Where No Pilot Had Gone Before?
Since 1968 it’s often been claimed that NBC’s order for a second pilot for Star Trek was “unprecedented” and marked the “first time in television history” such an “unheard of” thing had ever happened.
Is it true? Is any of it true? Did “Where No Man Has Gone Before” truly mark the first time a prospective series had a second pilot episode? Was NBC really the first television network to order a second pilot after rejecting the first one? Did the move actually cause "quite a stir within the industry"?
Read on to find out.
The Naked Cliffhanger
“The Naked Time” is an all-time classic Star Trek episode memorable for characters going berserk and revealing their “naked” psyches. The episode ends with a “laws of physics”-defying bang as the starship restarts her engines cold in an “implosion” and is hurled into a time warp, ending—as Spock observes—in the recent past.
But a redo didn’t just happen on the screen. It happened in the production of the episode.
On Thursday, July 7th, 1966, the closing scenes of “The Naked Time” went before the cameras.
But the finale filmed on this day would not make it to the air.
Why did this happen? What was this ending? It's long been said to have been a cliffhanger. Is that true? Let’s risk an implosion and time warp back 57 years to find out.
The Great Bird Of the Radio, 1974
Stories change over time and with repetition, so it’s important to preserve early accounts wherever possible. Case in point, a radio interview with Gene Roddenberry recorded only 4.5 years after the Star Trek went off the air, and only months after the premier of its Saturday morning follow-up.
In January 1974 a young DJ named Scott Arthur at WARM radio in Scranton, Pennsylvania learned that Roddenberry was scheduled to speak at a local college. “I got his phone number and set up an interview to promote the event in advance.” Decades later, Arthur found the raw recording and allowed it to be shared online. Join us as we FACT TREK this vintage recording.
The Off-Center Seat: 55 Years of Myth Making
In today’s post-truth, fact-challenged world, just what, in fact, is a fact?
And what happens when the people who have direct and personal experience/memories of an event are no longer with us? Absent their first-hand accounts must we depend on second-, third- or nth-hand accounts by people who weren’t there?
With that in mind, let’s rip through the upholstery of “Lucy Loves Star Trek,” the debut episode of the recent docuseries The Center Seat, and see how close the oral tradition on display in this documentary conforms to historical documents, first-person accounts, and contemporaneous media coverage.