Worldbuilding in Season 1

[Golbolco]

I recently completed my first watch through of TOS's first season.

What I am immediately struck by is how humanocentric the first season is; to some extent I can accept that there were budget constraints in the 1960s, but with so many aliens in Star Trek's setting being identical or near-identical to Humanity, my basic assumption is that they really are all humans.

On top of humans making up the majority of encounters including first contacts (which are actually rather rare in Season 1, despite the intro), there is a significant presence of Earth. When we learn about the outposts at the Romulan Neutral Zone, they are Earth Outposts. The Enterprise is a United Earth Starship under the United Earth Space Probe Agency, which I assume is just the official name for Starfleet. When we first hear about the Federation, which I think is only mentioned in two or three episodes towards the latter half of the season, I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that it is a nation made up of human-settled worlds and headed by Earth.

That brings us to Vulcan: I'm not sure when the Vulcans are mentioned to have been the first contact between Humanity and another race, but I don't think it's the first season unless I overlooked something. Indeed, I think it's possible that Vulcan was intended to have entered the Federation somewhat late. McCoy makes a sarcastic comment about Vulcan having been conquered in Conscience of the King; I could take this as a throwaway joke were it not for the fact that later in Court Martial, Kirk references having participated in a "Vulcanian expedition." What kind of expedition? Is Vulcan not nearby to Earth and a close ally? Was Vulcan's conquest by the Federation so recent that Kirk was there? Does that mean that Spock was born before Vulcan had joined the Federation?

From my point of view, it seems like the message of the first season is that as soon as Humanity made it to space they became heavily expansionist, butted heads with Romulans and later the Gorn and Klingons, and conquered a nearby alien race stated to be cool-tempered and peaceful compared to their own expansionist past.

Does anyone else have any observations about how the worldbuilding in early Trek is significantly different from later stories?

 

[Warped9]

They were basically flying by the seat of their pants in the beginning. There was little to no worldbuilding when the show started production. Later Treks all started with a fair amount of worldbuilding already established.

Nowhere in TOS is it established the Vulcans are Earth’s first alien contact. Fans just assumed it given 40 Eridani (the most accepted assumption of being the Vulcan home star system) is only about 16 ly. from Earth.

Neither is it established that Spock is the first Vulcan in Starfleet or that he is the only alien aboard the Enterprise. Indeed later in Season 2 we learn there are indeed other Vulcans in Starfleet and TAS will establish other aliens serve aboard the Enterprise.

As the OP has noted the more familiar Trek universe comes to light in the latter half of Season 1 where they were trying to be more consistent in their worldbuilding references.


I would add there is a subtext in TOS that suggests the Federation might be only a few decades old, maybe no more than about fifty years. This contradicts what TNG would later claim that the UFP was formed in the mid 22nd century, or a century before the events of TOS.

 

[Yorktown1701]

They were basically flying by the seat of their pants in the beginning. There was little to no worldbuilding when the show started production. Later Treks all started with a fair amount of worldbuilding already established.

Nowhere in TOS is it established the Vulcans are Earth’s first alien contact. Fans just assumed it given 40 Eridani (the most accepted assumption of being the Vulcan home star system) is only about 16 ly. from Earth.

Neither is it established that Spock is the first Vulcan in Starfleet or that he is the only alien aboard the Enterprise. Indeed later in Season 2 we learn there are indeed other Vulcans in Starfleet and TAS will establish other aliens serve aboard the Enterprise.

As the OP has noted the more familiar Trek universe comes to light in the latter half of Season 1 where they were trying to be more consistent in their worldbuilding references.


I would add there is a subtext in TOS that suggests the Federation might be only a few decades old, maybe no more than about fifty years. This contradicts what TNG would later claim that the UFP was formed in the mid 22nd century, or a century before the events of TOS.

Agreed. First season Star Trek very much feels as if the Federation is new and many discoveries are still being made. Perhaps the space-faring species had all explored nearby solar systems and set up colonies, which, now that the Federation exists, they are decolonizing - much as had been happening under the new United Nations. TOS reflects its era in many ways, and this is another, perhaps more subtle way, it was doing it. TOS is also reflecting much of the science fiction it's drawn from, which often had Earth setting up colonies in other solar systems. There's even a hint that the Federation is relatively new in"Whom Gods Destroy", when Kirk tells Garth that the Federation had made he and Spock 'brothers'.

