every bit as strong as Spock's, but his emotional outlook is a counterweight to Spock's logic. While they admire each other, they often argue.

Kirk calls him "Bones," short for "Sawbones," an old term for a doctor. The censors of the 1960s would never have let him say, "Damn it, man," or, "Damn it, Jim," as later portrayals of the character have,but, on 7 separate occasions during the series, he does say, or say a variation on, "I'm a doctor, not a (fill in the blank)!"

* James Doohan (1920-2005), as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Edward Scott, Chief Engineer. From Aberdeen, Scotland, "Scotty" thinks of the Enterprise as his baby, and will do anything to protect it and its reputation. Fortunately, he might be the smartest human on board, and, as both engineer and as acting commanding officer when Kirk and Spock are down on a planet, he got the ship out of some serious jams.

The stereotypical Scotty line is, "I'm givin' it all she's got," but I don't think he ever said that during any of the show's 79 episodes. And the stereotypical line spoken to him, by Kirk, is, "Beam me up, Scotty," but that was never said, either. Usually, it was, "Energize," or, "(Number of personnel) to beam up."

* Nichelle Nichols (born 1932 and still alive), as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, Chief of Communications. (Her first name was never mentioned on the show. Despite lots of speculation, it was never confirmed until the 2009 reboot.) Although her specific place of origin has never been mentioned, she said that Swahili was her native language, thus suggesting she was born and raised in Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda in East Africa.

While a horribly underused character, and unfairly relegated to the role of the ship's "telephone operator" (a stereotypical job for women up until the 1970s), the fact that she was both a woman and a black person among the ship's senior officers, and didn't take any crap from anyone, was revolutionary for the 1960s. Indeed, in the episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion," she successfully fought off a rape attempt by a much larger man.

As Nichols had a professional music background, she was allowed to sing in 3 episodes. Despite having to wear a skimpy outfit in the episode "Mirror, Mirror" -- almost certainly, the most black female skin exposed on U.S. TV to that point -- that episode also showed Kirk's confidence in her, his respect for her, and her ability to make that confidence and respect pay off. The episode "Plato's Stepchildren" showed her having to kiss Kirk, usually cited as the 1st interracial kiss on U.S. TV. (Some Southern stations refused to show that episode.)

She wanted to quit after the 1st season to go back to music, but no less than Martin Luther King told her she needed to stay on, as an example. Both comedian Whoopi Goldberg (who went on to play Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Dr. Mae Jemison (America's 1st black woman in space, who played a transporter operator on ST:TNG, making her the 1st real-life astronaut to appear on a Star Trek series), have cited her as a tremendous influence.

* George Takei (born 1937 and still alive), as Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, Chief Helmsman (His first name was never revealed until the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.) Like Star Wars creator George Lucas, Roddenberry was long fascinated by Asian culture, and wanted an Asian character among the bridge crew. Sulu was assigned to the ship's "astroscience" department in the 2nd pilot, but was moved to the helm for the main series.

Like Uhura, the other nonwhite character in the main cast, Sulu was grossly underused. So much so that, based on the original series alone, we probably know less about him than anyone else on the show. (Indeed, it wasn't until Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home that we found out that he was from San Francisco, rather than Japan as was long presumed.)

At least he wasn't a stereotype: Although the episode "Shore Leave" showed him facing a simulation of a samurai warrior, it also showed his interests in more modern firearms and botany. And "The Naked Time" showed he preferred a fencing foil to a samurai sword.

* Walter Koenig (born 1936 and still alive), as Ensign Pavel Andreievich Chekov, a young navigator introduced at the start of the 2nd season, because Roddenberry wanted to include a Russian character. To appeal to teenage viewers, he was given a hairstyle similar to Davy Jones of The Monkees. As Koenig said, "When people thought I was 22, Russian and single, I got more fan mail than anybody but Spock. When they found out I was 30, American and married, it dried up."

Brilliant but raw, his immaturity occasionally undermined his great capability. He was proud of his heritage, but mistakenly believed that many historical advancements and cultural icons were "invented in Russia."

* Majel Barrett (1932-2008), as Ensign Christine Chapel, McCoy's nurse. She later completed her studies, and was a full-fledged doctor in the movies. She has a hopeless crush on Spock.

Barrett was Roddenberry's girlfriend at the time, later his wife. She had played the First Officer, named only "Number One," in the show's 1st pilot, "The Cage," but the network balked at having a female officer ranked so high. She also voiced the computers on every Star Trek TV show and movie until the 2009 reboot, and played Ambassador Lxwana Troi, Denna's mother, on ST:TNG.

