The Classic Star Trek Canon

We have a preliminary list of views on some of Classic Star Trek from http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/classic_star_tr.html: which parts are canonical and which parts are obvious inferior forgeries:

Genuine and Canonical:

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Shore Leave
Mirror, Mirror
The Enterprise Incident
Arena
The Devil in the Dark
Balance of Terror
The Trouble with Tribbles
The Changeling
A Piece of the Action
Charlie X
A Taste of Armageddon
The Menagerie
Space Seed
The City on the Edge of Forever
Amok Time
The Omega Glory

Possibly Canonical, but Subject to Dispute:

The Gamesters of Triskelion
Star Trek: The Animated Series, various episodes

Definitely Heretic:

Spock's Brain (The Rex Momus heresy)
Star Trek I: The Motion Picture (The Bruce Moomaw and Jacob Levy heresy)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (the Stoffel and Bruce Moomaw heresy)

Comments

[Stuart]

The Tholian Web

[david]

Arena should go above genuine and canonical -- maybe ur.

[steve]

Anyone read The Price of the Phoenix and/or Fate of the Phoenix?

Definitely non-canonical, but I thought two of the best Star Trek novels.

[jerry]

Google assures me the "Rex Momus heresy" relates to traditional marriage, the cache tells me it's about pricks and circumcision.

Can you provide some links?

But actually, the best part of Star Trek was that even at the time, they didn't feel compelled to follow a strict canon. After all, once you have time travel you can kiss canon goodbye.

And canon/shmanon, if you want to get all canonical, then I prefer the original Ellison treatment of City, the one with the doper on board the Enterprise.

And since we never ever saw the Iotians come back to demand a piece of the Federation's action, it must either not be canon, or Bones did not leave his communicator on the planet which would spoil the ending.

[RedCharlie]

Star Trek animated series: "The Slaver Weapon" (based on a "Known Space" story of Larry Niven's)
http://www.startrekanimated.com/tas_ep_slaver.html

[Bruce Munro]

I'd put "Plato's Stepchildren" in the "heretical" list myself. I'm not so sure about the "Space Hippies" episode either (can't remember the name) - I'll have to wait till I see it again to check if it was as bad as I remember.

I always did hope the Iotians would make an appearance, perhaps on "Deep Space 9" (although would they be still imitating gangsters, classic era Starfleet, or an unholy admixture of the two?)

Bruce

[Matt]

Brad, I largely agree with your exercise in triage. (And that I am informed enough to have a view is troubling.) But to me, the canon also includes parts of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. Apocrypha to you?

[zatoichi]

Rise of the Archons: Genuine

The one where Abraham Lincoln appears outside the enterprise: Spurious.

[FDRLincoln]

What, no Doomsday Machine? You've got to have that. Also Errand of Mercy, for introducting the Klingons...John Colicos steals that episode. I always liked the villanous original Klingons more than TNG "honorable warrior" take.

[andres]

For God's sake Brad, get a life. It's only a *&#*$! television series ;-)

There are good Star Trek episodes/movies and bad ones. To label them canonical or heretical is to mistake storytelling for social theory or theology. Think of what Tolkien said when his writing was submitted to similar analysis.

[sfguy]

I don't understand what the heresies refer to either. But, additional episodes which are clearly canonical:

Journey to Babel
The Naked Time
The Corbomite Maneuver
The Doomsday Machine
The Galileo Seven
The Ultimate Computer

[ed]

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (which Shatner directed and co-wrote) deserves its own special category: Shit Sandwich.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Here I stand; I can do no other. It is not heresy, and I will not recant. The first and third movies (especially the longer version of the first movie, which they also showed on network TV) were better than the second and sixth.

And, you know, that brief animated "Star Trek" did have some surprisingly good things in it (besides the Larry Niven episode, which followed his original story "The Soft Weapon" almost exactly), simply because cartoons allowed all sorts of spectacular SF special effects that weren't possible any other way -- and in fact still aren't, even now. The Enterprise had two GENUINELY alien-looking crew members (none of this bumpy-forehead stuff), including a guy with four arms; there was one episode in which Kirk was on a water craft attacked by a really big and impressive water monster in a river gorge; and there was another in which the artificial gravity on the ship temporarily failed and everyone was floating around in midair on the bridge (which, of course, NEVER happened in the original series, no matter how much the ship was otherwise about to fall apart at the seams). If and when they want to experiment with reviving the whole property again, they could do worse than consider doing it via animation, especially with today's animation.

Oh, and to Andres: ever hear of "humor", buddy? (God help you if you ever have to sit through a showing of "Battlefield Earth".)

[Bruce Moomaw]

Two additional notes:

(1) I'm unacquainted with "The Wrath of Kahn". Did it star Madelyn, by any chance?

(2) Calling "Gamesters of Triskelion" even "possibly canonical" is not only genuine heresy; it's worthy of execution by burning.

