Star Trek: The Original Series 1-03: Where No Man Has Gone Before

Episode:

3

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Writer:

Samuel A. Peeples

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Director:

James Goldstone

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Air Date:

22-Sep-1966

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm watching the third episode of Star Trek: The Original Series: Where No Man Has Gone Before. It's also the second and the first, depending on how you look at it.

Sometimes people use the term 'pilot episode' to refer to the first released episode of a series, but this story was a true pilot, created to prove the concept and get Star Trek green lit. In fact it was the second pilot, produced after The Cage failed to win executives over. Getting two pilots like this was unusual, probably still is. When Desilu (the studio) originally came to NBC (the network) they'd offered them a choice of four story concepts and NBC picked the hardest one, so they felt like they were partly to blame for it not working out like they'd hoped.

So the Star Trek folks came up with some new options for the executives to choose from: three scripts titled Mudd's Women, The Omega Glory and Where No Man Has Gone Before. All three stories were put into production eventually, with Mudd's Women being regarded as one of the worst episodes of season 1, and The Omega Glory one of the worst in season 2. Fortunately Where No Man Has Gone Before was the script chosen for the second pilot, and it got the job done, earning Star Trek its first season.

It takes a while to get a TV series going though, so they ended up sitting on the finished episode for over a year. The episode ended up airing as the third story in season one, after The Man Trap and Charlie X, which is a bit weird as it features different characters and uniforms to the episodes before and after it. It does have the same premise as Charlie X though to be fair, so the story would've been familiar enough. Also at this point 66.7% of all Star Trek episodes featured the word 'man' in the title, down from 100% a couple of episodes ago. At the time of writing Trek would have to release another 550 episodes with 'man' in the name to get the percentage back up to where it was this week in 1966.

I'd give you some more facts, like how the cinematographer, Earnest Haller, had won an Oscar for Gone with the Wind and was pulled out of retirement for one last job, but I think I've proven by now that I've read the Wikipedia page.

Okay I'm going to go through the whole episode now commenting on basically everything, so this review is going to have SPOILERS. I'll not spoil anything that aired after it however, no matter how many Gary Mitchells or galactic barriers it has.

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The teaser begins with a shot of a spaceship making its way through space. I'm watching the remastered version with new CGI effects so now it's a particularly dusty region of space. The remastering team has also gone to the trouble of creating a slightly different version of the ship to match how it appeared in this story.

The original filming model was in a strange intermediate stage at this point between how it looked in the first pilot, The Cage, and how it'll look for the rest of the series. The differences aren't that dramatic, but the bridge dome at the top is too tall, the copper dish is huge, and there are spikes on the nacelles. Plus they added a window shape on the front of bridge, which comes and goes in the original version depending on whether it's a new shot or stock footage from The Cage. The biggest alteration for this episode however is the internal lighting that's got all the windows lit up. On this side of the model anyway (we don't see the other side). 

Anyway, William Shatner's recording a captain's log entry voice over, his first in the whole series. It's stardate 1312.4 and their currently unnamed ship is on its way to be the first Earth ship to probe outside the galaxy. The edge the galaxy is a bloody long way away in Star Trek terms, even if you just fly straight up instead of heading to the rim, so by Voyager rules it should've taken them decades to get here. But it's the first episode so I'll let them off. Something impossible has happened however: they've just picked up a distress call from an ancient Earth ship that got here before them two centuries ago! 

A scene from one of the movies and every episode of Enterprise.

Fan seem happy enough to agree that Where No Man Has Gone Before takes place in 2265, which means that this mysterious other ship was operating around 2065. That's only 40 years away! Star Trek's been on for long enough now that we've actually seen that time period now, and it definitely featured spaceships with FTL drives. Their engines weren't as good though, and this episode actually mentions that.

(Spoiler: we never get a satisfying explanation in this episode for how the impossible ship got all the way out here.) 

Then the camera pulls back to reveal that Captain Kirk and Mr Spock have been watching the star field on a monitor in the briefing lounge! They're not supposed to be doing effects like that on TV in 1965!

We also get a glimpse of the redesigned bridge, with the railings painted orange instead of black to make it look less monochrome and miserable. Mr Kelso informs them that they've reached the source of the distress call and it's an object one metre in diameter. He also informs them that it's in tractor beam range, so that's a piece of technology established right at the start of the series.

Spock is very smug at the moment because he knows that he's got Kirk beaten at 3D chess. But then Kirk suddenly turns it around on him, because he's the hero and he can do things like that.

Here's a proper look at William Shatner's Captain James Kirk, who's replacing Jeffrey Hunter's Captain Christopher Pike. They would've kept Hunter if they could have, but he wasn't interested (or his wife wasn't at least), so they had to look for a new lead to wear his space sweater. Shatner wasn't a step down though, much the opposite. He was considered to be a well-respected and talented actor with a lot of range, and was paid double what Hunter had gotten.

