by Edward Gross
So I wrote to Bill and said every time I start to feel good about Star Trek, something like this shows up. I wish somebody would whisper into that little schmuck’s ear that the producer was trying to meet what he asked for. If I disappointed him, the least he could do is understand that an attempt was made to satisfy him and not take a cheap shot. It’s that kind of stupid little stuff that drives me crazy.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
I thought Fred Freiberger did a yeoman’s job. There was a feeling that a number of his shows weren’t as good as the first and second season, and maybe that’s true, but he did have some wonderfully brilliant shows and his contribution has never been acknowledged.
FRED FREIBERGER
Shatner’s a pretty creative guy. When I say creative, I mean he’s willing to try anything. He loved “Turnabout Intruder.” I was, frankly, a little concerned when Gene Roddenberry came up with a story where Kirk changes places with a woman, but Shatner absolutely loved the idea. When I originally read it, I had said to Gene Roddenberry, “I wonder what Shatner is going to say about this.” Gene said he wouldn’t have a problem at all, and he was correct. When I mentioned it to Shatner, he just loved the idea. He was a Shakespearean actor and I have great admiration for him.
SCOTT MANTZ
“Turnabout Intruder” is a bad episode. I mean, right after the opening credits Kirk goes, “Believe me, it’s better to be dead than to be alone in the body of a woman.” Who would get away with saying something like that today? Nobody. It is such a dated and sexist episode. But as bad as it is, and as much of a travesty as it was to end Star Trek with that episode, Shatner’s performance is pretty incredible.
WALTER KOENIG
To me, the most heinous violation Freiberger perpetuated was casting Melvin Belli in “And the Children Shall Lead.” That infuriated me, because Melvin was a friend of his evidently, and it’s one thing to cast friends who are actors and another to cast friends who are not actors. He was a lawyer! Not only did it dilute the impact, whatever there was to begin with, but it took an acting job away from an actor. I was really upset after that. It was very unfair.
FRED FREIBERGER
To boost the ratings we tried to get something unusual in there, and in this case unusual in terms of casting. So we brought Melvin Belli in. It could have been a better show. I thought the idea was good, but it just wasn’t as strong as it could have been. I don’t think it boosted our ratings.
DAVID GERROLD
Everybody disliked Freiberger intensely. Leonard and Bill didn’t like him, nobody else on the staff liked him. Nobody knew what to make of him. It was a very difficult situation for everyone.
FRED FREIBERGER
The truth is, I’ve been the target of vicious and unfair attacks even to this day. The fact that at the end of the second season Star Trek’s ratings had slipped, it was losing adult fans and was in disarray, carries no weight with the attackers. The dumping was all done on me and the third season. It seemed it was now Star Trek law to lay everything on Freiberger. Every disgruntled actor, writer, and director also found an easy dumping ground on which to blame their own shortcomings. Whenever one of my episodes was mentioned favorably, Gene Roddenberry’s name was attached to it. When one of my episodes was attacked, Roddenberry’s name mysteriously disappeared and only then did the name Freiberger surface.
As an example, I read an article, which I think was in the L.A. Times, praising the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” as the first television show to allow an interracial kiss. A breakthrough. Roddenberry was lauded for this, when in fact Roddenberry wasn’t within a hundred miles of that episode.
ARTHUR HEINEMANN (writer, “The Savage Curtain”)
My feeling was that when Gene Coon left, much of the quality of the original show was lost. When Freddy Freiberger took over, I felt the show was being cheapened. The ideas during the third year weren’t as good, and it seemed as though he didn’t care as much. I don’t want to say anything against him, because he’s a nice guy, but he always seemed frantic and I couldn’t tell why. My feeling was that when he was in his frantic moments, he would make decisions that might be wrong.
DAVID GERROLD
There’s a difference between doing Star Trek and going through the motions of doing Star Trek. It was very much true on the first show. There are ten people down on the soundstage doing Star Trek, and eight of them are there to collect paychecks; they’re going through the motions of doing the show. It’s just a job to them. There are other people, like set decorator Johnny Dwyer, to whom Star Trek is a special job. Where Star Trek is a privilege and your life, it’s just this wonderful, marvelous thing to do.
