‘Star Trek’ instilled something new in TV viewers — fan loyalty

Star Trek is looking forward to its 50th anniversary - a 50-year mission to entertain and inspire.The purpose of science fiction is to imagine the future. When its fans come to build that future, they're often influenced by its design. So the prophesies fulfil themselves. We haven't yet learned to beam down to alien planets and our astronauts don't squeeze themselves into velour tunics.But some of the show's ideals have been realised. "I loved Spock," said President Barack Obama after the death of the man who played him. "Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy."The show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, was an all-American hero. Born in Texas in 1921, he worked in war and peacetime as a pilot before moving to Los Angeles to write TV scripts.story_article_left1 In 1964, he took a draft of Star Trek to Desilu Productions. They commissioned a first pilot with NBC, which was rejected because it was "too cerebral", then a second pilot with the network that introduced William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Nimoy as Spock the Vulcan.Television sci-fi in the past had either been camp nonsense or narrowly obsessed with hard science. Star Trek preferred to explore moral questions in a futuristic setting. Critics were divided over its September 8 1966 debut.The New York Times called it an "astronautical soap opera that suffers from interminable flight drag". Ratings for the first couple of seasons were middling; NBC considered cancellation.The show was saved with help from a grassroots effort - including student protests and interventions by high-profile fans like Isaac Asimov.It came back for a third season, but Kirk and Spock were relegated to the Friday night scheduling dead zone. NBC shot the golden goose with a ray gun.The show closed in 1969. It was really the re-runs in the '70s and movies in the '80s that elevated it to the status of a popular classic.Politically, Star Trek belonged in the era of John F Kennedy. Just as Kennedy had told the US that it stood on a "new frontier" of liberal progress, so the USS Enterprise had a mission to "boldly go where no man has gone before".Kirk was a dead-ringer for Kennedy, too: handsome, dynamic. The United Federation of Planets was the US. The Klingons were the Soviet Union.But Star Trek was not a nationalist cliché. The bridge of the USS Enterprise was supposed to reflect the idealism of the '60s yet patently did not reflect its realities.It contained a Japanese-American played by a gay actor, George Takei, and a Russian. Spock's mixed-species parentage alarmed a few racists. And there was even a black woman in charge of communications: Lieutenant Uhura, portrayed by Nichelle Nichols.Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space, put her desire to become an astronaut down to Nichols's revolutionary performance. And when Nichols considered quitting the show for Broadway, she found herself persuaded to stay put by the country's greatest living civil rights activist.Martin Luther King jnr introduced himself to Nichols at a fundraiser and described himself as a Trekkie. He said: "Nichelle, whether you like it or not, you have become a symbol.mini_story_image_vright1If you leave, they can replace you with a blonde-haired white girl, and it will be like you were never there. What you've accomplished, for all of us, will only be real if you stay."So she did.There were limits to how many frontiers Star Trek could cross. Lieutenant Uhura might have a fancy title but she was essentially a telephonist in a short skirt. Most of the women in the show were eye candy.Dr McCoy's constant ribbing of Mr Spock verged on outright racism. But operating within the straightjacket of '60s telefantasy, Star Trek was still prepared to challenge the viewers' assumptions. Some NBC outlets in the South refused even to air it.In the episode Plato's Stepchildren, Kirk and Uhura were forced by an alien power beyond their control to share a kiss - a scene that was shot twice, one with a smooch and the other without, lest the network lost its nerve. Shatner and Nichols hammed it up in the second recording to ensure that it would never be used.In the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, a good example of Star Trek's liberal didacticism, the crew picked up two monochrome aliens determined to kill each other to fulfil a blood feud.Their only difference? One alien was black down the left-hand side of his body and white down the right, the other was black down the right and white down the left. Racism was destructive and, the show concluded, absurd.None of this started riots. What made Star Trek stand out, rather, was its willingness to reflect the things already happening outside on the streets, where youth and cops clashed over Vietnam and civil rights. The show also offered comment and archetypes for people navigating a complex decade to identify with.Kirk was an old-school liberal - a rugged individualist.People often refer to the Star Trek universe as socialist: egalitarian, ordered like a military unit. But Kirk defied his superiors all the time. He was a Byronic figure, a romantic tempered by a dash of cynicism.Spock, on the other hand, represented the wave of the future - a new kind of liberalism that was obsessed with science and almost inhumanly wonky. When David Cameron's Downing Street found Obama's detachment difficult to deal with, they leavened the situation by nicknaming him "Spock".The journalist Jeffrey Goldberg caught many people's eye when he also labelled the president "Spockian" in The Atlantic, noting that the man who ran for office on the promise of hope in fact guarded his rhetoric for fear of generating too much excitement.It's a comparison that Obama would've appreciated. As a kid growing up in the '60s, his world view was informed as much by Star Trek as later politicians have been shaped by The West Wing or Game of Thrones.full_story_image_hright2Hence attempts to find literal, physical ways in which the future world of Star Trek has materialised - the warp drive, hand-held computers or doors that open automatically with a noisy "shush" - is fun but misses the bigger picture. Star Trek didn't rewrite the laws of physics. But it did expand the American imagination.Consider the surprising political reach of its stars. Nimoy became a poet and peace campaigner. Shatner fancied himself as a serious talkshow host.Takei, meanwhile, became an iconic figure within the gay rights movement. Although when it was announced that his character would be depicted as gay in the latest movie, he was less than impressed. He claimed that Roddenberry had considered a similar move 50 years before but had regarded it as a step too far for the time. Takei was nervous about tinkering with his hero's vision.How fascinating