Wow-Original Star Trek is pretty cool.

[mojo1701]

I've seen Whoopi Goldberg say that she saw Nichele Nicholls as a role model when she was growing up and considering a career in show busness.

Yeah, that story was told by Nichelle Nichols herself on "Trekkies."

Yeah, the original Star Trek is pretty cool... except for that one episode written by Harlen Elison (involving a time warp)...

I rather liked that episode.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Well, that's one ill that sprung from ST, then. Stupid Whoopi Goldberg. Bah.

IMO, of course.

Oh, I agree. I cringed typing her name.

Nevertheless, its cool to see the fruits of Dr. Kings efforts like that.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

I rather liked that episode.

I thought it had a massive plot hole. Its been too long ago now for me to remember it, but I know when it ended I was thinking "WTF!" Then the screen said "Written by Harlen Elison." And I said, "Oh, well that explains it."

 

[Starman]

I thought it had a massive plot hole. Its been too long ago now for me to remember it, but I know when it ended I was thinking "WTF!" Then the screen said "Written by Harlen Elison." And I said, "Oh, well that explains it."

City on the Edge of Forever is the title.

The filmed episode is quite different from what Ellison originally wrote, though. Roddenberry said it was too expensive to film and wanted Ellison to rewrite it. Ellison being who he is, he refused. So, it was rewritten by Roddenberry, I believe. Ellison ended up winning an award for his original version of the script, which has been made available for purchase.

 

[mojo1701]

I thought it had a massive plot hole. Its been too long ago now for me to remember it, but I know when it ended I was thinking "WTF!" Then the screen said "Written by Harlen Elison." And I said, "Oh, well that explains it."

What's the plot hole? I don't remember one.

City on the Edge of Forever is the title.

The filmed episode is quite different from what Ellison originally wrote, though. Roddenberry said it was too expensive to film and wanted Ellison to rewrite it. Ellison being who he is, he refused. So, it was rewritten by Roddenberry, I believe. Ellison ended up winning an award for his original version of the script, which has been made available for purchase.

The expense wasn't what I remember reading. According to the background information for the episode at Memory-Alpha.org, a Star Trek wiki:

Harlan Ellison was dismayed with the changes Gene Roddenberry made to his story (which included, among other things, a drug addicted Enterprise crewman). So much so, that he wished his credit removed, a request Roddenberry denied.

 

[Umbran]

Because that one really hurt my suspension of disbelief.

The secret is that sometimes it wasn't about "belief" at all. I don't think the authors always wanted you to take it as a credible, believable story. This is an earlier part of the SF literary tradition. Sometimes it was just plain allegory, or a morality play.

It is insulting to your intelligence when they do someting psuedo-subtle, and then have to explain it afterwards, because they don't think you were smart enough to get it. Or when they try to sneak something that's just plain wrong by you and hope you won't notice.

But when they instead break out the completely unsubtle Sledgehammer of Morality there's no insult intended. They know darned well you're going to get it, because they're going wield the thing like a dwarf on amphetamines, and even a lump of charcoal would get the point.

 

[Vigilance]

The secret is that sometimes it wasn't about "belief" at all.

Yeah... there was a generation of sci-fi storytellers that thought their audiences had intelligence and imagination.

These days its all about "you are there FX" and a belief that their audiences are stupid.

 

[Elf Witch]

I have seen a lot of younger people who did not see TOS when it was first on or in its big heyday of reruns in the 70s accuse the show of being badly wrirtten or cheesy or not up to the standards of the shows that followed.

I don't think they realize just how ground breaking the show was. I grew up in the south and we still had water fountains that said "white only" and yet on our tv screens we had a beautiful black woman who was an officer and just as respected and any other officer. Trek showed had the first interracial kiss. We also had an Sulu who did not play the sterotypical oriental. Checkov a russian while we were still in the grip of the cold war. The show was about hope. Hope that we did not something as stupid as blow ourselves to smithreens.

When I was young we had drills in school for when the bombs got dropped. I often had nightmares of nuclear war. Yet as corny as it sounds watching Trek gave me hope.

My family is a bunch of bigots some are proud to be members of the Klan. Yet I am not like that I truly believe that watching trek as a child and a teen had something to do with that.

I know that it was trek that introduced me to my love of reading SF and Fantasy. I mainly read gothics as a teen then they came out with the Trek novels written by James Blish I read them and noticed that they were called SF novels so the next time I went to the bookstore I looked in that section. I found Red Planet by Heinlien and was forever hooked.

 

[Starman]

What's the plot hole? I don't remember one.



The expense wasn't what I remember reading. According to the background information for the episode at Memory-Alpha.org, a Star Trek wiki:

Well, the drug addiction stuff was a problem for Roddenberry, but the expense was also a part. Star Trek Memories by Shatner and Chris Kreski goes into some of the details of it and has interviews with some of the writers and producers about the incident. It's a good read to boot.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah... there was a generation of sci-fi storytellers that thought their audiences had intelligence and imagination.

These days its all about "you are there FX" and a belief that their audiences are stupid.

While perhaps true, that wasn't the point I was trying to make at all.

Science fiction has a strong "morality play" tradition, of telling stories in which the statement the story makes is more important than the immersive qualities of the fiction.

The Original Series episode, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" stands as a good example. This is where we see a conflict between Bele and Lokai, the "half-white/half-black" humanoids playing out a racial struggle so powerful that it destroyed their homeworld. In this episode, the important point is not the story, or the characterization. It's the simple statement that racism is stupid.

Much of H.G. Wells' work also fits this mold - The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and War of the Worlds are all strong "statement" stories, and any number of short stories by Larry Niven (and many other "hard" SF authors) are more about displaying a particular point of science than they are about characters or plot. In these works, the point of the writing is to make you think about how people work, how the universe works and where we fit in it, or where we may go in the future, or what our current behaviors mean. This is part of where the term "speculative fiction" comes from - the story is as much or more about speculation than storytelling.