All Our Yesterdays

It's easy to assume that the last few episodes of Star Trek were filmed with the knowledge that the series had been cancelled. This isn't necessarily the case. Presumably at the end of the third season the cast and crew were toiling away with the expectation that the series wasn't coming back, but also with the the memory of the extraordinary letter writing campaign which led directly to the renewing of the series. In The Making Of Star Trek Stephen E. Whitfield describes the mid-January second season wrap party as, "a mixture of party atmosphere and half-voiced despair."

Certainly All Our Yesterdays looks like the product of a team who are still holding out for a miracle, but they are not just sitting around and hoping that miracle will happen all by itself. All Our Yesterdays looks stunning. It's obviously been made by people determined to prove that there is still life in the Star Trek format. It's an episode designed to satisfy all of NBC's wants. An action adventure story set on an alien world, which begins on the planet and not on the Enterprise as NBC Network Production Manager Stan Robertson constantly nagged, with a good meaty story for Spock and McCoy, and lots of jeopardy for Kirk. As a production it's got an impressive scope. With no Enterprise sets needed the series goes to town bringing the planet Sarpeidon's history to life. In order we see a library set, a street scene (including what looks like night shooting on a backlot) an ice cliff, a cave interior, and a jail set. All of these sets are large, the library and the cave interior both contain several distinct areas, and it looks as if money for sets must have been diverted from Turnabout Intruder which takes place largely on the Enterprise. The story is also lit gorgeously. Director of Photography Al Francis produces some amazing work for this episode. Zarabeth's cave is filled with blues and oranges and deep reds which highlight the shadows. Kirk's jail cell is also filled with shadow and there's a lovely moment as Kirk overpowers the Prosecutor, who is pushed into shadow so only the edge of his hair is lit before Kirk grabs the man's chin and turns his face into the light.

The script makes an effort to give Sarpeidon's people different speech patterns.

WENCH: Oh, thank you, man. I thought I'd be limbered sure when that gull caught me cutting his purse.

KIRK: What's that? Are you all right?

WENCH: Oh, I took you to be an angler, but you're none of us, are ya? Well, you're a bully fine coe for all of that. What a handsome dish ya served them, the coxcombs.

Everyone in Kirk's storyline talks in a faux olde-English, except for the Prosecutor who turns out to also be from the future. Zarabeth has some nice understated and bitter humour ("my crime was in choosing my kinsmen unwisely") and care is taken to make sure that Mr Atoz can be distinguished from his duplicates. Unfortunately the story itself is derivative. Like The Savage Curtain it's another assembly of previously successful plot elements. The Spock/Zarabeth romance suffers from the same fault as the Kirk/Rayna story in Requiem For Methuselah. We've seen this plot before and it just feels like one time too many round the block for the [crewmember] falls in love story. Leonard Nimoy and Mariette Hartley work hard to give the romance some weight and make it seem of real significance to the characters but All Our Yesterdays is no This Side Of Paradise.

Spock's slow reversion to the brutal and savage ways of his ancestors allows the relationship to seem slightly less contrived. Presumably Vulcans share some sort of telepathic group mind. When Spock travels into Sarpeidon's past he unconsciously plugs into an earlier version of this telepathic network and it overwhelms his logical and rational side. Although Spock has travelled into the past in other stories the furthest back he went was 1930 New York in The City On The Edge Of Forever when Vulcans were still rational and logical beings. This telepathic link must also be what allows him to instantly sense the destruction of the Vulcan crewed starship Intrepid in The Immunity Syndrome. The near instantaneous nature of both suggests that telepathy in Star Trek travels faster than the speed of light. Maybe it's not limited by the normal laws of physics.

At first glance this story would seem to contradict the basic lesson of The City On The Edge Of Forever, that changes in the past cause changes in the present. The sheer number of people fleeing into Sarpeidon's past should reduce it to a mass of paradoxes and undo the future which they need to escape from the coming nova. Actually, the time travel aspect of this story makes sense; or at least as much sense as any time travel story can. The history of Sarpeidon is a closed loop. The library sits literally at the end of Sarpeidon's history and the records it contains have already been shaped by the actions of the refugees. They may have only left recently but as Spock puts it, they are dead now. "dead and buried. Long ago." 

