The ambitious five year mission “to seek out new life and civilizations” launched itself into our culture, then ground to a sober halt in 1969 – two years early; the short-sighted network had stripped it from the air.
But Star Trek had captured imaginations, where it lived on.
Now, in 2013, Farragut Films is reviving the mission in a nonprofit web-based series called \”Star Trek Continues.\” Their goal is to continue the last two years of the original mission.
Their efforts are yielding a product that is uncannily close to the original episodes in both story and set design. Although no one can make a profit from it due to licensing conflicts, the team of fans producing it are no amateurs.
Stars such as Jamie Bamber of Battlestar Galactica are contributing their talents. Other skilled actors are dedicating many hours of unpaid labor, and everything from the set to the lighting of the original Star Trek has been expertly – and painstakingly – reproduced.
This faithfulness to the original series is a welcome gift to many fans who felt let down by the current reboot of the Star Trek universe by J.J. Abrams.
While J.J. Abrams re-launched Star Trek in 2009 and owns the movie franchise, the movies lurched away from the canon and left many fans of the original series cold. The progressive idealism that made the original television series so endearing was largely lost; instead fans were given a standard Hollywood action adventure flick.
While I was a fan of the Abrams series Lost and his Star Trekfilms were not necessarily bad movies, they did not feel like Star Trek to me. It was not so much about the canon. For me, it was more about the characters.
As a child, I fell in love with Spock the stoic, who prized logic above else, but whose repressed human side kept rising to the surface, much to his annoyance. It was not just the obsession with logic I loved about Spock, but his restraint.
Not that he never deviated. In my favorite episode, Spock, convinced that the captain is dead, found Kirk alive and perfectly healthy; Spock\’s face transformed, and a brilliant smile broke out. “Jim!” he says; it was a purely unguarded moment, and priceless.
As soon as he realized his “error,” he immediately worked to recompose his serious facade, but Kirk was amused and the secret was out. But what made the moment so amazing was that the spontaneous emotional display was a dramatic exception to his normal restraint and control.
Of course, Spock was not all about logic; he was an idealist who valued life and was willing to sacrifice himself to protect the “lives of the many” at the expense of a few, although, being half human, he sometimes struggled with this arbitrary application of “logic.”
But if he ever admitted to letting his emotions influence him, it was not without a fierce and painful struggle.
Spock was fascinating to watch because he asserted control over his emotions so expertly that the slightest hint of emotion stood out and became all the more poignant because it was so rare.
But the J.J. Abrams version failed to adequately capture the dignified restraint that, for me, encapsulated who Spock was. The new Spock is romantically involved with Uhura, but the original Spock feared losing control, and if he did enter a relationship in which his duty might have been compromised by emotion, a good explanation would have been due.
The new Spock is comfortable enough with his human side that he opens up to Uhura about his grief about the loss of his home and his mother; he gives this as his reason for closing himself off to her.
The original Spock would have been unlikely to apologize for his emotional distance, since he distrusted emotion and saw himself as, above all, logical.
Of course, the viewer always knew that the original Spock was more human than he cared to admit. But he would have had trouble admitting emotion in the most extreme circumstances, even if it were painfully true.
But the Abrams Spock is apparently so emotionally precarious that Kirk bets that he can provoke Spock into a burst of unhinged violence. More incredibly, Kirk succeeds. But the original Spock had extraordinary impulse control; it would have taken more than one try to reduce him to histrionics or fisticuffs.
The Abrams Spock, no matter how many times he spoke of logic, was Spock in name only.
The Farragut project, however, is doing everything it can to honor the spirit of the original series and so far, it has done an excellent job. The first web episode, which has already aired, mirrored the original episodes with spectacular fidelity.
And while Spock was not the central focus of the first web episode, his character was much closer to the Spock I loved, and I am looking forward to seeing how he unfolds as the new series progresses.
I am hopeful, especially after seeing how the new “Kirk” presented himself in the first web episode. He did an ingenious job of capturing the original captain, down to the most subtle hints of humor in his eyes that I remember about the William Shatner version, but that I had forgotten until the new actor reminded me of them.
Fortunately, my experience of watching the first web episode did not end there. In October, due to an invitation from someone who is involved with the project, I got to explore the new set in Georgia. I was amazed at the lengths that the cast, set designers, make-up artists, and technical experts were willing to go to in order to achieve sequels worthy of the Star Trek name.
At the time of my visit the production crew was filming the second episode and I got to watch them shoot part of one scene, lasting less than a minute, in which an actor merely drags his fingers across the transporter console. The scene was shot again and again, the camera dipping each time, and then rising.
Cameramen also fretted about the original sequence of lights on the transporter in a scene where someone was to be “beamed in.” No detail was being overlooked in the effort to produce an experience that honored the original Star Trek.
The set, too, was an amazingly faithful reproduction of the original, having been replicated, I was told, by reverse engineering; a computer was used to analyze how the set design looked in the original Star Trek episodes in order to reconstruct it.
It was surreal to me, walking down the ship corridor I had seen so many times as a child and adolescent. I stood on the bridge, sat in the seat where Kirk sat, and got to examine the consoles. While walking around, I was continually dazzled by the amount of effort, talent, and skill that was being applied to a nonprofit venture.
Only after seeing the first web episode and the elaborately detailed work going into making the film true to the original Star Trek did I realize how disappointed I had been in the Abrams films. The characters I loved did not appear as I remembered them; nor did the themes of equal treatment of genders and races, or respect for cultural differences play a significant role.
Star Trek was about more than futuristic gadgetry and exploding satellites. It was the complex characters and the progressive themes that lifted the show from escapism to greatness.
I was excited to see that the spirit of the original was being carried on by a modern team of skilled actors, set designers, and technicians working not for pay but for the prime directive of art: to strain every resource, spare no expense, and withhold no effort in order to realize the most powerful expression of a vision, simply because it would be awesome.
And continuing the original voyage that shot its way through the final frontier and into our cultural imagination is nothing, if not that.