This also makes sense in terms of storytelling: TOS was meant to have the Enterprise out on the frontier, where communications with Starfleet could take days or weeks, even with subspace radio, meaning Kirk represented the Federation himself and had to make decision accordingly. This is much like 19th century ship Captains of British and other vessels, far from home and cut off from any communication with home, who had to make decisions the same way. This suggests that the Federation wasn't that old and could be a small organization on an interstellar scale.

 

[Golbolco]

Nowhere in TOS is it established the Vulcans are Earth’s first alien contact. Fans just assumed it given 40 Eridani (the most accepted assumption of being the Vulcan home star system) is only about 16 ly. from Earth.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the (fanon) detail of Vulcan orbiting 40 Eridani preceded the (fanon) detail of Vulcans being Earth's first contact. When did each of these facts begin circulating, and when were each of these facts made canonical?

I would add there is a subtext in TOS that suggests the Federation might be only a few decades old, maybe no more than about fifty years. This contradicts what TNG would later claim that the UFP was formed in the mid 22nd century, or a century before the events of TOS.

I'm curious about this one, because I sort of feel that the timeline for Trek is stretched in some places. I have some old RPG and strategy game guides, and they generally date the founding of the Federation to very shortly after first contact with Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar. That's a far cry from ENT delaying the founding of the Federation to a century after first contact. I have yet to see Journey to Babel or most of Season 2 of TOS, so I guess my view of the worldbuilding's progression is incomplete.

 

[Warped9]

In “Journey To Babel” we see races, such as the Vulcans, Andorians and Tellerites, having some sort of latent tension or antagonism between them. Might this mean the Federation is still in its early years and still not one big happy family? Then again even within a large scale alliance there can still remain conflicting interests.

In “Whom Gods Destroy” Kirk’s remarks also hint the Federation might not be that old.

And then there is the earlier references in “Balance Of Terror” to the Earth/Romulan war, suggesting this conflict predates the Federation. And that is reinforced later in TNG and ENT.

Fans have long assumed that Vulcans, Andorians, Tellerites as well as humans were the founding members of the Federation. They assumed that because those are the distinct races we saw. But nowhere in TOS is that actually established.

One thing we can reasonably assume is that there was always meant to be a lot more to the TOS universe than what they could afford (or manage) to show onscreen. They could only really reference things they could not actually show.


It could also be that when Roddenberry was developing Star Trek his initial general concept was for it to be Earth centric with no star spanning alliance firmly conceived. Later contributors such as Gene Coon put forth the idea of the Federation and Starfleet which fit Roddenberry’s initial concept better of humanity moving out peacefully into the galaxy.

TOS also suggests we made it out there on our own. Thats why I have long disliked and rejected the FC and ENT assertions of a devastated Earth with the Vulcans nursemaiding use into the galaxy.

 

[Christopher]

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the (fanon) detail of Vulcan orbiting 40 Eridani preceded the (fanon) detail of Vulcans being Earth's first contact. When did each of these facts begin circulating, and when were each of these facts made canonical?

40 Eridani was first proposed as Vulcan's primary star in James Blish's adaptation of "Tomorrow is Yesterday" in Star Trek 2, published in February 1968. It has never been made explicitly canonical, but Enterprise's fourth season very strongly implied it by establishing that Vulcan is 16 light years from Earth, which makes 40 Eri the most likely of a small number of candidates.

The idea of Vulcan as first contact was made canonical in Star Trek: First Contact. The earliest instance of it I'm aware of was in the 1987 novel Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno, which (much like "Carbon Creek" decades later) posited a secret Vulcan contact decades before the official first contact with Alpha Centauri (from the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology version of Federation history).

Fans have long assumed that Vulcans, Andorians, Tellerites as well as humans were the founding members of the Federation. They assumed that because those are the distinct races we saw. But nowhere in TOS is that actually established.

This developed in two stages. Franz Joseph Schnaubelt's Star Fleet Technical Manual established the founding nations of the UFP as the United Nations of Earth, the Planetary Confederation of 40 Eridani, the Star Empire of Epsilon "Indii" (typo for Indi), the United Planets of 61 Cygni, and the Alpha Centauri Concordium of Planets. These were all implicitly multi-world political bodies that merged into a larger one, and from their iconography in the book, it seems clear that the author intended them all to be human-founded nations except for 40 Eri, the only one whose flag and seal didn't have Earthly writing or imagery (implicitly following Blish's precedent).

A couple of years later, the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual by Eileen Palestine, Geoffrey Mandel, et al. explicitly identified 40 Eri as Vulcan's home star, as well as assigning Epsilon Indi to the Andorians and 61 Cygni to the Tellarites, since they were the main alien Federation members seen in "Journey to Babel." So fandom took those two sources and interpreted Earth, Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Alpha Centauri as the founding worlds.

