TREK HARD

I've finished THE IMPOSSIBLE HAS HAPPENED, Lance Parkin's history of "the life and work of Gene Roddenberry."

In terms of propounding a thorough overview of the STAR TREK creator, Parkin's book does what it purports to do, regaling readers with all the details of Roddenberry's career (though I can't picture anyone but TREK enthusiasts bothering with said details).

There's one problematic aspect of Parkin's book, though. In an overview, it's impossible to emphasize any of a subject's accomplishments over any others. Parkin does give us "the life" of Roddenberry, but no aspect of the producer's work is any more important than any other. Thus Roddenberry's history with his primary accomplishment, "Classic Trek," cannot be allowed to loom larger than his role in his first show, THE LIEUTENANT, or his severely adumbrated influence on the set of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION. Indeed, Parkin spends a lot of time talking about Roddenberry's failed projects.

So what made Classic Trek so persuasive to its audience? Parkin talks around this problem, but only provides circumstantial answers: how bad all the other SF shows of the time were, and so on. But the author is unable to see what it seems obvious to me: that Roddenberry was simply a more nuanced and vital creator/producer in the 1960s, and that he lost ground as he began repeating himself, as indeed many commercial creators do.

Certainly Parkin cannot deal with anything along the ideas I promoted in this essay...


ADDENDUM: I got interrupted in the midst of writing this essay, so here's the rest of it.


In the linked essay, I wrote:

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference might be the various iterations of the STAR TREK franchise. Though there are certainly some inferior episodes within the three seasons of "Classic Trek," Roddenberry in his capacity as head producer (for the first two seasons, at least) infused the show with a substructure of mythical ideas that balanced the show's apparent enshrinement of sweet reason.
In my commentary on the second-season episode "Amok Time," I mentioned that even though the writer was Theodore Sturgeon, I suspect that Sturgeon came up with the idea for the story as one he hoped that a producer with Roddenberry's tastes would purchase: one focused on the struggle of two males over a female. Even the caveat that one of the two doesn't actually want the female-- that Kirk is actually fighting Spock with the object of saving Spock from a more dangerous antagonist-- does not banish the archetype that I've termed "Savage Masculinity." This archetype of "men gone wild" persists in many episodes penned by many authors-- all of whom, it's been alleged, Roddenberry re-wrote for his own purposes-- and helps keep the TREK universe from being too antiseptic.

Parkin goes into great detail as to how sterile Roddenberry made the first two seasons of STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, which is a POV with which I and many other TREK fans agree with, even though I may well be the only one concerned wit "mythical ideas." What I said of the later TREK follow-ups applies equally to NEXTGEN:

Rational overthought dominates almost everything, and for the most part there's no sense that any other mode of thought can even exist.

Lance Parkin, however, is so fixated on Roddenberry's lack of success in his later projects that toward the end of the book he states the case against the producer (without really ever stating "the case for"):

At the heart of the case against Roddenberry is the idea that he's a one-hit wonder, that he only ever came up with one show that worked, and that most of the best things about STAR TREK are demonstrably the work of people who aren't Gene Roddenberry.

Though I would affirm that Roddenberry was somewhat sparing of praise to those who worked with him on TREK, Parkin commits the same sin by attempting to minimize Roddenberry's contribution. Throughout the book he cites many anecdotes in which this writer or that actor gripes about not getting proper credit. Yet how many of these "behind the scenes" people can be said to have careers any more amazing than Roddenberry's? There's no question that Gene L. Coon was instrumental to infusing TREK with some needed elements, not least being that of humor. But by the same harsh standard Parkin imposes on Roddenberry, Coon was just one of hundreds of journeymen writers in the world of television. Coon served as a producer at times, but like his writing credits his credits as producer are pretty spread out. He wrote 13 TREK episodes.and produced 33. Only his tenure on IT TAKES A THIEF, producing 17 episodes, comes close to his TREK performance, and that took place right after his departure from TREK.

Parkin clearly feels the need to puncture Roddenberry's admittedly self-serving image of himself as the only driving force behind Classic Trek. Nevertheless, Roddenberry was, for roughly two seasons, the man who made the decisions about what scripts did or did not get produced. It seems demonstrable that at no time in his career was he as good at writing humorous scenes as Gene Coon. Nevertheless, if Roddenberry hadn't recognized the value of humor in TREK, then there probably wouldn't have been any humor in TREK. I can see, as well as anyone, ways in which Roddenberry may have vitiated certain scripts, as I discussed in my review of A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR. But at no time does Parkin demonstrate decisively that Roddenberry lacked control over the elements that went into making Classic Trek, outside of those that the network may have altered under the standards they applied to all of their shows.

I don't expect that Parkin should share my regard for the mythic elements of Classic Trek. But he should have at least considered the possibility that Roddenberry's creativity did not remain precisely the same throughout his career. I don't claim to be an expert on all the scripts Roddenberry wrote in the 1950s and 1960s-- a part of the producer's career that Parkin passes over quickly. But even without my doing a deep-dive into all 24 of the HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL scripts with which Roddenberry is credited, or the 29 he did for his one-season wonder THE LIEUTENANT, I still tend to believe there's more to Roddenberry than just a guy who took the credit from other people. We're not talking about BATMAN's Bob Kane, who by all accounts really didn't do much beyond selling a great idea to DC Comics while letting others do the work.

The relative sophistication of Roddenberry's pre-TREK work mostly seems to disappear from most of the projects he completed post-TREK, though I have a mild liking for PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW. I don't know what sea-change caused the change in Roddenberry's work following the end of Classic Trek. But I know that Lance Parkin is wrong to judge the best of the producer's work by the standards of his worst, much less by the idea that none of the good stuff came about from anything Gene Roddenberry did.