This was Leonard Nimoy's second episode as Spock and they still hadn't quite got his look nailed down yet. In fact they've taken a step backwards and put in him in a gold tunic instead of the blue he was wearing in The Cage! At least I think it's supposed to be gold. In the original DVD release the uniforms look brown and in the remastered version they sometimes turn green.

The two had been hanging out and playing a bit of 3D chess while waiting for the ship to reach the source of the call, and they have just enough dialogue to establish that Spock doesn't have Kirk's 'Earth emotions' but one of his ancestors did marry a human female. So 3D chess and Spock being a part-human alien without Earth emotions have both been established as well, and it's only a minute in.

They've grabbed the source of the distress call with their tractor beam, but bringing the object in through an airlock would be too low-tech so they're going to beam it on board with the transporter instead. The episode's really eager to show off all its toys!

The transporter room has had a bit of an upgrade since its appearance in The Cage. They've painted the floor orange and... well, that's mostly it. They've also painted the console orange, but I'm not really sure that counts as it's actually the helm console that's been swiped from the bridge set.

At least they've brought Scotty in to operate it this time! He's not wearing a red shirt yet but he is played by James Doohan, making his first on-screen appearance in the series.

They beam aboard this prop which has S.S. Valiant written across the top. It's an old-style ship recorder and by the look of it something bad happened to the old ship it was ejected from. They decide to feed the tapes through Mr Spock's computer and see if they're still intact.

You can tell this is from a story written in the 60s as the term 'tapes' doesn't seem so futuristic these days. They are retrieving the data wirelessly though to be fair. I expected them to pull out some of those coloured blocks and insert them into a slot on Spock's console, but nope.

Then Kirk orders the ship put on alert, I guess because it's a dramatic way to end the teaser.

OPENING TITLES

Top: this episode. Bottom: every other episode.

Hey they re-rendered the opening titles just for this episode so that it has the correct model for the ship! As far as I can tell the original version of the episode had basically the same opening credits sequence as every other episode this season, with a mix of models depending on whatever footage they had available.

This picture also shows off how the remastering team got better with the CGI over time, with the bottom image being their first attempt and the top one being done later. (They still don't look as good as an actual model shot though, sadly).

Oh, there was one thing unusual about the opening credits in the original aired episode: it didn't have Kirk's famous "Space, the final frontier..." narration. That seems a bit ironic considering it's where everyone knows the term "where no man has gone before" from, but the line in the monologue actually came from this episode's title.

ACT ONE

The ship's hallways have had a makeover since The Cage, with most of the trapezoid arches removed and more stuff on the walls, like a red stripe along the top. In fact this is pretty much the look the series sticks with for the rest of the series. There is one major difference though: there's no curve to the walls.

When Star Trek finally got picked up as a series they packed up and moved 6 miles north east from Desilu's beat up old Culver City lot to its Gower Street studios, which gave them an excellent excuse to build a massive curving corridor set. You'd never see a straight hallway this long in the series again (except for reused footage).

Remastering aside, the episode comes in two forms: the version aired on TV and the version the NBC executives saw.

Un-Aired Pilot Version

They're both pretty similar, though the original version includes a few shots here of the main characters walking around the corridors, with Gary Mitchell playing around and being creepy around Yeoman Smith without her being aware of it. It's like watching one of those 'Star Trek INtakes' videos on YouTube, where they edit in an outtake and make it seamless.

The proper act one begins with Kirk and Spock entering a turbolift, with Mitchell racing to get in before the doors close. It appears like there's only one set of doors, weirdly, but it's the future so they might just have two sets stuck together seamlessly or something.

The doors close quick enough that you don't even notice or think about the fact that a wall has appeared on the left side of the corridor. The characters have a bit of a chat while the window/display thing on the side shows they're moved up a few floors, then the doors open again and...

They're now on the bridge, all in one unbroken shot! It's a similar trick to the one that Star Trek '09 later pulled for its first reveal of the bridge, as they were actually on the bridge set the whole time. They just put a fake wall in front of the alcove to make it look like a corridor for a moment.

The scene shows that Star Trek was perfectly capable of more elaborate shots when it had the time and budget for them. In fact they had a lot of time for this one, as it was shot in 9 days instead of the usual 6 or 7.

This is an unusual shot of the bridge for a number of reasons. We can see the right hand row of consoles, which were usually removed to give them more room to get the camera in, and we can see a lot of the ceiling too. They're also still using the viewscreen from The Cage and people are walking in front of it, meaning that they're using rear projection instead of blue screen compositing (though I guess it's showing a screensaver at the moment). And the weirdest thing of all: they've got the helm console twisted around to point towards the railing instead of the screen. I guess Scotty didn't put it back properly when he was done with it in the transporter room.

I guess they've swapped the position of the helm and navigation consoles as Mitchell's piloting the ship from the left side instead of where Sulu usually sits on the right.

