Has Fred Freiberger been misblamed for Season 3 over the years?

Funny you should mention that. I was thinking the tone of the narrator reminded me of a training video from the human resources department!

 

Took me a while to get to this video. Actually it's quite good! I love how well it mimics the type of directing and camera work you'd see on 1999. The moving camera in the Eagle cockpit was actually a nice touch. There's also very little ambiguity of story considering without dialogue, it's essentially a silent movie.

My favorite little touch has to be the floppy antenna on the moon buggy.

All that, and even a light-hearted joke ending that actually made me chucle!

 

I remember forcing myself to sit through SPECTRE and finding it hard to believe that with such a great couple of principalcast members, it could be so flat and almost unwatchable.

I think QUESTOR shot its wad for a different reason than having already resolved Questor's nature (his incompleteness actually does work to make the characters complementary if it went to series); the series wouldn't have had John Vernon's character, which is what gave the thing its genuine complexity and depth (I've always thought that character was nearly entirely Coon's.)

Having bought QUESTOR on DVD recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Vernon character is just as good as I remembered (I pretty much remembered the dialog at the end verbatim, even though it had been decades.)

I suppose that they could have had a similar character in the series, but I can't imagine him having the ethical weight. I absolutely see Vernon's perspective about man, and I always tear up when he takes the homing device (have watched the last 10 minutes about 5 times already since buying it.)

 

True, it is strange that the movie cuts off much of what would've been interesting to see in a series. But it does make it more satisfying as a movie than a lot of TV pilots, because it has more closure.

 

Well, let's not forget that it wasn't always the case that pilots were aired. Had the show been picked up it's possible the pilot would have never aired, especially if it contradicted the series to follow.

 

Not in this case, because The Questor Tapes was a "backdoor" pilot, designed to work as both a standalone TV movie and a pilot for an ongoing series. That way, if the series didn't go forward, the expense of the pilot would not be wasted, because it could still be aired and syndicated as a movie, which it was. So it was always going to be aired. This is how all of Roddenberry's '70s pilots were done. Other notable '70s series like The Six Million Dollar Man and The Incredible Hulk also began as TV movies (2-3 movies, in fact) before debuting as weekly series.

Indeed, TQT was picked up as a series before the pilot aired, but it aired anyway. It fell through because Roddenberry had a falling out with Universal and NBC about the direction for the series. They wanted to drop Mike Farrell's character, and -- yes -- to disregard the ending of the movie. Roddenberry refused, so the deal fell through. They may have been right about the latter, but Roddenberry was right about the former: the show needed the Questor-Jerry relationship.

 

B.J. Hunnicutt was really good for M*A*S*H. I think TV got the better bargain, as it was.

 

Yeah, but Roddenberry was entitled to fight for the good of his show, not some other show that would benefit from his loss. The Questor-Jerry relationship was the heart of the movie. It had the potential to be as compelling a pairing as Kirk and Spock. I can't believe NBC (or Universal?) wanted to get rid of it.

 

You know, I'm not saying that the behind-the-scenes info that we have on The Questor Tapes is false (I mean, how would I know, right?), but we already know that Roddenberry's version of events with respect to, how do I put it, some of the other shows he's worked on are at least somewhat dodgy. Given that we're talking about something that arguably would have sabotaged the premise of the show, I'd like to understand more fully what the sources are for the narrative. Because it sure sounds incredible.

 

Actually this information doesn't come from Roddenberry, for the most part. There's a great article with interviews with all the major decision-makers which unfortunately went offline five years ago, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20081121211450/http://www.retrovisionmag.com/questor_tapes.htm

So that's confirmation from multiple people, including the very person whose idea it was to drop Jerry and change the ending.

I think Rhodes was shortsighted there. You could say that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy make one perfect person among them, complementing one another's weaknesses, but that doesn't mean it was impossible to put them in jeopardy or conflict.

 

Wow, thanks! Just to clone The Fugitive, huh? Well, The Incredible Hulk was that, and I guess, in the Hulk, Frank Price got a successful Fugitive clone.

