Star Trek Continuity

Most people don’t worry about this stuff. I do.

The continuity of a television show like Star Trek is, at first glance, a relatively simple affair. The show aired on the NBC television network starting on Thursday, September 8, 1966 and continued for three years. From a continuity standpoint then, we can simply state that everything happened in the order that we would have seen it had we been watching the show from the beginning.

Unfortunately, we run into problems almost right away. It turns out that the third episode aired was the first episode filmed. (And the first episode was actually the second pilot.) For the episode entitled “Where No Man Has Gone Before” the cast had yet to be solidified. From a viewer’s standpoint, there would odd discrepancies. Doctor McCoy is nowhere to be seen, instead we have Doctor Mark Piper as the ship’s chief medical officer. Uhura is gone. Sulu is an astrophysicist.

One episode later, all was back to the way it was. McCoy was solving a medical emergency, Sulu was at the helm, and Uhura was back at communications. From the viewer’s standpoint, things were obviously amiss. A reordering was necessary. Ultimately it would be determined that the actual order of the episodes would be the production order of the series. The events of “Where No Man Had Gone Before” would now be moved to the beginning of the timeline, and other episodes would follow logically in the order that they were produced. This allowed for the actors and writers to develop the characterization and continuity organically, building on what came before. Watching the original seven episodes in order will give an attentive viewer a keen insight in just how Leonard Nimoy developed the character of Spock over time, refining a stern, almost angry alien into the calm logical Spock we think of today. (I sometimes hear from people that the previews from the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek film show Zachary Quinto playing an angry, combative Spock as being somehow out of character. Actually, watching Nimoy in the earliest episodes show hat Quinto’s playing Spock spot on, continuity-wise.)

So this formulation of Star Trek continuity serves us well, for a very short time. A viewer interested in Star Trek might have found themselves, circa July 1967 noticing a Gold Key Star Trek comic book on the spin rack at their local drugstore. The curious individual might spend the twelve cents the comic cost and bring it home, only to discover that the creators of the comic had no idea what Star Trek was about.

There are lots of stories about what happened to cause the disconnect between what was on the television and what was presented in the comic. It is said that Italian artist Alberto Giolitti had never seen the series and used only publicity photos as reference. The truth is that Gold Key had little interest in anything but licensing the name Star Trek and could not care less about quality or fidelity to the series. Continuity with the original series was out the window.

However, later issues in the series (it ran for 61 issues) included sequels to events that had happened in the original series. Harry Mudd, a con man character from two episodes of the original series (and one episode of the animated) appears in issue #61. The Guardian of Forever, a powerful alien artifact that serves as a portal to the past, last seen in the first season episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” figures prominently in issue #56. Zefram Cochrane, creator of the warp drive, and Dr. McCoy’s daughter (about whom more later) also make appearances. It seems that even though all the events depicted in the Gold Key comics did not take place in Star Trek’s core continuity, all the events of the Star Trek television series did take place in Gold Key’s continuity.

In other words, we have identified two different Star Trek continuities. But that’s not the end of it.

The same curious visitor who purchased that comic book from that drugstore in 1967 might have made his way to a science fiction convention in New York and picked up the very first Star Trek fanzine, Spockanalia. Fanzines quickly became extremely popular, filled with poetry, original stories, and critical dissections of Star Trek continuity. In the very first fanzine a new idea was promulgated about Vulcan culture, a type of poetry known a ni var, defined as meaning literally “two form.” The idea is to compose a piece comparing two different things, or two aspects of the same thing. Ultimately, “Ni Var” came to be the title of a short story in the collection Star Trek: The New Voyages, and a Vulcan Starship in the television series Enterprise was named the Ni’Var after the story.

This is only one small way in which the continuity created by the fans in the many hundreds of fanzines that prospered in the wake of Star Trek influenced continuity. In the hands of the fans, the continuity of Star Trek exploded into a kaleidoscope of different possibilities, and the creators of the different “official” media were able to not only pick and choose the bits they liked, but were also to gear their efforts towards the fans interests.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Star Trek works of James Blish. James Blish was the celebrated (though second-tier) science fiction author best known for his “Cities in Space” stories and his James Joycean short story “The Quincunx of Time.” Into his hands fell the awesome task of adapting Star Trek scripts into a batch of short stories for Bantam Books.

According to Blish, “26 July 66 An apparent opportunity has arisen to do a book of 8 short stories derived from scripts of the forthcoming TV series Star Trek for a flat fee of $2000. This creates a dilemma. I need the money and could do the work quickly. One the other hand I don’t like this kind of work and it’s bad for the reputation to get involved in that sort of hacking.”

Blish, like the editors over at Gold Key, considered this Star Trek job hackwork, quick money, and little more. In the end, of course, Blish would make more money from Star Trek than he would from all his other writing combined. So much, that he could comfortably retire, become a full-time writer, and move to England.

