12 Reasons Why The Original Series Is The Best Star Trek Show

Although Gene Roddenberry originally pitched "Star Trek" as "Wagon Train" in space, it ultimately played less like a TV western and more like "The Twilight Zone," which went off the air two years before "Star Trek" premiered. Like Rod Serling's groundbreaking show — and not much else — "Star Trek" was flexible in the genres it covered. It tackled historical fiction by going to planets made up of gangsters and Nazis. It explored prejudice through the metaphors of various alien species. Episodes highlighting Tribbles and Harry Mudd provided comedy, while the pursuit of a Romulan ship had echoes of a submarine drama. Even Biblical allegories were on the table. However, no matter what form an episode's story took, it usually involved a subtle parallel with the present, and a moral applicable to life here on Earth. 

By contrast, most other shows on TV in the '60s stayed in their lanes. Even the closest competitor to "Star Trek," "Lost in Space," was a much more straightforward space adventure. Part of the series' versatility came from the push and pull between the network and Roddenberry; the former wanted action, while the latter preferred more cerebral stories. NBC even rejected the first "Star Trek" pilot, "The Cage," but allowed Roddenberry to make a second, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," which sealed the deal. Roddenberry ultimately got the best of both worlds, of course, by reusing footage from "The Cage" in the two-part episode "The Menagerie."

For the most part, subsequent "Star Trek" shows faced relatively little network interference. Sometimes, however, restrictions can be the greatest source of creativity, and that tension between the smart and the visceral helped give the original "Star Trek" its timeless appeal. Its best successors capture a similar balance.

In related what is, perhaps, the most famous anecdote she ever told, the late Nichelle Nichols has talked repeatedly about how she wanted to quit "Star Trek," and how she was talked out of it by none other than the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King met Nichols at an NAACP meeting and told her how important it was for viewers to see a Black woman in a position of authority. This wasn't just conjecture. The character of Uhura was so important to Whoopi Goldberg that she inspired Goldberg to become an actress, and was the main reason why Goldberg pushed so hard for a role on "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

What often gets buried in retellings of this story is that King also confided in Nichols that "Star Trek" was the only show that he and his wife, Coretta, would let their three kids stay up late to watch. Now, King didn't live to see any subsequent "Star Trek" series, but that's still a powerhouse of a recommendation, and none of the other Trek shows have received an equivalent endorsement. It's great to see figures like David Cronenberg and Stacey Abrams make cameos on "Star Trek: Discovery," but let's face it: Neither is on MLK's level.

Nowadays, the sour corners of the Internet complain of "wokeness" and "forced diversity" every time an actor of color gets cast in a major sci-fi story. For the original "Star Trek," however, that was the actual point. Gene Roddenberry went out of his way to depict a multi-racial, multinational crew to give Cold War-era audiences hope that in the future, racism, nationalism, and xenophobia would be quaint relics of the past. (Sexism, maybe not so much.) While diversity has continued to be a key value of "Star Trek," the optimism hasn't always, partly because Roddenberry toward the end of his life over-corrected and insisted there never be any conflict between crew members. The moment he was gone, we got the militarism of "Deep Space Nine," the far-from-home despair of "Voyager," and "Enterprise" doing space 9-11. 

At least with the likes of Captains Burnham and Georgiou, the franchise has mostly put sexism back in the past.

In "The Original Series" episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," Frank Gorshin, best known as the Riddler in 1966's "Batman," sports a paint job that's half white and half black, and plays a character who is bigoted against an alien who's half black and half white simply because his colors are reversed. In "Plato's Stepchildren," omnipotent beings force Kirk and Uhura to smooch, thus creating the first kiss between a white man and a Black woman on a scripted network show. Yes, the original series sometimes had all the subtlety of, well, William Shatner when it wanted to get a point across, but at least it was out there making statements. Very few of its contemporaries could say the same.

At other times, "Star Trek" used the trappings of a more traditional genre story to smuggle in social commentary. "The Devil in the Dark," for example, makes audiences understand that a crawling blob of rock was only killing people in order to protect its eggs, which can be read as either a plea for animal rights or a statement against imperialism, depending how smart you think the Horta actually is. "City on the Edge of Forever," widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, is a great, romantic time-travel story, but it's also an argument against going for the quick, short-term gains, as well as a lesson on the need to make sacrifices for the greater good. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one" became a "Star Trek" catchphrase thanks to the movies, but the series was subtly making the same argument decades before the Enterprise cruised across the silver screen.

Ask fans of "The Original Series" what the worst episode of the show is, and they'll probably name "Spock's Brain," in which everyone's favorite Vulcan has his brain stolen, leaving him to wander around like a zombie. Or maybe they'll mention "The Way to Eden," in which space-hippies who refer to uncool people as "Herbert" convince Spock to jam with them on his Vulcan harp. Sure, these episodes are incredibly silly, but they're also funny as hell, both as bizarre examples of what NBC thought would be perceived as cool at the time and also because Shatner, Nimoy, and the rest of the cast fully commit to the material.

When "The Next Generation" is bad, you get a Wesley episode. When "Deep Space Nine" is bad, it's probably an episode about Rom and his mother. But when "The Original Series" is bad, you get Shatner going full Shatner, Nimoy indulging his hippie impulses, and some super-'60s weirdness. Despite the absurdity — or, maybe, because of it — it rules.

In "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," reptilian alien babies burst out of human bodies, then quickly grow into man-sized CGI lizards. "The Original Series" had neither the budget nor the freedom to even consider such things, and its take on the Gorn accordingly looks more like a knock-off Godzilla suit than the fearsome creatures that hunt Captain Archer's crew.

What "Star Trek" did have, though, was imagination. The Guardian of Forever, a powerful alien capable of time travel, is basically a walk-through light fixture. When "Spectre of the Gun" called for a Wild West town but the budget didn't allow for a full one to be built, the use of minimal props and sets made for a more surreal, alien landscape. That Romulans and Vulcans share a common heritage is a fun story twist, but it was likely conceived of in order to reuse alien makeup effects (and actors, as Mark Lenard played both a Romulan captain and Spock's father). Now that shows can do anything, they don't always leave room for the writers to serve as the real special effects.

When you can't afford to be realistic, you have to be weird instead. Many, many UK sci-fi shows, from "Doctor Who" to "Sapphire and Steel," have built their cult followings out of that line of thinking. It's an aesthetic that makes "The Original Series" memorable in ways that simply aren't available to more modern "Star Trek" shows.