Shatner had appeared in 2 episodes of The Twilight Zone, an earlier series that dealt in fantasy: "Nick of Time" in 1960 and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in 1963. Nimoy had 1 line on the 1961 episode "A Quality of Mercy." Doohan was in the 1963 episode "Valley of the Shadow." Takei starred in the 1964 episode "The Encounter." But none of these episodes dealt with space travel.

In 1964, Shatner and Nimoy actually appeared onscreen together very briefly in "The Project Strigas Affair," an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Nimoy, Kelley and Doohan had appeared on the Western series Bonanza, where they caught the attention of Gene L. Coon, who wrote for that series, and wrote and produced for Star Trek -- he and Roddenberry often being called "The Two Genes."

Nimoy, Nichols, Koenig and Barrett had appeared on an earlier military-themed TV series created and written by Roddenberry, The Lieutenant, which starred Gary Lockwood, who was cast as the ill-fated First Officer, Lieutenant Gary Mitchell, in the 2nd Star Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Lockwood's character, U.S. Marine Lieutenant William Rice, had the same middle name as Kirk: "Tiberius."

*

Today, it's easy to call Star Trek, especially the original series created by Roddenberry that ran from September 8, 1966 to June 6, 1969, a legend. Today, it's very difficult to see why such a groundbreaking, often wonderful (though also often campy and occasionally even ridiculous) show was nearly canceled after just 2 seasons, and was finally canceled after 3 seasons. Easy to see why it was brought back in movies and had later series based on it, yes; easy to see why NBC gave up on it originally, no.

Surely, there must be good reason why the Peacock Network dropped this ball...

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame NBC for Canceling the Original Star Trek Series

5. The Sale of Desilu Productions. Lucille Ball and her then-husband and then-costar Desi Arnaz founded this company in 1950, combining their names. It was very rare then -- and even in the Sixties -- for a woman or a non-Anglo to be in charge of a Hollywood production company, but Desilu had both. In 1962, after their divorce, Lucy bought out Desi's shares in the company.

Lucy loved Star Trek. After the first pilot, "The Cage," didn't get picked up in 1965, she stood up for it, and used her influence at NBC to tell the suits to give it another chance.

And Lucy loved Star Trek. And, being the boss,

she didn't have any 'splaining to do.

They did, and a second pilot was commissioned. With an entirely new cast except for Leonard Nimoy as Spock -- although, as I said, Majel Barrett would be cast in a new role -- "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was written and filmed. Jeffrey Hunter, who played Captain Christopher Pike in "The Cage," was not available, so William Shatner was cast as a new Captain, James T. Kirk. NBC liked the new version, and set it up for the 1966-67 season.

In February 1967, Lucy sold Desilu to Gulf & Western, which had just bought Paramount Pictures. G&W turned Desilu into Paramount Television. Paramount, on screens both small and large, has run Star Trek ever since.

Paramount Television's original logo

Without its biggest backer, Lucy, on hand to speak up for it, Star Trek lacked the star power it needed. It would be as if, today, Jerry Seinfeld, a star of the era of TV before the current era, were now running a TV studio, and had backed a groundbreaking new show, but split with his wife, and sold off his shares in order to pay her a settlement, and it died without him to watch over it.

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey. It changed the rules for special effects in science fiction. Before Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, Star Trek was considered a big leap forward over the sci-fi films of the 1950s, and also over the biggest sci-fi TV series before it, Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949-55) and Lost In Space (1965-68).

Once people saw 2001, with all its flaws -- including its long, wordless, classical-music-backed montages that made the film at least 15 minutes longer than it needed to be (and ended up inadvertently inspiring Star Trek: The Motion Picture a decade later) -- people saw Star Trek's red skies, papier-mâché boulders and rubber-masked aliens, and realized, "Hey, they could have done a lot better."

A still from 2001

Of course, they couldn't -- because, in the days before computer-generated imagery (CGI), science fiction cost a hell of a lot of money to produce. This was also a reason that neither the original Battlestar Galatica or the 1970s version of Buck Rogers (which was so campy it made the 1960s Batman series look like The Dark Knight) only lasted 2 seasons each. If Star Trek could have been made even more cheaply, NBC would have done it.

Kirk fighting a Gorn captain in "Arena"

In fact, they did, in the 3rd season, 1968-69. Which certainly didn't help things for...

