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The Enterprise Incident

William Shatner

Joanne Linville

Jack Donner

Leonard Nimoy

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Star trek : the enterprise incident (1968), directed by john meredyth lucas / gene roddenberry / john m. lucas.

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The Enterprise Incident (Episode)

Stardate 5031.3 : Disguised as a Romulan, Kirk steals a cloaking device.

Captain Kirk , in an overworked and confused state, takes the Enterprise into Romulan space, where the starship is immediately surrounded by Romulan ships that demand their surrender. Kirk and Spock beam aboard the Romulan flagship, and Kirk attempts to explain his ship's trespass as equipment failure, but Spock denounces his captain, stating that he deliberately acted without orders in entering Romulan territory. Dr. McCoy is the beamed aboard the Romulan vessel to examine the increasingly erratic Kirk, who, infuriated beyond reason, suddenly turns and attacks Spock. Spock, acting in self-defense, uses the Vulcan death grip , instantly killing Kirk. McCoy returns to the Enterprise with the captain's body. The Romulan Commander is highly interested in Spock, both professionally as well as personally, and she attempts to induce him into defecting to the Romulan Star Empire. Spock appears to be interested in her offer.

But the entire affair has been a hoax, to gain possession of the Romulan cloaking device — and there is no such thing as a Vulcan death grip. Kirk, surgically altered to appear Romulan , is beamed back aboard the flagship and steals the device. After the theft is discovered, Spock is detained as a spy . As he awaits execution, Chekov locates the Vulcan using the Enterprise's sensors , and Spock is beamed back aboard — along with the Romulan Commander. The Enterprise escapes by using the cloaking device, hurriedly installed by Scotty . Kirk is left with an unexpected bonus — the captive Romulan Commander — while Spock must contemplate the deceit that he practiced on the woman.

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orange beverage

Romulan ale

Ens. Pavel Chekov

Command division officer

Capt. Kirk disguised as a Romulan

Operations division officer

Romulan Commander

Romulan centurions

Romulan Guard #1

Romulan Guard #2

Romulan Guard #3

Romulan Soldier

Romulan Technical Officer

Romulan Technician

Subcommander Tal

The Enterprise Incident

audio receiver

cloaking device

disruptor pistol

Romulan D-7 class cruiser

Vulcan death grip

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Created by Gene Roddenberry

Starring William Shatner

Also Starring Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock and DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy

Written by D.C. Fontana

Directed by John Meredyth Lucas

Produced by Fred Freiberger

Co-Producer Robert H. Justman

Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry

Associate Producers Edward K. Milkis Gregg Peters

Guest Star Joanne Linville as Romulan Commander

Co-Starring Jack Donner as Tal

James Doohan … Scott Nichelle Nichols … Uhura George Takei … Sulu Walter Koenig … Chekov Majel Barrett … Nurse Chapel Richard Compton … Technical Officer Robert Gentile … Technician Mike Howden … Romulan Guard Gordon Coffey … Romulan Soldier

Story Consultant Arthur H. Singer

Theme Music by Alexander Courage

Director of Photography Jerry Finnerman

Art Director Walter M. Jefferies

Film Editor … Fabien Tordjmann Unit Production Manager … Gregg Peters Assistant Director … Gil Kissel Set Decorator … John M. Dwyer Costumes Created by … William Ware Theiss Photographic Effects … Howard Anderson Co. Sound Effects Editor … Douglas H. Grindstaff Music Editor … Richard Lapham Re-Recording Mixer … Gordon L. Day , C.A.S. Production Mixer … Carl W. Daniels Script Supervisor … George A. Rutter Sound … Glen Glenn Sound Co. Casting … Joseph D'Agosta Makeup Artist … Fred B. Phillips , S.M.A. Hair Stylist … Pat Westmore Gaffer … George H. Merhoff Head Grip … George Rader Property Master … Irving A. Feinberg Special Effects … Jim Rugg

A Paramount Production

In Association With Norway Corporation

Executive Vice President in Charge of Production Douglas S. Cramer

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Star Trek: The Original Series – The Enterprise Incident

“I Spy” was a very popular TV series that appeared during the run of Star Trek: The Original Series and for exactly the same number of years.  During that time period, there were a number of other spy series that appeared on TV such as “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and “Mission: Impossible”.  There were others that were spy series but not quite the same such as the comedy “Get Smart” or the western series “The Wild, Wild West.”  The popularity of these shows was driven by a number of spy movies that appeared in the 1960s, the most famous being the ones that featured “Bond, James Bond”.

All these TV series contained the usual spy thriller ingredients: clandestine missions that were carried out on their own; amazing devices that were beyond imagination; women that used their sexuality to lure agents to the other side; disguises that allowed the main character to fit in and complete their mission; betrayal of a friend, deception and so on.  Most of all, plot twists kept the viewers wondering if the heroes would be able to complete their mission; yet it was not until the last few moments of the story and usually in the most amazing ways did they survive. Being a “child of the 60s” (as we old folks like to say) I got to watch these movies and TV series first run and it was marvellous.

However, to my knowledge, sci-fi never was a part of the mix until the third season of Star Trek . 

As we all know, Star Trek survived near cancellation after the second season, yet a fan letter-writing campaign made the network reconsider and allow a third and final season of Star Trek to occur.  What were we rewarded with…”Spock’s Brain”?  Really? This article is about “The Enterprise Incident”. If or when a review of one of the worst episodes in any of the three seasons is needed, “Spock’s Brain” might be the winner.  Yet, by hanging in there for one more episode, we were rewarded with “The Enterprise Incident”.

As with a good spy thriller, we open with deception.  Our hero, Captain Kirk is not acting his usual self.  In a voice-over, kindly Dr McCoy was heard recording into the ship’s log his comments on the recent actions of his good friend.  Was Kirk crazy?  Or was he crazy like a fox?  We did not know from the outset, but he did instruct Sulu to send the Enterprise directly into Romulan territory and soon, as expected, the Enterprise was surrounded by three Romulan vessels.

Flashback, we have to do this now before it gets too late.

In season one of Star Trek , we were treated to one of the better episodes “Balance Of Terror”.  In it, a Romulan vessel attacks a number of Star Fleet outposts along the Neutral Zone which was established nearly 100 years earlier after the end of the Romulan War.  Using a newly developed plasma weapon and the ability to cloak themselves to the point of invisibility to the TV viewer, the Romulans looked like they had the upper hand.  In the end, after an exciting nerve and tactician-driven battle, Kirk and his crew defeat the enemy and survive to live for another episode. 

Again, this is not a review of “Balance Of Terror” however if not for that episode could “The Enterprise Incident” have occurred?  Might I also add, the 10th episode of Strange New Worlds would not have happened as well?  If you have not seen the 10th episode of Strange New Worlds stop right here and watch it.  Heck, watch all the prior nine episodes as well.  This series is, simply put, the best Trek since Enterprise.  I’ll leave someone else to write a review of Strange New Worlds since I need to get back to “The Enterprise Incident”.

Where were we? Oh yes, the Enterprise is surrounded by what looks like Klingon warships.  In notes about the episode available when watching on Prime Video, the original model of the Romulan ship from season one was lost and so the production team had to make do with Klingon crafts in replacement.  I am sure the script writer D C Fontana was not happy when she had to do a rewrite of the dialogue to explain why Klingon ships had to be used.  Being the excellent writer she was, she came up with a good reason for their existence. 

Back to the story…Captain Tal demands that Kirk and the Enterprise surrender to him and his forces.  The Romulans used that same cloaking device from “ Balance Of Terror ” (and so the tie-in) to get the drop on Kirk once the Enterprise entered Romulan territory.  A mistake by Kirk or a plan from the beginning?  We don’t know for sure.  The Romulan Commander, who uses that as her name throughout the episode (never revealing her name to anyone except Spock in a whisper) requests Kirk and Spock come aboard her ship leaving everyone’s favourite Scotty in command.

Upon arrival on the Romulan ship, the Romulan Commander accuses Kirk of espionage and in his usual bravado, says it was navigation errors that caused them to cross into Romulan space.  Now the betrayal occurs.  Spock claims that Kirk has lost his mind and it he and he alone directed the Enterprise.  This leaves Star Fleet out of the picture and Kirk is put into the brig while Spock is left to do is part of the plan.

Historical note if you don’t mind?  In additional notes about the episode, D C Fontana indicated that the events surrounding the USS Pueblo incident were the basis for this episode. The USS Pueblo was captured in what the US military considered international waters in 1968.  The North Koreans said otherwise, saying that the ship was spying on them and Russia. For 11 months, the crew was held in prison demanding that they admit to what they were doing, even though they never would do so.  In 1973 an excellent made-for-TV film was released called “Pueblo” which I watched the first run.  What made it so interesting, besides that the story was used for “The Enterprise Incident” is that for the first time on network TV, actors playing Navy sailors displayed “The Bird” (aka “The Finger) to their North Korean captors.  I believe this was a first for network TV. Not knowing what this meant, the American sailors said it was a Hawaiian good-luck sign and once the Koreans learned of its true meaning, the crew was tortured. Even though the crew was released, the ship remains in North Korean.  Back to the episode.

Did Kirk suffer like the captain of the Pueblo?  Well, if you consider “ Vulcan Death Grip ” a bad thing, then yes?  When Spock and the Romulan commander visit Kirk in the brig, Spock says Kirk is unstable and Kirk attacks him.  Spock applies the “pinch” and Kirk collapses to the floor.  Oh no!  Are we or the Romulan Commander to believe that Spock could kill his best friend and captain?  Ah, deception once again.  McCoy is asked to examine Kirk’s limp body and declares him dead.  None of the old McCoy lines like: “it’s worse than that, he’s dead Jim” because it’s Jim! 

In the next scene, Kirk is back in the Enterprise, lying on a bio-bed as dead as dead can be…or is he?  With lovely Nurse Chapel at his side, Kirk’s eyes open.  Hooray, our hero is alive!  McCoy has learned of the plan to get Kirk and Spock on the Romulan ship. That they were to find the cloaking device, and steal it from the Romulans so that once again, a “Balance Of Terror” was maintained on both sides—espionage at its best.

While this is happening, our other hero, Spock is doing something a beautiful blond would do to James Bond, seduce him into a false sense of security.  Spock, seduce?  In his stoic style, he convinces the Romulan Commander that he is willing to give up Star Fleet and join her at her side since there is long-term compatibility between Vulcans and Romulans.  This was established back in the episode “Balance Of Terror” (once again, you cannot have one without the other).  She falls for it hook, line and sinker. 

Back on the Enterprise, Dr McCoy gets to do what’s expected in any episode of “Mission: Impossible”. He uses his surgical skills to alter Kirk’s likeness to resemble a Romulan, giving him the same up-swung eyebrows and pointy ears that both races contain.  Kirk now has to tell Scotty what the true meaning of the mission was.  With Romulan soldiers in the Enterprise brig, swapped when Kirk and Spock went to the Romulan ship (did I not mention before about prisoner swaps are always a part of a spy thriller?), Kirk dresses in one of the uniforms and transports over to steal the cloaking device.

As a note: in the Enterprise book “ The Good That Men Do ”, Trip, instead of dying in the last episode, is transformed into a Romulan and begins the most amazing undercover work.  If you have not read this book, I thoroughly recommend it.  Especially if you hated the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise .

Spock, using the seduction of the Romulan Commander, gives Kirk time to find the device. However, Spock is caught making a call to Kirk to let him know where the unit is maintained.  Kirk finds it all by himself and after fighting two Romulans with karate chops and judo kicks (always seen in a good spy story) steals the device and Scotty transports him before he is caught by the Romulans.  Story over? Not yet. 

Spock is charged with espionage and spying; he admits to his guilt and involvement.  He asked to be given time to make a deposition of his crimes and all the while this gives Scotty time to do his magic, to install the cloaking device on the Enterprise. 

I don’t know if you ever tried to mate an alien device to another device of human origin, to make it happen, Scotty is your man.  If you have travelled to a European country and tried to plug in a US-made electronic device into an electrical outlet without the proper adapter, well too bad.  They don’t fit.  Yet, Scotty is able to mate the cloaking devise into the engineering systems of the Enterprise.  Does it work…not yet. 

First the Romulans, in a fit of pique, decided to attack the Enterprise.  Never will the cloaking device make it to Starfleet!  As Kirk gives the order to Sulu to go to Warp Factor 9 (does the Enterprise even go that fast?) the Romulans follow.  And as they begin to catch the Enterprise (does a Romulan ship go faster than Warp 9?  I guess so) Kirk asks Chekov to scan for Vulcan life signs on the Romulan ship so that they can transport Spock back to the Enterprise.  Chekov gets to say one of my favourite lines in all of Star Trek , “got him, sir!”, I love the way he says it, maybe even more than “newcleur wessles” (that’s about as phonic as I can be).  Seeing that Spock is in transport mode, the Romulan Commander grabs ahold of him and she ends up on the Enterprise. Silly girl.

Kirk calls Captain Tal and says “I got your boss here” yet she commands Tal to attack no matter what.  She will go down with Kirk’s ship before she allows the cloaking device to fall into the enemy’s hands.  It looks like the end…or is it?  Remember Scotty is the master technician and he presses the go button and…it works!  The Enterprise disappears from the screen and they make their escape.  Hurray.

What’s left, is only for Spock and the Romulan Commander to have one last moment as he takes her, not to the brig, but to her quarters.  Isn’t Star Fleet so nice and accommodating, much to her surprise?  We are the good guys, remember?  And with that, Dr McCoy reminds Kirk he has an appointment to have his “ears bobbed”.  Kirk leaves the bridge, rubbing his pointy ears for a last time, while the bridge crew all are in smiles, as it should be.

As you can see, this episode filled in all the blanks for a great spy thriller, only done in deep space.  I’m sorry “Moonraker”, even though it was a Bond film, it could not fill the shoes of this episode of Star Trek . 

Season Three of Star Trek was not the quality of the first two seasons.  Lack of interest by the studio, Gene’s feeling that he had been mistreated by the networks for sticking Star Trek on Friday nights to die an untimely death due to lack of viewership.  In the end, the love of Star Trek was resurrected on syndicated TV and in six movies.  To this day, Star Trek lives on with new TV series on Paramount+ and alternative timelines with the JJ Abrams films.  Gene passed away on October 24 th , 1991, before he could see just how gigantic Star Trek would become.

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Star Trek – The Enterprise Incident (Review)

This July and August, we’re celebrating the release of Star Trek Beyond by taking a look back at the third season of the original Star Trek . Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the latest update.

The Enterprise Incident is generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of Star Trek ‘s much troubled third season.

The third season of Star Trek has cultivated a reputation as a failure or a disappointment, a collection of episodes that are wildly disjointed at best and openly frustrating at worst. This disappointment is largely justified. While the third season struggled with a number of problems beyond its control, there were also a number of serious self-inflicted wounds. The production team consciously chose to bury Spectre of the Gun deep in the running order while pulling Spock’s Brain forward to be the season premiere.

When on Romulus…

However, the third season of Star Trek is not the disaster that many would claim. Taken as a whole, the season is much weaker than the first two seasons, but it also has its share of strong and classic episodes. There are classics upon which everybody agrees, like The Enterprise Incident or The Tholian Web . However, there are also any number of delightful oddities like Spectre of the Gun or The Empath . Still, there is a sense that the show is not everything that it once was, and that things have changed.

In some respects, The Enterprise Incident is the most conventional and “classic” of the third season episodes, the episode that feels the most “of a piece” with the first two seasons. It is also the last Star Trek episode of the original series to be credited to franchise veteran Dorothy Fontana.

A Commanding presence.

To be clear, The Enterprise Incident is not the last Star Trek script to be written by Dorothy Fontana. Fontana would oversee production on Star Trek: The Animated Series . She would work on the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation . She would even contribute a script to the first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Even in the context of this troubled third season, Fontana would be involved in the production of That Which Survives and The Way to Eden , although she would ask to be credited under the name “Michael Richards.”

The third season of Star Trek haemorrhaged talent. Among the most notable absentees from the day-to-day running of the show were Gene L. Coon and Dorothy Fontana. Gene Roddenberry was also largely absent from the management of his series, having relocated to the other side of the production lot. All three remained involved in the production in some way; Coon and Fontana contributed scripts and stories, while Roddenberry was still involved in stories and scripting. Still, there was a sense that the series had been diminished through their absence.

“This was a lot of trouble to go to for a pretty stylish lamp.”