With the third season, the reason that it was the way it was, is that the guy at the center, the guy who represented the vision of what the show was supposed to be, was going through the motions. He wasn’t doing Star Trek. You try and explain that to the fans, and they think you’re disloyal to the show. Where that comes from is a loyalty to what the show represents.
FRED FREIBERGER
I have no quarrel to make with the right of critics, self-styled or otherwise, to dislike my episodes and to state that dislike. What angers me is when they choose to attack my character, sometimes labeling me as indifferent or uncaring. None of that could be farther from the truth, and I’m thankful that on occasion people like Bob Justman have gone out of their way to publicly stand up for me.
MARC CUSHMAN
Roddenberry’s adversarial relationship with NBC played a large role in why there was no fourth season. There were legitimate business reasons in that they perhaps weren’t getting as much as they could have for commercial time, but mostly it was political and it was personality. And so the folklore begins, because why is a network trying to cancel a show? Well, it must be because it had bad ratings.
No, there are other reasons why networks cancel a show. They didn’t want to renew it for the third season, but the write-in campaign forced them to. In second season they put it on Friday night, which is not a good night for Star Trek, but it was still their highest-rated Friday night show. It was their centerpiece show for the entire night. The show before it, Tarzan, wasn’t doing that well, and the show after it was a disaster. People would switch over and catch the movie on ABC at the halfway point, so even though the rating came down a bit on Friday nights and it wasn’t really standing up to Gomer Pyle too well, it was beating ABC and it was, again, NBC’s highest-rated show of the night.
So normally you don’t cancel that. But at that point they just didn’t want to do business with Roddenberry. So after the write-in campaign they put it in the death slot, the single worst time of the week, Friday night from ten to eleven p.m. They were determined that season three would be the last year.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG (coauthor, Star Trek Lives)
Nobody wanted more third season, but everyone wanted more first season. But having syndication was what mattered most, because of the lack of any other distribution channel. Today we see webisodes made by fans. George Takei was in one. Major Kickstarter funding is being raised for webisodes. But back then there simply was no recourse, no alternate channel for fan creativity.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE (authors, Star Trek Concordance)
The third season ground down, show after show being worse than the last, until even the authors of the scripts were having their names removed or using pseudonyms in place of their real names. To be fair, there were a few good scripts in the third season, but in the main those few seemed to be almost mistakes that slipped by.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
At the time, it was great just to have new episodes to watch, but even at the age of fourteen and fifteen, I knew that the show wasn’t as good as it used to be. When season three ended, I don’t remember feeling the need to start writing letters again, nor do I recall any hue and cry from my friends to do so. And looking back now, I have very little fondness for any of the season three episodes.
FRE
D FREIBERGER
Despite everything, morale on the show for the most part seemed okay. When they cut the budget down, you know that’s not a good sign. The last couple of shows the morale went down a little, but prior to that I hadn’t noticed. Despite that, if you’re a pro, you do the best you can right up until the last minute. Listen, three years for a show—any show—isn’t bad, especially when the ratings are so low.
While the third year of Star Trek has largely been dismissed as a creative failure by many, there are still a number of notable and beloved (or at least groundbreaking) episodes that were produced that season—no easy task, given the budget crunch and the departure of so many of the show’s previous key players. “Spectre of the Gun,” the first draft of which was written by Gene L. Coon, was a surrealistic western in which Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find themselves reliving the shootout at the O.K. Corral. In “The Paradise Syndrome,” an accident gives Kirk amnesia and has him becoming Indian god Kirok. He takes a bride in Miramanee, and ultimately becomes the victim of the people who realize he is not a deity—culminating in her tragic death and that of Kirk’s unborn child.
