Confessions of a Sci-Fi Newbie #3: Star Trek: The Original Series

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

This week, I tackled one of the pinnacles of science fiction: Star Trek. My newbie-ism has no bounds. I have a confession: I have never seen Star Trek. Not one episode. Not even the movie with hottie hotness, Chris Pine, and American Horror Story’s Zachary Quinto. Contain your shock.

I watched the first episode, The Man Trap. The show originally aired in the late 60s, and I must say, they did pretty well as far as effects go without all of our 21st century cinema gadgets. I was actually surprised at how much I really liked the episode (this is why you have to read books and not just look at the covers).

Okay, so, there’s this starship USS Enterprise flying around the Milky Way basically checking up on the humans that live on alien planets. The ship is not only supposed to bring the humans supplies, but also check on their general well-being. In this episode, Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy fly to a planet to perform a routine medical examination on Robert Crater (heehee, crater) and his wife, Nancy. Except things don’t go so routine. First, there’s something funny going on with Nancy’s appearance. Dr. McCoy sees her as he remembers, a younger, beautiful woman, Captain Kirk sees her as an older woman, but the kicker is that one of the flunkies, Truman Darnell, sees her as pretty young blonde, an entirely different woman. She’s similar to Moira from American Horror Story.

Spoiler Alert: she’s actually a monster. Nancy kills so many people in this episode. Maybe that’s why I liked it. She sucks all of the sodium from her victims, leaving these red suction circles on their faces. I mean, how cool is that for cause of death.

Things I’ve Learned:

• Captain Kirk is hot. Do you see that little dark reddish-blonde quiff thing he’s going on with his hair? He must’ve been a heart-breaker back in the day.
• The ship looks kind of like a satellite dish.
• Captain Kirk is pretty funny. Well, he was in the beginning of the episode, but then he turned serious when all the craziness that was happening.
• Spock is wearing a lot of blush and eyeshadow.
• I know Uhura and Sulu! Uhura is Nichelle Nichols. I recognized her from Snow Dogs and Heroes. Sulu is George Takei, the LGBT activist, and I recently saw him an episode of Lost Girl.
• The dresses on the girls in this ship are entirely too short.

Things I’m Curious About:

• Do the different colored shirts have meaning?
• I wonder how Captain Kirk’s friendship with Spock plays out because Kirk’s personality seems very easy going, and Spock seems to have trouble grasping human humor. There was a scene when Uhura was playfully flirting with him, and it completely went over his head.

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• Starfleet Academy Brings SciFi Life To Old Tropes
• It Came From The Archives! “Hello Tomorrow! Doesn’t Need Its Gimmick”
• Wonder Man: Excellently Acted