Enterprise crew deaths: None.

Running total: 56

The Deadly Years

The Deadly Years is a good example of the balancing act faced by any writer hoping to sell a script to Star Trek. You need an exciting, unique concept, and you also need a script which is actually achievable under the production limitations of the series. You can submit your idea about the Enterprise landing party being attacked by a slug 1000 feet tall but it's probably not going to get past Gene L. Coon's desk. Unless you've written the greatest 1000 feet tall slug attack script ever. A script so good that not making it actually causes the production team some distress at which point they will start looking at ways to make it practical (“what if the slug is only ten feet tall?”, “will 1000 regular sized slugs work instead?”).

By all accounts this is the process The City On The Edge Of Forever went through (with fewer slugs). A whittling down of Harlan Ellison's original script to remove expensive elements like a hike across the terrain of the Guardian's world, including shots of mountains and a distant city, while hopefully staying true to the core of the story. Even after cutting back on the scale The City On The Edge Of Forever was one of Star Trek's most demanding scripts, costing $245,316 against a first series average of $190,000, and taking seven and a half days to film rather than the standard six. The reason the production team went to all this effort can be seen in a Robert Justman memo to John D. F. Black, “without a doubt this is the best and most beautifully written screenplay we have gotten to date and possibly we'll ever get this season.” Harlan Ellison's script was one the production team felt they had to make. 

The script of The Deadly Years doesn't compare to The City On The Edge Of Forever but it does have an irresistible concept. The idea that Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and the unfortunate Lieutenant Galway all begin rapidly ageing. It's a threat the audience can grasp instantly. Ageing the main cast has tremendous visual appeal, and it gives the actors something different to do; playing older than an actor's age is a real challenge. On the downside old age make-up is complicated, expensive, and time consuming to apply. The script doesn't just call for the actors to gain a few decades they are continually ageing so the amount of make-up required keeps increasing. Plus, the script doesn't just need one actor ageing up, but five. In the book The World Of Star Trek William Shatner recalls spending three hours in the make-up chair, so that's around nine hours of make-up for those sickbay scenes featuring aged Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

The compromise which makes the episode affordable is the competency hearing to decide if Kirk is still fit for command. For ten minutes, a fifth of the episode, the action is restricted to one set and everything is kept as simple as possible. Most of the characters stay seated so camera moves are simplified and much of the cutting is just between wide shots of the briefing room and single shots of characters. The lighting is very basic, which presumably reduces setting up times between shots. And although Scotty is present he is the only character not to get a big single close-up, the closest the camera gets to his face is when Scotty appears in a two shot with Doctor McCoy, which suggests his old age make-up has been simplified to reduce preparation time. Also the courtroom events unfold in real time which means the ageing make-up can be fixed for a significant section of the episode. 

Unfortunately the one thing everyone notices about The Deadly Years is it drags badly during the competency hearing. The bulk of act three is taken up with courtroom drama as characters rehash incidents the audience saw in act two. It would be wonderful to replace this hearing with something more dramatic, possibly a sub-plot where the infected landing party stay quarantined on Gamma Hydra IV, as in Miri, and search for a cure while the Enterprise rushes off for help from Starbase 10 and is attacked by Romulans, but that isn't possible. This is not to imply that the hearing is just ten minutes of dead air. The obvious discomfort of the Enterprise crew as they testify against Kirk is well handled. As is Kirk's constant confusion over which planet the Enterprise is currently orbiting, and Shatner's little old man chuckle as he demands the hearing ask him questions to prove he is fit to command.

Another money saving measure is the Romulan attack at the end of the episode. For budgetary reasons no actors are hired to play Romulans but this actually enhances their mystery rather than looking cheap. Writing about Errand Of Mercy I complained, “Any script with the Romulans must, or at least should, waste time explaining why each new trespass [of the neutral zone] does not result in war. Worse, if one side or the other allows multiple breaches of the zone then they start to look weak. Why tell us that breaching the zone is considered an act of war, if that's not what's shown on screen.” The Deadly Years answers that complaint very nicely by establishing that Romulan's don't talk. They are not interested in diplomacy or complaining about violations of their territory. If you cross the neutral zone you will be destroyed, and then the Romulan's will go back to their mysterious business. They are made more alien by not apparently caring about breaches of the zone beyond destroying the ship responsible.