The bridge has had a few changes since The Cage, though it's not quite in its final form yet. All of the orange is new, but the paint job on the console is a little different to how it'll end up. The chairs haven't got their padded backs added yet. And all the gooseneck screens have been removed except for Kirk's, which will disappear by the next episode. It also looks like they've raised Kirk's chair a bit so he's not sitting at the same level of the two officers in front. Pike looked a little small when he had the chair, but a bit of extra elevation helps.

The biggest difference here is the crew however. All the department heads arrive on the bridge, revealing that we've lost everyone from The Cage except for Mr Spock, and we've got basically the whole classic cast together now, minus Dr McCoy, Uhura, Chekov and Yeoman Rand. NBC wasn't impressed with a lot of the original cast (they were especially unimpressed with Roddenberry casting his mistress as the female lead), so we've got a lot of new faces here.

They've replaced Dr Boyce with Dr Piper, who still isn't played by Roddenberry's first choice, DeForrest Kelly. The director picked a different actor and he just went along with it. It wasn't until the series got picked up that he finally put his foot down and got the actor he wanted all along, playing the show's third chief medical officer, Dr McCoy.

They've definitely pulled that wall away to get the camera in now, because we can see the edge of Spock's console!

The ship is approaching the edge of the galaxy (with the department heads still lurking awkwardly by the door), but Kirk has Mitchell neutralise warp speed to hold position for a bit. Turns out that they're going to postpone heading into unknown for a bit while they work to find out what happened to the last ship to come out this way. 

Spock's got a wired headphone to his ear here instead of the wireless earpiece they'll have later, and he's busy analysing the recorder's logs. Kirk gets on the intercom to tell the rest of the crew what they're up to, but he's interrupted by Spock yelling "Tapes are burned out, switching to memory banks!" I guess it wasn't logical to wait a damn moment for his captain to finish.

Kirk's introduced to Dr Dehner, who's joined the crew to study how they react in emergency conditions. Mitchell asks her if she's working to improve the breed, and she replies that's she's heard that's more his speciality. So tells his buddy Kelso that she's a 'walking freezer unit', loud enough that she almost certainly heard him. So that escalated quickly.

Spock finally gets the information they need out of the recorder. Seems that the crew of the S.S. Valiant were swept out of the galaxy by a space storm and turned around to come back. Then there were multiple crewmembers killed, a frantic search for information about extra-sensory perception and finally the captain ordered the self destruct. So that's a bit of a concern. Kirk asks Dehner about ESP and she says she tested quite high... though she's clearly not psychic enough to pick up on the context of the question. Turns out that some humans in the Star Trek universe can sense the future and read the back of playing cards, though I don't think the series was trying to stray into fantasy here. I believe that ESP was still considered to be more science than pseudoscience at this point.

Anyway, now that they know the disturbing fate of the Valiant, Kirk has decided that they are going to... continue heading out of the galaxy. Because it's the Enterprise's job to throw itself into danger so that other vessels that come this way will know what to expect.

So I guess now ships will know to expect a mysterious purple force field. It's not showing up on the sensors but it's definitely there and they definitely can't fly over it because... I dunno. Maybe it really does surround the entire galaxy in every direction and it only look like a horizontal strip because... it's a trick of the light?

The idea of the galactic barrier came from the recent discovery of the radiation belts around the Earth. Writer Samuel Peeples figured that maybe other things could have radiation belts we haven't detected yet as well, which seems sensible enough I guess. We discovered a few years back that our solar system has a wall of incredibly hot plasma around it when a Voyager probe flew through it, so we do keep running into barriers like this.

Spock's apparently the first officer now and he gets extra shouty here, yelling commands like "Deflectors full intensity!" It's the kind of delivery that Next Gen's Riker could pull off, but it just sounds weird coming from him.

Original effects

Here's what the galactic barrier looks like in the original version of the episode. I have to be honest, I prefer the original effects to the remastered CGI a lot of the time. Computer effects open up so many possibilities, I love what modern series are able to do, but it's hard to make something look more real than an 11 foot miniature. It's just a shame the footage came out of the compositing process looking so rough.

Things are getting tense as they approach the barrier and Mitchell reaches out for Yeoman Smith's hand.

This always reminds me of something I read in the Star Trek writer's bible, right at the start. It has a quiz where you have to read a story outline and then identify the biggest problem with it. 

Turns out that the correct answer is #3. But Mitchell's not a captain and holding hands isn't a hug, so I'll let Mitchell off this time. I've got my eye on him though. (Spoilers: Kirk totally fails this test in a later episode, a really good one too.)

Anyway they hit the barrier and...

Boom! Everything starts exploding.

I mean seriously, that console is properly on fire! They weren't missing around when they filmed this episode.

Kirk orders the helmsman to turn the ship around and get them out of here, but Mitchell's hit by energy and becomes a sparkler.

Going negative is never a good sign. 