There were a number of reasons for why these key creative individuals had begun the process of moving on. Gene L. Coon had taken a job with Universal television, working on It Takes a Thief . Given the limited long-term viability Star Trek , which had narrowly escaped cancellation, it is hard to fault Coon for seeking security and steady employment elsewhere. Gene Roddenberry had tried to leverage his involvement in the show to secure a more favourable time slot for the series from NBC. When they refused to budge, he followed through on his threat to leave the show.

The details of Dorothy Fontana’s absence are somewhat more complicated, and shrouded in the backstage politics of the third season’s troubled production. Years after the show went off the air, Fontana became embroiled in a war of words with third season producer Fred Freiberger. With a franchise as popular as Star Trek and a season as troubled with this third season, there was a lot of controversy and a lot of apportioning of blame. It is not uncommon for key figures to trade blows in the press, and there is a sense of that happening with the third year of Star Trek .

The series is in its own death grip.

In this case, it was Freiberger who fired the first volley. Talking to Starlog in 1980, Freiberger suggested that the issue had been unprofessional behaviour concerning her second script of the season:

We were desperately trying to get it. We were picked up late for the third season, and she was told, “We need it, please, quickly.” She disappeared. We couldn’t find her. We checked with everybody. I called Gene Roddenberry. We finally got to her agent, and I told my story editor, “You tell her agent if we don’t get her back here, this assignment’s gonna be vacated!” Her agent told us she went to Hawaii! We said to get her back. We finally had to vacate that assignment to another writer. I called Roddenberry and said, “We can’t be the victims of this kind of non-professionalism.” And he said, “Okay, let her go.”

There is a lot to unpack in Freiberger’s accusations, but perhaps most striking is the appeal to Gene Roddenberry; Freiberger seems to invoke the name of the show’s creator to legitimise his version of events and to justify his decision to cut ties with one of the most beloved and influential writers on the show.

Deep purple.

Fontana vigourously denied these accusations, and offered an alternative narrative about her departure from the series. Responding to Freiberger’s comments through Starlog , Fontana insisted that she left the show of her own volition:

I had told Gene Roddenberry that I did not wish to continue on Star Trek as story editor because I wanted to freelance and write for other series. I did, however, want to continue to do scripts for Star Trek. Gene was agreeable to this, and I was given a contract in February of 1968 which called for a guarantee of three scripts, with an option for three more. Whenever anyone has asked why I chose to leave Star Trek’s story editorship, I have always given this reply.

Even years later, there is some lingering ambiguity about the particulars of what happened and why it happened. Whatever the fine details, The Enterprise Incident sits right in the middle of the controversy.

“Mister Chekov, this can’t be a third season script. It makes too much sense.”

In many respects, The Enterprise Incident is very clearly a Dorothy Fontana script. It is a very conventional episode, in many respects; which stands in stark contrast to the episodes around it. In terms of basic production and plotting, it could easily have been produced during the second season. The themes and plot mechanics feel quite removed from the funereal tone that permeates so much of the third season as a whole, which is really saying something about an episode in which Spock pretends to murder Kirk in self-defense.

Much like Gene L. Coon, Dorothy Fontana has something of a Star Trek writer’s shorthand; The Enterprise Incident is populated with little recurring details that demonstrate the author’s particular interests. Even the sequence in which Spock appears to murder Kirk, only for this to be revealed as a ruse involving McCoy, is lifted pretty heavily from Amok Time . The intimacy of Vulcan hand gestures comes from Journey to Babel . Spock’s conflicts between duty and desire echo The Naked Time and This Side of Paradise .

“I mean, I don’t even utter the words ‘Spock’s Brain’ once.”

It is no surprise that Fontana’s original outline for The Enterprise Incident would have featured Mark Leonard returning in the role of Sarek from Journey to Babel . In Fontana’s original story, Sarak would have been cast in a role similar to the one played by Spock here, effectively stalling for time as Kirk and his crew enact a daring espionage mission . Along with Gene L. Coon, Fontana was one of the writers most responsible for cultivating a sense of continuity to the larger Star Trek universe, suggesting connections tying together these episodic adventures.

It is very easy to take the Star Trek canon for granted from the perspective of 2016, when the franchise is fifty years old and the concept of a “canon” has permeated popular culture. However, it should be remembered that it took Star Trek quite a long time to figure out basic continuity concepts like the colour of Sulu or Uhura’s uniform. “Starfleet Command” did not exist until Court Martial . The Federation was not named until Arena . The original Star Trek show was not always consistent in terms of its settings or its history.

“Dammit, Spock. What if the Romulans had seen Amok Time ?”

This speaks to the realities of sixties television production. Nobody working on Star Trek imagined that they were building something to last five decades. Nobody was even sure that the show would get a second season, let alone more than twenty-five seasons of spin-off media. The best that the production team working on Star Trek could have hoped for was that the show would sell into syndication, where the episodes ran the risk of being jumbled around and any notion of continuity from episode to episode would be treated as a barrier to accessibility.

So what little sense of continuity crept into the show mostly crept in by accident. Gene L. Coon helped to create the Klingons and championed them as recurring antagonists for the Enterprise. Indeed, Coon even wanted a recurring Klingon nemesis who might square off against James Tiberius Kirk, perhaps even Koloth from The Trouble with Tribbles . It had been Coon who introduced the concept of the Federation into Star Trek , and who cultivated the idea of the Star Trek universe as more than just an impossibly vast space filled with random wonders and terrors.

“I’m going to be over there, just roamin’… I mean, Romulanin’ about.”

Dorothy Fontana did her own bit to ensure continuity and development across episodes. This is most obvious in her stewardship of Spock as a character. Spock’s poignant monologue about his family life in The Naked Time clearly paves the way for the exploration of that family dynamic in Journey to Babel . To demonstrate that this sort of organic character development was the exception rather than the rule, the death of Samuel Kirk in Operation — Annihilate! went absolutely nowhere in terms of defining or shaping Kirk as a character.

The Enterprise Incident is a very rare episode of the original Star Trek in that it leans heavily on existing continuity. It is too much to describe the story as serialised, but it is definitely a narrative that rewards long-term fans. The Romulan cloaking device was a major plot point back in Balance of Terror , and The Enterprise Incident hinges on a significant technical improvement to that device. The episode’s dialogue casually posits an alliance between the Klingons and the Romulans, the show’s primary recurring antagonists.

That’s a relationship that we’re going to Klingon to…

To be fair, there were undoubtedly production realities that dictated that minor detail about a possible alliance between the Klingons and the Romulans. The storytelling decision was likely made to justify the inclusion of the Klingon attack cruiser from Elaan of Troyius in the episode, although there has been considerable debate about why the original cut of the episode did not include the Romulan Bird of Prey from Balance of Terror :

After filming, the Bird of Prey model disappeared, which may account for the Romulans showing up in Klingon D7 cruisers in the third-season episode The Enterprise Incident. It may also have been the case that the producers wanted to display the D7 model as much as possible as a courtesy to the model kit company Aluminum Model Toys, which actually paid for it. In any event, the model’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Exactly what happened to the Romulan Bird of Prey model (if anything) is a matter of some speculation. William McCullor reported gossip that the model was held by a private collector unwilling to exhibit it for the public . Memory Alpha provides an account of a National Public Radio interview with designer Wah Chang who claims to have smashed the model in his own backyard . Notably, the remastered edition of the episode includes a Bird of Prey .

Whatever the reason for inclusion of the Klingon ship, the decision to tie its appearance to broader political wrangling involving two major non-Federation powers represents a clear progression in the development of the shared Star Trek universe. The first season had thrown the Federation and Klingons into conflict with one another over Organia; the second season had suggested a simmering cold war between the two major powers. The Enterprise Incident expands upon that by suggesting that the Klingons and Romulans have agency outside that seen by our heroes.

Fontana very much uses The Enterprise Incident as an opportunity to cultivate the sense of the Star Trek universe as something that exists beyond what is experienced directly by out protagonists. The Enterprise Incident consciously builds upon the key revelation in Balance of Terror that the Romulans and the Vulcans share a common ancestry. In Balance of Terror , that detail seemed to exist primarily to serve the themes of the story as an allegory about racism with obvious echoes of Japanese internment during the Second World War. Here, it is something more.

“Mister Spock, I had no idea that this is what you had in mind when you suggested ‘reunification’.”

The Enterprise Incident uses the common ancestry between Vulcans and Romulans as an opportunity to build a Star Trek universe that does not centre around Earth, to suggest that  other people have their own agency and their own history quite apart from that of direct relevance to Kirk. The Commander’s reference to the Vulcans as “distant brothers” and Spock’s reference to “the combined Romulan-Vulcan history of obedience to duty” suggest complex long-term relationships that stem beyond those of Earth.

The Romulan Commander all but explicitly states this in her conversations with Spock. “For someone with your capabilities and accomplishments, opportunities are made and will be,” she states. “I will see to that, if you’ll stop looking on the Federation as the whole universe. It is not, you know.” This is a very important thematic point, and it is something with which the  Star Trek franchise will grapple over its extended life cycle. The Federation is very much an extension of liberal American values into the future, but those values are not the only way to look at the universe.

“Let’s drink to that.”

Dorothy Fontana and Gene L. Coon will never get enough credit for building that ambivalence into the franchise’s foundations, perhaps owing to the narrative of Star Trek cultivated and crafted by Gene Roddenberry that portrays the Federation as an unequivocal paradise. Gene L. Coon deserves a lot of credit for being openly critical of these aspects of the Federation in his scripts, daring to ask if extrapolating contemporary American politics into the future is a good thing. Fontana deserves a lot of credit for being willing to look beyond the Federation.

This attitude towards political and historical continuity would pave the way for later Star Trek shows to develop and explore these ideas. In fact, Deep Space Nine would often reduce the Federation to observers watching complex historical dynamics play out between different races; the Romulan and Cardassian attack upon the Dominion in The Die is Cast comes to mind, as does the Klingon invasion of Cardassia in The Way of the Warrior . In building on what came before, Fontana sews the seeds for that approach to Star Trek in The Enterprise Incident .

“He’s come down with space dementia.”

This idea of Romulan and Vulcan agency is not just a world-building affectation. It very clearly plays into the themes of the episode. It is interesting that The Enterprise Incident chooses to focus on the Romulans instead of the Klingons. In many ways, the Klingons were the breakout alien species on Star Trek . They appeared with much greater frequency than the Romulans, perhaps because gold face paint and fake beards were most cost effective than pointy ears. The show had recently invested in a model Klingon war ship, and they would appear multiple times this season.

In contrast, the Romulans were a low-key Star Trek antagonist. The Romulans only physically appeared in two episodes of the original Star Trek series; Balance of Terror and The Enterprise Incident . They had a small background role in The Deadly Years , but nothing compared to the coverage the Klingons get in episodes like Friday’s Child or A Private Little War . In fact, while the Klingons would play major roles in the film franchise, this is the last major Romulan appearance until The Neutral Zone twenty years later.

“It’s Romul-us, not Romul-u.”

It is strange to think of the Romulans as an iconic Star Trek baddie, because they have historically been underserved and underrepresented by the franchise. While alien species like the Klingons, the Borg, the Cardassians, and even the Ferengi have their own larger narrative arcs across the franchise’s history, various production teams have often struggled with what to do about the franchise’s other pointy eared hobgoblins. However, the Romulans endure. They remain an essential part of the franchise, despite the fact they are hard to pin down.

Perhaps the key to their longevity is to be found in these early episodes. In terms of the original Star Trek series, the biggest difference between the Romulans and the Klingons is that the Klingons are most transparently bad guys. Although Gene L. Coon introduced the Klingons in Errand of Mercy as a way to critique Kirk’s warmongering ways, the Klingons were very clearly presented as a yellow peril menace. The Klingons would not really become sympathetic until The Day of the Dove made a conscious choice to subvert this dynamic.

This is the face of a rational man.

In contrast, the Romulans came with some measure of sympathy built in. Part of this is down to the make-up design, in that the Romulans had the luxury of looking both more human than the Klingons and resembling Spock. However, it was also largely down to how Balance of Terror had treated its antagonist. Kor and Koloth were great characters, but they lack the humanity and compassion of the anonymous Romulan Commander. Although he lacked a name, Kirk felt a strong sense of kinship to him. The two were mirrored.

Although the Klingons serve as a direct commentary on the Cold War, with their spheres of influence and their proxy wars, the Romulans served as a more abstract anti-war allegory. Although the major Romulan characters of the original Star Trek series were kept consciously anonymous, they were afforded a dignity and humanity that rendered them more than convenient two-dimensional antagonists. The Romulans were a constant reminder that even an anonymous adversary is still a person.

Censured by the Centurions.

The plot of The Enterprise Incident was loosely inspired by the Pueblo incident, the capture of the USS Pueblo by North Korean forces in January 1968. The crew were accused of espionage, and were only released after confessing. The ship is still held by the North Korean government. Fontana acknowledges that this international crisis was the genesis of the episode :

I proposed [The Enterprise Incident] as kind of a parallel to the Pueblo incident, which was major news at the time [and] was one of our ships, our navy ships, intruding into, in essence, someone else’s space and being nailed for it. So, I tried to bounce that idea off the Enterprise. What is the Enterprise doing? What is it after?

Fontana takes this basic premise and builds an espionage thriller around it. The episode opens with Kirk leading the Enterprise into Romulan space, with McCoy worried that Kirk has finally cracked under the pressure. The Enterprise is subsequently surrounded by Romulan ships who demand the immediate surrender of the ship and crew. Things go from bad to worse, with Spock appearing to sell Kirk out to the Romulans and even killing him.

“He’s dead, Jim is.”

Naturally, nothing is as it appears to be. Kirk has not cracked under the mental strain of command, or under the combination of earlier episodes (going be production order) like  Elaan of Troyius or  The Paradise Syndrome . Spock has not been tempted to align himself with the Romulan Star Empire against his fellow crew. Most obviously, Spock has not murdered James Tiberius Kirk, despite how it may appear. It is all a cunning ruse, part of an elaborate con game, authorised by Starfleet Command, to secure a new and improved Romulan cloaking device.

In any other context, all of these reversals would seem like contrivances, a script backing away from a number of potentially series-breaking premises and retreating to the easiest possible resolution. It is to the credit of Dorothy Fontana that she understands this.  Of course Kirk hasn’t gone insane.  Of course Spock hasn’t betrayed the Enterprise.  Of course Spock hasn’t killed Kirk. Any audience member with any degree of televisual literacy would know that these premises could never be allowed to stand on a weekly sixties television show.

“You have to keep in mind, the Dohlman of Elaan and his lost wife and child took a lot out of him. Even if you’re watching in broadcast order, the man’s just lived through Spock’s Brain .”

Fontana plays into her audience’s televisual literacy, counting on the viewer to understand that things are not as they appear to be.  The Enterprise Incident is never particularly coy about the twists that are coming. In fact, it signposts them quite heavily. The Romulan Commander effectively guesses the whole ruse in her first conversation with Kirk. The thrill is not in the twists of themselves, but in watching those twists play out. There is a sense that  The Enterprise Incident avoids spelling all this out from the start simply to avoid exposition, not because it is a big twist.

The Enterprise Incident  is a great Cold War espionage thriller. The episode is anchored in an incident involving North Korea that was not sanctioned by the Soviet Union; in fact, it arguably damaged the relationship between the two powers . Still,  The Enterprise Incident skilfully evokes the general mood of the era. There are two major powers dancing with each other, testing limits and engaged in shell games. Indeed, the portrayal of Spock as a would-be traitor even evokes attitudes in the American media to downed U2 pilot Gary Powers following his own capture .

Drinking the Romulan Kool Aid.

In  The Paranormal and the Paranoid , Aaron John Gulyas argues that  The Enterprise Incident  endorses the top secret mission undertaken by Kirk and Spock to steal the Romulan cloaking device, pointing to the episode as a relic of an era before Watergate and Vietnam had made the American people more sceptical of their would-be guardians:

True to the series’ 1960s roots, the Cold War metaphor casts the Federation/Starfleet characters in the role of heroes, doing what needs to be done to safeguard the home front against all enemies. The cloaking device – which allows Romulan ships to disappear and reappear at will – is a destabilising technology that would give the Romulans a significant military advantage; acquiring it for the Federation restores stability to the galaxy. Kirk and Spock’s violation of interstellar law and treaty is presented as acceptable, in the sontext of the episode, because their superiors have sanctioned it in the interest of the greater good. They are, in The Enterprise Incident, willing tools of a conspiracy that never question the rightness of their actions. The episode aired, however, in the fall of 1968; within a few years, the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal would leave Americans less tolerant of government secrecy than they had been at the height of the Cold War. A story like The Enterprise Incident would have been difficult to replicate in the 1980s or 1990s, when the public was less likely to assume good intentions on the part of governments.