3. Fred Freiberger. He had produced Ben Casey and The Wild Wild West with few problems. But when Roddenberry quit as, as we would say today, showrunner after the 2nd season, 1967-68, NBC hired Freiberger, and dealt him a rotten hand -- which he completely misplayed.

He looks more like a villain that Kirk had to take down

than an admiral (or a director) fit to give him orders.

He proved himself a well-meaning incompetent, particularly where science fiction was concerned. The 3rd season of Star Trek included few good episodes, and some laughable ones. The season premiere was "Spock's Brain." It was the only original series episode to have a character's name in the title, and when people talk about how ridiculous Star Trek was, this is the 1st episode they mention.

It actually got worse: "The Paradise Syndrome" ("Behold: A god who bleeds!"), "And the Children Shall Lead" (a ghostly Melvin Belli leads super-powered children to take over the ship), "Wink of an Eye" (a society moving at superspeed needs fertile men), "The Mark of Gideon" (a story about overpopulation that could have been a great one, but was totally blown), "The Lights of Zetar" (another interesting idea that bombed), "Requiem for Methuselah" (the crew encounter Methuselah, King Solomon, Alexander the Great, Lazarus, Merlin, Johannes Gutenberg, Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms, and they're all the same guy), "The Way to Eden" (space hippies, Chekov's girlfriend, "Herbert!"), "The Cloud Minders" (a story about the class gap between rich and poor, another good idea made ridiculous), "The Savage Curtain" (meeting Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and the founders of Vulcan and Klingon civilization, and, no, they're not all the same guy, and this was a great idea that was absolutely butchered), and, the last episode to air, "Turnabout Intruder" (a story rendered stupid by the rise of feminism in the next few years, and by later Trek shows and films that showed female starship captains).

In 1972, Freiberger became the producer of the cartoon Josie and the Pussycats -- already a dumb idea, since it was a teenage rock band that solved mysteries, essentially a combination of The Monkees and Scooby-Doo. He made it Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. No, I'm not making that up. He made it up.

In 1975, he was handed the reins of Space: 1999, to make the British series (albeit with American stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) more accessible to Americans. He changed the cast, and, as was the problem on Star Trek, it became less about the story and more about the action. That 2nd season was the last.

He was handed the reins of The Six Million Dollar Man for its 5th season, 1977-78. Let's just say that, unlike Colonel Steve Austin when he got his bionic body parts, it was not better than it was before. It was canceled. He had the Reverse Midas Touch: Everything he touched turned to crap.

In her memoir, Nichelle Nichols tried to absolve Freiberger for the demise of the show:

I know that some fans hold him responsible for the show's decline, but that is not fair. Star Trek was in a disintegrating orbit before Fred came aboard. That we were able to do even what we did is a miracle and a credit to him. 

William Shatner has also gone out of his way to say Freiberger shouldn't be blamed. But, in an interview for a book about the show, James Doohan ripped him: "Fred Freiberger had no idea what he was doing. He was just a line producer, suddenly handed creative control over a show that was like nothing else on television."

And Martin Landau wasn't forgiving of what he did with Space: 1999, telling him:

I'm not going out on a limb for this show, because I'm not in accord with what you're doing as a result... I don't think I even want to do the promos. I don't want to push the show any more as I have in the past. It's not my idea of what the show should be.

Contrary to what I had previously thought, Freiberger had nothing to do with Mission: Impossible, which was also a Desilu/Paramount production, and premiered on CBS just 9 days after Star Trek, running until 1973. Like Space: 1999 later would, it featured Landau and his then-wife Barbara Bain. After Star Trek was canceled, Landau and Bain left M:I. Nimoy was hired, as "The Great Paris" (real name never revealed), a magician and master of disguise like Landau's character Rollin Hand.

2. Political Correctness -- 1960s Style. Since the term first gained wide usage in the early 1990s, "political correctness" has come to mean "liberalism." But the backlash that came at it during the Space Age was much more effective than what conservatives have been able to do it in the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama years.

After 15 or so years of the Civil Rights Movement, 8 years of the New Frontier of JFK and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, 4 years of inner-city race riots, 3 years of protests against the U.S. military effort in Vietnam, and the previous year's "Summer of Love" with its hippies and its so-called free love and its drugs, tempered by the worst of the riots, by late 1968, people were tired of being preached to about peace and harmony and brotherhood.

With Robert Kennedy dead, Gene McCarthy's supporters demoralized, and people who would normally have supported Hubert Humphrey not convinced he was going to end the war, millions of Democrats either stayed home, or voted for Richard Nixon because he promised to end the war. Many others left the Democrats over race, and voted for Nixon or George Wallace because of their pledges to "restore law and order."