Mitchell's down and Dehner's also hit. This is bad because he's the one steering the ship! Fortunately Kirk knows all the right buttons to press until Spock can come and take over.

Original effects

In the original effects we get to see a recycled shot from The Cage here (the famous introduction to the ship that originally continued on to zoom into the top of the bridge dome), which mean that mysterious window-sized rectangle on the bridge has vanished.

Kirk, Sulu, Scotty and Dr Piper rush over to check on Dehner and then Kirk eventually goes to check on his buddy Mitchell as well. Okay to be fair Piper did check on him first and Yeoman Smith's hovering over him as well. That's pretty much her done for the episode by the way.

Before Kirk can make it over to his friend Spock grabs his arm and gives him the bad news. The main engines are out and they've lost nine people. This is a ridiculously high number of casualties for Star Trek, and we're only 10 minutes in! Maybe next time they could try sending a probe into the barrier first.

Kirk finally checks on Mitchell and discovers that his eyes have turned silver, which is really weird. It was also really painful for the actor (Gary Lockwood, better known for 2001: A Space Odyssey), as those contact lenses were huge. They were big enough to contain a layer of wrinkled tin foil, which gives him a real twinkle in the eye.

William Shatner holds the actor's head steady so the camera can to zoom right in. The screen fades out, but the glow of his eyes lingers for a moment, and that's the dramatic image they end act one with. 

ACT TWO

Act two starts with another captain's log and things aren't good. For one thing half the bridge consoles are still broken, and Kelso and communications officer Alden are busy fixing the helm. Without warp drive they're stuck with impulse engines, which means that destinations that were days away before are now years away. So the difference between warp drive and impulse engines was established this early as well.

We also learn that all the people who died during exposure to the force field were killed by an area of the brain burning out. This seems kind of bad! I didn't know that was a risk of space travel.

Spock brings up Dehner's medical record on one of the screens and for some reason it's a scan of some paper, not just... the information on screen. I wonder if that address line continues with 'Country', 'Planet' and 'Sector'. 

We get some interesting information here. For one thing her name didn't change halfway through filling out the form, so they just wrote 'SAME' at the bottom. Also Dehner lives on 1489 Street in the city of Delman, while Gary lives on 8149 Street in the city of Edlman.

Also they've put a date of birth and age for both characters, which should give me enough information to figure out these stardates! Dehner's date of birth was 1089.5 and she was 21 when the form was filled in, Mitchell's birthdate is 1087.7 and he was 23 at the time, so the 4th digit is the year counter. It's stardate 1312.9 today, so Dehner's now 223 years old and Mitchell is 225. Or maybe he's still 23 and he became a lieutenant commander absurdly fast.

Here's some information on the ESP rating that you have no hope of reading during the episode, as it's only on screen for about a second. Apparently people with a high ESP rating like Mitchell are able to have long telepathic conversations with the inhabitants of Deneb IV.

It seems like Mitchell has the highest rating in the crew at 91 and we already know that Dehmer ranks highly with her score of 89. Fortunately Spock is apparently rubbish at telepathy by comparison and is fine.

Kirk goes down to visit Mitchell in a brand new and very green looking sickbay set and he mentions he's been worried about him ever since "that night on Deneb IV". If you just watch the episode normally it sounds like he had a wild night with a woman, but two decades after its first airing people finally had the technology to pause on that ESP rating page and get the missing context. Now we know they're talking about how he suffered after-effects from a psychic connection!

We don't actually hear anything more about that, but we do learn things about Kirk. Mitchell hands him a pile of those data cartridges and tells us that back in the academy he was considered to be "a stack of books on legs". Kirk apparently taught there for a bit and demanded that his students used their brains, so Mitchell used his brain to distract him with a lab technician that he almost went on to marry. Some fans have theorised that this might be Carol Marcus, but I'm not spoiling later stories so I can't even talk about who that is.

Mitchell's taken the opportunity to reading some of that 'long hair stuff' Kirk likes, which turns out to be philosophy, Spinoza to be precise. Though these days he's finding it childishly simplistic, and he doesn't agree with it at all. I feel like I should study some of Spinoza's work myself to get a better understanding of whether this is something they should be worried about... but I won't.

Spock's been doing a bit of reading himself on the bridge. In fact he's got his screen to display what Gary's reading... though it's how fast he's reading it that's got him really worried. The pages are flying by so quickly that I don't think Spock's noticed that he's just cycling through the same three pages of text over and over. I get why they didn't fix that for the remastered version, though I am a little surprised that they didn't fix the angle of the text to match the screen.

The music's getting very dramatic at this point as Spock suggests this might not be the Gary Mitchell they know anymore. For someone who doesn't suffer from Earth emotions he's kind of freaking out about this.

Kirk and Spock are looking at monitors a lot in this story. It's like The Cage, except flipped, so they're they ones watching what the threat of the week is up to instead of the other way around.

And then Mitchell turns to look directly at us. So that's not creepy.