[andres]

Bruce, don't forget to read the smiley face ;-)

Haven't you read anything about William Shatner's heretical "Get a life" outburst? That's what I was parodying. And I'll sit through Battlefield Earth only if John Travolta is sitting beside me to hear my snorts and snickers...

[jerry]

How is the Gamesters of Triskelion non canon? Redshirt dies. Kirk beams down kisses the bleach blonde and saves the episode. The only thing lacking is the convertible.

"Kiss? What is kiss?"

Not canonical? 10,000 quatloos says you can't prove that.

[jerry]

Nevertheless Brad, it's repellent that you are not linking to the original discussions.

[sterne]

The Conscience of the King. Excepting that anyone in science fiction would name a planet "Q," anyway; I mean *really* now. But aside from that lapse, the bad guy was named Kodos!

[Jacob T. Levy]

I declare De Long an apostate for attempting to purge what are clearly canonical works. I hold to my gnostic true faith against his Nicene heresies. Tome for a holy war; if you don't stamp out those Nicene types early they have a funny way of spreading.

[Tom Beck]

Star Trek III may or may not be "canon" (I don't care), but it has the single best camera shot in the history of Star Trek (perhaps of cinema itself) - the destruction of the Enterprise, seen first in space, then from Kirk's POV on the planet looking up into space and seeing it burn in the sky, the result of his action. Simply stunning.

[MaryCh]

Is including 'Tribbles' in the canon a bow at the altar of kitsch within kitsch?

[david]

We had long debates as teenagers as to how much exactly one had to drink when the enterprise blew up. Which was a separate amount of drinking from what you had to drink when Kirk spoke Klingon. High points both.

[Stoffel]

Oh God, the shame.

But...but..."Klingon bastard, you killed my son!" No?

[Russell Arben Fox]

"Star Trek I: The Motion Picture (The Bruce Moomaw and Jacob Levy heresy)"

I not only embrace the Moomaw and Levy heresy, but I go beyond it: Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the best of all the TOS-cast movies. It has the purest and best science fiction plot and style of all the films; it was, indeed, the only one of the films that actually attempted to recreate the mood and dynamics of Star Trek-storytelling so as to make it appropriate for full-on cinematic treatment. Every other TOS-cast movie--to say nothing of every TNG-cast movie--has just been An Extra Long Episode On A Big Screen. Which is fine; I've got no hate for Wrath of Khan. But lets not read ST:TMP out of the canon solely because it tried to do something more with that canon. Did it do whatever it was trying to do successfully? Not entirely; it's hardly a great movie on its own terms. But as far as Star Trek movies go, it's ambitions and, I think, results were head and shoulders above all the rest.

[Bruce Moomaw]

"Kiss? What is kiss?"

I had forgotten that line. My mother, however, has not.

As for "Klingon bastard, you killed my son!", I must admit that it does conjure up echoes of the torturer's outburst in "What's Up, Tiger Lily?": "You brute! You killed my snake! Where will I find a long thin coffin?"

[Bruce Moomaw]

As for Russell Fox, I'll agree with him (and with Baird Searles when he reviewed the first two movies for "F&SF Magazine" 25 years ago). "Wrath of Khan" was just a big version of a mediocre TV episode (with a plot less interesting than "Space Seed", in fact) -- while the first Star Trek movie really was an attempt to do something unusual: to summon up an image of human beings confronting something awesome and utterly beyond their imagination.

The theater version should have cut out some of the extraneous special effects and left in some of the additional explanatory dialog that got put back into the longer version. But, like "2001", it really was an attempt to make an honest-to-God artistic SF film, instead of a warmed-over conventional melodrama that just happens to be set in outer space instead of in "the Bronx, Montmartre, or Bethnal Green" (to quote a bitter little poem on this subject by C.S. Lewis back in the 1950s.) Nothing else in the entire 40-year Star Trek canon -- except maybe for "Charlie X", only the second episode of the original series -- has had that kind of emotional depth.

And even my mother (who has little use for SF) liked it.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Come to think of it, maybe there was also "All Our Yesterdays" -- the only third-season episode I have any fondness for. There was something distinctly haunting about the idea of the Enterprise showing up to try to rescue the inhabitants of a planet whose sun was about to go nova -- only to discover that they had "saved" themselves by fleeing back into their own pasts, aware even as they did so that their race would have no future...

[Kip Manley]

How can you relegate Christopher Lloyd's Klingon to the dustbin of acanonicity? "Koik!" cries the Rev. Jim, sweating under his latex headpiece...

(Luckily, whoever did the cover art for How Much for Just the Planet? rescues Lloyd from said dustbin. Unless, of course, you consider that to be out of the canon, too.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_for_Just_the_Planet%3F

[Matt McIrvin]

Oh, come on, "The Omega Glory" sucks.