While this is perhaps an over-simplification of the political themes of Fontana’s script, it should be noted that later episodes of The Next Generation  exploring similar plot points and confrontations adopt a more openly sceptical approach to such political manoeuvring.

Shadowplay.

In  The Defector , Picard strays into the Neutral Zone and finds himself surrounded by Romulans demanding to haul the Enterprise home as a trophy. However, in this case, the intrusion into the Neutral Zone is revealed to be an elaborate con orchestrated by the Romulans to trick the Federation. Picard is never implicated in the intrusion in the same way that Kirk is. Similarly, in Pegasus , Federation attempts to develop a new more advanced cloaking device are presented as conspiratorial; Picard ends the episode by coming clean with the Romulans.

However,  The Enterprise Incident is openly sympathetic to the Romulan position. It is difficult to imagine the episode working anywhere near as well had Fontana employed the Klingons rather than the Romulans, and not  just because that would have meant altering the subplot focusing on Spock. Dating back to  Balance of Terror , the Romulans has been portrayed as sympathetic mirrors to the Federation. That shines through over the course of  The Enterprise Incident , which declines to treat the Romulans as unreasonable or explicitly villainous.

“Boy, this sixties lighting fixture really ties the room together.”

Indeed, the Romulan willingness to exchange hostages for Kirk and Spock is presented as a gesture of good faith that goes beyond what might be expected in this scenario.  “Granted, we do not easily trust each other, Captain, but you are the ones who violated our territory,” Tal reflects. “Should it not be we who distrust your motives? However, we agree to simultaneous exchange.” After all, the Romulans would arguably be entirely justified to use overwhelming force to take or destroy the Enterprise.

When Kirk pleads his case to the Romulan Commander, she quite rightly refuses to accept his explanation at face value and to allow him to go on his way. “Captain, if a Romulan vessel ventured far into Federation territory without good explanation, what would a starbase commander do?” she ponders. “You see, it works both ways. I hardly believe you are the injured party.” She is entirely correct. Indeed, the entire purpose of Kirk’s mission is to militarily undermine a foreign power. Kirk is very much the  injuring (rather than the injured) party.

“They cannae allow the Enterprise to get away Scott free alright.”

Indeed,  The Enterprise Incident is ultimately quite cynical about what exactly this mission will accomplish in the long term. “You realise that very soon we will learn to penetrate the cloaking device you stole,” the Romulan Commander reflects. Spock concedes the point. “Obviously. Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.” Indeed, the capturing of the Romulan cloaking device in  The Enterprise Incident seems to have very little long-term impact on the technology; the cloaking device is again largely impenetrable by  Star Trek III: The Search for Spock .

If the long-term political impact of this elaborate ruse is ultimately minimal, Fontana suggests that the personal consequences are much greater. Lives and careers are damaged and destroyed in this game of political brinksmanship. Much as the tragedy in  Balance of Terror is that Kirk and that anonymous Romulan Commander might have been friends, the tragedy in  The Enterprise Incident is that Spock destroys a potentially healthy interpersonal relationship with this anonymous Romulan Commander.

A cloaking dagger operation.

“It is regrettable that you were made an unwilling passenger,” Spock confesses towards the end of the episode. “It was not intentional. All the Federation wanted was the cloaking device.” Spock and the Romulan Commander are reduced to pawns in this larger chess game. Personal desires are secondary to broader concepts of “duty.”  Defending his betrayal, Spock reflects, “Clearly, your new cloaking device is a threat to that security. I carried out my duty.” The Romulan Commander responds, “Everyone carries out his duty. You state the obvious, Spock.”

The result is that  The Enterprise Incident plays like something of a tragedy. Lives are effectively destroyed, and nothing is gained. The Enterprise Incident is not as explicit in its criticisms of the personal costs of statecraft as episodes like  Balance of Terror or  The Defector , but the theme bubbles through the episode in a way that is hard to avoid. Although  The Enterprise Incident is structured as a playful Cold War espionage heist story, it is also quite cynical about the toll that these games take upon the pieces move across the board.

It does not Tal-y up.

The relationship between Spock and the Romulan Commander would be one of the major bones of contention between Fontana and the production team working on the third season. In his interview with  Starlog , Fred Freiberger insisted that Fontana had been very unprofessional in taking production notes on the script:

The story, dramatically, I felt, didn’t work. I wanted to get dramatic stories. There were some very good elements in it. She probably had a better grasp of Spock’s character than I did. One of the things I really wanted to do with Spock’s character was to explore the areas Gene had built into the character about a Vulcan father and an Earth mother, which I didn’t see too much of. He was just playing that cool guy all the time from what I saw. I wanted to use the other aspects of the character… which were not germaine to her [Fontana’s] script. So we kept working on trying to get her to rewrite that script. She was very resistant. She was not at all cooperative. She wrote it and then we rewrote the script… extensively. Now she had a choice. If she didn’t like what was there, she could use a different name, which is a procedure the Writer’s Guild has set up for writers who feel this way. She didn’t have to put her name on it. I’m not putting her down as a writer. She’s a pretty good writer. I’m talking about professionalism. So we rewrote the script, and I think we got pretty good reactions on it.

To be entirely fair to Fontana here, it should be noted that when Freiberger talks about “the areas Gene had built into the character “, he is largely talking about the character as defined by Fontana in her rewrite of  The Naked Time or  This Side of Paradise or  Journey to Babel .

One Commander to another…

For her part, Fontana was openly critical of the way that new producer Fred Freiberger and new script editor Arthur Singer. As she explained to the fan magazine  Enterprise Incidents :

I took my name from those last two you mentioned. The Romulan Incident — The Enterprise Incident — was heavily rewritten much to my alarm, and I wanted to take my name off it. Gene talked me out of it, but I ended my contract shortly thereafter because I did have a contract to do three or four. And when they—the producer of the show—told me that Dr. McCoy was Kirk’s contemporary and was not old enough to have a daughter at twenty-one years old, I realised they hadn’t even read the Writer’s Guide. I didn’t want to work for anybody who didn’t even have a working concept of the show. In fact, the story editor some three months later wandered onto the set and asked our set decorator, “By the way, what does that transporter thing do again?”, at which point most of the crew gave up caring. Because when you do not have people doing the stories who are knowledgeable about what the entire show is about, you can’t keep up pride in your work because you’re being given drek.

Indeed, one of the big issues with  The Enterprise Incident for certain technical-minded fans is all the transporting that takes place when most of the ships should have their shields up; a violation of a basic  Star Trek principle.

If only Starfleet had allowed him to continue is research into transwarp beaming.

Talking to Marc Cushman for  These Are the Voyages , Fontana explained that her big issues with the changes that were made to  The Enterprise Incident concerned the relationship between Spock and the Romulan Commander:

What I didn’t like was the more or less sexual tension that was put in between the Romulan commander and Spock, because I thought, ‘Ughh, I wouldn’t believe it.’ If I was the commander of that Romulan ship and a Vulcan approached me, I wouldn’t trust him for a minute. So, I felt that was not valid, that it was unbelievable. It was put in after I finished my work.

It is not an unreasonable complaint about the episode. After all, the Romulan Commander is effectively undone by Spock’s sex appeal. At one point, Spock is able to communicate with the Enterprise while she puts sexy clothes on.

Romancing the Romulans.

Freiberger serves as something of a lightning rod in this controversy, because he was the producer working on the third season and because he is the creative voice that engaged Dorothy Fontana on the matter. However, it is worth noting that Freiberger is not necessarily the  only person responsible for the changes. Freiberger was in regular contact with  Star Trek veterans Gene Roddenberry and Robert Justman, either of whom could have interjected on the point. Indeed,  These Are the Voyages credits Justman with the idea for the romance in the first place.

There is something uncomfortably sexist about the romance. After all, the show would never allow Kirk to be undercut in such a manner. Elaan of Troyius  provides a a helpful counterpoint; Kirk was able to resist a woman who had bound him to her on a biological and chemical level. The Romulan Commander has no such excuse. It seems like one look at Leonard Nimoy is enough to make even the most professionally-minded woman forget basic security procedures. Ultimately, Spock is only discovered by Tal, the Romulan Commander’s male second-in-command.

Like any good engineer, Scotty was concerned by the bits and pieces left over from his “assemble it yourself” Romulan Cloaking Device kit.

This is an example of how frustrating the third season of  Star Trek can be on matters of gender. The Romulan Commander is in many ways one of the most overtly feminist figures in the season. It is telling that  The Enterprise Incident introduces a female Romulan Commander in the same season that  The Turnabout Intruder insists that there are no female Starfleet captains. At the same time, it is hard to argue that  The Enterprise Incident is  more sexist than drek like  Elaan of Troyius or  The Paradise Syndrome or  Spock’s Brain .

The result is an episode that feels positively feminist in comparison to the episodes around it by virtue of featuring a rare female character in a position of authority, while still being anchored in a number of unpleasant sexist stereotypes about how professional women cannot be trusted to keep their personal and professional lives separate. It is a perfect example of the problematic progressiveness that defines so much of the original  Star Trek series, where even the most forward-looking aspects are anchored in troublesome elements.

A touching romance.

Still, the Romulan Commander is an intriguing character. It is no surprise that the Romulan Commander has become such an iconic  Star Trek character. Diane Duane’s Rihannsu novels focus on the aunt of the character in question. The character herself plays a key role in novels like The Fate of the Phoenix ,  Vulcan’s Heart  and  Killing Time .  The Next Generation considered bringing back the character for  Face of the Enemy . It is a shame that there were not more female characters like her in the original run of  Star Trek .

Despite the troublesome implications of the relationship between the Romulan Commander and Spock,  The Enterprise Incident  perhaps demonstrates Freiberger’s efforts to attract new audiences to the show.  The Enterprise Incident is more overtly built around the sex appeal of Leonard Nimoy as Spock than any other episode of  Star Trek , including the episode where Spock gets so horny that he strangles Kirk to death in a hot sweaty wrestling match.  The Enterprise Incident is designed to emphasise the sensuous mysterious aspects of the show’s science officer.

Spock is all ears.

After all, Spock was the breakout sex symbol on Star Trek . A profile in People Magazine reported that “the sacks of Spock mail reached 10,000 letters a month, mostly from women, much of it torridly erotic.” In an interview with The Pittsburgh Press , Leonard Nimoy recalled being confronted with his sex symbol status:

“Sometimes, Cleveland,” Nimoy smiled, “it’s fun. I remember at Bowling Green University in Ohio a young woman got up and said, ‘I am going to do something for your ego. Are you aware that you are the source of erotic dream material for thousands and thousands of women around the world?'” What did he do? “I toasted her, with water, and said, ‘May all your dreams come true.'”

In 1967, Isaac Asimov wrote an article in  TV Guide outlining the key to the character’s sex appeal . Asimov argued that Spock had been able to make smart seem sexy. He was very much a contrast to the rugged and conventional masculinity of James Kirk.

“Fascinating Captain. My shirt does not even rip open in the same way that yours does.”

Henry Jenkins contended that it was Spock’s restraint and composure that made him so appealing to fans :

“Spock is sexy for a large number of people, male and female,” Jenkins says. “Many of the female fans I studied really are attracted to the emotional depths of this character.” Like many men, Spock “represses outward signs of emotion,” Jenkins says. He’s a character “who tries to hold it all in, but who seems to be sensitive, sensuous at certain times.” And Spock’s intense relationship with Captain Kirk only complicates his character. “He seems to have a deep affection and even passionate relationship to Captain Kirk,” Jenkins says. “This character, then, became the embodiment of the mystery of masculinity.”

Spock is a rather unconventional male lead, but that makes him all the more striking in context.

Spock tries to (turbo) lift her spirits.

In a 1996 interview with Andrew Duncan for The Radio Times , Leonard Nimoy weighed in with his own thoughts on what made Mister Spock so sexy:

He had an attraction because he was smart and quite sexy. He was unavailable, mysterious, exotic with hidden passions. Sensitive, I went through some awareness of that in the early years and it was very flattering, but I didn’t take advantage. It was so unexpected for me to be treated as rock stars are in their 20s. Here I was, at 35, having this adulation, screaming, fawning, fan magazines. It was interesting and at times quite scary, but I was old enough to handle it.

Whatever the precise reason, there is no denying that Mister Spock was the show’s breakout sex symbol. Dorothy Fontana’s work on  The Naked Now ,  This Side of Paradise and  Journey to Babel undoubtedly contributed.

Guarded emotions.

In discussing  Elaan of Troyius , Fred Freiberger talked about his efforts to attract female audience members to  Star Trek . In an interview with Starlog , writer Margaret Armen claimed that  The Paradise Syndrome went down very well with  “sponsor’s wives.”  As such, it made a great deal of sense to build an episode around Spock’s latent sex appeal. In the context of the third season,  The Enterprise Incident  seems like a conscious attempt to capitalise on Spock’s allure. This is Fred Freiberger trying to save  Star Trek by trying to broaden the audience.

Indeed, The Enterprise Incident  offers a much more conventional and safer  “sexy Spock” story than the consciously queer  Amok Time . After all,  Amok Time  had emphasised the unconventional aspects of Spock’s biology while stressing his relationship to Kirk; Theodore Sturgeon’s script tied Spock’s sex drive into a wrestling match with Kirk. In contrast,  The Enterprise Incident offers a much more heteronormative view of Spock’s sexuality. There is no mention of a seven-year cycle, just a female love interest to gently caress.

Lighten up.

In fact, it could be argued that the relationship between Spock and the Romulan Commander is a form of  “pandering” that takes away a lot of what made Spock so sexy and alluring to the fanbase in the first place. Fontana noted as much in a memo on these rewrites, as reprinted in  These Are the Voyages :

Frankly, our fans — especially the vocal ones who write a lot of letters to networks — are very hip to what is and what isn’t “Vulcan.” They write whole treatises and fanzines — for a large circle of subscribers — based on Vulcan psychology, physiology, emotions, mores, and what Spock eats for breakfast. And they will tune us out if the “business” in this seduction scene goes unchanged.

In many ways, this represents a key conflict in the third season of  Star Trek . Fred Freiberger had been drafted in to help save a show that could not be saved. Freiberger’s philosophy seemed to be an attempt to push the show towards more mainstream audiences, occasionally at the cost of neglecting what made it  Star Trek in the first place.

“Would you believe that we were playing Pokémon Go ?”

It should be acknowledged that Freiberger’s efforts to popularise the show were often unsuccessful.  Elaan of Troyius and  The Paradise Syndrome are terrible episodes of television. However, they were also doomed from the outset. The narrative that has developed around the third season of  Star Trek tends to avoid the real issues with the season – budget cuts, the departure of key creative personal, scheduling. Instead, Fred Freiberger has become a convenient scapegoat for all of the flaws with this season of television.

Fan narratives of the third season treat Freiberger and Singer as an external colonising force seeking to transform Star Trek into something alien. Freiberger and Singer are portrayed as television producers with no real interest in  Star Trek as an institution, and no respect for the show’s underlying values and philosophies. This narrative has been cultivated by key writers who worked on the third season, writers like Dorothy Fontana, Margaret Armen and David Gerrold. The abiding narrative is that Freiberger and Singer neither knew nor cared about  Star Trek .

The Enterprise finds herself in a bit of a fix.

In some respects, this would set the tone for the occasionally fraught relationship between the production team working on  Star Trek and the audience watching at home. Any deviation from the established template would be treated as hostile until proven otherwise; witness the intense and extreme reaction to the Bad Robot films by certain vocal elements of the fandom who would argue that  Star Trek Into Darkness is somehow a worse film than  Star Trek V: The Final Frontier .

JJ Abrams and his writers were treated as interlopers without the proper respect for the show or its fans. Although history has somewhat vindicated them, it should also be noted that producers like Nicholas Meyer and Ira Steven Behr were also criticised by certain vocal segments of the fandom for daring to imagine their own takes on the  Star Trek mythos that deviated from the templates outlined by Gene Roddenberry. A lot of that knee-jerk fan reaction and sensitivity can be traced back to this point in the franchise’s life cycle, the ghost of Fred Freiberger.