We don't get to see Mitchell's point of view though, so it's very possible he's staring at an obvious security camera. 

Dehner has been assigned to keep an eye on him, and she's trying to be nice this time. She even apologises for being a bit cold earlier on the bridge, saying "Women professionals do tend to overcompensate." Do they? Even in 2265?

They we get our first-ever glimpse at the screen above the beds in sickbay. Mitchell demonstrates how it works for us by dropping all his vitals down to zero and killing himself for 22 seconds. It seems that ESP powers can give you perfect health and also no health at all.

He also claims he's remembered everything he's read off every 'tape' and she decides to test him. So the cartridges they use are called tapes then. Makes sense, even if they're likely solid-state media, terms stick around. She gives him a page number and he quotes a poem by someone on the Canopius planet back in 1996. It's apparently one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries... which means that 1996 is two centuries or so ago at most. Well it's actually 269 years, but that's close enough.

Then Mitchell grabs her arm and asks her how she feels, in a really creepy whisper... 

Fortunately they're interrupted by Kelso, who has dropped by on his coffee break to see how Mitchell's doing. Turns out that he was doing repairs and Mitchell's not impressed with his work. He saw an image of the damage in Kelso's mind and knows that if they activate the impulse packs in that condition they'll blow the whole impulse deck. Then they'll have no engines at all!

Kelso's definitely no Trip Tucker when it comes to fixing spaceships... though he does kind of look like him.

Then we're back in the briefing lounge set, now redressed for briefing instead of lounging. It was the briefing room in The Cage as well, though the walls and beams were considerably greyer in that.

Turns out that Mitchell was right about the impulse pack and the fact that he saved the ship hasn't made Spock any less concerned. Dehner seems to be the only person here to even wonder if Mitchell's change could be a positive, and she's surprised by Spock's lack of compassion for someone he's worked next to for years. Well, she assumes they've worked together for years. I suppose we'll find out in Strange New Worlds, assuming it lasts long enough for Mitchell to graduate from the academy (the dude would be about 17 in season 1).

Spock does know something she doesn't though: Mitchell's been playing around with the controls on the bridge with telekinesis, either to toy with the crew or test what he can do. Sulu's the head of astro-sciences in this episode, so he gives them the mathematics and they're some pretty cold equations. He uses a money metaphor to explain a geometrical progression, saying that if you start with a penny and double it each day, then you'll be a millionaire within a month. Which is absolutely true. I don't know how the hell he got the data that Mitchell's powers are doubling in a certain amount of time though. Also I wanted someone to say "Back up a minute Sulu, what's a 'penny'?" 

Here's a Sulu fact for you: depending on who you ask he's either named after the Sulu sea, or executive Herb Solow.

The briefing ends, but Spock stays behind to try to convince Kirk of the danger his friend presents. He even calls him 'Jim'! It's Spock's belief that they won't make it to an 'Earth base' with Mitchell on the ship. He'll soon grow too powerful for them to stop, so powerful he'll consider them nothing but an annoyance. Personally I think Spock's making a huge assumption there, considering he presumably hasn't met a lot of godlike beings by this point. But it's hard to argue against the logic of 'we only have a limited amount of time to stop him, after that point Mitchell holds all the cards'. Plus Mitchell's been kind of a creepy git and they do have the destruction of the Valiant as a cautionary tale.

Spock offers Kirk two suggestions: strand Mitchell on a planet, or kill him now. Kirk was stern and professional with the others around, but in private he's able to be as outraged by Spock's lack of compassion as Dehner was. Gary's a regular character that they've known for years (off-screen)! He eventually has to realise however that Spock's actually got a point.

Fortunately Spock's found an incredibly convenient planet just a few light days away from the unexplored edge of the galaxy. To put that in perspective, the nearest star to our sun is 1,500 light days away. The planet's so close that they can get over there without their warp drive!

ACT THREE

It's act three, which means it's time for another captain's log voice over while Kelso and Alden mess around with the helm console some more. The ship's en route to Delta-Vega to drop off their godlike crewmember. The planet's completely uninhabited, with a completely automated lithium cracking station down there operating without any human maintenance or supervision. They don't seem to have any problems with thieves coming by and taking the ore for themselves, possibly because the place is so remote that the ore ships only drop by every 20 years.

Incidentally there's a world called Delta Vega in one of the movies that's so close to Vulcan that you can sometimes see the planet in the sky as big as the moon. This is a different world, and Kelso's going to go down there now with a repair party to try to get the resources they need to fix their engines. If they fail, they won't even have the power left to break orbit.

Meanwhile we see Mitchell pouring himself a cup of water using his Jedi powers, so we get some cup sliding and some cup floating effects.

Kirk, Spock and Dehner go down to sickbay to get Mitchell, but he's onto them and zaps them with electricity. Fortunately Dr Piper's there and... no, not really. You'd expect him to be all over this episode, seeing as half of it takes place in sickbay, but he didn't even get a line in that briefing room scene earlier. I'm not surprised he left the series after this episode as he was barely in it to begin with.