Less successful is the reason the Enterprise breaches the neutral zone in the first place. After Kirk is removed from command Commodore Stocker (for a change the Federation official of the week is nice and well meaning rather than nasty) takes over and orders the Enterprise to fly directly through the neutral zone to the superior medical facilities at Starbase 10. The Star Trek production team made a big deal about believability. Stephen E. Whitfield's The Making Of Star Trek includes an except from the Star Trek writers guide in which prospective writers are asked to find “the major Star Trek format error in the following 'teaser' from a story outline.” What follows is an outline for a scene involving the Enterprise being attacked. As the ship faces destruction Kirk puts his arms around his Yeoman and embraces her. To explain why the scene is wrong the guide suggests imagining it as taking place on the U. S. S. Detroit a Navy destroyer as it faces destruction from an enemy gunboat on a suicide mission; “would Captain E. L. Henderson... turn and hug a comely female WAVE who happened to be on the ship's bridge?” No he wouldn't, the guide concludes. Equally, following a serious accident on a military exercise in West Germany in 1967 would a US Army officer commandeer a Jeep and order it to drive in a straight line through East German territory to bring the critically injured to the superior medical facilities in West Berlin? No he wouldn't, and no matter how naive the script tries to make Commodore Stocker with lines like, “if I could talk to [the Romulans], explain to them why we violated the Neutral Zone,” this is a major believability failure.

The purpose of this scene seems to be to contrast Kirk's direct experience with Stocker's lack of ability, and to make the audience reflect on the foolishness of a system which devalues Kirk's experience just because he is old and a little confused on the fine details. In other words to comment directly on the way the elderly are treated in western society. While this is a laudable message it's undercut by the rest of the script which is about the horror of growing old and has a very unsympathetic view of the elderly. Kirk is tetchy, forgetful, irrational, paranoid, and falls asleep in his chair on the bridge. The message is also undercut by the ending. Understandably the production team wanted a newly young Kirk to leap onto the bridge and save the day but this nullifies any potential message about wisdom being as valuable as youth.

Joseph Pevney directs again, in fact in broadcast order he has now directed three episodes in a row. Although the direction in the competency hearing is largely kept simple he does throw in a few moments of visual flair. The best is when Spock questions Yeoman Atkins. The camera follows Spock around the briefing room and ends on a three shot with Spock and Atkins in the foreground, and Uhura in the background reacting. Once Atkins has been dismissed Spock walks to the front of the frame, picks up one of the electronic clipboards, and walks back to the middle of the shot and begins talking to Uhura. Outside of the competency hearing Pevney has more time to create memorable shot compositions. The best occurs right at the start when Chekov enters one of the buildings on Gamma Hydra IV. Shot from inside looking out, the frame is largely dark with just the slit of the doorway showing the surface of the planet and its lurid orange sky. As Chekov comes through the door he walks into shadow until he stands silhouetted against the exterior. Groping his way forwards in the darkness the camera pulls back, showing us a room full of dimly lit shapes, until the lights suddenly come on and we see the corpse of Alvin. This sequence looks great, but it also demonstrates how the director has to work as a problem solver and compose shots to explain story points clearly. Chekov is a young ensign, but he's seen death before, and shot more matter of factly (Chekov enters the building, sees the corpse, panics, and runs out) this could have looked silly. As it is the use of darkness, and the lights suddenly coming on, and the decision to use weird old age make-up on the body rather than just having an extra lie down, all puts the emphasis on this being a shocking moment. Chekov is scared because it's unexpected not because he's seen a dead man. 