Kirk had a somewhat unconventional plan to win over some of Spock’s sex appeal.

Indeed, it is interesting to note that this happened in the wake of the high-profile fandom campaign to  “save” the series. It could be argued that the campaign served to give fandom a sense of  “ownership” and  “entitlement” to the show, something that would be consciously cultivated by Gene Roddenberry in the years that followed to help him craft his own narrative of the show’s history and production. Fred Freiberger was an outsider to that fan circuit, a producer who would be unlikely to list  Star Trek as the crowning accomplishment of his television resume.

Of course, such criticisms tend to overlook the fact that Freiberger was drafted in at the last minute because Gene Roddenberry resigned when the network refused to ascede to his demands about the scheduling of the show. Freiberger was not a usurper or a hostile invader laying claim to a beloved institution, he was a producer in an impossible situation trying to find a workable solution at a point when many of the show’s veteran production team had already thrown in the towel.

A plot device.

The Enterprise Incident is not quite perfect. However, it feels a lot more like the first two seasons of  Star Trek than the rest of the third season around it. If not for the influence of the Pueblo incident on the story,  The Enterprise Incident might easily be mistaken for a script carried over from the previous season. As Dorothy Fontana’s last credited contribution to the original  Star Trek show, it is a reminder of just how much the show has lost through the absence of key figures like Fontana and Coon in its third year.

Still,  The Enterprise Incident holds up well. It is a highlight of a very troubled season.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: D. C. Fontana , dorothy fontana , enterprise , romulans , star trek , the enterprise incident , the original series |

19 Responses

I think part of the reason the Romulans are so popular is because so little known about them. As you point out other species have had a great deal of time dealt with their culture, but not so the Romulans. The Romulans have almost always remained the inscrutable Cold War, as you say mirror, foes they began as.

Yep. And I think the longer they stayed that way, the harder it was to transform them into something else.

While is something I liked about Enterprise. There was a sense that the Klingons and Romulans had been transformed from external mirrors to contemporary American values, stand-ins for the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans, instead become a reflection of American values themselves; the Klingons in Judgment are Bush-era hawks, the Romulans in the United trilogy are living in a state of perpetual warfare striking at their enemies through drones.

The Enterpriase Incident is an excellent episode, but I think it left a very mixed legacy regarding the Romulans.

The first was that for better or worse the Romulans became pigeonholed as Cold War-esque espionage antagonists. Now many of the indvidual episodes that ran with this were very good – ‘Face of the Enemy’ from TNG is a particular favourite. However the sheer number of ‘intrigue’ Romulan stories weakened them overall for the simple reason that our heroes always end up winning by outwitting them. The franchise can talk about the fearsome Tal Shiar all they like but if we have just seen them be humiliated by the crew of the Enterprise for the sixth time they will look less impressive. DS9 took this to the logical conclusion where the Romulans are inflitrated by the Founders, manipulated into a war by a Starfleet captain and even are having their strings pulled by Section 31.

The other issue might be a personal quirk but the playing up of the Vulcan/Romulan element in later stories that built on ‘The Enterprise Incident’ sometimes left me uncomfortable. The big offender here is the ‘Unification’ two-parter from TNG were Spock delivers the hugely racist line: “An inexorable evolution toward a Vulcan philosophy has already begun. Like the first Vulcans, these people are struggling to a new enlightenment and it may take decades or even centuries for them to reach it but they will reach it… ”

Now I suppose that wasn’t the intention but something about that sentiment has always rubbed me the wrong way, the suggestion that Romulans are simply wrongheaded Vulcans and therefore their own culture has little to no merit. Agan that may be a quirk on my part but it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Unification makes sense to me – the Vulcans & Romulans are really one race which separated into distinct cultures. But while they may have been quite different at the point of separation, why would we expect that to remain the same after thousands of years? We’ve seen Vulcans who are quite duplicitous, why should Romulans be entirely immune to logic?

You also forget the tendency of one’s descendants to reject their ancestors’ trappings. There must be thousands of Romulan teens who don’t want to go into the family ale brewery and would rather meditate over an IDIC.

My problem is how reactionary it seems – and how one sided. Spock isn’t saying the Vulcans have much to learn from the Romulans and that the two sides will combine into a stronger, more diverse whole. He is saying the Romulans will effectively be assimilated into a Vulcan identity with the implication that the Romulans have nothing important to teach their cousins, or perhaps even nothing worth preserving. Which honestly feels hugely problematic to me.

Now granted I may be reading too much into a few lines but it is hard not to read a sense of cultural superiority into Spock’s words.

Yeah, Reunification seems to come with a rider saying that the Romulans are effectively “doing it wrong” and that they need to come “home.” It’s not a language of compromise or reconciliation; it sounds almost like absorption.

Was it you, Ross, who pointed out that the Tal’Shiar must have an excellent PR department based on what we see of them in the franchise? They certainly don’t appear particularly terrifying when our crew beat them so frequently? (It was a very astute point.)

And I’d agree somewhat with the uncomfortable undercurrents of Reunification, not least because the Vulcans really aren’t anywhere near as perfect as some fans (and some episodes) seem to suggest that they are.

Yeah, glad to see I wasn’t totally alone in thinking that. 🙂

As I said before my favourite Romulan episode, at least after TOS, is ‘Face of the Enemy’, and not just because it was an unusually strong Troi episode but also because it gives us much more of an insight into the Romulan frame of mind than we usually get – Toreth is justifiably afraid of the Tal’Shiar, but also seems to hold them in contempt (“Contrary to the propaganda that your superiors would have us believe, Starfleet is neither weak nor foolish.”)

It is a real shame we never got a Romulan equivalent to the rich recurring characters we got from the Cardassians, the Klingons and the Ferengi.

I’m quite fond of The Enemy and The Defector as Romulan episodes go. In the Pale Moonlight notwithstanding, for obvious reasons.

It’s weird to think we had more better-developed Ferengi than Romulans, isn’t it? Heck, more individual Borg, to be honest.

>She probably had a better grasp of Spock’s character than I did.

“Probably.” How magnanimous of him! I can see why fandom likes to pile on this guy.

>In some respects, this would set the tone for the occasionally fraught relationship between the production team working on Star Trek and the audience watching at home.

This isn’t unique to Trek either – look to MST3K fandom who eventually cast their blames on Jim Mallon; Buffy fans blamed the Kuzuis; Chris Carter takes the blame for X-Files, Damon Lindelof for Lost.

There are points at which Freiberger makes it very hard to count a credible defense of his tenure. That and the “tits in space” story do him few favours. And the fact that he made a number of ill-judged and poor decisions in his own right. There’s a comparison to be made to Brannon Braga, who also has those sorts of stories and details in his own history.

But I do think Star Trek is kinda unique in the way that it tends to pile on “outsiders” like Freiberger and Abrams. And arguably Berman, who was somewhat seen as a network-friendly blow-in, even after almost twenty years working on the franchise. I wonder how much of the hatred of Braga is rooted in that infamous (ill-advised) interview in which he boasted proudly of never having watching the original Star Trek.

The ironic thing for me is that while Star Trek fans seem to hate Abrams, Star Wars fans have embraced him. Yet, I feel lukewarm towards the force awakens, while I really enjoy the the Abrams Star Trek films. I think it comes down to my appreciation that the Abrams Star Trek films seem to be pushing to explore new things, while the new Star Wars film was so safe I could not muster any interest.

It is a strange contrast. I liked The Force Awakens, but I preferred to two Abrams films. I also preferred them to Beyond.

I was really looking forward to Darren’s analysis of “The Enterprise Incident.” Good read.

This is another one of those ST episodes that I never had the opportunity to watch when I was a kid. I didn’t actually see it until about two years ago. I was quite shocked at how cynical the story was, in what a duplicitous light it placed Starfleet and the crew of the Enterprise.

There is a real moral ambiguity to this episode. Starfleet are the aggressors who commit an act of war against the Romulans. Now, you could certainly argue that when the Romulan government ordered a series of unprovoked attacks on Starfleet less than two years earlier that resulted in hundreds of deaths (in “Balance of Terror”)and that Starfleet’s actions in this episode were an inevitable response that. I’m sure Starfleet would argue that it was only taking measures to prevent another catastrophic sneak attack. Nevertheless, considering that the Federation is, at least on paper, committed to peaceful resolutions to conflicts, it is interesting that Starfleet felt the need to eschew diplomacy and utilize espionage.

(Actually, I’m sorta confused about the precise nature of the relationship between Starfleet and the Federation. Has that ever been clarified?)

In certain respects “The Enterprise Incident” feels very much a precursor to Deep Space 9. With only a few minor changes, I could even see it as an actual episode of DS9. (It’s even been suggested that this episode was the behind-the-scenes first appearance of Section 31.) It definitely made me realize that those Star Trek fans who objected to idea that factions of Starfleet would act in an amoral fashion in DS9 and some of the movies were obviously forgetting about this episode.

I agree that the romance between Spock and the Romulan Captain is probably the one few weak points in this episode. It does make her seem rather naïve. I think the reason why the episode still works so well is that Joanne Linville gives a great performance, and has some genuine chemistry with Leonard Nimoy. it’s too bad that her character was never brought back in Next Gen or DS9. But I can certainly see the events of this episode as one of the things that eventually led Spock to work for unification between the Vulcans and Romulans.

I think The Enterprise Incident was hugely influential in terms of what we think of as modern Star Trek; not just DS9, but even late-stage TNG. It gives the Romulans (and even the Klingons) real agency, it suggests a breathing universe outside Starfleet’s sphere of influence. The Romulan Commander was a hugely influential character, and I think that you’re right to point to it as something that might have inspired the story for the Unification two-parter. (It was certainly an influence on Face of the Enemy.)

I’ve always seen the Romulan Commander not as the victim of Spock’s duplicitous seduction but as someone who was trying to seduce him to her side just as much as he was trying to seduce her. She was trying to seduce him in order to turn him, while he was trying to seduce her to distract her. And if she’d managed to turn him, she wouldn’t just have acquired an excellent officer, she’d have acquired an officer who was privy to an enormous amount of classified information about Starfleet — reason enough to promise him his own ship. The fact that he was more successful than she was is because distraction takes less time than turning. Well, that and the fact that he’s one of the heroes. 🙂

I’m amazed that Freiberger thought that women needed romance to like Star Trek; I like Star Trek because I like SCIENCE FICTION. We do have brains, Fred, and we sometimes use them to think about philosophy or alternate worlds or any of the thousand other things that science fiction can do. Geeze.

That said, it was nice to see Spock in romantic mode when actually in his right mind and not hopped up on spores or 5000 years in the past or something. Of course, it was mostly an act, rather than a genuine relationship, but it was still enjoyable. I find Spock’s stroking fingers with the Romulan Commander to be way hotter than all the lip-mashing Kirk ever did with the Babe of the Week, but then, I’ve been a confirmed Spock girl since 1969. 🙂

I’m always amused when I see men scratching their heads about why women like Spock, as if millions of women all liked him for exactly the same reason, because we’re not individuals or anything. *insert eye-roll here* I’ve talked about Spock’s appeal with several other women, and we all have different reasons for liking him.

In addition to the reasons you’ve mentioned, I think a lot of women want to take care of Spock; he appeals to the nurturer in us. As a hybrid, he seems to be completely accepted and appreciated by neither Vulcans nor humans, and he deserves so much more. That wonderfully ethical, self-sacrificing character, that magnificent mind, that endearing personality … how could such a fabulous person NOT be loved and appreciated? So we perceive a lack and want to rush in to fill it. 🙂

Another thing I rarely see mentioned is that although Spock has all of the virtues traditionally associated with masculinity (brave, strong, decisive, protective, all that stuff), he has almost none of the FLAWS of traditional masculinity. Instead of being rude, he’s exquisitely polite, almost courtly. He hates violence and uses it only as a last resort. He doesn’t get angry (and SO many women have had SO much cause to fear male anger). He’s never crude. He’s always beautifully groomed. He doesn’t leer at women or treat them like things to be used. And although he’s justly confident in his prodigious abilities, he doesn’t swagger like Kirk; he’s confident in a restrained way, not in a cocky way.

Another thing is that Spock is capable of mind melds, so if one were in a relationship with him, one would never have to wonder what he really thought or what he really felt, because he could take you inside his mind and SHOW you. Plus, a meld seems likely to produce a very deep intimacy, a level of intimacy that neither talking nor sex can match, a level of intimacy that we humans can’t achieve on our own, without half-Vulcan help.

There’s more — I could probably talk about Spock all day — but I’ve bent your ear long enough. 🙂

I don’t know about that reading of the Romulan Commander. Leaving Spock alone while trying to get into something sexy is a very basic tactical error in a situation like this. (Not even having the room bugged suggests that she wasn’t thinking purely tactically.) And the fact that the script has her male subordinate effectively catch Spock out isn’t particularly flattering. That closing scene between the two does suggest some mutual connection, one that seems to apply to Spock in some degree. The difference being that The Enterprise Incident suggests that Spock was able to suppress that emotional attachment.

And no worried about bending my ear! That said, I’m not sure I’d describe Spock as “polite.” If anything, I think Kirk is easily the most diplomatic and sociable of the trio. Spock can be quite blunt, and there are quite a few moments over the course of the series where Spock provides a withering commentary or dismissal of his colleagues based on their emotionalism. Which is not necessarily unfair and certainly nowhere near as bad as McCoy’s racism, but I’m not sure I’d buy that Spock is polite or courtly.

I tend to agree with Corylea. When the Romulan Commander left Spock alone there were probably guards outside the room and she knew that if Spock contacted the ship it would be detected, which it was. Also I like how when Spock’s deception was discovered the Romulan Commander was canny enough to realize that the Enterprise crew were after the cloaking device.

For what it’s worth, David Gerrold suggests that the revisions Fontana refused to make to her script were the kind that sought to portray the United States as in the right during the Pueblo Incident, and that the episode we see, where Kirk and his crew come off as purely clever and heroic, is the result of others rewriting that script in Fontana’s absence.

Gerrold implies that the story Fontana tried to tell would have explored Kirk’s complicity in an illegal mission that violated treaty, with Sarek as diplomatic cover and military superiority as the only justification, and those above Fontana both detected the implied criticism of United States policy in Asia and were highly displeased with it. Fontana, already at odds with the show-runners for reasons described above, would have nothing to do with watering down that message.

Gerrold’s own bad blood with the franchise’s king-makers and his later anti-imperialist critiques of Star Trek are worth mentioning here, but I still don’t find much reason to think he lied about any of this, since when “The World of Star Trek” was published, Fontana could certainly have disputed Gerrold’s version of events that involved her personally. She never did, so far as I’m aware.

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Joanne Linville

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Joanne Linville ( 15 January 1928 – 20 June 2021 ; age 93) was an actress who played the Romulan commander in the Star Trek: The Original Series third season episode " The Enterprise Incident ".

She filmed her scenes on Wednesday 19 June 1968 , and between Monday 24 June 1968 and Wednesday 26 June 1968 at Desilu Stage 9 and Paramount Stage 3 .

Linville was the first actress to play a female Romulan in the Star Trek franchise, and it may be this role for which she is most well-known. For the Star Trek: The Next Generation sixth season episode " Face Of The Enemy ", writer Naren Shankar suggested that Linville reprise her role as the Romulan commander, but she was unavailable. ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 270)

Linville began acting on television in the 1950s, appearing on several popular anthology series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents , Kraft Television Theatre , and One Step Beyond . Perhaps her earliest was a 1954 episode of Studio One co-starring fellow Original Series guest performer David Opatoshu . She went on to make three more appearances on Studio One (including one with Fritz Weaver ), and even had a recurring role on the show. Another early appearance for Linville was a 1956 episode of The Kaiser Aluminum Hour entitled "Gwyneth", in which Linville played the title character. This episode also marked the first of several times Linville would work with her future Star Trek co-star William Shatner . She and Shatner next appeared together in a 1958 episode of The United States Steel Hour and then in a 1961 episode of The Defenders – both times playing husband and wife – before working together on Star Trek . She also worked with Leonard Nimoy prior to Star Trek , co-starring together (with Paul Carr ) in a 1962 episode of the drama Sam Benedict .

In 1959, Linville co-starred with the man who played the first Romulan commander seen on Star Trek , Mark Lenard , on a DuPont Show of the Month production of Don Quixote . In 1961, she starred as a Civil War widow unaware of the fact that she's dead in the episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "The Passerby", co-starring with fellow Original Series guest stars James Gregory and Rex Holman . She also guest-starred with Celia Lovsky in an episode of Gunsmoke that same year.

