Word: crews
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...after four million years of cranial evolution, man (and Desilu Studios) produced a television series about "Space, The Final Frontier," an NBC show featuring a starship called the USS Enterprise that could on a good night travel quite a few times faster than the speed of light, and a crew of 430 human and other beings ("carbon-based units" as they came to be called) determined to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations: to boldly go where no man has gone before...
Roddenberry assembled a talented production crew, and sought out some of the best science fiction writers around, men like Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, instead of relying on the usual hacks who specialized in cop shows and dumb westerns. At a cost of $200,000 for each episode, Star Trek at least strove for excellence and intelligence, if it came up short sometimes...
...second part of The Motion Picture describes the Enterprise crew's interception and final solution to the problem. The first half seems aimlessly tacked on. The writer and producer thought it necessary to explain the ten year gap between the last episode of the Star Trek television series and The Motion Picture. The resulting footage is not only unwieldy and expensive (a five-minute sequence involving the Starfleet's San Francisco headquarters must have cost at least $2 million) but also damages the rest of the show--the half-hour wasted on James T. Kirk's procession to the Enterprise...
...make them memorable, it is a shame that there are no thematic elements which would make The Motion Picture more durable. The story focuses exclusively on one problem--stopping the intruder before it destroys all the "carbon based units" (i.e. life) on the Earth. The Enterprise and its crew, once it has assembled, proceeds to the alien with no delay, no tests or demonstrations of strength, courage, ingenuity, resourcefulness or extraordinary ability. And once one technological challenge has been overcome, the Enterprise and its crew arrive at their destination having had no shakedown, without demonstrating that the women...
...message is typical Roddenberry--that we should not strike out at the unknown without first determining its true purpose and motivations. Unfortunately the moral is swallowed up and permanently obscured by the simplicity of the characters and the weakness in the plot. We do not perceive the Enterprise crew as thinkers but as doers, whose own motivations are as clouded as those of the enemy they are combating. We end up learning more about the enemy than the human beings. We can assume that Roddenberry meant us to view the alien as a projection of ourselves. It was a good...