It could also be that when Roddenberry was developing Star Trek his initial general concept was for it to be Earth centric with no star spanning alliance firmly conceived. Later contributors such as Gene Coon put forth the idea of the Federation and Starfleet which fit Roddenberry’s initial concept better of humanity moving out peacefully into the galaxy.

Roddenberry was building on a common precedent in the science fiction of the era, an Earth-centric human empire or federation expanding into the galaxy. The commonness of this idea was largely due to the overarching influence editor John W. Campbell had on the SF of the '40s through the '60s. Campbell was a white supremacist who liked to see his politics presented allegorically in the fiction he published, with humans (invariably white and usually male) being smarter, more dynamic, and worthier than alien species and spreading Earth's manifest destiny to the stars. Fortunately, over time, ST embraced a more egalitarian model, though it was still stuck with the human-dominated crew it had started with.

Though it occurs to me to wonder how much the change to a multispecies Federation owes to the egalitarian values of its creators, and how much it owes simply to Spock becoming the breakout character and the writers trying to cater to that popularity. If the most beloved character in the show was the alien-human hybrid, it made sense to play up the idea of human-alien cooperation as a good thing.

TOS also suggests we made it out there on our own. Thats why I have long disliked and rejected the FC and ENT assertions of a devastated Earth with the Vulcans nursemaiding use into the galaxy.

Except that's not what happened. FC only established that Vulcan helped Earth rebuild after WWIII, while ENT explicitly established that the Vulcans tried to impede humanity's expansion into space because they feared our aggressiveness, and we got out there despite them, not because of them.

 

[Greg Cox]

Watching early TOS, one gets the distinct impression that Vulcans are still fairly exotic and mysterious to humanity. Spock's Vulcan nature is a frequent source of curiosity and fascination to his crewmates, who often act as though they've never actually met a Vulcan before, while Spock is often called upon to explain various aspects of Vulcan culture and physiology to his companions (and the audience).

Decades later, this doesn't quite gibe with modern portrayals of humans and Vulcans having a long, complicated relationship dating back centuries, but all that world-building was still a generation or two away back in the sixties.

As for that weird line about Vulcan being conquered, I suspect it's a relic from the glory days of westerns, when Trek first aired. In very broad terms, Spock can seen as Tonto: the faithful native sidekick. So maybe the screenwriter automatically assumed that human pioneers had "conquered" the Final Frontier, including Vulcan? Just a theory.

 

[Christopher]

As for that weird line about Vulcan being conquered, I suspect it's a relic from the glory days of westerns, when Trek first aired. In very broad terms, Spock can seen as Tonto: the faithful native sidekick. So maybe the screenwriter automatically assumed that human pioneers had "conquered" the Final Frontier, including Vulcan? Just a theory.

Indeed, Leonard Nimoy played plenty of Native American characters in '60s TV, due to casting directors' belief that he looked "ethnic" enough to play a variety of ethnic groups. He also played a fair number of Asians, and the West certainly conquered or politically subjugated a number of East and South Asian nations.

It's occurred to me that "Balance of Terror" implies that Earth may have been the aggressor in the Earth-Romulan War. After all, if the Romulans only had "simple impulse" and not warp drive (as "Balance" claimed and later productions have retconned away), they could hardly have left their home system to conquer others within a reasonable amount of time. So humans must have come to them. Also, despite what the onscreen map depicted, the dialogue asserts that the Neutral Zone surrounds only the twin planets Romulus and Remus, so it's implicitly just a single star system that's interdicted from the rest of the galaxy.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

It seems obvious that the Romulans must have had SOME form of FTL drive. They couldn't have built an Empire without it!

As for Earth being the bad guys: The hell? This isn't the MU. We're not talking about the ing Terran Empire here.

 

[Warped9]

As much recognition as the Star Fleet Technical Manual and the Starfleet Medical Reference Manual get they were not strictly canon since much of what they asserted was not actually ever established onscreen during TOS’ run. Some of it would get accepted later in Trek feature films and television series.

 

[drt]

I would add there is a subtext in TOS that suggests the Federation might be only a few decades old, maybe no more than about fifty years. This contradicts what TNG would later claim that the UFP was formed in the mid 22nd century, or a century before the events of TOS.

There's additional subtext that humans established interstellar colonies and encountered aliens prior to the invention of warp drive.

I also had the impression from TOS/TAS that everything was farther apart and more sporadically populated than we got in the later productions.