that the obsession with faithfulness to the original - the clichéd obsession of all Trekkies - has been internalised by its original cast. And perhaps Star Trek's most enduring achievement was to change the way we think about TV.Before Kirk went into space, shows were loved but disposable. In the '70s, networks discovered the value of repeats and of fan loyalty - people who would religiously watch every episode and collect memorabilia as if they were Fabergé eggs.Stephen Hawking is a fan; so are Alex Salmond, Bill Gates and Daniel Craig. Visiting the set of a Star Trek movie in 1991, Ronald Reagan said: "I like them [the Klingons]. They remind me of congress." Although congress is probably less civil.sub_head_start Be fast, furious to live long and prosper sub_head_endIf you want to understand how Star Trek has changed over its long life, just look at how an attack on the Starship Enterprise is staged. In Gene Roddenberry's original 1966 TV series, a space battle involves the cast staggering back and forth across the set, rarely in the same direction, while someone jostles the camera.On the set of Star Trek Beyond - the 13th film in the series - things are a bit more advanced. I am standing in an Enterprise corridor that is about to be obliterated. The set, in Vancouver, is built inside a giant gimbal that will start rocking as soon as someone shouts "action"; bits of the walls are primed to explode. The cast will have their work cut out just to stay upright.It's 50 years since Roddenberry had the idea for a drama about a multicultural, multispecies group of explorers travelling through space to discover new life forms and bring peace, not war. Although set far in the future, it would reflect current concerns, such as racism, sexism and the futility of war.mini_story_image_vleft3That cheaply made but smartly written TV show (which ran for three series) has spawned five further shows and 13 films so far. Star Trek Beyond is the third since JJ Abrams rebooted the big-screen franchise in 2009.The new film brings back the familiar crew - including Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock and Zoe Saldana as Uhura - and introduces Idris Elba as a new villain, Krall. It also has a new director in Justin Lin, best known for the Fast and Furious films. But, after all these years, where does Star Trek fit in?The last Star Trek film, Into Darkness, was well received by critics on its 2013 release but failed to satisfy fans - who voted it the worst Star Trek movie ever at a convention in Las Vegas - or even its director, Abrams, who admitted: "It didn't work as well as it could have, had I made some better decisions before we started shooting."The film was accused of being too backward-looking, pinching much of its plot from 1982's Wrath of Khan. So what do you do with Star Trek in 2016 to keep it relevant? Lin says you tear the whole thing apart."I had an overall idea that I wanted to deconstruct Star Trek. I had talked to JJ about literally deconstructing Star Trek by destroying the Enterprise."And that's exactly what he's done. Along with the British actor Simon Pegg, who is not only appearing as engineer Scotty but has also written the screenplay (with Doug Jung), Lin has put together a story that sees the Starship Enterprise set upon by aliens and torn to pieces.It sounds like a pretty aggressive manoeuvre. Could it be the work of a man who wants to make Star Trek something it is not - Fast and Furious in space, perhaps? Lin argues this approach makes Beyond more faithful to Roddenberry's vision. After all, the original Star Trek was about always looking ahead, always imagining what else might be possible. It might surprise fans to learn that Lin has been an avid Trekker for years."I grew up watching it. All my friends watched Star Wars but I couldn't afford the movies, so I watched Star Trek."Even now, it's fair to say that, although there are an enormous number of people who appreciate Star Trek as a rich fictional universe with a lot to say about the modern world, it still suffers from an image problem.Star Trek is not cool, which perhaps explains why it has always been a solid box-office performer, rather than a spectacular one. Into Darkness made $467-million worldwide, which is hardly small change. But compare that with the takings for Bond (Spectre made $880-million) or Star Wars (The Force Awakens made $2.1-billion) and it starts to look less impressive.Pegg is all too aware that the new film has to appeal to diehard fans and the casual viewer."You can't make a story that the more casual viewer would feel alienated by. I know some Star Trek fans get very angry at this. I think they believe you could make a movie that's just like the original series and expect it to do well. It just wouldn't, sadly. So it's a fine balance that you try to strike," he said."For us it was important to have a spectacular and exciting film underpinned by the fundamental things that Star Trek was about, which was musing about our significance in the galaxy - what it means to be human."Sadly, the production of Star Trek Beyond was bookended by loss. Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played the original Spock and took a small role in both Abrams's Star Trek films, died shortly before filming began. His death had a particular effect on Quinto, who plays the younger Spock."My connection to the character I think is more spiritual now thanThen, on June 19, barely a month before the release of Beyond, Anton Yelchin - the actor who plays the Enterprise's navigator, Chekov - was killed in a car accident. Among a cast that has grown very close over the past seven years, he was the youngest.full_story_image_hleft4When I saw him on set, in August last year, he was bright and bouncy, accompanied by a ridiculous-looking little dog called Elvis."We're really caretakers of this artefact ... this wonderful material that has had 50 years of history. We have to respect and embrace it," he said."I'm really the baby out of everyone. When we made the first one, Chris [Pine] was the age I am now and I was 18. But I still feel like the baby."He was only 27 when he died.Despite all its struggles, the early signs suggest that Star Trek Beyond, arriving at the end of a fairly dismal summer for blockbuster movies, will succeed.Yet, even if it fails, Star Trek, with its still extremely passionate fan base, will almost certainly carry on for years to come, in one form or another.For starters, next year it will return to TV screens in a new series overseen by Brian Fuller, who headed the critically acclaimed dramas Pushing Daisies and Hannibal. And only a fool would bet against there being more films further down the line.In the world of Star Trek there is always more future ahead, more unknowns to be explored. If there is a final frontier, we haven't reached it yet.- ©The Daily Telegraph, London ..