Then there was “Day of the Dove” which has an energy force that feeds on anger, hatred, and hostility, arming both the Klingons and Kirk’s crew with swords and setting them at one another’s throats on the Enterprise for what is intended to be an eternal battle, as none of the opponents actually die; “The Tholian Web,” in which Kirk is presumed dead but is actually trapped between dimensions; “Plato’s Stepchildren,” a disturbing episode in which aliens with telekinetic abilities torture Enterprise crewmen for their amusement—and during which Kirk and Uhura share television’s first interracial kiss; “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” a treatise on racial intolerance that focused on two survivors of a warring civilization, the source of hatred for which is derived from which side of their face is white and which side is black; “All Our Yesterdays,” which presented a very different Spock as he and McCoy are projected backward in time to a period before Vulcans embraced logic and he finds himself driven by primitive impulses, including love; and the series swan song, “Turnabout Intruder,” which has Kirk switch bodies with former lover Dr. Janice Lester.
FRED FREIBERGER
When Gene Coon wrote the original script for “Spectre of the Gun,” it took place in an actual western town. Bobby Justman and I thought about how we could help it some, and therefore we did this surrealistic kind of town to try and give it an otherworldly approach. Vincent McEveety was a hell of a creative director. I thought he did some wonderful things with it. I thought the show came out well, and that was satisfying, considering that was my first episode on Star Trek, though it aired later in the season.
VINCENT McEVEETY (director, “Spectre of the Gun”)
Even though “Spectre of the Gun” is not one of my favorites by a long shot, the effects, the wind, the stylized sets—the fragmented sets—all make it feel like a stage play. It was the kind of thing that takes a lot of imagination to relate to. However, it’s interesting that what little fan mail I get in my life usually pertains to that show. People love it, which I can’t believe, because I don’t.
MARGARET ARMEN
My thinking in writing “The Paradise Syndrome” is that these people on a spaceship for years and years have to get awfully sour, and have a special longing for their home planet and the simplicity of Earthlike nature. So I wondered what would happen if they were just hungry for R & R on an Earthlike planet, and they suddenly and unexpectedly came upon a planet which has a primitive Earth sort of idyllic civilization. I thought it was a good story, which kind of touched on man’s longing to go back to very simple things. To love in a simple, open way, and to be loved in a simple, open way. I think if Gene Roddenberry had been producing, it would have come out better, but who’s to say?
JEROME BIXBY (writer, “Day of the Dove”)
“Day of the Dove” was kind of my response to the Vietnam thing at that time. Throw down the swords! My original story was very late-sixties, and I ended it with a peace march which, thank God, came out. By the way, I first wrote Kang as Kor, the splendid Klingon commander in “Errand of Mercy.” John Colicos was in Italy at the time shooting a film. They wouldn’t give him a week off to come back and reprise Kor. He was furious. He could taste the role. So Kor became Kang, played by Michael Ansara, and he chewed the scenery. He also has referred to it as one of his favorites. Even his tousled rug was perfect, an almost boyish Klingon, tough as a ten-minute egg but genuinely likable.
MICHAEL ANSARA (actor, “Day of the Dove”)
This was the only Star Trek I had done at the time. I loved the part of Kang. I loved doing it, even though you never know how good a role is going to turn out until you see the final product. In this episode, it seemed to be the first time the Klingons were not purely “bad guys” but beings with a sense of honor and purpose. Everything I have done, even the bad guys, I try to give the character a sense of honor and believability.
FRED FREIBERGER
A shipboard show, which we needed. Considering our restrictions, I thought it came out well. It was more of a derring-do kind of show, and Michael Ansara was wonderful as the Klingon Kang.
JUDY BURNS (writer, “The Tholian Web”)
I met a student who was a physicist and told him that I wanted to write a Star Trek script which would be a ghost story based on fact. He said, “Why don’t you use the theory of infinite dimensions?” What came out was “In Essence Nothing,” which became “The Tholian Web.” At the time, if I remember correctly, the very first draft of the story had Spock as the one who disappeared. Eventually I received a classic memo from Bob Justman, who summed up by saying, “I think we can use it, but it should be Kirk out there. He would be schmuckishly heroic to stay behind on this other ship.” Besides that, there was another episode called “Spock’s Brain” in which Spock was out of it for a period of time, and they didn’t want to have him incapacitated for two scripts.