Also, "The Way to Eden" really, really needs to go on the "didn't happen" list.

"Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is one of those ambitious-but-not-really-successful messes that I am compelled to watch whenever I get the chance. There's a lot in it to admire, along with the things that are embarrassing or just tedious--pretty much what you'd expect from nailing the sensibility of "Star Trek" to that of "2001: A Space Odyssey".

(I'm similarly fascinated by another big SF movie of 1979, Disney's "The Black Hole", though "Star Trek: TMP" is a better movie overall. In the case of "The Black Hole" it's sort of like watching the most magnificent train wreck you've ever seen--they were trying so hard and it all got ruined by committee.)

[Bruce Moomaw]

That's because it was Disney, during the days when Roy Disney was still running the company and it had no imagination left whatsoever. They must have kicked themelves black and blue after "Star Wars" came out at the same time that they were releasing yet another of their mass-produced safe-for-the-kiddies bores called "Pete's Dragon" -- and then, being Disney, they tried to churn out a copy of "Star Wars" with no imagination or originality whatsoever in it. That is the only movie I've ever attended where the audience yelled insults at the screen after it ended (" 'The Black Hole' is where your $5 goes!" yelled one girl). I did kind of like the robot with the acidulous Roddy McDowell voice, though -- he had more charm than either C-3PO or R2D2.

[Bruce Moomaw]

We've gone kind of far afield from economics, haven't we? That's OK -- like Calvin in "Calvin and Hobbes", I have a command of totally useless information.

[Forrest]

Star Trek 2 and 6 are antithetical to the morals of echt Trek.

I can't think of episode one where killing a sentient antagonist is regarded as other than regrettable (The Doomsday Machine was a machine, and consider the twist put on that general scenario in One Of Out Planets Is Missing/animated; the Ripper entity wasn't conclusively destroyed...).

In 2 and 6 the audience is expected to cheer, just like in Star Wars.

[Russell Arben Fox]

Bruce, thanks for your support on ST:TMP. I'm going to say, though, that Wrath of Khan was more than just "a big version of a mediocre TV episode"--for what it aims to be (as you note, a melodrama set in outer space), it's pretty good. I feel the same way about several of the TOS-cast movies: they're fine entertainments, and I've got no beef with those who love them. But ST:TMP was trying to hold on to TOS's sci-fi fundamentals, and made a noble attempt at it.

As for those fundamentals, I would say they were present more often in TOS than you allow. True attempts at pure science fiction storytelling were rare to the point of non-existence in TNG, DS9, etc., but they made up, I would say, fully half of the original series's episodes. Of course, a lot of those episodes were failures, but a fair number of others weren't. Besides Charlie X and All Our Yesterdays, which you note, I would definitely include Arena, The City on the Edge of Forever, and several other classics. Star Trek: TOS was, despite it's frequent incompetence, nonetheless a source of some seriously fine sci-fi on occasion, a legacy which ST:TMP alone out of all the movies tries to honor.

[Matt McIrvin]

The pacing and audio of ST:TMP are also significantly improved by the recent director's cut DVD, one of the last things Robert Wise worked on before he died. It's worth seeing.

[Brock]

If The Search for Spock is non-canonical, how could Spock still be around in The Voyage Home and The Undiscovered Country, after his death in The Wrath of Khan? His rescue could not just happen "off-screen."

Ergo, The Search for Spock is canonical.

[Tom C]

"For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky" -- has to be in cannon, for best episode title, at least.

[Ken Houghton]

The Gamesters of Triskelion CANNOT be canon--Uhuru gets raped and nothing is ever done with it.

Errand of Mercy MUST be canonical--the Organian Treaty is key to later leverage, including the Kittimer (sp?) references that are the only good things (other than Peter Beagle's "Sarek," some of the early Borg episodes, and a few of the Melinda Snodgrass-edited Third Season episodes) about TNG.

"The Omega Glory," somewhat to my regret, must be considered canonical because it was one of the three original pilot scripts.

sfguy's list (18 Jan, 2:32pm) is largely legitimate; each episode spawned something subsequent. Though, on that ground, if "The Naked Time" is canonical, then "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (John Christopher) must also be canonical.

The exception from the sfguy list is "The Galileo Seven," which is glorious but, again, doesn't lead to anything. (I trust sfguy would not argue that "The Enemy Within"--Kirk's split personality episode, just in case I'm misremembering the title--is canonical.)

Dr. Atoz (or should I type that "AtoZ" to make the joke obvious) is fun, and Spock having sex with Mariette Hartley is a mitzvah, but I can't see the argument for "All Our Yesterdays" as canonical, save as a bright spot in the third season, which is like saying something from SNL ca. five years ago that is moderately funny should be "canonical" because it's "like a stream of bat's piss."

Of course, I agree with Moomaw (and Searles) that TMP is a better actual movie than Wrath of Khan--it's just less ST.