She went on to appear on such shows as Ben Casey , I Spy , The Fugitive (in an episode playing the wife of James Daly with Arch Whiting ), Bonanza (playing the daughter of Jeff Corey 's character), two episodes of Hawaii Five-O (including the two-part episode "Once Upon a Time" with Vince Howard , William Schallert , and Bill Zuckert ), Kojak (with Malachi Throne ), The Streets of San Francisco , CHiPs (with Robert Pine ), Charlie's Angels (with Bill Zuckert), and Mrs. Columbo (starring Kate Mulgrew in the title role). She also co-starred with both Fritz Weaver and Jason Wingreen in one episode of two different shows: The F.B.I. in 1969 (having previously appeared in an episode with William Smithers ) and Barnaby Jones in 1970 (on which she had previously appeared with Richard Derr ). Lee Meriwether was a regular on the latter series. The FBI episode with Linville and Fritz Weaver also featured Barry Atwater .

Linville's career also included small roles in a few feature films, most notably as Burt Lancaster's wife in the 1973 action thriller Scorpio , which also featured fellow Trek veterans John Colicos , James B. Sikking , William Smithers, and Celeste Yarnall . Other films in which she appeared include 1976's A Star Is Born and Gable and Lombard and 1982's The Seduction (starring Michael Sarrazin and Kevin Brophy ). Her earliest film, however, was the Academy Award-nominated 1958 drama The Goddess .

Additionally, Linville had roles in a number of made-for-TV movies, including 1970's House on Greenapple Road , in which she played the wife of the character played by William Windom . Tim O'Connor , Paul Fix , Ned Romero , Peter Mark Richman (billed as Mark Richman), and Ena Hartman were also in this film. She also appeared in Lou Antonio 's TV movie The Critical List in 1978. During the 1980s, Linville made two appearances on the soap opera Dynasty (starring Joan Collins and Lee Bergere ), an episode of L.A. Law (starring Corbin Bernsen and Larry Drake ), and the 1989 TV movie From the Dead of Night (with Merritt Butrick ) before retiring from acting.

Linville was married from 1962 until 1973 to director Mark Rydell, and it was only for a supporting role in his 2001 TV biopic on James Dean that she briefly came out of retirement. She and Rydell had two children together – actors Amy and Christopher Rydell , the latter of whom has appeared on Star Trek: Enterprise . Amy Rydell later reprised her mother's role as the Romulan Commander for the fan series Star Trek Continues two-part finale, "To Boldly Go". Linville herself participated in the fan audio drama "Starship Excelsior" for the 50th anniversary special, "Tomorrow's Excelsior", reprising her role as the Romulan Commander.

Linville passed away on 20 June 2021 at the age of 93. [1]

External links [ ]

• JoanneLinville.com (X) – former official site
• Joanne Linville at the Internet Movie Database
• Joanne Linville at Wikipedia
• Joanne Linville at TriviaTribute.com

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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekS3E2TheEnterpriseIncident

Recap / Star Trek S3 E2 "The Enterprise Incident"

Edit locked.

Original air date: September 27, 1968

It's another day on the Enterprise , and Kirk's acting like he had an extra helping of bitch flakes for breakfast. This becomes especially evident when he orders the ship to fly straight into Romulan space, a direct violation of the peace treaty. Of course, they soon find themselves surrounded by Romulan ships demanding their surrender. Kirk tries to B.S. the (female) Romulan commander ( Joanne Linville ) by saying it was all a big mistake due to equipment failure. Spock rats him out, saying it was deliberate, resulting in Kirk doing a passable impression of Achmed the Dead Terrorist. Bones comes aboard just in time to see Kirk attempt to carry out his threat, only to be thwarted by the Vulcan Death Grip (tm). "You're dead, Jim!"

...Or is he?

The Enterprise Tropes:

• 2-D Space : The Enterprise is surrounded by three ships, which should still leave them free to go up or down. This is given a Lampshade Hanging (possibly unintentional?) in the remastered episode, when the Enterprise does exactly that.
• Bavarian Fire Drill : Kirk does this with the first guard he encounters on beaming onto the Romulan ship, but is less successful bluffing his way past the two centurions guarding the cloaking device.
• Bittersweet Ending : The Federation has acquired the cloaking device, but it's just one more shot in a Lensman Arms Race . Meanwhile Spock implies that he was not impervious to the Romulan commander's charms , but he had to put duty before love and she would not have respected any other decision.
• Blatant Lies : Kirk tells the Romulan commander that the Enterprise crossed the Neutral Zone because of a navigational error. She immediately calls bullshit.
• Canon Discontinuity : In a 1991 interview Tim Lynch, TNG research consultant, Richard Arnold talked about the crew forgetting that Romulans had cloaking devices and said to consider the third season canon until it contradicts something.
• Cannot Tell a Lie : Discussed. The Romulan Commander asks Spock if it's true that Vulcans are incapable of lying, and he replies that they are incapable of making statements that they know to be untrue, but are capable of selectively withholding the truth. He then proceeds to lie like a rug for the rest of the scene. Thus, he was lying about not being able to lie. . . and a Vulcan can certainly lie, provided they have a logical reason to do so.
• Captain Obvious : When Spock states "I carried out my duty" while invoking his Right of Statement, the Romulan Commander objects (probably suspecting that he is stalling for time ) that he is stating the obvious. Spock simply points out that there are no regulations regarding the content of his statement .
• Captain's Log : The opening narration is a medical log read by Dr. McCoy, deviating from the norm.
• Chair Reveal : My God, the Romulan warbird is commanded by...a beautiful woman!
• Chewing the Scenery : At least this time Kirk has an excuse, as he's pretending to be insane.
• Custom Uniform of Sexy : The Romulan uniform doesn't involve much fanservice, except for the female commander's short skirt.
• Deadly Force Field : Kirk injures himself hurling his body at the Forcefield Door .
• Department of Redundancy Department : "Execution of state criminals is both painful...and unpleasant".
• Does This Remind You of Anything? : Despite his talents, Spock is subject to his own glass ceiling in Starfleet.
• Duel of Seduction : Oddly, it's not Kirk trying to seduce the Girl of the Week this time. It's Spock!
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending : Downplayed; Kirk is told to go to Sickbay to have his Pointy Ears removed. Spock urges him to comply as they don't look as 'aesthetically pleasing' on humans. He stops to Death Glare at Spock, then enters the turbolift in a huff as the crew exchange grins.
• Eye Awaken : Nurse Chapel is shocked when the supposedly dead Kirk suddenly opens his eyes.
• Face Death with Dignity : After announcing what he's really been up to, Spock calmly asks the Romulans what their preferred method of execution is.
• Faking the Dead : Kirk. Even his own crew isn't in on it. Dr. McCoy lampshades a real danger with this kind of trick that most people don't think of, "You're lucky they didn't do an autopsy on you".
• Fate Worse than Death : The Romulan commander hints that their interrogation methods would leave Kirk either dead or worse.
• First-Name Basis : The Romulan commander whispers her first name to Spock. He comments on the name's beauty , but it is never revealed.
• Forbidden Zone : The guarded door that is restricted to "loyal Romulans". This only serves to tip off Spock that the top secret cloaking device is inside.
• Forcefield Door : Kirk gets injured throwing himself at it, causing Dr McCoy to beam over.
• Foreshadowing : Kirk (or Shatner) looks suspiciously like he’s trying to not laugh when he’s “dead” from the “Vulcan death grip”.
• Gender-Concealing Writing : The audience doesn't get a gender reveal until the Chair Reveal .
• The Guards Must Be Crazy : Romulan!Kirk gets past three of them. Granted, each one is more competent than the last, but still...
• Ham-to-Ham Combat : Kirk and the Romulan commander exchange mutual threats and bluster.
• He's Dead, Jim : Or in this case: Jim's dead, Spock!
• Holding the Floor : Spock stalls for time by invoking the Romulan tradition of "Right of Statement", i.e., the last words of a condemned man.
• Honor Before Reason : The Romulans have Enterprise surrounded by three warships (all Klingon-made D7 battlecruisers originally, two D7s and Romulan-built Warbird in the Special Edition), and request Kirk and Spock beam over to the task force flagship to discuss the situation with the Commander. When Kirk asks what assurance he has that he and Spock will be safe, the Romulans, despite having absolutely no reason to provide such assurances and the ability to simply obliterate Enterprise should Kirk refuse, offer two of their relatively senior officers in a hostage exchange.
• As Kirk and Spock beam over to the Romulan vessel, two Romulan officers beam over simultaneously as hostages. This comes in handy when Kirk needs to borrow an enemy uniform .
• Kirk tries to invoke this with the Romulan commander who was accidentally beamed over to the Enterprise with Spock, but she orders her subcommander to destroy the Enterprise with her on it.
• If I Do Not Return : Kirk leaves Scotty with orders saying that if he and Spock don't return from the Romulan flagship, the Enterprise must not be captured, even if it means self-destructing .
• If I Wanted You Dead... : The only reason the Romulans don't attack them on sight is because they want to capture the Enterprise intact.
• I'll Kill You! : Kirk (to Spock): I'll KILL YOU! KILL YOU!
• Intertwined Fingers : For Vulcans, this is practically passionate kissing. Romulans get off on it too.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique : The Romulan Commander threatens Kirk with this, after admitting that a Vulcan like Spock would No-Sell it.
• Jerkass : Kirk acts like one as per his Sealed Orders .
• Just Following Orders : The Romulan commander uses this as justification to not hold the Enterprise crew responsible for Kirk's transgression.
• Leave No Survivors : The Romulan Commander demands that everyone on the Enterprise be destroyed, including herself.
• Lensman Arms Race : Starfleet has to steal the cloaking device to keep the Balance of Power with the Romulans. The new model is even better at hiding cloaked ships from sensors than old models — demonstrated when Enterprise is caught completely by the Romulan armada, whereas in "Balance of Terror" the cloak was imperfect enough Enterprise could catch an echo of the cloaked ship. Starfleet wants a copy so they can study it and build countermeasures. Capping off the episode, at the end after both the new cloaking device and the Romulan Commander have been captured, she chides Spock that any advances they make in scanning technology from studying it will only be transient, as before too long the Romulans will simply build a better one . Spock himself freely admits that military "secrets" are perhaps the most fleeting of all.
• Look Behind You : Kirk pulls this on a Romulan trying to stop him from taking the cloaking device.
• Mouth of Sauron : Before The Reveal , Subcommander Tal does the talking for the yet-unseen Commander.
• Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer : McCoy calls Scotty, who's in acting command of the Enterprise , to sickbay, and refuses to explain in advance why. Justified in this case because he's being called down so he can be let into the conspiracy surrounding Kirk's fake death, which McCoy can hardly tell him over the intercom.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine : The Romulan commander invites Spock to dinner in her personal quarters. She tries to get to him Through His Stomach by offering him traditional Vulcan fare.
• No Name Given : The Romulan Commander. Not even in the script is her name revealed.
• Obfuscating Insanity : Kirk pretends to go off the deep end to explain why he ordered the ship into Romulan space. Spock gets the assist on that, as he tells the Romulan commander that Kirk has gone bonkers. McCoy verifies that as well.
• Only Mostly Dead : Kirk, thanks to the "Vulcan Death Grip".
• Plausible Deniability : The reason Kirk is acting crazy , even in front of the crew; should the mission go south, everyone will be able to testify — even under lie detectors — that he acted without the Federation's authority.
• Plug 'n' Play Technology : The Romulan cloaking device is compatible with a Federation ship? Maybe Scotty has an adapter in his bag of tricks. Downplayed ; Scotty notes that it's a slapdash job, likely to overload and blow out the cloak or cause any other number of problems. His wince when he "throws the switch" per Kirk's orders indicates that at least one of those potential problems was a fatally large boom.
• Properly Paranoid : The Romulan commander doesn't buy Kirk's BS about "navigational error" and believes that he's after the cloaking device. Of course, she's 100% right.
• Ready for Lovemaking : The Romulan commander comes back to Spock wearing just a robe and barefoot.
• Real Life Writes the Plot : The Romulans are suddenly using Klingon battlecruisers because the original Romulan Warbird model was not available. The reasons are unclear: some say it was lost and eventually passed to a private collector, others say it was damaged or destroyed, either in a mishap while filming for " Balance of Terror " or by the modelmaker himself (who was not in the prop-makers union and so was uncredited and unpaid for his work, and smashed it in anger when it was returned to him without payment).
• Ripped from the Headlines : D.C. Fontana's initial inspiration for this story and its title was the Pueblo incident which involved the capture of an American patrol boat, the USS Pueblo (AGER-2), by North Korean forces during The Vietnam War . The incident occurred on January 23, 1968, just two months before Fontana completed her first draft story outline. It was really based on the Pueblo Incident, in the sense that here's this ship caught spying and they have to find a justification for their being there. Kirk's sanity is put on the line in terms of why they're there. Then, of course, they have to get out safely, preferably with the information they came for. Now that's not what happened with the Pueblo , but the Pueblo Incident kicked off this line of thinking in my mind.
• Scotty Time : Kirk gives Scotty fifteen minutes to rig up the cloak. Spock meanwhile gives a 20 minute formal statement justifying his crimes, which is almost up by the time Scotty is finished. Unfortunately Scotty's first attempt doesn't work and a Hyperspeed Escape is needed to gain enough time.
• Sealed Orders : Captain Kirk receives secret orders to steal a Romulan cloaking device . As part of The Plan , he acts like a Jerkass as a form of Obfuscating Insanity .
• Some Kind of Force Field : The doorway of the brig on the Romulan ship is covered by a Forcefield Door that's invisible except when Kirk tries to get through it.
• Slip into Something More Comfortable : The commander leaves Spock to change from her uniform to a more feminine dress, giving Spock a chance to send a signal to Kirk about the location of the cloaking device. Ironically, given the short skirt of her uniform, the "Something More Comfortable" is in many ways less revealing.
• Staged Shooting : There's no such thing as a Vulcan Death Grip! They can stun the neural system to simulate death, however.
• Subspace Ansible : Even then, it would take three weeks for a message to get to Starfleet.
• Superdickery : In the first half of the episode, we see Kirk behaving irrationally, culminating with him ordering the Enterprise to fly unprovoked into Romulan space. And then, we see Spock betray the Enterprise to the Romulans, even killing Kirk. Of course, it all turns out to be a ruse that Kirk and Spock planned ahead of time.
• Take a Third Option : The Romulan Commander accurately points out that as a hybrid, Spock is constantly torn between the emotionless logic of his Vulcan side and the emotions of his human side. She tempts him that if he joined Team Romulan, he wouldn't have to choose, because the Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcans who did not reject their emotions and passions, thus making them a nice middle-path where he would actually fit in pretty well. At the end of the episode Spock reveals that this middle path was more tempting to him than he ever let on, and it took his strong sense of duty to Starfleet to reject it.
• Take Our Word for It : Spock's reaction to the Romulan Commander's name.
• Taking You with Me : Scotty threatens this if the Romulans try to capture the Enterprise . This is why the Romulan commander tries to seduce Spock over to their side, so he can help them capture it intact.
• The Romulan commander orders her Number Two to destroy the Enterprise , even though she's currently aboard.
• The bridge crew are so astonished that Kirk is alive and wearing Pointy Ears that he has to add, " That is not a request , gentlemen" before they rush to obey his orders.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes : The Romulans initially give the Enterprise "one of your hours" to surrender.
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway : Scotty hooking up the cloaking device. It doesn't work immediately, but he still makes it happen.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee : It helps that until halfway through the episode, there's no indication that there's a plan going on .
• Uptight Loves Wild : Invoked by the commander, who holds out the attraction of the passionate Romulan female as opposed to the sterility of pure logic and emotional-denial practised by Vulcan women.
• Villain Has a Point : The Romulans may be enemies of The Federation , but when Kirk questions their honesty at one point, Subcommander Tal points out that the Enterprise encroached into Romulan space, making Kirk seem like the untrustworthy one.
• We Will Not Use Stage Make-Up in the Future : Starting a tradition that will be followed in the next generation , Kirk has himself surgically altered to look like a Romulan and ends the episode by going to have his ears bobbed.
• We Would Have Told You, But... : The crew of Enterprise are kept in the dark so Starfleet can maintain Plausible Deniability regarding Kirk's actions, if things don't work out according to plan.
• What Happened to the Mouse? : The two Romulan guards that were beamed over in exchange for Kirk and Spock are presumably still in the brig at the end of the episode (one in his skivvies, since Kirk needed to borrow his uniform to sneak around on the Romulan ship). Presumably they were let off at the Federation outpost with their commander and then handed over to their government.
• Worthy Opponent : The Romulan Commander. She also views Kirk this way.
• You Just Told Me : Kirk tells the Romulan guard that there's a spy on board attempting to steal the cloaking device . The guards' eyes instinctively go to the glowing ball thingy, tipping off Kirk that that's his objective.
• You're Insane! : The Romulan Commander says "You must be mad!" to Spock after he betrays her. He denies it.
• Star Trek S3 E1 "Spock's Brain"
• Recap/Star Trek: The Original Series
• Star Trek S3 E3 "The Paradise Syndrome"

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Star Treks Long Road To TV Began 60 Years Ago This Month

• 60 years ago, Gene Roddenberry took his first step towards bringing Star Trek to the screen with a successful meeting with NBC.
• "The Cage" was chosen as the pilot for Star Trek, but two other potential storylines were also pitched to NBC.
• While the show faced initial challenges, Star Trek: The Original Series went on to become a beloved science fiction classic.

