Chapter 2: Star Trek at 60 — the mates pick their favourite original series episodes

They conflated. All right.

How you know all this stuff — he's amazing. Everybody can, like, you know, just do fact-checking live on AI as they hear this episode recorded.

But before we jump in, uh, we have a special anniversary today. Um, on this day in 1966, 60 years ago, NBC aired the original series of Star Trek, premiering an episode called The Man Trap. Star Trek was, of course, created by Gene Roddenberry. I wish I had met him. I never did. Uh, who brought the concept to Desilu Productions, the Hollywood studio run by Lucille Ball, you know, from I Love Lucy, back in 1964. Desilu produced the pilots and then, with Lucy's backing, helped get the series on air. Mega congrats to CBS, who is carrying the legacy forward, and to my dear friend Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek.

And Rod's going to be at Moonshots Live.

And to celebrate this anniversary, I've asked all of the mates to pick their favorite original series episode. Um, I'm going to kick us off uh with uh my favorite — uh, not my favorite episode, my favorite clip uh from Star Trek. Uh, and it's a clip that has my favorite quote from Captain Kirk. I'm going to go ahead and play it uh and then we'll go around the horn here. So, uh, this is from the 20th episode on, uh, season 2 — actually season 1. Here we go.

[Star Trek clip plays: Kirk answers Dr. McCoy's objection to contact with a far more advanced intelligence, and closes with "Risk is our business."]

God, I still get chills when he says that, you know — risk is our business, that's what this starship is all about.

There have been so many parodies of Shatner, William Shatner. The parodies are actually exactly what he really sounds like.

He's so good. He's so good. So, you know, we're going to be having the Hollywood red carpet premiere of the 60th anniversary uh episode at Moonshots Live. And uh he was the executive producer — working on getting him there, which would be incredible. Uh, so that was uh from season 2, episode 20 of the original series, called Return to Tomorrow. Uh, let's go around the horn here. Uh, Alex, I'm going to start with you.

Yeah. So maybe let me just begin with a preliminary statement that you will not find, I think, a bigger Star Trek fan uh among the Moonshot mates, but here we are 60 years on from the inception of Star Trek. I think Star Trek has a real problem. So I'm picking as my favorite original series episode, City on the Edge of Forever, which is one of only two original series episodes — maybe obvious — one of only two original series episodes that won the Hugo Award. For those who haven't seen it, it's a time travel episode. Kirk and McCoy and Spock go back in time and there's a closed timelike loop wherein World War II gets changed and the future of Earth inevitably is impacted, and there's a moral dilemma, as always with the original series. It was a morality play. But the reason why I chose that episode among all of the other episodes is because it's a closed timelike curve.

And I think Star Trek, 60 years on, has a real problem, which is that Star Trek isn't keeping up with the singularity. Star Trek had the Eugenics Wars — for those deep in Star Trek mythology, we were supposed to have the Eugenics Wars in the '90s. That didn't happen. We were supposed to have first contact in the TNG chronology, first contact with the Vulcans, on April 5th, 2063. I actually think if there's going to be a first open contact, it's going to be far earlier than 2063.

There's no singularity at all in the Star Trek chronology. Challenge me if you disagree. Star Trek is not keeping up with the times.

Literally, reality has outraced Star Trek. So, I picked this episode because I think Star Trek, in short, is going to need a lot more closed timelike curves where the future tech and science falls back into the past, in order to retcon a Star Trek mythology going forward that actually keeps up with the singularity herd. But it's the anniversary today, so let's not dump on Star Trek.

All right, Dave, over to you.

Yeah, my choice is a season 2 episode called The Apple, which by all accounts is not a great episode for entertainment value, but it was the first one that dealt with this concept that in the future there's advanced AI and entire civilizations can end up asleep at the wheel because the AI is just doing everything for you. And so in this episode, the whole civilization has no idea that the AI is manipulating them.

And they live in this paradise.

It's called The Apple because it's the Garden of Eden. And they're just in this perfect paradise managed by the AI until it goes wrong, and it's so ahead of its time in terms of predicting that potential outcome — which I think Waze has proven, like, we can literally forget how to navigate because of Waze, and that's just a fact now. So I think, you know, Star Trek was at its best when it was actually predicting real futures that nobody else was touching in the media at all. And, you know, as a young person watching these things, you can say, I can totally see how that's going to happen. And so that's my favorite episode, because there were several that dealt with this issue, but that was the first.

Yeah. And as Alex said, you know, the moral elements it dealt with back in the 60s were extraordinary. Um, all right.

Every episode was a morality play, and TNG to some extent as well. It was great. Star Trek lost that. If you've watched — if you've — so I don't care whether this is perceived as dumping on recent Star Trek. I'm the hugest Star Trek fan. Star Trek has lost the original moralizing vision of the original series. If you've seen some of the recent movies or television shows, it's an action show. It needs to go back to basics.

I agree with you there, Alex. You can't really — I know. Um, I suppose Mirror, Mirror from the original series, where they have the alternate universe and Spock in a goatee. Um, goes something goatee. Yeah. Well, sometimes. Um, but yeah, I think it was always interesting to kind of see the flip reverse side of things. As you said, morality is kind of at the core of the original series of Star Trek, and pushing it in various directions. And this one was one of the more obvious ones. It's like, hey, look, it's an evil universe, but at the same time, you know, them not getting dilithium crystals because they use it for war and others. You see the knock-on effects of things like that.

Thank you. Salim, wrap us up here. Uh, for me it was uh season 2, episode 24. It was called uh The Ultimate Computer. And basically they have an AI that goes rogue and starts to automate uh the ship. And the aim is benevolent initially — can we run the ship using an AI or computer, in that framing? And Kirk is worried because it's about to take his job. Uh, but then the thing starts going rogue and making its own decisions, and uh it's incredibly relevant for today's world, right? Because it's this theme of autonomy, automation versus transformation. Um, and here you have this enormous stress of the — they've introduced an AI, but the AI is redoing everything to match its thinking, and this is exactly what we're living through today. So for me, that's the most relevant. I mean, prophetic, 60 years ago.