Fortunately Kirk and Spock are able to solve the problem using teamwork and their phenomenal intelligence. They wait for Mitchell to stand up and start bragging about what he could do as a god, then Kirk punches him, and Spock punches him, and Kirk punches him again. Dehner then finishes him off with a sedative.

They manage to bring him to the transporter room without incident. Well, except for when he woke up for a moment and started yelling about squashing them like insects. But he apparently needs to be standing up for the transporter to work, so they have to get him balanced on his feet while he's drugged out of his mind. The fact they pull it off is surely another demonstration of his godlike powers.

I get why the production crew did it this way, as they didn't want to break the rules of how the transporter works. But this is the pilot episode, they haven't established any rules yet! It can do whatever the plot needs it to do!

Then we get a beautiful looking matte painting of Delta-Vega's lithium cracking facility, and they've even composited in some of the actors on the right. (I'm calling it 'Delta-Vega' with a dash, because that's what's written on the sign). The painting was slightly enhanced for the remastered version, but only slightly. It looked great to begin with.

Dehner asks if Kirk's sure there's no one on the planet but them, and he replies "Nobody but us chickens, doctor". Which is kind of a weird thing to say. Though it would've made more sense back in the 60s, as the phrase had been popular enough to get a song written about it. It's a line said by a chicken thief to convince the farmer that there's no chicken thievery going on in the hen house, so it's not entirely relevant to their current situation.

Alden and Kelso are busy stripping the place bare and rigging it to explode, and Alden finally gets a line here! I don't know why they're doing all Scotty's work while he's barely in the episode, but they're doing a great job. They're setting up a switch so that in the worst case scenario they can blow the place up and kill everyone here to stop Mitchell. I guess the phaser and photon torpedoes buttons up in their nice cosy bridge must be broken.

Mitchell's regains consciousness in a cell and reminds Kirk of the time he took a poison dart for him and nearly died. His argument is that if he could trust him with his life then, why can't he trust him now?

And seconds later he's testing his cell's force field with his face. In fact he even admits that Spock is right and the human race won't survive people like him. Though the force field drains him to the point where his eyes return to normal for a moment. So we can add 'force field' to the list of things this episode introduces to Star Trek, along with deflector shields, impulse engines, and so on. Still no phasers yet though, as Spock's armed with a laser prop from The Cage.

Hey they're just slotting the white panels into the console that caught fire earlier! And it's Scotty helping Alden out this time, not Kelso! Once it's in place all the screens come on, so they apparently got it set up correctly.

Scotty then he sits down and opens communications to the planet to ask Kirk if he got the phaser rifle they sent down. So there is a phaser in the episode after all!

Kirk's so pissed off when he sees Spock walking into the room with that god-slaying anti-Mitchell rifle he slams his The Cage-era communicator down on the desk and storms away to the window. Spock understands that this is something he's going to need to explain and follows him over.

At this point Kirk's more willing to go with the opinion of a trained psychiatrist over that of his first officer, especially as she's the loudest (and only) voice saying that Mitchell won't harm anyone. He has more respect for her as a professional than you might expect from a 60s show. But Spock argues that his lack of feelings gives him an objectivity she doesn't have.

So Kirk concedes defeat, again, and tells Kelso that if Mitchell gets out and he feels he's the last chance to stop him, he's to hit the button and blow the whole place up. Uh, stop him from what? The whole planet's basically just a larger version of his cell.

ACT FOUR

Act four begins with another log entry by Kirk, but it doesn't take long for Mitchell to murder Kelso telekinetically and then knock out Kirk and the rest with lightning. So now there's been 10 deaths! Mitchell's not all that impressed with Kirk's choices, saying that "command and compassion is a fool's mixture". It's not a very pro-compassion episode so far.

Mitchell shuts the force field down and leads Dehner into his cell where they both pose in front of the mirror... revealing that she's got the silver eyes too now!

Only she's better at keeping her eyes open and looking straight forward.

The episode cuts to a while later, with Kirk and Spock still lying unconscious next to an empty cell. With Dr Dehner turned evil it's Dr Piper's chance to finally do something this episode, and he wakes Kirk up. Kirk tells him to leave Spock unconscious though, as he wants time to go after Mitchell and Dehner alone. If he doesn't call them in 12 hours, their orders are to go to the nearest Earth base and tell them to hit the planet with neutron radiation. Wow, I guess the Enterprise's weapons really are broken. Either that or the writers hadn't decided to give it any yet.

The original Star Trek is famous for its flat coloured planet backdrops (created with a white backing lit through coloured gels) but here they've got an actual painting. Well, they've inherited an actual painting from The Cage anyway. It's funny how much Delta-Vega resembles Talos IV. It's a shame that they couldn't afford to use painted backdrops on the set for any of the later episodes, but at least they always found room in the budget for the Styrofoam rocks.