Blish saw the adaptations of the various star trek scripts as collaborations between the original writer and himself. As a result, his earliest collections retained the original titles of the episodes. (For instance, the episode Charlie X is called “Charlie’s Law” in the first collection.) In Blish’s original work, he thought very hard about such ideas as faster-than-light travel, and used various terms and ideas from modern physics. Blish saw his work as all inter-related, one large, mostly coherent universe. In his Star Trek work, Blish incorporates many of the same concepts. He refers to Nerst generators and Vegans in his adaptations. These are concepts from his works.

Again we see the establishment of another, separate continuity. The Star Trek of James Blish is related to but curiously different from the Star Trek of television. In the first three collections especially, when Blish is presented a choice of fidelity to the episode as aired or to the episode as written, he, being a writer, sides with the “as written” every time. His adaptation of the episode “The Spectre of the Gun” is radically different from the episode as aired.

But Blish’s biggest contribution to Star Trek continuity was his original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die! At this point the only previous original novel was Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds for Whitman. That novel was juvenile, faithful to the series, but ultimately uninteresting. From a continuity standpoint it is at best innocuous. Spock Must Die! is anything but innocuous. Blish blows the lid off the Federation/Klingon stalemate, and introduces us to the interstellar war only hinted at in the series. By the end of the novel, the Klingon empire is completely wiped out, forbidden from space travel, and no longer a threat to the Federation.

But despite Blish’s huge, game changing continuity, he was careful to consult with Star Trek fans about aspects of the series he did not understand. He dedicates Spock Must Die! to Kay Anderson, the editor of the Star Trek fanzine ST-Phile. He includes information about McCoy’s divorce and daughter, information removed from the Star Trek episode “The Way to Eden” but discovered by fans and incorporated into their understanding continuity. He also goes into elaborate detail about why women find Spock attractive, putting forth at least four different theories. Remember, early Star Trek fandom was a predominantly female undertaking, and the cult of Spock was a large focus.

That Blish’s books followed their own continuity can no longer be in any doubt. More surprisingly, the Bantam Books that followed, for a while at least, followed Blish’s continuity. The next Star Trek novel, Spock, Messiah!, refers to the events of Spock Must Die! as having occurred immediately prior to the current novel. (As an interesting side note, perhaps worthy of further inquiry, Star Trek novels were mostly at this point written by men, and fan fiction mostly written by women.)

These new continuities spring up because the owners of Star Trek, DesiLu and later Paramount Studios, didn’t care. They were after the quick licensing money and little else. The comics and the novels followed their own continuities, while the television series, canceled by 1970, entered syndication. The fans and their continuities could be safely ignored: There was little money to be made there and the publicity it generated was good for the show.

So Star Trek continued to be licensed out to whoever had the money and the interest. The U.S.S. Enterprise model released by AMT had decals that allowed you to fashion your ship as any one of the twelve Constitution class starships in the Federation fleet, never mind that only half a dozen are named in the series. (I remember my brother making the U.S.S. Congo.)

Other Star Trek toys followed. Most famously, and most fondly remembered, are the Mego action figures. The action figures are highly collectible, and though based on the show, once again seem to generate their own continuities. In the original Star Trek episode “A Private Little War” Kirk is attacked by a large, white, poisonous, spiny primate known as a “Mugato.” A primitive, savage creature, the Mugato is an animal. When Mego decided to do their action figure of the Mugato, they gave the creature clothing.

An intelligent Mugatu wearing clothes? It made little sense, until Peter David, years later in the Star Trek novel Fire on High introduced Ensign Janos, an intelligent Mugato, unique among his kind. David named the Mugato after Janos Prohaska, who design the Mugato and played him in the episode. Ensign Janos has an English accent.

We can see that the continuity of Star Trek follows five main lines, and that the lines can influence or ignore each other. Continuity can be followed or ignored, it is not cut in stone, but is fluid and organic. Sticklers might say that only the aired episodes and movies are in continuity. Paramount, the present owners of Star Trek, take this position, except that they have stated that many of those episodes are not in continuity. None of the animated episodes, except for “Yesteryear” are in the official continuity. The fifth Star Trek movie, in which we learn that Spock has a half brother, is also out.

Paramount’s inability to ensure quality controls over the years has lead to this disaster of continuity. Perhaps in response to this, Lucasfilm has stated that every Star Wars comic and novel and cartoon is in continuity (except perhaps, the Star Wars Holiday Special.) Joss Whedon, over at his so-called Buffyverse, has taken ownership of his world, deciding what’s in and what’s out. The episodes and comics and novels he likes are in. Those he doesn’t like are out.

One last point about Star Trek continuity, and it’s direct influence on the new Star Trek film by J.J. Abrams. In the previews, we get to see some pretty impressive action scenes featuring skydiving. In all the episodes of the original series, we never see Kirk or Spock engage in anything like this. (Though in Star Trek V we see Spock catch Kirk as he falls off a mountain, but then, that’s out of continuity, isn’t it?) However, way, way back in time, the very first Star Trek toy ever officially licensed and produced, was this:
Makes you wonder, doesn't it?