Some of the things I was a little disappointed in were caused by technical problems. Originally there were no space suits when Kirk and the others beamed over to the other ship. There were force-field belts which kept them encapsulated in a kind of mini force field, which included an oxygen bank. It kept them secure as long as the batteries held, but if the batteries ran out, which was the greatest threat to Kirk, then they die. Therefore, Kirk would have wandered around the ship looking like he looks, except for a little force-field belt. I think it would have made a better ghost story. He looks silly constantly making brief appearances on the Enterprise in that space suit. I really had a lot of qualms about that. From a story point of view it would have been better. They felt strongly that if they started something like a force-field belt, it might have ramifications down the line on other stories.
DIANA MULDAUR (actress, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”)
For “Is There in Truth No Beauty?,” we read the script and it all got thrown out. It was out of order when we shot it. I came in from Broadway and I thought, “My god, is this what film is all about?” You had no idea what you did before that scene or after that scene. But it was one of the most wonderful shows I think they made. We shot it all out of sequence and we learned our lines when we got on the set that morning as they were writing it.
FRED FREIBERGER
The big thing about “Plato’s Stepchildren” was who was going to kiss Uhura, a black girl. We had quite a few conversations on that one, because someone said, “Let’s have Spock do it,” and I said, “No, if we have Spock do it, we’re going to have all these people screaming that we didn’t have the guts to have a white man kiss her.” We went through a whole thing, but it all worked out, and Shatner said to her as he fought against the aliens’ control, “It’s not that I don’t want to, but I don’t want to humiliate you.” That’s a show I’m very proud of.
OLIVER CRAWFORD (writer, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”)
This was originally a Gene Coon stor
y that was brought to me. It dealt with racial intolerance, and I thought it was a marvelous visual and cinematic effect. The whole point of the story was that color is only skin deep. How could any writer not respond to that? That fit right into the times and I was very pleased to write the episode.
FRED FREIBERGER
Gene originally had a devil with a tail chasing an angel. We thought, “What an idea it would be to do black on one side and white on the other, and the other guy has it the opposite way.” That’s the stupidity of prejudice. There’s a wonderful moment when Kirk says, “What’s different about him?” and he says, “He’s white on the other side!” That was a big morality show and I liked the idea of it.
YVONNE CRAIG (actress, “Whom Gods Destroy”)
People come up to me and say, “Do you remember the fourth episode?” and I say to them I only saw two episodes of Star Trek, one was “The Trouble with Tribbles” because I just love them, and I saw mine once [“Whom Gods Destroy”]. When I was doing the scene where I was blown up, we couldn’t keep that green paint on me. It was just a nightmare, and so when I raised my arms I had what looked like Spanish moss in my pits. It was just dangling so I said to the cameraman, “Does this bother you?” And he said, “No, it’s too far away, they’ll never see it.” Years later, I thought “Oh my God, I wonder if with Blu-ray you see it all.” Well, you didn’t because they cleaned it up. I was just so grateful. But it was hard to keep the paint on, it was a mess.
When they had to audition me they said, “Can you do a three-minute dance?” and I said, “Unless you’re doing The Red Shoes, three minutes is a long time,” but I said, “Yes, I can do a three-minute dance if you want it, but you’ll probably just have to cut it to pieces, because that’s crazy.” It’s nuts, but it was fun to do.
FRED FREIBERGER
With “All Our Yesterdays,” I remember that when Leonard Nimoy read that script he came to me and said, “I’m a Vulcan, how can I be passionately in love with a woman with emotion involved?” So I said, “This is way back in time, before the Vulcans had evolved into a nonemotional society.” He accepted that, for which I was very grateful. One of my favorite episodes.
