Newbie guide to Star Trek
I’ve watched Star Trek as far back as I can remember. Early memories of it are watching it with my dad when it was still on NBC, and watching it every day at 6pm on WPIX in NY. It was rare that any syndicated show would be on seven days a week, but Star Trek was one of those rare shows that had such a following, WPIX felt it was a strong enough show to run it daily.
Star Trek lost its way over the years, and now JJ Abrams and his crew are re-energizing the franchise for audiences both old and new.
If you’ve never seen an episode of Star Trek, or feel the need to brush up on your history, here’s a list of episodes I think would be useful.
“The Cage” / “The Menagerie” - “The Cage” was Star Trek’s original pilot which was deemed “too intellectual” by NBC. It is, in fact a decent story but has several dull spots. Spock behaves nothing like he does in later episodes. Pike is an OK captain, but lacks the swagger that James Kirk had. There’s no McCoy, no Scotty. The sets are rather dull compared to the rest of the series and the dialog is flat. “The Menagerie” is a two-part episode which takes footage from “The Cage” and uses them as historical flashbacks during a trial in which Spock is accused of mutiny when he hijack the Enterprise to take his former captain Pike, who is now critically injured, back to Talos which is currently under Federation quarrantine.
“Amok Time” - So far, we’ve known Vulcans to be “walking calculators”. What we don’t know is that every seven years they need to return to Vulcan to mate. Like salmon. It’s a great episode displaying the friendship between Kirk and Spock, and gives a lot of Spock’s personal backstory.
“Journey to Babel” - the Enterprise is transporting ambassadors from several systems to Babel to decide if Coridan should be admitted to the Federation. What we find out is that the Vulcan ambassador is Spock’s father Sarek who brought his wife Amanda with him on the trip. Another great Spock episode which would give some insight to Spock’s family for the upcoming movie.
“Space Seed” - the Enterprise comes across a DY-100 transport ship in the middle of nowhere, filled with exiled generically engineered “supermen” from Earth’s 1990’s. Their leader is Khan, played by Ricardo Montalban. This episode was the forebearer to “Star Trek II”, arguably the best Star Trek movie made, and one of the best science fiction movies.
“The Counter-Clock Incident” (animated) - Similar in plot to “Journey to Babel”, this episode shows that Robert April was the first captain of the Enterprise. Not required viewing, but interesting.
Other episodes worth viewing, but have little or no relevance to the movie itself:
“Where No Man Has Gone Before” (only tie-in to the film is a reference to Delta Vega)
“The Corbomite Maneuver”
“The City on the Edge of Forever”
“The Doomsday Machine”
“Balance of Terror”
“Mirror, Mirror”
“The Trouble with Tribbles”
“The Ultimate Computer”
“The Enterprise Incident”
“For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky” (good McCoy episode)
Movies
Star Trek II, III, and IV work as a trilogy, so it’s best to watch them together.
Star Trek web sites
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Darrell
