26 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER18, 2019
“ You’ll have to imagine the melody for this next song, too.”• •
hole in the quilt of canon, and patch it.
Look at the earliest “Trek” fanzines, like
Spockanalia, the first issue of which came
out right around when “Amok Time”
aired: they’re obsessed with Spock’s Vul-
can heritage, his childhood, and, above
all, his sexuality. “Amok Time” tried to
patch those holes. It rewarded the fanfic
impulse, rewarded fandom itself. That
probably explains why “Trek” is still
around after all these years.
My father endured my disquisition
with unusual forbearance. Like all our
conversations from then on, this one
was doomed to take place on my terms.
So they’re in a turbolift. Then what?
Then they get stuck.
And then?
I’m working on it.
I went back to my script. One of the
machines connected to my father was
giving off short, exasperated sighs; an-
other beeped conventionally. From time
to time, my father made sounds of mild
discomfort and agitation, but he never
opened his eyes or spoke. Meanwhile,
Ensign Spock and Number One began
to understand that they would not be
getting out of the turbolift anytime soon.
Alone in that placeless place, in a niche
carved out from the ordinary routines
of duty, they had timeless time for con-
versation. Hidden things would be dis-
covered and revealed.
I remember you writing Sherlock
Holmes fan fiction when you were
young. Not “Trek.”
I drew my own Starfleet starships,
and Enterprise crew members from alien
species. But I never wrote any stories.
I’d thought about this in the weeks
since I’d come on as a writer and a pro-
ducer, and eventually as the showrun-
ner, for “Star Trek: Picard.” As a kid, I
had tried my hand at writing fiction
that mapped to Robert E. Howard’s
“Hyborian Age,” Larry Niven’s “Known
Space,” and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s“Barsoom” (and, as an adult, I wrote two
Lovecraftian Cthulhu Mythos stories),
but never to the “Trek” universe, even
though it took up far more space in the
atlas of my imagination.
I guess, for me, it was always about
the voice on the page. That was the
clue I needed to start trying to “make
my own.” I read all the James Blish and
Alan Dean Foster adaptations, but they
were never the voice of “Star Trek.” And
I didn’t have the means, or maybe the
chutzpah, to make my own fan epi-
sodes. Until now.
So, what hole are you patching?
The mystery of Spock’s smile, when
he encounters the singing flower on
Talos IV.
“The Menagerie.”
Yeah, or really “The Cage.”
That was the title of the original, un-
aired “Star Trek” pilot, famously rejected
by NBC for being “too cerebral.” “The
Cage” featured a captain named Chris-
topher Pike ( Jeffrey Hunter) in com-
mand of the Enterprise, with Number
One (Majel Barrett, the wife of “Star
Tr e k”’s creator, Gene Roddenberry) as
first officer and Spock (Leonard Nimoy)
as science officer. Great swaths of it were
later cleverly repurposed as flashback
material in a first-season episode, “The
Menagerie,” to tell the story of how Mr.
Spock—the only character from the re-
jected pilot to carry over into the se-
ries—following the logic of mercy, hi-
jacked the Enterprise in order to come
to the aid of a paralyzed and horribly
disfigured Pike, who was thereby estab-
lished, in the “Trek” canon, as Captain
Kirk’s immediate predecessor.
Even a casual fan watching “The
Menagerie” immediately noted striking
differences, beyond those of cast and
characters, between the eras of Captains
Pike and Kirk: differences in set design,
costumes, makeup, lighting, direction,
visual and sound effects. Kirk and crew
never commented on or seemed to no-
tice these discontinuities, which were
all implicitly attributable to the passage
of time between Pike’s day and Kirk’s.
All but one, that is, which had long tan-
talized at least one non-casual fan: apart
from the ears and the gull-wing eye-
brows, the Spock who served under
Captain Pike was nothing like the Spock
who later launched a thousand zines.
In the rejected pilot, and in Rodden-