In fact the place was just a rocky wasteland before Mitchell got to it, as his powers have grown way beyond basic telekinesis to actual magic. He's able to spontaneously will plant life into existence, creating it from memory in an instant. Which means that now can tempt Dehner with an apple.

Mitchell senses that Kirk's on his way and tells Dehner to go meet him, his voice getting increasingly echoey as he becomes more godlike. He's greying at the temples now as well. At this rate he'll have the full grey beard within the month! 

So far Kirk hasn't been all that amazing as a leader, but here we learn that he's the kind of captain that can pull off a speech about philosophy and morality while also carrying a giant phaser weapon. Apparently the story behind that rifle is that when NBC asked for the second pilot to have more action, Gene Roddenberry got in touch with toy manufacturer Reuben Klamer and arranged for them to design and build them a big ray gun... for free. The idea was that they'd get potential licensing rights. But once filming was over and they'd finished taking publicity photos with it, the gun went back to the toy company and never appeared in the series again.

It's a very 60s looking prop, but it's also a complicated gadget. There are three coloured lights, three buttons at the back, and three cores with coloured ends to match. It seems like the cores rotate as you select different energy levels. I don't know what does the most damage, yellow or red, but it doesn't matter much here as he's got it set to orange.

Kirk actually tries to convince Dehner to help him against Mitchell, even though she has to know that if Mitchell's too big of a risk to let live then she is too. His argument is that it's not the power that's the problem, it's that Mitchell didn't acquire the millions of years of wisdom to go along with his millions of years of evolution. He then takes Mitchell's line "command and compassion is a fool's mixture" and flips it, yelling "Above all else a god needs compassion!" Finally he tells her to be a psychiatrist for just a little longer and observe the ugly savage humanity that's still inside him. Though when Mitchell finally arrives Shatner does a combat roll holding the prop and pulls the trigger without hesitation. 

It's always nice to see some stunt work from the actors, but having it come after dialogue and then lead into an effects shot in the same take is even more impressive. Especially as the camera pans across to follow Kirk as he rolls. They had to really hold that camera still afterwards (with Shatner holding the gun still as well), in order to composite the effect over the top.

Anyway Mitchell just no-sells the phaser beam completely and then tosses the phaser prop away telekinetically. I hope they had some padding for it to land on.

Mitchell decides to give Kirk a proper grave, which means we get his birthstardate too! It's 1277.1, so if the last digit measures years like I worked out earlier, then that makes him 36. That's actually a really plausible number. Though Kirk's been giving us stardates in his log the whole episode and it's gone from 1312.4 to 1313.7, so it seems more likely that the stardate's measuring weeks and Kirk's only 36 weeks old. And people think that the 'R' is the big mistake in this scene!

Incidentally, they remastering team didn't change his middle initial from an 'R' to a 'T' here even though they could've done, and I admire their restraint.  Well okay they decided against it because it would've required a ton of rotoscope work, but at least some of the team didn't think it was a great idea.

Shatner gets to show off his physical acting here, as Mitchell yanks him forward telekinetically and forces him to put his hands together. He wants him to pray to him as a god, but Kirk's still using everything he does and says against him by pointing out to Dehmer that he said pray to him, not to both of them.

"There'll only be one of you in the end. One jealous god. if all this makes a god, or is it making you something else?"

Finally his speech gets through to Dehner and she pulls a Star Wars, turning on Mitchell and zapping him with a couple of weak blasts of Force electricity! He goes and zaps her right back and the strain causes her to collapse. It's a very low energy sequence (ironically) as the actors couldn't really move much while the effects were being composited over them, but Dehner was able to get the job done. Mitchell's eyes to turn back to normal for a moment...

...giving Kirk and his stuntmen the opportunity for a proper torn-shirt Star Trek fight. 

Kirk manages to get the upper hand and is about to deliver the killing blow with a rock to Mitchell's head, when he hesitates. For a moment I thought he was going to start yelling "If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals!" but no, he just apologises to his friend and then goes to slam the rock down onto him.

But Mitchell gets his glowing eyes back at the last moment and sends the rock flying. It really disappears off into the distance somewhere. They're going to have to send someone to find that if they need to do another take.

Dehner's still down, so Kirk has no backup this time. He's in some real trouble here! Especially as Mitchell picks up a far bigger boulder like it's nothing. So Kirk pulls them both into the grave, leaps back out, grabs the phaser rifle...

...and then sends a chunk of rock down onto him. That other boulder was nothing to Mitchell, but this was apparently enough to knock him out, maybe even kill him. There's no sign of movement at least. I guess burying him in the grave he dug for Kirk was ironic enough to kill even a god.

But now Kirk's got to go kill the other one! Actually Dehner's already suffered a mortal blow from Mitchell and she dies soon after Mitchell does.