These were all implicitly multi-world political bodies that merged into a larger one, and from their iconography in the book, it seems clear that the author intended them all to be human-founded nations except for 40 Eri, the only one whose flag and seal didn't have Earthly writing or imagery (implicitly following Blish's precedent).

How funny, I got the Technical and Medical manuals on the same day back in the 70s, so never really processed them as deriving from different sets of assumptions, therefore I always associated Andor and Tellar with Epsilon Indi and 61 Cygni. It used to bug me that the iconography in the Technical Manual for those two was so earth-centric, and it never occurred to me that FJ likely intended them to be human colonies.

That he never really indicated on any of his maps where Vulcan, Tellar, Andoria, etc. were from his point of view likely helped cement the Medical Manual's assignments. I wonder how things would be different today if the Technical Manual had located things differently (since it was arguably the more popular of the two)?

despite what the onscreen map depicted, the dialogue asserts that the Neutral Zone surrounds only the twin planets Romulus and Remus, so it's implicitly just a single star system that's interdicted from the rest of the galaxy.

Yeah, back when all we had was TOS/TAS, I always thought the Romulans were a minor power confined to a relatively small area of space (maybe 10-20 ly in diameter) pretty close to the Federation core worlds.

 

[Greg Cox]

And the Federation, circa TOS, generally seemed like a loose consortium of disparate worlds with their own ways of doing things, and who maybe didn't know each other all that well, as opposed to operating under one larger central authority, all subscribing to the same rules.

Heck, in "The Cloud Minders," Ardana is a Federation member but nobody outside the planet seems to have noticed their very stratified social system until the Enterprise has occasion to drop by and get a firsthand look at how exactly zenite is mined.

 

[Christopher]

I also had the impression from TOS/TAS that everything was farther apart and more sporadically populated than we got in the later productions.

That was true in TNG initially as well. The "small Federation" got started as DS9 developed over time. Deep Space 9 was initially meant to be on the remote frontier, but then they started doing these interstellar political arcs that required frequent commutes between DS9, Earth, Cardassia, Qo'noS, etc. within a short amount of time, and that required packing everything into a much smaller volume than had previously been intended.

How funny, I got the Technical and Medical manuals on the same day back in the 70s, so never really processed them as deriving from different sets of assumptions, therefore I always associated Andor and Tellar with Epsilon Indi and 61 Cygni. It used to bug me that the iconography in the Technical Manual for those two was so earth-centric, and it never occurred to me that FJ likely intended them to be human colonies.

Yeah, it was quite a few years before I realized it myself.

That he never really indicated on any of his maps where Vulcan, Tellar, Andoria, etc. were from his point of view likely helped cement the Medical Manual's assignments. I wonder how things would be different today if the Technical Manual had located things differently (since it was arguably the more popular of the two)?

Well, FJ probably chose those stars for the same reason Blish chose 40 Eri for Vulcan -- because they're reasonably close to Earth and reasonably plausible as the kind of stars that might support habitable planets. They're among the stars that are frequently used as inhabited systems in hard science fiction because they're plausible candidates.

However, canonical Trek has never paid much attention to realistic galactic geography. Season 1 of Enterprise clearly seems to assume that Vulcan and Andoria are considerably further away than those stars, though season 4's writers ignored that and put Vulcan at 40 Eri's distance.

 

[Ronald Held]

Perhaps it is still the case in the 2260's that Starfleet ships are mostly the same race?

 

[Maurice]

Later contributors such as Gene Coon put forth the idea of the Federation and Starfleet which fit Roddenberry’s initial concept better of humanity moving out peacefully into the galaxy.

If going through the production paperwork for the show has taught @Harvey and I anything it's that you can't conclude who conceived of what by who the credited writers are on a given episode. Roddenberry has both the non-interference directive and the law of parallel planetary evolution in his 1965 unfilmed second pilot version of "The Omega Glory" for instance. Roddenberry, Coon, Fontana, Justman were all suggesting things in various memos and script drafts, and they had meetings and conversations which were documented. As such nailing down who invented what detail is nearly impossible.

 

[Phaser Two]

Watching early TOS, one gets the distinct impression that Vulcans are still fairly exotic and mysterious to humanity. Spock's Vulcan nature is a frequent source of curiosity and fascination to his crewmates, who often act as though they've never actually met a Vulcan before, while Spock is often called upon to explain various aspects of Vulcan culture and physiology to his companions (and the audience).

Decades later, this doesn't quite gibe with modern portrayals of humans and Vulcans having a long, complicated relationship dating back centuries, but all that world-building was still a generation or two away back in the sixties.