 

True that. I didn't recall they'd aired the pilot after deciding to pick up the series. One wonders if they'd have ultimately changed Questor's background since they'd "spoiled" it in the TV movie.

 

As I said, they would've disregarded the movie's ending. Whether that meant just having Questor still not know his origins or having those origins change, though, is unclear.

Although we have a precedent, or maybe a postcedent: TNG's Data (who was, of course, based on Questor) was originally going to have been built by advanced aliens who'd used him as a sort of "ark" for the memories of the human colonists on the world where he was found, but the series quickly disregarded that origin in favor of the whole Noonien Soong angle, and the stored-memories angle was ignored except in "Silicon Avatar" where it was retconned as just storing the colonists' journals and such. So maybe Questor's origins would also have been changed in the series, if they'd gone ahead with the revised plan.

It's worth noting that The Six Million Dollar Man's pilot movie was contradicted in a number of ways by the sequel movies and weekly series, rendering it out of continuity. In the pilot, Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin) is the head of the bionics project instead of Oscar Goldman (which is strange, since it was Goldman in the original novel the film was based on), and Steve is a civilian astronaut instead of the Air Force colonel he was in the series. Also, Barbara Anderson's character, a nurse whom Steve falls in love with while he's rehabilitating, is replaced by a different character and actress in a second-season episode that reflects back on the events of Steve's origins. So while the same basic story was still assumed to have occurred, a number of the details, including the identities of two of the key figures, were changed.

 

I"m pretty sure there's a STARLOG interview with Richard Colla (and one in some unauthorized Trek book too) that covers GALACTICA and QUESTOR, including some mention of Nimoy for Questor and how THAT fell through (GR!!!) ... I don't know if it is part of the online STARLOG archive or not, but maybe that would shed a bit of light (the GR version on INSIDE STAR TREK is all about him wanting the robot to sleep with Dana Wynter and the network not letting him, which sounds like all the GR stories to me.)

 

I found a scan of a Colla interview by Edward Gross in Starlog #137 (an issue I still have, by the way) that has two paragraphs about Questor:

http://www.byyourcommand.net/cylongallery/displayimage.php?album=1306&pid=24940#top_display_media

He basically just says he chose directing Questor over doing The Six Million Dollar Man because he thought the former had more of a message, that quality is no guarantee of popularity, that it was revisiting Spock/Kirk themes of intellect vs. emotion, and that he liked doing it and was sorry it didn't get picked up. Nothing about Nimoy or the network/studio politics.

I can't find any other Colla interviews in Starlog.

 

Hmm. Then I'm guessing it might in I AM SPOCK. I know that in one of these interviews Colla talks about GR's THE GOD THING, and provides a more complete view of that story than I've heard anywhere else.
...

I just checked around and according to trekweb, Ed Gross' STAR TREK THE LOST YEARS has the Colla interview about THE GOD THING.

 

I recall seeing Spectre when it was first broadcast and liking it a lot. Of course I haven't seen it since.

 

I can't speak to what happened behind closed doors, but I think the following will be of interest to people here. I've been holding this for a blog post at some point in the future, but that could take ages, so I'll quote it here...

(From a February 1, 1968 letter from Roddenberry to Herb Schlosser at NBC; there are two versions of this letter at UCLA -- one has this paragraph and one has it edited out):

 

Oh, darn... I think I used to have that book, but I sold it off years ago, because I felt the Reeves-Stevenses' Phase II book covered most of the same ground and I was running out of shelf space.

 

Interesting. I seem to remember a bit in Yvonne Fern's Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation that referred to a series idea about what Roddenberry called "rational Hitlers," aliens effectively ruling Earth using fascist means, but to good ends; there would be specific exploration of whether "beneficient fascism" was possible, and whether humanity needed it. It sounded a little like what became Earth: Final Conflict, and I wonder if this might have been the same thing--though the implication in the passage I recall was that the aliens weren't villainous. (Unfortunately, I got rid of the book years ago, and can't confirm the details.)