It was 60 years ago this May that Gene Roddenberry and NBC embarked on the first step on their journey to bringing Star Trek: The Original Series to the screen. TOS premiered on NBC on September 8th, 1966, following a failed pilot, a radical overhaul, and a change of lead actor. Years before "The Man Trap" aired, Gene Roddenberry began shopping his Star Trek concept around various studios and networks, to no avail . In 1964, however, Roddenberry sold Star Trek to Lucille Ball's, Desilu production company, signing a three-year deal in April that year.

While Gene Roddenberry now had studio backing, he still needed a network partner to make his Star Trek dreams a reality . Despite Desilu's existing deal with CBS, Gene Roddenberry failed to sell his Star Trek Is... pitch document to the network, as they opted to go with Irwin Allen's Lost in Space instead. In early May, however, Gene Roddenberry had a successful meeting with NBC's Vice-President of Programming, Mort Werner, who asked him to provide him with three potential story ideas for a Star Trek pilot . Roddenberry and Werner's meeting was the first step on a long journey to get Star Trek on TV.

Star Trek: The Original Series Cast & Character Guide

Star Trek: The Original Series features some of the most iconic characters in all of science fiction with the crew of the original USS Enterprise.

NBC Ordered Three Star Trek Storylines 60 Years Ago This Month - What Were They?

We know "the cage" was successful, but what else was on offer.

Of the three potential storylines that Gene Roddenberry pitched to NBC, "The Cage" was the one that was successfully mounted as a Star Trek pilot. For years, fans have speculated about what the two unsuccessful storylines could have been. There are some possible clues in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek Is... pitch document, dated 1st March 1964 . The front page, which describes Star Trek with the keywords " Action. Adventure. Science Fiction " also outlines six potential story ideas.

Four out of six of these storylines are classic episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series in an embryonic form. "The Day Charlie Became God" could describe the second of Star Trek 's two pilots , "Where No Man Has Gone Before", but is also very clearly an early version of "Charlie X". The third story idea, "President Capone", would eventually be realized as Star Trek: TOS season 2, episode 20, "A Piece of the Action" . The fifth potential story idea, "The Women", is an early version of "Mudd's Women", which was one of the three ideas pitched as a potential second pilot in 1965 .

Other story ideas later in the Star Trek Is... document include "The Man Trap" and "The Mirror", which would later be adapted for episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series .

The 2013 reference book These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One by Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn reveals that "The Women" was also one of the three story ideas pitched to NBC in 1964. The final story was "Visit to Paradise", the outline of which was referred to in the Star Trek Is... pitch document as "The Perfect World". Although declined by NBC in 1964 in favor of "The Cage", "Visit to Paradise" would later be adapted as "The Return of the Archons", in which the USS Enterprise discovers a peaceful planet ruled by the evil computer, Landru .

6 Star Trek Planets Controlled By Computers

Star Trek has introduced several planets controlled by computers, some with more positive results than others.

November 2024 Marks The 60th Anniversary Of Star Treks Unaired Pilot

Shooting on "the cage" began on november 27th, 1964..

NBC selected "The Cage" as their preferred Star Trek pilot at the end of July, 1964 . For the next few months, preparations were made to start shooting "The Cage", with Roddenberry submitting rewrites to NBC right up until the final draft being submitted on November 20, 1964. This was one week before Star Trek 's first scenes were shot on November 27; the conversation between Captain Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) and Dr. Phil Boyce (John Hoyt) about the incident on Rigel VII. Shooting on "The Cage" wrapped on December 28, 1964, with the Orion slave girl scenes the last to be filmed .

The day after shooting wrapped, Roddenberry received the USS Enterprise model for use in the show. NBC declined to take Star Trek further in February 1965, because the network believed it didn't have the mass appeal that they were looking for . However, Gene Roddenberry and Desilu convinced NBC to give Star Trek a second chance, and commissioned "Where No Man Has Gone Before" a month later. Star Trek 's second pilot was more positively received by the network, and NBC ordered it for broadcast in the 1966/1967 TV season, and the rest is history.

How Will Star Trek Commemorate Its Actual 60th Anniversary?

September 8th, 2026 is sooner than you think..

While nobody is expecting Star Trek to throw a big party to celebrate 60 years since the production of its failed pilot, the anniversary of "The Cage" is a reminder that Star Trek 's 60th anniversary is fast approaching. At this stage it's not clear how exactly Paramount will celebrate the massive milestone in 2026, but there have been some interesting recent developments. Paramount recently confirmed that a Star Trek origin movie written by Seth Grahame-Smith and directed by Toby Haynes is part of their 2025/26 slate.

The upcoming Star Trek movie was recently described in a Variety cover story as " an origin story of sorts for the main timeline of the entire franchise ". This suggests a movie that takes place between the 30th anniversary movie, Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Enterprise . However, the story of Star Trek 's real-world creation could make for a fascinating Gene Roddenberry biopic , which would be a leftfield choice that could be greeted warmly by fans. Whatever direction it goes in, it seems like the Star Trek origin story will be the perfect way to kick off the celebrations in Star Trek: The Original Series ' 60th anniversary year.

All episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series are available to stream on Paramount+.

Star Trek: The Original Series

Star Trek: The Original Series follows the exploits of the crew of the USS Enterprise. On a five-year mission to explore uncharted space, Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) must trust his crew - Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Forest DeKelley), Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (James Doohan), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Chekov (Walter Koenig) and Sulu (George Takei) - with his life. Facing previously undiscovered life forms and civilizations and representing humanity among the stars on behalf of Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets, the Enterprise regularly comes up against impossible odds and diplomatic dilemmas.

Star Trek Has Finally Revealed the Evil Enterprise's Weird Fate

Watch out for any goatees.

Today, everyone knows what a multiverse is. But back in 1967, parallel universe stories weren’t nearly as common as they are now, even within the sci-fi genre. A classic Star Trek episode, Jerome Bixby’s “Mirror, Mirror,” helped popularize the alternate universe trope, complete with meaner versions of yourself who may rock an evil little goatee like Mirror Spock.

Star Trek’s Mirror Universe also gave us an alternate version of the USS Enterprise in the ISS Enterprise , a ship that served the Imperial Terran Empire, not the United Federation of Planets. Now, in the Discovery Season 5 episode “Mirrors,” the evil ISS Enterprise is back... as a force for good. Here’s what it all means. Spoilers ahead.

The ISS Enterprise returns

Captain Burnham watches the ISS Enterprise warp to Federation HQ.

While pursuing the thieves Moll and L’ak, Book and Burnham take a shuttlecraft into an unstable wormhole and discover the floating, pseudo-derelict ISS Enterprise . One of the clues to the Progenitor’s tech has been hidden on it, but for Burnham, it’s kind of like a bizzaro universe homecoming. Burnham spent a decent amount of time in the Mirror Universe in Discovery Season 1 , and in Season 2 she found herself on the Enterprise with her brother Spock just before jumping from the 23rd century to the 32nd century.

In “Mirrors,” Burnham notes that “crossing between universes has been impossible for centuries,” which means the ISS Enterprise must have crossed over into the Prime Universe well before the 32nd century. Burnham is referencing the events of Discovery Season 3, when we learned that Philippa Georgiou, a resident of the Mirror Universe, couldn’t go back to her home universe because those dimensions had drifted apart. But the ISS Enterprise , which was previously captained by an evil Kirk, crossed over into the Prime Universe well before that moment, and Discovery has now added details connecting The Original Series, Deep Space Nine , and Discovery Season 3.

How evil Spock became good

Spock talking with Kirk in “Mirror, Mirror.”

In the Deep Space Nine episode “Crossover” we learn that after Kirk talked to Mirror Spock and encouraged him to try making the Terran Empire a peaceful power, Mirror Spock did just that. But as Mirror Kira explained, Mirror Spock’s idealism didn’t work out the way he’d hoped:

“Spock rose to Commander in Chief of the Empire by preaching reforms, disarmament, peace. It was quite a remarkable turnabout for his people. Unfortunately for them, when Spock had completed all these reforms, his empire was no longer in any position to defend itself against us [the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance].”

Discovery appears to be referencing this exact event, even if Spock isn’t named outright. When Book learns the ISS Enterprise became a refugee ship for people who’d turned against the Empire, he says, “The Terran High Chancellor was killed for trying to make reforms.”

This likely references Spock, but adds the twist that he was perhaps betrayed by other people within the Terran Empire, even if Earth adopted his reforms. Now, by the end of “Mirrors,” the 23rd-century ISS Enterprise has been moved to the Prime Universe and the 32nd century. It’s an antique by modern standards, but it’s a contemporary of the USS Discovery, so it’s still serviceable. This means that by the end of Discovery Season 5 there will still be a version of the classic Enterprise floating around Federation headquarters, so when the Starfleet Academy series debuts, 32nd-century Starfleet cadets will have access to the classic version of the most famous Enterprise. It may technically be an evil twin, but its historic adventures aren’t over just yet.

Star Trek: Discovery and The Original Series stream on Paramount+.

• Science Fiction

All Roads Lead to Discovery: The Full Star Trek Timeline, Explained

Star Trek: Discovery takes place at the furthest point in the franchise timeline. Here is the stardate for each major entry in the series.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, the final season, is currently underway. The series debuted in 2017 and was used as the launch title for the streaming service CBS All Access, now rebranded Paramount+. It was also the first Star Trek series on television in 12 years following the conclusion of Star Trek: Enterprise back in 2005. While Paramount has spent nearly a decade trying to get Star Trek 4 out of development hell , the franchise has been going strong on Paramount+ with various series on the streaming service at different times of the year. Now, there is almost always a Star Trek series on the air at any given point.

Star Trek: Discovery is a fascinating case for the franchise, as it was originally conceived as a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series , but following the conclusion of Season 2 and starting in Season 3, the series jumped far into the future, the farthest point in the franchise history. Star Trek: Discovery now takes place in a universe built on years of stories. Here is a breakdown of the Star Trek timeline across television and film and how it all leads to Star Trek: Discovery .

Star Trek: Enterprise (2151-2155)

Star trek: enterprise.

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The last television series on air before Star Trek: Discovery is also the first in the timeline as Star Trek: Enterprise takes place over 100 years before the adventures of Kirk and Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series . The series follows Jonathan Archer, the captain of the Enterprise NX-01 which was Earth’s first starship able to reach warp five. Major events in the series are around first contact with alien species like the Klingon and the Xindi. The series also featured the true formation of the United Federation of Planets.

The series also established the Temporal Wars, a conflict that stretched across time and space and resulted in the creation of multiple timelines as agents from various factions in the 32nd century were sent back in time to move history in their favor. This eventually resulted in an all-out war, and while it was resolved, it later had some major ramifications for the franchise. The first was that all-time travel technology became outlawed or destroyed in the 32nd century, so when the crew of Discovery jumped forward in time, they had no way of returning home. The other was a way for the writers to fix continuity errors , like moving up the date of Khan's rise and the Eugenics wars from the 1990s, as established in The Original Series , to the 2010s.

Star Trek: Discovery: Seasons 1 and 2 (2256-2258)

When Star Trek: Discovery first premiered, it was pitched as a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series , taking place nine years before the events of the series. It introduced Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, the never-before-mentioned adopted sister of Spock who ended up starting the war between the Federation and the Klingons, one that would have repercussions for the franchise for years. Star Trek: Discovery dealt with a threat from the Mirror Universe , a faction that would come into play in Star Trek: The Original Series , while season two brought on fan-favorite versions of characters from the original Star Trek pilot in the form of Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijln), and Spock (Ethan Peck).

Star Trek: Discovery season two ended with the crew of the Enterprise making the decision to jump forward 1000 years in the future to save the galaxy from an artificial intelligence threat. This resulted in Pike, Spock, and Number One telling Starfleet that Discovery was destroyed in the battle and vowing never to speak of it or the crew again to prevent another incident like the rouge AI Control from happening. This was done to explain why nobody in the later series of Star Trek mentioned any of the characters on Discovery or the advanced technology the ship had as the first and only one of its kind to use an experimental spore drive.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2259-TBD)

Star trek: strange new worlds.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is both a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery , following Captain Pike and the crew of the USS Enterprise, introduced in that series, as well as a continuation of the original pilot for Star Trek: The Original Series "The Cage." Now that Captain Pike knows the fate that awaits him by the time Star Trek: The Original Series happens, he and the crew of the Enterprise begin exploring strange new worlds. The series is notable for featuring not only Spock but also his first-ever meeting with Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) and the first missions of Uhurua (Celia Rose Gooding). Other members of the original crew, like Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) and Doctor M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun), while Season 2's finale introduces a young Scotty (Martin Quinn).

Star Trek Movies in Order: How to Watch Chronologically and by Release Date

It also adds a new wrinkle to the lore: La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), who is a descendant of villain Khan Noonien Singh. The series has so far fleshed out the alien race, The Gorn, and features the foundation of the Prime Directive rule, one that forbids a Starship from interfering with the development of an alien planet. It also features time travel in two key episodes. The first was when La'an and another version of Kirk traveled to 2020 Toronto, where La'an has a chance to kill a young Khan when he was just a boy but doesn't due to him not being guilty of any crime yet, and the other involved the crew of Star Trek: Lower Decks traveling back in time and arriving back 100 years before their time.

Star Trek: The Original Series (2265-2269)

The one that started it all, Star Trek: The Original Series , follows the crew of the USS Enterprise in their five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and go where no one has gone before. Under the guidance of Captain Kirk (William Shatner), his first officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and friend and ship doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelly), the crew of the USS Enterprise are the most important characters in the Star Trek franchise. Decisions and events here have major ripple effects on the entire franchise.

There are far too many to name, but the biggest ones include in 2267 when the crew finds and uncovers the body of Khan Nooniegn-Signh, and after he attempts a mutiny, they leave him on a planet to begin a new life, an action that will have repercussions decades later.

Star Trek: The Animated Series (2269-2270)

Star trek: the animated series.

Star Trek: The Animated Series was made in 1973, four years after Star Trek: The Original Series was canceled. It featured the continuing adventures of the crew of the Enterprise's five-year mission. It lasted for two seasons and helped round out the stories of Captain Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the USS Enterprise.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (2271)

Star trek: the motion picture.

While no official stardate is mentioned in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and is only identified as the 2270s, supplementary material for the film dates it one year after the crew of the Enterprise's five-year mission. The film sees the crew of the Enterprise reunite to investigate a mysterious and powerful alien cloud known as V'Ger, which is destroying everything in its path as it approaches Earth. While not stated in the film, subsequent Star Trek material has suggested that V'Ger is the progenitor of the Borg, one of the franchise's most popular recurring enemies.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (2285)

Star trek 2: the wrath of khan.

The most iconic Star Trek film, The Wrath of Khan , picks up 15 years after the events of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed." The time since the planet Khan was marooned on , it became a wasteland after one of the planets near it was destroyed and altered the atmosphere. Khan now seeks revenge on Kirk and does so by going after the planet-terraforming machine called the Genesis device, a machine created by Kirk's ex, Carol Marcus, and his son, David Marcus. Kirk is able to defeat Khan but at a price, as Mr. Spock is forced to give his life to save the crew of the Enterprise. Spock's death will have major repercussions on the franchise that will be felt for years.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (2285)

Star trek iii: the search for spock.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock picks up just months after The Wrath of Khan , as the crew of the Enterprise discovers that there is a way to revive Spock. They go against Starfleet's orders and steal the Enterprise to return Spock's body and mind to Vulcan so that he can be reborn. The crew must also face off with hostile Klingons, led by Kruge (Christopher Lloyd), who is bent on stealing the secrets of the powerful terraforming Genesis.