As for that weird line about Vulcan being conquered, I suspect it's a relic from the glory days of westerns, when Trek first aired. In very broad terms, Spock can seen as Tonto: the faithful native sidekick. So maybe the screenwriter automatically assumed that human pioneers had "conquered" the Final Frontier, including Vulcan? Just a theory.

Greg, it's good to "see" you. Maybe I'm reading the wrong threads but I don't remember a post from you here in a while.

Your Spock-as-object-of-curiosity observation is spot on and something that has long nagged at me about S1. (S1 is actually my least favorite of the three despite some *masterful* episodes - I prefer the more finished product of S2/S3 and just don't seem to be bothered as much as most by the darker tone and missteps, actual and alleged, of S3.) The writers seemingly had a dilemma from the start. They needed to explain Spock to the audience, but without (thankfully) resorting to fourth wall breaks or clunky exposition ("as you know, Captain . . . "), they really had to make Spock a wonderment to his crewmates. Honestly, I think they did a pretty good job, and I hasten to point out that the problem is still present to varying degrees in the Vulcan Duology of S2. Thankfully, there's much less of this in S3, another reason why I like it so much. Vulcans seem much better integrated into the far more developed idea of the Federation by then. The Cloud Minders, Requiem for Methuselah, The Empath, All Our Yesterdays, Whom Gods Destroy, and Let That Be Your Last Battlefield all show some evidence of this. Even the Scalosians seem to have heard of Vulcans. And The Enterprise Incident - while serving as a personal irritant of mine - actually builds a lot of connective tissue between Vulcans and the Federation.

That's a great perspective on the "conquered" line, which is indeed weird. It's one of about five to ten lines of dialogue in Star Trek that I just ignore instead of attempting any analysis or rationalization. Which isn't bad for 79 episodes that aired starting almost 56 years ago.

If going through the production paperwork for the show has taught @Harvey and I anything it's that you can't conclude who conceived of what by who the credited writers are on a given episode. Roddenberry has both the non-interference directive and the law of parallel planetary evolution in his 1965 unfilmed second pilot version of "The Omega Glory" for instance. Roddenberry, Coon, Fontana, Justman were all suggesting things in various memos and script drafts, and they had meetings and conversations which were documented. As such nailing down who invented what detail is nearly impossible.

Amen to this. I've never understood how it has become an article of faith that Roddenberry did this, while Coon did that, etc. They were all collaborating heavily. I suspect there's some revisionism at work, perhaps because Roddenberry fell out of favor to some degree in later years. I completely get that, but casually attributing all the best script ideas to Coon and Fontana and all the best production innovations to Justman has never really resonated with me.

 

[Greg Cox]

Greg, it's good to "see" you. Maybe I'm reading the wrong threads but I don't remember a post from you here in a while.

Thanks! I mostly hang out in the Trek Lit section, but occasionally I poke my head (i.e. procrastinate) by poking my head in the other forums.

 

[Phaser Two]

Thanks! I mostly hang out in the Trek Lit section

Well . . . I mean . . . I guess I can see that . . .

Please pop around these parts more often!

 

[drt]

Well, FJ probably chose those stars for the same reason Blish chose 40 Eri for Vulcan -- because they're reasonably close to Earth and reasonably plausible as the kind of stars that might support habitable planets. They're among the stars that are frequently used as inhabited systems in hard science fiction because they're plausible candidates.

Oh, I realized why FJ chose 61 Cygnus and Epsilon Indi - I was probably familiar with possible habitable planet candidates from the front cover of Niven’s Tales of Known Space.

I was just speculating if he had assigned Andoria and Tellar to different places in the Technical Manual how that may have changed things down the road. However, since Mandel did both the Medical Manual and Maps, maybe those locations would have become cemented into Trek lore anyway.

 

[Phaser Two]

And the Federation, circa TOS, generally seemed like a loose consortium of disparate worlds with their own ways of doing things, and who maybe didn't know each other all that well, as opposed to operating under one larger central authority, all subscribing to the same rules.

Heck, in "The Cloud Minders," Ardana is a Federation member but nobody outside the planet seems to have noticed their very stratified social system until the Enterprise has occasion to drop by and get a firsthand look at how exactly zenite is mined.

And worse than that, Kirk says he was there before, although he didn't have much of a chance to look around. How Ardana got into the Federation remains a bit of a mystery.

I prefer going with Procyon as the location for Andoria, as ENT and the later series decided to do. It's a relatively prominent star, it's close, it was mentioned in the Spaceflight Chronology, and I like the idea of a star that many people know featuring in our sci-fi - like Canopus serving as Arrakis's star in Dune.