[PT]

As far as ST2 and killing sentient opponents is concerned: it seems to me that for most of the movie, the crew of the Enterprise did the minimum amount of killing that it had to do in self-defense against the Reliant, which is pretty much what was done in all of the space battles in all of the series. Once the Reliant is disabled, the shooting stops and Enterprise calls for Reliant's crew to prepare for boarding, ie, they prepare to rescue the survivors.

Anyway: in canon I would put "Galileo Seven" and "Tholian Web" -- they are great bookends, an early episode and a late episode with Spock in command, and show (I think) the development in his abilities in this area over the course of the series. "Bread and Circuses," even though I'm not fond of the ending, for the dialog between Spock and McCoy in the jail cell. "Day of the Dove," a more nuanced vision of the Klingons ("We Klingons need no urging to hate humans...only a fool fights in a burning house..."). "Tomorrow is Yesterday" -- who can forget that teaser vision of the Enterprise in a blue sky over 20th century Earth? Furthermore, it's the spiritual godfather of ST4. "Journey to Babel," "Where no Man has Gone Before," "The Ultimate Computer" for sure. Maybe "Operation: Anihilate" and "Obsession", but I have a thing for episodes which featured spacegoing lifeforms (but not such a thing that I'd put that one with the giant amoeba on the list).

A few that I didn't originally like that much but I've come to have more of an appreciation for: "The Cloud Minders" is, I think, more subtle than I originally gave it credit for (watching it as an adult you certainly see that the Stratos-dwellers are in fact utterly brutal and not at all the beautiful people they are made out to be), "Let That be Your Last Battlefield," "Spectre of the Gun," "Assignment: Earth" (the nice symmetry in which the Enterprise crew can't tell Gary Seven much becuase they're from the future and he isn't, but he can't tell them much because the species that sent him is both powerful and still unknown in the 23rd centure).

Definite heresies: "The Way to Eden," "Spock's Brain," "Is There in Truth No Beauty," "That Which Survives," "Miri."

[Cal]

I'm copping to the fact that I am ignorant of the titles for the original television episodes. I am old enough to have watched them when they were originally aired (and my children are awed by the fact that I watched the original Scooby Doo episodes), but was the younger brother, so spent much of my time protesting the jackboot of oppression by my brother who forced me to watch the show (we only had one television). It would help if you gave short plot summary for the show titles listed. It will help me and others who are familiar with the show but do not know the titles.

[Tom Beck]

Oh, and Star Trek VI is a really bad movie. It makes no sense. How can an explosion on the Klingon moon be felt halfway across the galaxy without totally destroying the Klingon planet? If the Klingons are an empire, how come they only live on a single planet? How can the location of the peace conference be such a secret if it's so easy for the Enterprise to find it? How come such an important conference has absolutely no security of any kind guarding it? And etc., etc., etc.

[Sharon]

Naked Time, Enemy Within, and yeah, the Mariett Hartley episode, although my BF and I were talking about th Library episode last week and he had to really work to convince me (oh my, is my geek showing?).

All in the cannon, but where's the love for "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield?" This "so bad it's good" episode has to have home someplace.

[Jeff R.]

The Wikipedia page for "Spock's Brain" asserts (uncited) that Gene Coon wrote the script as a parody, but Roddenberry didn't get it.

[Dan Drezner]

Oh, my lectures are going to be so rushed this week because I spent the time reading and these threads (and laughing at Jacob's TMP defense).....

I have to second including Enemy Within, Errand of Mercy, and The Doomsday Machine into the canon. I can only assume that Brad put Gamesters of Tisekelion anywhere in this post to prompt irate comments.

My semi-heretical suggestion would be "Wink Of An Eye", the one with the Scalosians and the buzzing. This is for only one reason, and one reason only -- it has the most explicit on-camera suggestion that Kirk got it on during the episode (you see him, in his quarters, putting his boots back on in the scene after the one where he kisses Deela).

Oh, and Jacob,

[Fifteen quatloos on the one with the ears!]

[Stephen Frug]

I agree with Brock, but would put it more strongly: you can't have ST2 and ST4 without shoe-horning in ST3. They're a set. Fortunately, I think that ST3 can be safely described as "mostly harmless".

[Big Cheese]

The problem with Star Trek: The Motion Picture is mostly pacing. Almost every single shot is on screen too long -- especially the special fx shots. You could probably cut 20 minutes out of the film without losing any scenes by just tightening up the individual shots. I think it would really help the story and keep the energy up. For example, look at the scene where Kirk and Scotty board the Enterprise in space dock. It takes a good five minutes for the shuttlecraft to fly all the way around the ship before docking. The music and images are great, but after a few minutes you really just want them to get on with the story. It's surprising since the film was directed by one of the greatest film editors in the history of Hollywood.