The 1968 election can be viewed as close, as Nixon won by only 520,000 popular votes, 43.4 percent to Humphrey's 42.7 percent. But that was good for 301 Electoral Votes to HHH's 191, and Wallace's 46. Throw in the people who voted for Wallace, and, of the people who actually showed up to vote, just under 58 percent of the popular vote, and 347 Electoral Votes, went to candidates who voted to crack down on blacks and student demonstrators, and thought the way to end the Vietnam War was to win it, and thought the way to win it was to escalate it.

Does this look like someone who would

willingly watch Star Trek? No, he looks like a "Herbert."

The general public was no longer interested in hearing Jim Kirk talk about man reaching for the stars and peaceful coexistence, or Spock talking about logic. They were more likely to listen to Scotty say one of the few lines of the main cast that could be considered conservative: "The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank!"

The cancellation of Star Trek was unfortunate. But it was not a tragedy. An actual tragedy is Reason Number 1 why you can't blame NBC for canceling it:

1. The Apollo 1 Fire. In the Star Trek episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" -- 1 of 10 episodes written by Dorothy Fontana, who had to use her initials, "D.C. Fontana," because studios either didn't want women writing TV shows, or didn't want it known that they were writing them -- the Enterprise is accidentally hurled back in time.

Uhura intercepts a TV broadcast saying that the first manned mission to the Moon will be launched on the following Wednesday. (It was, indeed, launched on a Wednesday: July 16, 1969. Granted, Fontana had a 1-in-7 chance, 14.3 percent, of getting that right, and those aren't especially long odds, but she did guess right!) Kirk heard this, and said, "But that was in the late 1960s!" Spock answered, "Evidently, so are we."

Fontana couldn't possibly have known in late 1966 exactly when the 1st successful mission would be launched. She only knew of what JFK said in his address to Congress on May 25, 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth." So she wrote, "in the late 1960s."

This looks like a man who would would watch Star Trek

-- if not a cosplaying "Trekkie."

"Tomorrow Is Yesterday" was broadcast on January 26, 1967. The very next day, astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom (one of the original "Mercury 7," whose name would be used for a ship in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock), Edward H. White II (the 1st American to make a spacewalk), and Roger B. Chaffee (a Navy pilot and engineer who was preparing for his 1st spaceflight) were undergoing a rehearsal for the launch of Apollo 1, meant to launch on February 21. An electrical fire spread through the capsule, killing them. (Grissom was 40 years old, White 36, Chaffee 31.)

L to R: Ed White, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee

The tragedy set the U.S. space program back. The 1st manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, wouldn't get off the ground until October 11, 1968 -- almost 2 years later, and putting JFK's end-of-decade (December 31, 1969) goal in serious jeopardy.

The last episode of Star Trek to get a first-run airing, "Turnabout Intruder," got it on June 6, 1969. Everyone figured that was the end. On July 20, 1969, just 44 days later, during Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. As Roddenberry put it, "Suddenly, people going into space and exploring strange new worlds didn't seem so far-fetched anymore."

"That's one small step for a man,

one giant reason to believe in Gene Roddenberry's vision."

Star Trek caught on in syndication, airing on what were then "independent" TV stations, like New York's WPIX-Channel 11. NBC didn't want the show anymore, so it was cheap for these stations to air. Low risk, and any reward was nice. The reward turned out to be huge: As with 1950s shows The Honeymooners and The Adventures of Superman, the late 1960s Batman series, and, later, the original, early 1970s version of The Odd Couple, Star Trek brought those stations higher ratings than did the old movies they were airing. Star Trek got a new life, making possible not only its movies and its later series, but Star Wars and the other sci-fi film epics of the late 1970s and afterward.

But had the Apollo 1 fire not happened, the 1st Moonwalk might have happened months or even a year earlier, during Star Trek's 3rd season. It might have made people hungrier for a show about the exploration of space, boosted the ratings, and saved the show.

We'll never know what kind of episodes we would have seen had "its five-year mission" been completed. The show's legacy clearly didn't need it. But, as fan series such as Star Trek: New Voyages and Star Trek Continues have shown, it would have been nice to find out. And so, we can speculate.

Kirk: "Is that the logical thing to do?"

Spock: "No. But it is the human thing to do."

The main cast during filming of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,

1991, the last film with all of them together:

Koenig, Takei, Kelley, Nichols, Shatner, Doohan, Nimoy

And what we do have has served us well.