The Deadly Years works best when it keeps the focus of the story on out of control ageing, being elderly before your time, and the mixture of pity and embarrassment the Enterprise crew feel at the degeneration of Kirk's abilities. At times it is like proto-body horror, with Kirk's ageing traitor body being a precursor to the sort of thing David Cronenberg would do infinitely more gorily in the late 1970s. Perhaps in the end it's better the story stays away from obvious messages about respecting the wisdom of our elders because that can be a trite message and combining it with scenes of Kirk as a grumpy old man would have made for a confusing mix.

Crew deaths: 1, Lieutenant Galway. 

Running total: 37 

Misc:

This week one of the background pictures of the closing titles is a photograph of regular extra William Blackburn dressed as a Tellarite, from Journey To Babel, for a make-up test.

Amok Time

Amok Time is the episode which confirms Spock's position as Star Trek's breakout character. The first episode of the second series, the shop window episode, is given over to the character the viewers are most likely to recognise, the guy with the ears; a trick Star Trek would try again in a year with the much more exploitatively titled Spock's Brain. Amok Time is also the episode which creates Vulcan. Filling in acres of detail about Spock, his character, his planet, and his biology.

It's remarkable the episode got made. In 1952 CBS decided the word “pregnant” could not be used to describe the lead character in I Love Lucy, the acceptable terms were “expecting”, or “with child”. Five years later the same network refused to approve the début episode of gentle comedy Leave It To Beaver because the show's two child characters hide a baby alligator in a toilet cistern (the agreed compromise was that the toilet cistern could be shown but not the toilet itself). Nothing much had changed by 1967. Stephen E. Whitfield's The Making Of Star Trek is full of notes from NBC's Standards and Practices Department. Dagger Of The Mind: Please delete the underlined in Janice's speech, “I'm a damned attractive female.” Miri: Caution here where Janice opens her uniform to check on the progress of the disease; avoid exposure which would embarrass or offend. Space Seed: Caution on the embrace; avoid the open-mouth kiss. And yet Amok Time is an episode in which Mr. Spock must surrender to his throbbing biological urges and return home to claim his child bride; or die. "I realised that by creating a separate world, a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network." Gene Roddenberry's often used quote has never seemed more appropriate. Certainly the implication of Amok Time is that NBC was happy to talk about sex, as long as it was alien sex.

That said, there is a certain amount of coy tap dancing round the subject. The most explicit Amok Time gets is this exchange.

SPOCK: It has to do with biology.

KIRK: What?

SPOCK: Biology.

KIRK: What kind of biology?

SPOCK: Vulcan biology.

KIRK: You mean the biology of Vulcans? Biology as in reproduction? Well, there's no need to be embarrassed about it, Mister Spock. It happens to the birds and the bees.

SPOCK: The birds and the bees are not Vulcans, Captain. If they were, if any creature as proudly logical as us were to have their logic ripped from them as this time does to us. How do Vulcans choose their mates? Haven't you wondered?

KIRK: I guess the rest of us assume that it's done quite logically.

SPOCK: No. No. It is not. We shield it with ritual and customs shrouded in antiquity. You humans have no conception. It strips our minds from us. It brings a madness which rips away our veneer of civilisation. It is the pon farr. The time of mating. There are precedents in nature, Captain. The giant eelbirds of Regulus Five, once each eleven years they must return to the caverns where they hatched. On your Earth, the salmon. They must return to that one stream where they were born, to spawn or die in trying.

Film editor James D. Ballas allows most of that scene to play out as a single shot which makes it a masterclass for comparing the acting styles of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Shatner seems more inclined to play the scene lightly, looking for the sort of gentle laughs a sitcom might get out of a scene where the father of the family attempts to discuss the facts of life with a son. Nimoy plays it straight but makes the interesting choice to play against the intent of the scene. Instead of being embarrassed he makes Spock visibly angry at not only being forced to discuss something so deeply personal, but at having to keep explaining points to this stupid earthman. Both actors also reverse their usual body language so the more physical Shatner stands very still, while Nimoy writhes in shame. And, of course, the shot is impeccably set-up by director Joesph Pevney who has both actors stand in the centre of the frame, facing the camera, their stances identical with their hands behind their back. Capping the whole scene is Gerald Fried's evocative score.