Here’s How Much Each Star Trek Movie Made at the Box Office Upon Release

The film features some major hallmarks of the franchise. The first is the destruction of the Enterprise, a ship that had been with the franchise for years and would be absent in the following film. The second was establishing the core characters as fugitives from the United Federation of Planets, which would set up clearing their names in the follow-up. It also featured Spock being resurrected but at another cost for Kirk, the death of his son, which would begin to drive Kirk's prejudice against Klingons for many films.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (2286 and 1986)

Star trek iv: the voyage home.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home sees the former crew of the USS Enterprise discover that Earth is in grave danger from an alien probe attempting to contact now-extinct humpback whales. The crew travels to Earth's past to find whales who can answer the probe's call. The first and final part of the movie takes place one year after The Search for Spock , but the majority of the movie takes place in 1986, the present day for moviegoing audiences. While Star Trek had done time travel stories before, this one set a template for future entries in the franchise. By the end of the film, Kirk and his crew had been reinstated and cleared of all charges.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (2287)

Star trek v: the final frontier.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier deals with the crew of the new USS Enterprise-A as they confront renegade Vulcan Sybok, who is searching for God at the center of the galaxy. Sybok is Spock's half-brother , and he is from his father's previous relationship with a Vulcan woman. This makes the second chronological secret member of Spock's family and the first introduced in the series in order of release.

Sybok's presence was actually hinted at in the series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds when his lover, Angel, attacks his half-brother's ship. The entry is also the first to allude to a higher power in the Star Trek franchise, and while God would not be revealed in the series, the idea of someone being the creator of life in the galaxy would be picked up years later in Star Trek: The Next Generation and is now the main storyline for the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (2293)

Star trek vi: the undiscovered country.

The final time the entire crew of the USS Enterprise would be together was in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country . The Klingons seek to form an alliance with the Federation after years of fighting due to their planet suffering a major catastrophe, but Kirk is still bitter after the death of his son at the Klingon's hands in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . Kirk and Bones are framed for the murder of a high-up Klingon official, which threatens the peace accords, and they, alongside the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, must work to clear their names.

This final entry for most of the original cast marks a turning point in the franchise. It marked the end of the Federation and Klingon conflict, setting up Star Trek: The Next Generation , featuring the character Worf in a prominent role as part of the crew. The film takes place 28 years after Star Trek: The Original Series, and through one live-action show, an animated series, and six films, audiences saw a massive epic unfold for these characters, but the story was far from over as a new era began for the franchise and the next generation began.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (2364-2370)

Star trek: the next generation.

Star Trek: The Next Generation takes place a century after the events of Star Trek: The Original Series . The series follows Captain Jean Luc-Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-D as they continue to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations. For many audiences, this was their Star Trek and introduced a whole new host of concepts to the franchise, with the most iconic being the villain, The Borg.

Star Trek: The Next Generation might be one of the most important in terms of how it connects to Star Trek Discovery. The first is the episode "Unification," in which Spock looks to bring peace between the Vulcans and Romulans. Not only is this paid off as Spock's vision of a united Romulus and Vulcan comes true in the form of the planet Ni'Var in Star Trek: Discovery , but his work with the Romulan people will lead to the events that create the alternate Kelvin timeline of Star Trek , Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond .

Yet the most important element is in the episode "The Chase," which reveals that the reason various alien life in the galaxy looks so similar is due to sharing a common ancestry from an ancient species that crafted life in their image. This revelation forms the backbone of Star Trek: Discovery 's final season as the crew looks to find the technology of the species that created life, now dubbed the Progenitors. The episode debuted in 1993, and now, 31 years later, the series is finally going to delve into some answers.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (2369-2375)

Star trek: deep space nine.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine broke from franchise conventions as instead of being focused on a starship, it was set on a space station Deep Space Nine, located adjacent to a wormhole connecting Federation territory to the Gamma Quadrant on the far side of the Milky Way galaxy. The series begins one year before the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation come to a conclusion and is firmly connected to the events of that series as Benjamin Sisko, head of Deep Space Nine, is mourning the death of his wife, who was killed by the Borg at the Battle of Wolf 359 seen in the episode "The Best of Both Worlds Part II" from The Next Generation and has a difficult time seeing the face of Jean-Luc Picard as that was the face he saw leading the Borg that lead to the death of his wife.

The biggest event of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is The Dominion Wars, a massive story arc that ran over the course of the series. It involved all major powers of the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants, organized into two opposing military alliances, the Federation Alliance and the Breen-Dominion Alliance, which resulted in the deadliest conflicts in the galaxy. It would begin the drive for the Federation to become a more militarized organization.

Star Trek Generations (2371)

Star trek: generations.

Star Trek: Generations occupies an interesting place within the timeline. It is set one year after the events of The Next Generation and two years into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the year 2371. Yet the film's beginning takes place shortly after the events of Star Trek VI: The Final Frontier, which sees Captain Kirk stuck in a pocket dimension, allowing him to meet Captain Jean-Luc Picard of The Next Generation nearly a century later into his future. This film marked the death of Captain Kirk , who died the way he lived, a man of adventure.

Star Trek: First Contact (2373)

Star trek: first contact.

Star Trek: First Contact is another time travel movie, similar to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . Set six years after being assimilated by the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation , Captain Picard and his crew travel through a time portal to pursue the Borg to April 4, 2063. This is the date before the historic warp drive flight that leads to humanity's first encounter with alien life, and the Borg are looking to alter the future so humans never make contact. The film's date of April 5th has now become an unofficial Star Trek holiday known as First Contact Day .

Star Trek: Insurrection (2375)

Star trek: insurrection.

Star Trek: Insurrection is notable as the film is set in 2375, the same year as the final season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Trying to take the renegade Starfleet team element from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , the crew of the USS Enterprise -E rebels against Starfleet after they discover a conspiracy with the Son'a species to steal the peaceful Ba'ku's planet for its rejuvenating properties.

Star Trek: Voyager (2371-2378)

Star trek: voyager.

Star Trek: Voyager begins in 2371, the same year as Star Trek: Generations . It follows the adventures of the USS Voyager as it attempts to return home to the Alpha Quadrant after being stranded in the Delta Quadrant on the far side of the galaxy. This entry is key for introducing two characters to the franchise that will play major roles in future installments. The series introduced Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), the first female Captain in the franchise, who will later have a major role in Star Trek: Prodigy .

The second is Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), a former Borg drone that was born Annika Hansen before being assimilated by the Borg at age six in 2356, eight years before the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation . Seven of Nine plays a major role in Star Trek: Picard as the series delves more into the Borg's history and culture.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2379)

Star trek: nemesis.

Star Trek: Nemesis takes place fifteen years after the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation and deals with a threat from a clone of Captain Picard named Shinzon (Tom Hardy), who has taken control of the planet Romulus and was created by the Romulan Empire originally to create a spy within the Federation but the plans were abandoned likely due to the events of "Unification" and the clone child was left on die as a slave on the Romulan controlled planet Remus. The film marked the final film for the crew of The Next Generation as it marked many landmarks, including the wedding of Commander Will Ryker and Deanna Tori and the death of Data, all elements that lead into Star Trek: Picard .

Star Trek: Lower Decks (2380-TBD)

Star trek: lower decks.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is a comedic spin on the Star Trek franchise . This animated adventure follows the low-ranking support crew of the starship Cerritos and begins one year after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis . Star Trek: Lower Decks crossed over with Star Trek: Strange New World in that series' second season episode, "Those Old Scientists," which saw Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid get the chance to play their roles of Beckett Mariner and Brad Boimler, respectively, in live-action.

The series just announced its fifth and final season, meaning both it and Star Trek: Discovery will come to a close in 2024, and fans are certainly hoping to hear a mention of the characters of Lower Decks in Discovery just to know these lowly crew members did become big names with the Federation history.

Star Trek: Prodigy (2383-TBD)

Star trek: prodigy.

Star Trek: Prodigy was an attempt to create a new starting point for young kids to get into the Star Trek franchise. Set in 2383, it follows a group of young aliens from the Delta Quadrant who find the abandoned starship Protostar and learn about Starfleet with the help of the ship's computer, an AI of Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . This young crew of kids makes their way to the Alpha Quadrant while discovering what it means to be a crew and what being part of Starfleet is all about.

The series features plenty of cameos and references to the past Star Trek series but does so in a way that invites the young viewer to learn more about them. The series was canceled at Paramount+ after one season but was then picked up by Netflix, where it will have a second season.

Kelvin Timeline (2387, 2255 - 2263)

This is where things get a bit tricky. In the year 2387, a supernova destroys the planet Romulus. For those in the original timeline, the destruction of Romulus kicks off the events of Star Trek: Picard, but a major event happens that none of the characters are aware of at the time: the creation of a new timeline.

In an attempt to stop the supernova, an elder Spock launches a piece of red matter into the supernova that creates a black hole that sucks both him and the Romulan villain Nero (Eric Bana) through it and back in time. Nero arrives first in the year 2233, which results in the destruction of the USS Kelvin and the death of Geroge Kirk on the birth of his son James T. Kirk's birth, creating a new branching timeline that is the Kelvin timeline, which is where the events of Star Trek , Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond take place. This means that while the events of the Kelvin timeline take place earlier, they are doing so in a separate timeline that is built off the events of the prior stories. So 2009's Star Trek is both a reboot, a prequel, and a sequel to the franchise.

Due to the timeline changing, the events of the Kelvin timeline actually take place earlier than in Star Trek: The Original Series . 2009's Star Trek takes place in 2255, while Into Darkness takes place four years later in 2259, and Beyond is set in 2263, roughly four years into the crew's five-year mission. This is notably two years before Star Trek: The Original Series begins. By the 31st century of Star Trek: Discovery season three, the Prime Timeline is aware of the Kelvin timeline. They established a Starfleet officer named Yor, a time soldier who originated from another timeline and referenced the events of 2009's Star Trek .

Star Trek: Picard (2399-2402)

Star trek: picard.

Star Trek: Picard takes place 20 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis in the year 2399. In the years since the series concluded, the Federation has become more isolationist. Following the destruction of Romulus, the Romulan people have become scattered; meanwhile, an attack on a Starfleet operation has led to a ban on synthetics. Season one focuses on Picard discovering more about the syncs with the discovery of Data's daughter Soji while also exploring more into the Borg culture as Romulans have begun mining Borg technology.

Season 2 takes place two years later, in 2401, and sees an old adversary named Q, an extra-dimensional being, traping Picard and his new crew in an alternate reality which forces them to travel back in time to Los Angeles 2024 to save the future while exploring more about Picard's own family origin. Finally, season three takes place one year later, in 2402, as Picard reunites with his old crew from The Next Generation , as well as his long-lost son, for a final showdown with the Borg.

Star Trek: Discovery: Seasons 3-5 (3188-TBD)

Now, finally, it's time to loop back to Star Trek: Discovery . Season 3 sees the crew of Discovery travel to the year 3188 to discover the Federation fragmented and investigates the cause of a cataclysmic event known as the "Burn" as they attempt to rebuild Starfleet. Burnham is promoted to captain at the end of the season, and in season four, the crew helps rebuild the Federation while facing a space anomaly created by unknown aliens that causes destruction across the galaxy, similar to the plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The fifth and final season sees Discovery faced with its biggest task yet. They embark on a journey to uncover the mystery of The Progenitors, the species that The Next Generation revealed created multiple sentient lifeforms in the universe. The final season of Star Trek: Discovery , the series set furthest in the Star Trek timeline, is now taking the franchise to answer the oldest question in the cosmos: where do we come from, and what is our purpose?

With humans making first contact with aliens on April 5, 2063, to the events of Star Trek: Discovery in 3188, the story of Star Trek is one that spans 1,125 years. It is an epic tale filled with heroes, villains, and worlds filled with imagination and hope. Star Trek continues forward as there are plenty more stories to tell.

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Star trek: discovery brings back a mirror universe enterprise computer easter egg.

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Returning Cast & New Character Guide

Walter keonig reveals missing chekov & kirk moment in star trek’s mirror universe episode, south park season 27 faces a major recurring problem for the 5th time in 24 years.

Warning: This Article Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Episode 5 - "Mirrors"

• Star Trek: Discovery season 5 brings back the Mirror Universe's ISS Enterprise with a male computer voice.
• Captain Burnham and Booker discovered the derelict ISS Enterprise in interdimensional space and brought it back to the Prime Universe.
• The USS Enterprise's voice is female, but it's male in the Mirror Universe.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 brought back the Mirror Universe's ISS Enterprise and mirrored the change Star Trek: The Original Series made to the Enterprise's computer. Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) found the derelict ISS Enterprise in interdimensional space and piloted it back to Star Trek 's Prime Universe. The Mirror Universe's Enterprise in Star Trek: Discovery is the same ship introduced, along with the Mirror Universe, in Star Trek: The Original Series ' classic episode "Mirror, Mirror". Naturally, the ISS Enterprise's computer is the opposite of the USS Enterprise's computer in both series.

On his X, Jörg Hillebrand (@gaghyogi49), who was a researcher for Star Trek: Picard season 3, pointed out that the ISS Enterprise in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 5 , has a male computer voice, just like the ISS Enterprise does in Star Trek: The Original Series ' "Mirror Mirror." This is a 'mirror reversal' of the USS Enterprise's computer, whose female voice was provided by Majel Barett-Roddenberry. Check out the post below:

John Winston voiced the ISS Enterprise computer in Star Trek: The Original Series, and Barnaby Carpenter provided the ISS Enterprise computer voice in Star Trek: Discovery.

As Burnham seeks the universe's greatest treasure in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, she'll need help from a host of new and returning characters.

Star Trek's Computer Voices Are Traditionally Female

But not in the mirror universe.

Starfleet computer voices are traditionally female in Star Trek. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry voiced not just the USS Enterprise's computer in Star Trek: The Original Series , but also the starship computers in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager . Star Trek: Picard season 3 laudably restored Majel's voice as the USS Enterprise-D's computer. On Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ' Alex Kapp is now the voice of the USS Enterprise's computer. However, to make the Mirror Universe's ISS Enterprise 'the opposite' of the USS Enterprise, the Mirror computer voice was and still is male in Star Trek: Discovery .

No one can ever replace Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as a Star Trek computer voice.

Different actresses voice the various computers in the current Star Trek on Paramount+ series . In Star Trek: Discovery , Annabelle Wallis voices Zora, the sentient and emotionally sensitive supercomputer of the USS Discovery. On Star Trek: Lower Decks , Jessica Ruth McKenna voices the USS Cerritos' computer. Star Trek: Prodigy 's Bonnie Gordon is the voice of the USS Protostar's computer, among other roles. In Star Trek: Picard season 3, Amy Earhart was the voice of the USS Titan-A's computer. Of course, no one can ever replace Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as a Star Trek computer voice, but Star Trek: Discovery season 5 went the proper extra step by bringing back a male computer voice as Majel's ISS Enterprise counterpart.

New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season 5 stream Thursdays on Paramount+

• Star Trek: The Original Series (1966)
• Star Trek: Discovery (2017)

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Court is the final frontier for this lost 'Star Trek' model

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In April, Heritage Auctions heralded the discovery of the original model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the iconic starship that whooshed through the stars in the opening credits of the 1960s TV series “Star Trek” but had mysteriously disappeared around 45 years ago.

The auction house, known for its dazzling sales of movie and television props and memorabilia, announced that it was returning the 33-inch model to Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry Jr., son of series creator Gene Roddenberry. The model was kept at Heritage’s Beverly Hills office for “safekeeping,” the house proclaimed in a statement, shortly after an individual discovered it and brought it to Heritage for authentication.

“After a long journey, she's home,” Roddenberry’s son posted on X , (formerly Twitter).

But the journey has been far from smooth. The starship model and its celebrated return is now the subject of a lawsuit alleging fraud, negligence and deceptive trade practice, highlighting the enduring value of memorabilia from the iconic sci-fi TV series.

The case was brought by Dustin Riach and Jason Rivas, longtime friends and self-described storage unit entrepreneurs who discovered the model among a stash of items they bought “sight unseen” from a lien sale at a storage locker in Van Nuys last October.

