Star Trek: Context

Recently, I mentioned delving into the Star Trek Lit-Verse. My first foray, in that regard, was a book by Greg Cox called Captain to Captain. I enjoyed the book–it was just what I hoped I would find. But I came away feeling under-prepared. There were things happening in the book that I knew nothing about. There was, for instance, an early reference to an accident that Captain Christopher Pike had, and that Spock had commandeered the Enterprise to take him somewhere–an affair that was very hush-hush. I figured that this was from some part of the lit-verse that I was not yet familiar with.

And yet, a sneaking suspicion told me that maybe I didn’t know enough Star Trek lore from the televised series to have the necessary context. I decided that context would be necessary to increase the enjoyment of the books that I read. So I decided to watch every episode of every Star Trek series, along with every movie, in broadcast order. Typically, the way I’d organize such a project would be to create a spreadsheet listing out all of the episodes and working through them methodically. But a quick look at just how many episodes there are made this seem like a daunting task.

We are, however, in the midst of something of a paradigm shift in technology. Generative AI is beginning to catching with some of what we see in the computers in Star Trek episodes. With that in mind, I asked ChatGPT to create the spreadsheet for me. ChatGPT tried, but still has some limitations in that regard. It did the next best thing, however. It wrote a Python script to scrape Wikipedia and create the spreadsheet I wanted. After a little tweaking, I had my spreadsheet which lists the Series, Season, Episode Number, Title, Writer, and Original Air Date. I sorted the spreadsheet by Original Air Date and I added a columns for watch date and rating. I set a goal of watching one episode a day and I watched Season 1, Episode 1 of Star Trek, TOS on December 2. I thought it was pretty bad, but I got through it.

At a rate of one episode per day, I’ll finish this journey on May 27, 2026.

I’ve been doing pretty good so far, usually watching one episode per day, sometimes squeezing in more than one. I’d never seen most episodes in TOS before, so they are mostly new to me. I starts slowly to me, and the overly dramatic acting takes more getting used to than the state of the art special effects. The first really good episode was “The Enemy Within” written by Richard Matheson. Most have been average.

And then, on Saturday, I watched episodes 11 & 12, “The Menagerie, Parts I & II.” I don’t know much about Star Trek history from a fandom perspective, but I’d venture a guess that this is where the series really began to take off. The two-part episode was excellent, a cut above everything that came before it. Moreover, it provided the very context that I was missing when I read Captain to Captain.

I’ve seen a majority of The Next Generation episodes before now. And I’ve seen all of Enterprise and Picard. Otherwise, these episodes are mostly new to me. I’m making brief notes on each episode as I was them. For instance, I noted that in the first episode, “The Man Trap” dealt with a kind of shapeshifter, much as the final season of Picard did as well. Having the context of that very first episode, I suspect that it was no coincidence in Picard. I noted that Episode 8, “Miri” was “Lord of the Flies in space.” For “The Menagerie” I simply noted, “Excellent episode. Real emotion, esp. in the 2nd part, and from the character that shows the least emotion.”

In some episodes, I note plot holes that seem obvious. In “The Enemy WIthin,” for instance, once the crew learned that Kirk had been “split” in the transporter and there an evil Kirk roaming the ship, why didn’t they immediately set about using a challenge/response phrase to verify which Kirk they were talking to? Why didn’t they send a shuttle to rescue Sulu and the others from the freezing cold when the transporters weren’t working?

Mostly, I’m enjoying the backstory hat the series has provided. It has already come in handy and added new context to a book like Captain to Captain. I look forward to more.