A little while later we see that Piper's such a rubbish doctor that has hasn't been able to fix Kirk's arm with all his 23rd century technology. He's just wrapped a bandage around it and called it a day.

Scotty's taken Mitchell's position at the helm while Alden's taken over navigation from Kelso. The crew member death count has gone up to 12 now, setting a record I don't think will ever be broken, but Alden wasn't one of them. He didn't return as a regular however, as he was replaced at communications by Uhura. Yeoman Smith is another character that didn't return... in fact I think she left the episode ages ago.

Kirk records one last log entry and we see him do it this time. He says that Dehner gave her life in performance of her duty, as did Mitchell. He's not blaming the guy for what he became in the end. Spock comes over and admits that despite all the times this episode he said he didn't have feelings, he actually did feel for the guy too. Kirk tells him there's hope for him after all, adding a slight bit of positivity onto what's been a real downer of a story. There's no real joke at the end though. The Enterprise crews are pros are laughing off any kind of tragedy, but laughing off the deaths of two of the bridge crew is maybe a bit too much.


CONCLUSION

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I had to include a shot of the old title, as it's rare to get a look at those old spikey engines from the side.

Where No Man Has Gone Before is a story all about the Enterprise going to two places men have already gone before: the galactic barrier and Delta-Vega. In fact you could make an argument that maybe they shouldn't have gone to the galactic barrier seeing as the last people to try it all died, but the Enterprise is all about going boldly...  and suffering lots of casualties in the process.

The title could also refer to Mitchell and Dehner, who transcend human limitations and evolve to a point that no one ever has (except for someone on the Valiant who got there before them). It's just a shame that their wisdom and compassion didn't get a similar upgrade, much the opposite in fact. Star Trek is generally one of the most optimistic science fiction series, all about how we can suppress the worst parts of ourselves and achieve amazing things, but not this time! Mitchell becomes the definition of absolute power corrupting absolutely, as he does horrible things like strangle Kelso to death and electrocute Kirk a couple of times. Meanwhile Kirk had to deal with his own great power coming with great responsibility, as he had the final say about whether to kill his friend or just strand him alone. This is Depressing Trek so saving him was never really on the table and no one comes up with a third option. In fact it's so bleak that showing compassion and stranding him turned out to be the wrong option and cost Kelso his life. Which was a bit weird actually as killing Kelso served no purpose; he would've left with the rest of the crew in a few minutes and then Mitchell could've done whatever he wanted. Kirk going after Mitchell seems kind of pointless too as he could've just beamed up and waited for the neutron radiation to arrive. I dunno, maybe he thought Dehner needed rescuing. Either way it was actually the most important decision that any character has made in the entire 56 year history of Star Trek.

The series had already had one pilot, The Cage and it showed that Trek could pull off all its ambitions on a TV budget. But it was considered to be "too cerebral", so to really prove Trek could bring the action-adventure, Kirk had to go out there with a giant space gun and beat the crap out of Mitchell. And crucially he had to do it at the end of the episode. The Cage has a big fight scene as well, and I think it actually lasts about as long as Kirk vs Mitchell, but the problem is that doesn't come at the climax of the story. The Talosians weren't an enemy that could be defeated with wrestling moves and a big gun, in fact by the end they weren't an enemy at all. Mitchell, on the other hand, was asking for a smack, and the episode delivered. Does that make it a less intelligent episode than The Cage? I think it might give viewers a little less to think about, but it's not a stupid story and it's definitely not all-action.

It is a better looking episode than The Cage though, mostly because it's a lot more colourful. The crew are still in the same uniforms, but the sets have gotten a repaint so they're not all so grey. Plus we've got more of the proper crew now, with Scotty and Sulu appearing, along with Captain Kirk, who is certainly a lot less angsty than Captain Pike. Well, the Captain Pike we saw anyway; we didn't catch him on a good day and who knows what he would've been like as a regular. It'd be fair to say that the crew aren't exactly at their best here, as Spock isn't entirely in character and the others are barely in it at all, but William Shatner absolutely nails the role of Kirk right from the start. Plus the episode takes advantage of being a pilot by pulling a Joss Whedon and filling the cast with people who appear to be regulars, right until they're killed off. Mitchell and Dehner you could see coming, but Kelso was a bit of a shock to me. I suppose he had to die though so that Scotty could have a job besides running the transporter.

Overall I was pretty gripped by this. More so that I would've expected considering that a quarter of the episode takes place in sickbay and yet there's no McCoy. It was a very strange idea to air it as the third episode in the series though, without even a framing device to explain why we've clearly jumped to the past for a story. Especially as it comes directly after from Charlie X, which was about the exact same problem more or less. I've noticed that Star Trek has struggled sometimes to come up with new ideas and you'd expect that after 856 stories, but it's less forgivable when it's only three episodes in!

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NEXT EPISODE

Star Trek: The Original Series continued on to The Naked Time. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm heading Where No One Has Gone Before.

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