Star Trek 2: Where No Man Has Gone Before (1966)

As the pilot episode that sold Star Trek to NBC, this show looks different in its costumes, design of sets, and casting, from any of the other originally broadcast episodes. It introduced William Shatner in the role of Captain James Kirk and elevated Leonard Nimoy as Science Officer Spock from the supporting role he'd had in the earlier, then-unaired first pilot ("The Cage") to co-starring status. It also established the beginning of the Kirk/Spock friendship, as well as the conflict between Spock's reliance on logic and Kirk's (and the rest of the crew's) dependence on emotion. DeForest Kelley was not yet in the cast (NBC resisted using him as the doctor because he'd played so many villainous roles up to that point), but James Doohan and George Takei were introduced in their roles as Scott and Sulu, respectively. The direction by James Goldstone was as good as it got on the series, dramatically taut and yet filled with a subtle sense of wonder about the story's deep space setting. The tone is a bit more humorless and the action somewhat darker and more violent than most of the series itself would display, Gary Lockwood's telekinetic strangling of Paul Carr's Lt. Kelso being particularly brutal for its time in a show aimed at a young audience, and the fight between Kirk and Mitchell unusually savage for its time as well. The most striking element of the episode, however, along with astonishingly fluid visual storytelling and excellent special effects (one does experience the illusion of being very far out in space), is the freshness of the portrayals by the cast members their first time out. They were still learning roles that hadn't developed and it is bracing to watch everyone at work under those circumstances, like watching a full-dress rehearsal for the series that followed. The only frustration is that Paramount has never seen fit to prepare a release of the original un-aired director's cut of this episode, which ran nearly 60 minutes. It had a lot more establishing footage of life aboard the starship and depicted more fully the doomed friendship between Kirk and Lt. Comm. Gary Mitchell (Gary Lockwood), as well as different, much more dramatic opening and closing title music (elements of which survive in the background score and credit music). That edition, which circulated illegally in the 1970s on 16 mm film, would be worth re-releasing. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide