Can you survive being torn apart atom by atom? How fast do you have to go before you turn into
a lizard? And what's the real deal with time travel anyway? Keep watching to find out.
The 1966 pilot episode of "Star Trek," titled "Where No Man Has Gone
Before," wasn't actually the first episode filmed for the series. Two years before,
another pilot called "The Cage" was filmed, sporting a number of differences,
including an entirely different captain. Instead of James T. Kirk, it was Christopher Pike manning
the captain's chair — the same Pike who would later lead "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."
The studio didn't like the first pilot and commissioned a second with a number of changes,
including a new captain and first officer. After the second pilot debuted,
the studio didn't want to waste the footage from "The Cage," so it was cut up and used
as flashbacks in the two-part episode "The Menagerie." In the years prior to home video,
this led many to believe they had actually watched "The Cage" on television in the 1960s.
Decades later, in celebration of the franchise's 20th anniversary in 1986, "The Cage" was released
on VHS and laserdisc, reassembled using a mix of scenes from "The Menagerie" and a black and
white print owned by Gene Roddenberry. Just a year later a film archivist found the original
35mm color negatives, and in 1988 as part of a primetime special, "The Cage" finally aired on TV.
Vulcans are seemingly emotionless beings, guided by a strict sense of logic. But that's not quite
true: they have all the same emotions as any human, they've just chosen to suppress
them. We've seen emotional Vulcans a number of times in "Star Trek," usually when their logic
fails them due to an outside influence, illness, when they reject traditional Vulcan teachings,
or during the debilitating seven-year mating cycle known as Pon-Farr.
"I suppose most of us overlook the fact that even Vulcans aren't indestructible."
In the original "Star Trek" episode "This Side Of Paradise," Spock inhales the spores
of an alien flower and is overcome with strong feelings of love. In the "Next
Generation" episode "Sarek," the Vulcan illness called Bendii syndrome causes a
breakdown of Sarek's emotional control. In the "Voyager" episode "Blood Fever,"
the Vulcan ensign Vorik becomes rageful during his Pon-Farr when unable to take a Vulcan mate.
"Star Trek: Enterprise," meanwhile, suggested that living among humans can cause a Vulcan
to be more emotional, because humans are a reminder of the way Vulcans used to be.
"Listen to me! You're making a mistake!
"When your logic doesn't work, you raise your voice? You've been on Earth too long."
The fifth "Star Trek" movie, "The Final Frontier",
focused on Spock's half-brother Sybok and his rejection of Vulcan tradition.
Before the time of the Vulcan messiah Surak, founder of Vulcan logic,
Vulcans were a warlike people fueled by emotions. But thanks to the teachings of Surak,
Vulcans are now trained to repress feelings through strict mental discipline, and
sometimes undergo a ritual called the Kolinahr, which purges the last remnants of emotions.
That said, there are plenty of examples of Vulcans who rebel against their culture's tradition.
Airing for two seasons, "Star Trek: The Animated Series" continued the
adventures of the starship Enterprise after the original show's cancellation,
with nearly the entire cast of the original series reprising their roles.
Thanks to animation, the stories were able to envision truly wild aliens,
environments and situations, some of which were pretty weird, including an episode with a gigantic
20-foot tall clone of Spock, and a race of beings who could separate their head and legs. The show
is largely seen today as a curious oddity, and given its sometimes off-the-wall stories it's
not usually clear if it's meant to be considered canonical. The answer is a little complicated.
Most of "Star Trek" never directly acknowledged anything that happened in the series, but there
are lots of small details that first appeared in "The Animated Series" that have shown up in
live-action Trek. Spock's home city of ShiKahr is first mentioned in the Animated Series,
and referenced in "Deep Space Nine", and even visited in "Enterprise". The animated, cat-like
Kzinti race is mentioned in "Picard". And the Klingon ship, the Klothos, gets a mention in "Deep
Space Nine" as well. These are just a few of the small Easter eggs scattered throughout Trek canon.
So, is it part of the main Trek storyline? Was there
ever a 2-story tall Spock clone running around?
The short answer is "probably". While many of the details mentioned in The Animated Series don't
line up with timelines later established in Trek proper, modern writers have used the cartoon as
a source of inspiration, and cherry-picked key elements for more canonical stories.
"Star Trek" fans who only started watching with the arrival of the movies might be surprised to
learn that the Klingons in "The Original Series" were just human-looking beings
with goatees and gold tunics. But when the franchise transitioned to the big screen,
the Klingons got a major facelift. With a big-screen budget, producers wanted a
more alien-looking race, and so the Klingons suddenly had big forehead ridges, sharp teeth,
and a new and unusual language. This is how the Klingons would mostly remain.
Later, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" established them as an honor-bound and
ritualistically warlike people who glorified combat as a cultural tradition. But their
visual changes weren't yet explained. In fact, when three Klingons from the
original show appeared on "Deep Space Nine", they sported ridged foreheads,
reinforcing the notion that Klingons had simply always looked this way.
But that would start to change in the "DS9" episode "Trials
and Tribble-ations," when it was acknowledged for the first time.
"What happened? Some kind of genetic engineering?"
"A viral mutation?"
"We do not discuss it with outsiders."
In an episode of "Enterprise" several years later explained the changes canonically
as the result of a genetic plague. While a clever idea and a solid story, it created the
expectation among fans that changes to designs should have an in-story explanation, causing
serious discussion when "Star Trek: Discovery" once again updated the look of the Klingons.
The Vulcan salute seen in "Star Trek" has become an indelible part of pop culture,
but what does it really mean, and where did it come from? The first question is pretty
simple, as the salute is a visual gesture representing the oft-spoken Vulcan greeting…
"Live long and prosper."
Generally, Vulcans in "Star Trek" use the salute as both a greeting and a goodbye,
meaning it's essentially the science fiction aloha. We have actor Leonard
Nimoy to thank for its origins, having come up with the salute for the episode
"Amok Time" when Spock returns to Vulcan. Nimoy told "StarTrek.com",
"The idea came when I saw the way [director Joe Pevney] was staging
the scene. He had me approach T'Pau and I felt a greeting gesture was
called for. So I suggested it to Joe, who accepted it immediately."
Nimoy has gone on to explain that he was inspired by Jewish religious leaders from his youth,
who used the same gesture during certain ritual prayers. Saying,
"When I saw the split-fingered gesture of these
men [...] I was entranced. I learned to do it simply because it seemed so magical."
James T. Kirk was the first captain of the 1701 Enterprise, right?
Well, no! We already learned that Captain Christopher Pike
was the original captain in "The Cage". But you'd be wrong again.
Introduced in the "Star Trek: The Animated Series" episode "The Counter-Clock Incident,"
Captain Robert April is actually the first person to helm the classic Enterprise,
NCC-1701. As mentioned earlier, "The Animated Series" isn't 100% officially canon,
but this is one bit of background information from that series that writers of "Discovery"
drew from. Not only did he get a name drop in the first season as one of Starfleet's
most decorated officers, but Pike's own service record onscreen shows that he
took command of the Enterprise from its previous captain, Robert April. April
himself makes an appearance in "Strange New Worlds", finally in his true canonical form.
How does time travel work in the Trek universe? The short answer is, "however the writers want it
to." You'll probably never find a consistent answer across different episodes and movies.
Two episodes of the original series and the film "The Voyage Home" had the Enterprise use the
"slingshot maneuver" to create a time warp by manipulating the gravity of a star,
while at least two episodes have used the Guardian of Forever, a sentient portal, to move back and
forth through time. But the question remains: How do the rules of time travel work in "Star Trek"?
In most episodes, the franchise has used "Back To the Future" rules, where changing history
results in an altered present. This kind of time travel was most notably used in "City On
The Edge Of Forever," in which the time-stranded members of the Enterprise couldn't prevent the
death of Edith Keeler without destroying their own future, hundreds of years later.
The movie "First Contact," and the "Deep Space Nine" episode "Past Tense" also play by the same
rules. Some stories, however, have used causality loop rules, where we discover that the travel
back in time was part of history all along, and they just didn't know it. This is how the "Next
Generation" two-parter "Time's Arrow" worked, with the crew discovering Data's head on Earth,
buried for hundreds of years, even before they traveled back in time.
But more recently, a third time travel ruleset appeared in the 2009 "Star Trek" movie from J.J.
Abrams, in which the Romulan Nero's travel back in time resulted in the creation of
an entirely new branching reality. Ultimately, the writers of "Star Trek" seem to use whatever
rules they want to serve the story in front of them, and space is weird, so that's okay.
The 1967 "Star Trek" episode "The Squire Of Gothos" features an enigmatic villain
named Trelane, a powerful trickster who kidnaps Kirk and Sulu off the bridge of the Enterprise.
After they're rescued, Trelane appears on the bridge of the ship without explanation, and with
no discernible technology, transports the entire bridge crew down to his planet. He magically
changes people's clothing, plays childish games with the crew, and speaks to them in French.
"Ah, monsieur! Vive la gloire! Vive Napoleon!"
Later, they're put on trial, where Trelane is the judge, in full courtroom dress. Eventually,
his games are put to an end not by Kirk, but by a pair of non-corporeal beings who scold
Trelane for misbehaving, revealing him to be little more than a child of his god-like race.
If this sounds familiar, it's because this all bears a striking resemblance
to the character of Q, who tormented the Enterprise-D in "Next Generation" in a very
similar way. Q also kidnaps crew members, pops onto the bridge of the Enterprise,
causes impromptu costume changes, and has more than once dressed as a judge and put
the crew of the Enterprise on trial. He's also fond of speaking French.
"Au contraire, mon capitaine! He's back!"
But Star Trek has dozens of all-powerful beings, so the question of whether Trelane
is himself a Q has been the subject of debate. According to actor John De Lancie, who played Q,
the answer is a clear and unequivocal yes, according to a 2010 interview with StarTrek.com.