“It’s an unfortunate misunderstanding. We have a seller on one side and a buyer on the other side and Heritage is in the middle, and we are aligning the parties on both sides to get the transaction complete,” said Armen Vartian, an attorney representing the Dallas-based auction house, adding that the allegations against his client were “unfounded.”

Read more: Andy Cohen turned Bravo into a cable powerhouse. Now the 'king of reality TV' faces his own drama

The pair claimed that once the model was authenticated and given a value of $800,000, they agreed to consign it to an auction sale with Heritage planned for July 2024, according to the lawsuit. However, following their agreement, they allege the auction house falsely questioned their title to the model and then convinced them, instead of taking it to auction, to sell it for a low-ball $500,000 to Roddenberry Entertainment Inc. According to the suit, Eugene Roddenberry, the company's CEO, had shown great interest in the model and could potentially provide a pipeline of memorabilia to the auction house in the future.

“They think we have a disagreement with Roddenberry,” said Dale Washington, Riach and Rivas’ attorney. “We don’t. We think they violated property law in the discharge of their fiduciary duties.”

The two men allege they have yet to receive the $500,000 payment.

A surprise discovery in a Van Nuys storage unit

For years, Riach and Rivas have made a living buying repossessed storage lockers and selling the contents online, at auction and at flea markets. In fact, Riach has appeared on the reality TV series “Storage Wars.”

“It’s a roll of dice in the dark,” Riach said of his profession bidding on storage lockers. “Sometimes you are buying a picture of a unit. When a unit goes to lien, what you see is what you get and the rest is a surprise. At a live auction you can shine a flashlight, smell and look inside to get a gauge. But online is a gamble, it’s only as good as the photo."

Last fall, Riach said he saw a picture of a large locker in an online sale. It was 10 feet by 30 feet, and “I saw boxes hiding in the back, it was dirty, dusty, there were cobwebs and what looked like a bunch of broken furniture,” he said.

Something about it, he said, “looked interesting,” and he called Rivas and told him they should bid on it. Riach declined to say how much they paid.

There were tins of old photographs and negatives of nitrate film reels from the 1800s and 1900s. When Rivas unwrapped a trash bag that was sitting on top of furniture, he pulled out a model of a spaceship. The business card of its maker, Richard C. Datin, was affixed to the bottom of the base.

A Google search turned up that Datin had made “Star Trek” models, although the two men didn’t make the connection to the TV series.

“We buy lots of units and see models all of the time,” Riach said. He thought they would find a buyer and decided to list it on eBay with a starting price of $1,000.

At once, they were deluged with inquiries. Among Trekkies, the long-lost first starship model had attained a mythical status.

The original “Star Trek'' debuted in 1966 and aired for three seasons. Although its original run was brief, the show has generated numerous films and television spinoffs and is one of the most lucrative entertainment franchises, with an enormous fan base.

In 2022, at a Heritage auction of 75 props and items, a Starfleet Communicator from the 1990s series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” sold for $27,500 while a pair of Spock’s prosthetic Vulcan ear tips from the original series went for $11,875, more than twice the amount they brought when they were sold in 2017 for $5,100.

The starship’s design was crucial to the series' success. "If you didn’t believe you were in a vehicle traveling through space, a vehicle that made sense, whose layout and design made sense, then you wouldn’t believe in the series,” Gene Roddenberry said in the 1968 book “The Making of Star Trek,” according to the auction house.

For years, the show’s creator had kept the 33-inch model on his desk. It became the prototype for the 11-foot model used in subsequent episodes. That version was later donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. But that first model disappeared around 1978 when the makers of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” borrowed it.

A missing starship model

In 1979, Roddenberry wrote to then Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg stating that he had “loaned” the model to the studio more than a year earlier.

"My problem is simply that of getting my model back," Roddenberry wrote, according to a copy provided by Washington. "It is a fairly expensive piece of model making but its real value to me is what it represents." He added that no one he had spoken with "had the slightest hint as to who got it or what happened to it."

Roddenberry died in 1991 .

After the massive interest sparked by the eBay listing, Riach and Rivas pulled the sale and began researching the model more intently. They discovered the connection between Datin and the TV series but also learned that the original model was the same size as the one they had found and it had gone missing. “I said wow, do we have something here?” said Riach, and then reached out to Heritage.

Riach admitted that “Star Trek” wasn’t really on his radar. He was a die-hard “Star Wars” fan, having collected vintage memorabilia from the space films since he was 8 years old.

But given the treasure he unearthed, he now says, “I love ‘Star Trek.’

“There are people buying storage units for 20 years and you will never find anything this great,” he said. “It’s like buying a lottery ticket. It was a very great find.”

Things took an unexpected twist, Riach said. In March, he and Rivas signed an agreement to sell the model for $500,000 after it was pulled from the planned auction and they were told Roddenberry Entertainment had a "strong claim" to the model's title and “would tie them up with its ‘powerful legal team.’” But then they were given a new transfer agreement to sign with a new set of terms. Riach declined and, instead, he and Rivas called Washington.

Heritage “moved the goalposts,” said their attorney. Under the new agreement, Riach and Rivas would be paid a "finder's fee," which Washington called a "reward," converting it from a transactional payment to a potentially voluntary payment.

They claimed that by April, when Heritage announced the model had resurfaced, the pair came to believe the house failed to disclose the item's value was much greater than they had been told.

Joe Maddalena, Heritage’s executive vice president, made public statements calling it “priceless.” “It could sell for any amount and I wouldn’t be surprised because of what it is,” he told the AP . “It is truly a cultural icon.”

They also had not been paid.

On April 28, 10 days after Heritage announced it had returned the model to Roddenberry, Riach and Rivas' lawyer sent a letter to the auction house’s attorney outlining their claims and asking for the payment promised; they also proposed mediation.

Vartian, the lawyer representing Heritage, said that Riach and Rivas became “impatient" about getting the transaction done, and disputes the house had a fiduciary duty to them.

“This is an arm's-length business relationship," Vartian said. "They bring something to the auction house and are trying to get the most possible amount as quickly as possible, that is [Heritage’s] position and what they did.”

Still, Vartian is confident that they will soon conclude the transaction, saying, “Various things including scheduling have taken longer than it would.”

For his part, Riach says this experience is much like that of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise — “a strange new world.”

“I’ve never experienced anything like this. I’ve sold fine art at auction and other places, I got my check and went on. I’ve never had this roller coaster.

“Storage is a hard game. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose," he added. "We’ve bought a $10,000 unit and everything was complete garbage. But if you play long enough, you can get lucky.”

Sign up for our Wide Shot newsletter to get the latest entertainment business news, analysis and insights.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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Joanne Linville (1928-2021)

IMDbPro Starmeter Top 5,000 4848

• Romulan Commander
• 1968 • 1 ep

• Mimi Nettleson Chiles
• 1973–1979 • 3 eps

• 1957 • 1 ep

• Lavinia Godwin
• 1961 • 1 ep

• Hedda Hopper

• Dr. Ann Morgan

• Rona Samuels

• Claire Maynard

• Zina Willow

• Maggie Brill

• Elena's Mother

• Nan Forrester

Personal details

• Stella Adler Academy
• Jo Anne Linville
• January 15 , 1928
• Bakersfield, California, USA
• June 20 , 2021
• Los Angeles, California, USA (undisclosed)
• Mark Rydell December 1962 - July 1973 (divorced, 2 children)
• Children Amy Rydell
• Parents Joseph Henderson Linville
• Austen Rydell (Grandchild)

Did you know

• Trivia First actress to play a female Romulan, in the episode The Enterprise Incident (1968) . She was never named, and only referred to as the Female Romulan Commander.
• When did Joanne Linville die?
• How did Joanne Linville die?
• How old was Joanne Linville when she died?

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Shohei Ohtani Interpreter Gambling Scandal TV Series in Development at Lionsgate

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The gambling scandal surrounding LA Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani ‘s interpreter is already getting the TV series treatment.

Lionsgate Television is in early development on a series focused on the scandal. No writer or network is currently attached to the project, but Scott Delman and Albert Chen are both attached to produce. Executive Max Elins is overseeing the project for Lionsgate Television, while Bryan Weiser negotiated the deal.

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Chen previously authored the sports gambling book “Billion Dollar Fantasy.” He is also the co-creator, co-host, and producer of the podcast “All American” from Stitcher and SiriusXM. He was a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, during which time he covered baseball extensively, and was also a contributor at MLB Network.

“This is major league baseball’s biggest sports gambling scandal since Pete Rose – and at its center is its biggest star, one that MLB has hitched its wagon on,” said Chen. “We’ll get to the heart of the story – a story of trust, betrayal and the trappings of wealth and fame.”

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Court is the final frontier for this lost ‘Star Trek’ model

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In April, Heritage Auctions heralded the discovery of the original model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the iconic starship that whooshed through the stars in the opening credits of the 1960s TV series “Star Trek” but had mysteriously disappeared around 45 years ago.

The auction house, known for its dazzling sales of movie and television props and memorabilia, announced that it was returning the 33-inch model to Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry Jr., son of series creator Gene Roddenberry. The model was kept at Heritage’s Beverly Hills office for “safekeeping,” the house proclaimed in a statement, shortly after an individual discovered it and brought it to Heritage for authentication.

“After a long journey, she’s home,” Roddenberry’s son posted on X , (formerly Twitter).

But the journey has been far from smooth. The starship model and its celebrated return is now the subject of a lawsuit alleging fraud, negligence and deceptive trade practice, highlighting the enduring value of memorabilia from the iconic sci-fi TV series.

The case was brought by Dustin Riach and Jason Rivas, longtime friends and self-described storage unit entrepreneurs who discovered the model among a stash of items they bought “sight unseen” from a lien sale at a storage locker in Van Nuys last October.

“It’s an unfortunate misunderstanding. We have a seller on one side and a buyer on the other side and Heritage is in the middle, and we are aligning the parties on both sides to get the transaction complete,” said Armen Vartian, an attorney representing the Dallas-based auction house, adding that the allegations against his client were “unfounded.”

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April 3, 2024

The pair claimed that once the model was authenticated and given a value of $800,000, they agreed to consign it to an auction sale with Heritage planned for July 2024, according to the lawsuit. However, following their agreement, they allege the auction house falsely questioned their title to the model and then convinced them, instead of taking it to auction, to sell it for a low-ball $500,000 to Roddenberry Entertainment Inc. According to the suit, Eugene Roddenberry, the company’s CEO, had shown great interest in the model and could potentially provide a pipeline of memorabilia to the auction house in the future.

“They think we have a disagreement with Roddenberry,” said Dale Washington, Riach and Rivas’ attorney. “We don’t. We think they violated property law in the discharge of their fiduciary duties.”

The two men allege they have yet to receive the $500,000 payment.

A surprise discovery in a Van Nuys storage unit

For years, Riach and Rivas have made a living buying repossessed storage lockers and selling the contents online, at auction and at flea markets. In fact, Riach has appeared on the reality TV series “Storage Wars.”

“It’s a roll of dice in the dark,” Riach said of his profession bidding on storage lockers. “Sometimes you are buying a picture of a unit. When a unit goes to lien, what you see is what you get and the rest is a surprise. At a live auction you can shine a flashlight, smell and look inside to get a gauge. But online is a gamble, it’s only as good as the photo.”

Last fall, Riach said he saw a picture of a large locker in an online sale. It was 10 feet by 30 feet, and “I saw boxes hiding in the back, it was dirty, dusty, there were cobwebs and what looked like a bunch of broken furniture,” he said.

Something about it, he said, “looked interesting,” and he called Rivas and told him they should bid on it. Riach declined to say how much they paid.

There were tins of old photographs and negatives of nitrate film reels from the 1800s and 1900s. When Rivas unwrapped a trash bag that was sitting on top of furniture, he pulled out a model of a spaceship. The business card of its maker, Richard C. Datin, was affixed to the bottom of the base.

A Google search turned up that Datin had made “Star Trek” models, although the two men didn’t make the connection to the TV series.

“We buy lots of units and see models all of the time,” Riach said. He thought they would find a buyer and decided to list it on eBay with a starting price of $1,000.

At once, they were deluged with inquiries. Among Trekkies, the long-lost first starship model had attained a mythical status.

The original “Star Trek’’ debuted in 1966 and aired for three seasons. Although its original run was brief, the show has generated numerous films and television spinoffs and is one of the most lucrative entertainment franchises, with an enormous fan base.

In 2022, at a Heritage auction of 75 props and items, a Starfleet Communicator from the 1990s series “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” sold for $27,500 while a pair of Spock’s prosthetic Vulcan ear tips from the original series went for $11,875, more than twice the amount they brought when they were sold in 2017 for $5,100.

The starship’s design was crucial to the series’ success. “If you didn’t believe you were in a vehicle traveling through space, a vehicle that made sense, whose layout and design made sense, then you wouldn’t believe in the series,” Gene Roddenberry said in the 1968 book “The Making of Star Trek,” according to the auction house.

For years, the show’s creator had kept the 33-inch model on his desk. It became the prototype for the 11-foot model used in subsequent episodes. That version was later donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. But that first model disappeared around 1978 when the makers of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” borrowed it.

A missing starship model

In 1979, Roddenberry wrote to then Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg stating that he had “loaned” the model to the studio more than a year earlier.

“My problem is simply that of getting my model back,” Roddenberry wrote, according to a copy provided by Washington. “It is a fairly expensive piece of model making but its real value to me is what it represents.” He added that no one he had spoken with “had the slightest hint as to who got it or what happened to it.”

Roddenberry died in 1991 .

After the massive interest sparked by the eBay listing, Riach and Rivas pulled the sale and began researching the model more intently. They discovered the connection between Datin and the TV series but also learned that the original model was the same size as the one they had found and it had gone missing. “I said wow, do we have something here?” said Riach, and then reached out to Heritage.

Riach admitted that “Star Trek” wasn’t really on his radar. He was a die-hard “Star Wars” fan, having collected vintage memorabilia from the space films since he was 8 years old.

But given the treasure he unearthed, he now says, “I love ‘Star Trek.’

“There are people buying storage units for 20 years and you will never find anything this great,” he said. “It’s like buying a lottery ticket. It was a very great find.”

Things took an unexpected twist, Riach said. In March, he and Rivas signed an agreement to sell the model for $500,000 after it was pulled from the planned auction and they were told Roddenberry Entertainment had a “strong claim” to the model’s title and “would tie them up with its ‘powerful legal team.’” But then they were given a new transfer agreement to sign with a new set of terms. Riach declined and, instead, he and Rivas called Washington.

Heritage “moved the goalposts,” said their attorney. Under the new agreement, Riach and Rivas would be paid a “finder’s fee,” which Washington called a “reward,” converting it from a transactional payment to a potentially voluntary payment.

They claimed that by April, when Heritage announced the model had resurfaced, the pair came to believe the house failed to disclose the item’s value was much greater than they had been told.

Joe Maddalena, Heritage’s executive vice president, made public statements calling it “priceless.” “It could sell for any amount and I wouldn’t be surprised because of what it is,” he told the AP . “It is truly a cultural icon.”

They also had not been paid.

On April 28, 10 days after Heritage announced it had returned the model to Roddenberry, Riach and Rivas’ lawyer sent a letter to the auction house’s attorney outlining their claims and asking for the payment promised; they also proposed mediation.

Vartian, the lawyer representing Heritage, said that Riach and Rivas became “impatient” about getting the transaction done, and disputes the house had a fiduciary duty to them.

“This is an arm’s-length business relationship,” Vartian said. “They bring something to the auction house and are trying to get the most possible amount as quickly as possible, that is [Heritage’s] position and what they did.”

Still, Vartian is confident that they will soon conclude the transaction, saying, “Various things including scheduling have taken longer than it would.”

For his part, Riach says this experience is much like that of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise — “a strange new world.”

“I’ve never experienced anything like this. I’ve sold fine art at auction and other places, I got my check and went on. I’ve never had this roller coaster.

“Storage is a hard game. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose,” he added. “We’ve bought a $10,000 unit and everything was complete garbage. But if you play long enough, you can get lucky.”

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Stacy Perman is a Company Town reporter working on investigations and enterprise stories covering the entertainment industry. Before joining The Times in 2018, she was a writer and correspondent for Time and Businessweek; her work has appeared in a number of publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the Hollywood Reporter. She is the author of three books including the New York Times bestseller “In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-The-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules.”

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