What's remarkable about Amok Time is how right this all feels. After 29 episodes this influx of backstory could have been a clumsy graft, like suddenly revealing Scotty was married, instead it feels entirely appropriate. Theodore Sturgeon's script puts the audience in the same shoes as Kirk and McCoy, suddenly exponentially increasing their knowledge of Spock and Vulcan. Within the Star Trek universe it makes you realise what a closed world Vulcan must be. More so even than the USSR at the time the episode was written. Almost like North Korea today. Plus, it's a terrific example of a wish backfiring. Spock is ashamed of his human half and wants to be more Vulcan then with the onset of his Pon farr he realises he is more Vulcan than he hoped. It's a lovely moment which shines a light at the heart of his character and the conflict between his Vulcan and human ancestry.

The what's-wrong-with-Spock mystery is only half the episode. At the beginning of act three Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to Vulcan where the duplicitous logic of Spock's bride T'Pring manoeuvres Kirk and Spock into fighting each other. The greatest achievement of the episode may be that Vulcan extends beyond the boundaries of the studio set. Throwaway lines give it history, “[that's] T'Pau. The only person to ever turn down a seat on the Federation Council,” and a sense of place, “It's lovely. I wish the breeze were cooler.” Even better, the series has the self confidence not to worry about making Vulcan customs look silly. The black masked Vulcan carrying an axe, the blizzard of alien words (koon-ut-kal-if-fee, kroykah, plak-tow), the constant jingling of bells all look, and sound, a little silly. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the production team to play it safe and cut them from the script but they didn't. And Amok Time is a better episode as a result. Customs often look weird to outsiders. In the same way that Guardsmen wearing Bearskins, or Beefeaters, or Morris Dancers end up looking indistinguishable from Monty Python's Flying Circus fish-slapping dance. Being presented in all its wind-chimed, bell ringing glory, gives Vulcan more depth and the alien words benefit from being put in a context which the audience cannot grasp but is obviously there. Removing anything from the script in case the audience might laugh would leave the series looking terribly po-faced. Worse it would remove a magnificent piece of editing when Spock is “deep in the plak-tow.” The two bell ringers march round the plinth Spock and T'Pau are standing on. A sequence of rapid cuts follows; a close-up of Spock, a close-up of the bells, a dutched angle close-up of T'Pau; T'Pring; Kirk; McCoy; Stonn. All backgrounded by the bells jingling and Gerald Fried's fighting music (also known as the national anthem of Decapod 10 from Futurama). It's brilliantly bizarre, the closest Star Trek ever got to a genuine sixties freak out. And just when you think it can't get any better a thunderflash goes off sending a plume of smoke curling into the sky. All that's missing is a fisheye lens close-up of Spock (like we'd see in season three's The Tholian Web).

Amok Time is one of those episodes where everyone seems excited to be involved and has raised their game. Extra care has been taken over even small details. When William Shatner takes the lirpa he drops his arm as if the weapon is heavier than he expected. The blood effect on his wound is slightly gorier and more realistic than might normally be seen. Someone has even taken extra care over the photograph of T'Pring as a child. It's barely on screen for three seconds and yet a set has been constructed for the background. In fact, someone seems to have gone to the trouble of constructing a unique set because it's not one I recall seeing in the episode. It would have been easy, and cheap, to photograph the young T'Pring against a neutral background. That extra money was found to make even a still photo look as good as possible shows everyone concerned wanted Amok Time to look great. And the end result of the production team's pride in their work is that sense that Vulcan is a living world. Even the photograph of T'Pring raises all sorts of questions. Who took the picture, Spock's parents? Young Spock himself? Does he have other pictures of T'Pring? Or a photo album of images from Vulcan? Speculation opened up simply because someone put a more than normal effort into an image on screen for three seconds.

Star Trek is not a series which does introductions but the other notable event of Amok Time is the first appearance of Ensign Chekov. Not that you'd notice from the way he's filmed that he was any different from the other interchangeable bridge crew we saw in season one, but finally, the gang's all here. 

Enterprise crew deaths: None, again. It's been a good few weeks for the Enterprise crew.

Running total: 26