And even though it's non-canon, the novel "Q Squared" by Peter
David confirmed that Trelane was a renegade who hailed from the
race known as the Q Continuum… though nothing on screen has yet confirmed it.
The holodeck has provided "Star Trek" opportunities to venture to new worlds
within the confines of the ship, able to recreate everything from a Romulan
landscape to a jazz club. The room uses a combination of hard light holograms,
force fields, and replicator technology which together can create the illusion of an endless,
fully-interactive 3D environment. And thanks to replicators, a person in the
holodeck can even leave the confines of the room and take a simulated object with them.
We've also seen the capabilities of the holodeck expanded on a few occasions. "Voyager" kicks
holograms up a notch by inventing holographic technology that allows their Doctor to roam the
ship freely. In a later "Voyager" episode, "Dark Frontier," the crew tie two holodecks together,
allowing one team to operate on a re-creation of Voyager, while the other simulates a mission
on a Borg cube, with actions in one affecting the other. Likewise, in "The Killing Game" an
alien race called the Hirogen take over Voyager and install holo-emitters throughout the ship,
turning the multiple decks into one massive simulation of 1940's wartime France.
The holodecks have been shown to be a huge drain on the ship's power, and are usually the first
things shut down in emergencies. They're also extremely vulnerable to malfunctions,
with power surges switching off safety protocols, or making exit impossible. This has made the
holodecks the source of much drama, since the crew can get trapped in a dangerous world within their
own ship, and intelligent holograms might just try to take over the Enterprise once in a while.
One of the most fundamental pieces of technology on "Star Trek," the
transporter is also one of the most baffling. Since it converts a person into energy and then
reforms them at another location, many have wondered if a transporter actually kills you,
and creates a duplicate of you on the other end. It's probably the best scientific
and philosophical question the series has raised, but it's rarely addressed onscreen.
"If you've got some reason you want my atoms scattered all over space, boy…"
According to the science of the show, the transporter works by scanning and converting
your physical matter into a stream of all of your subatomic particles. Once a location is selected
for transport, your matter stream is "beamed" there and reassembled. The same particles that
were you before are still you after. But the problems arise when it's not the same particles,
such as when a duplicate of Will Riker was created by a second transporter beam
in the episode "Second Chances." If the original matter that was Riker rematerialized on the ship,
where did the matter that made the second Riker come from? A lot can go wrong, and it often does.
Because the transporter doesn't have to reconstitute you using the same atoms, it
can replace them with new ones using the blueprint the transporter created of your energy pattern.
This is why some believe a transporter is a kill and copy machine. We're left
to take the word of fictional "Star Trek" scientists — the transporter doesn't kill you,
it transports the real you, body, soul and all.
Introduced in the first episode of "Enterprise," the character referred to by fans as "Future
Guy" was a projection that spoke to people in the 22nd century from a far off future.
Through his vague silhouette he would speak to the villainous Suliban to influence events in
his past for his own ends. Another time traveler named Daniels traveled back to
recruit Archer to help stop him, and put an end to what he called the Temporal Cold War.
But who was this Future Guy? Unfortunately, the series abandoned the plot thread before
viewers would get concrete answers. Speaking at a convention in 2009, series producer
Brannon Braga and former showrunner Manny Coto claimed that a proposed fifth season would have
revealed Future Guy as a Romulan attempting to change history. But on Twitter in 2015,
Braga stated that the original plan was that the mystery villain would have been revealed
as Captain Archer himself, attempting to manipulate his destiny from the future.
In the expanded universe of "Star Trek" novels, the shadowy baddie was revealed to
be Jamran Harnoth, a 28th century time agent who worked for an organization
called the Order Of The Omega. Onscreen, there's yet to be a definitive answer.
Whether or not going faster than Warp 10 is possible is a question that's plagued
"Trek" for decades, because the series seems to have rewritten the rules of warp travel
more than once. In the original "Trek" series episode "Journey To Babel," it's said that
speeds above Warp 10 are unsafe, while in "The Changeling" anything above Warp 15 is called a
"multiwarp." Meanwhile in an "Animated Series" episode, the Enterprise went as fast as Warp 36.
By the time of the "Next Generation," it seems that the fastest possible speed a starship could
achieve was Warp 9.9. According to the "Star Trek: Voyager" episode "Threshold," anything
Warp 10 or beyond was "infinite velocity" and meant you would exist at every point in
the universe simultaneously. Time and distance would have no meaning. But in achieving Warp 10,
Tom Paris and Captain Janeway wound up evolving into slug-like creatures.
So while it seems that achieving such speeds are technically possible, they're not really
recommended. Still, there are other ways of traveling the stars that are faster than Warp 9.9.
We've seen a slipstream drive in use on "Voyager," and a protostar drive
on "Star Trek: Prodigy," both moving ships beyond the highest warp speeds.
And the spore drive on "Discovery" cuts speed out of the equation entirely,
just putting you wherever you need to be using the power of space mushrooms.
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