Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • The Cage, The Menagerie

    The Cage was the first of two pilot episodes produced for The Original Series. It was filmed at MGM Studios in December 1964 and delivered to NBC’s executive offices in New York in February 1965. It was first shown to the public at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland.

  • Star Trek: First Contact

    It is the seventh decade of the twenty-first century, our future and Star Trek’s past. Only an act of great heroism can save a dying civilization. A global nuclear war, the Third World War, instigated by the bellicose Eastern Coalition (ECON), has taken place in the fifties. We are ten years into its aftermath.

  • How the Transporter Really Works

    Over the decades, the copious science fictional “explanations” of how Star Trek’s beaming technology really works, or might some- day be able to work, have undergone dis- cernable paradigm shifts. The original notion was that of the dematerialization-rematerialization, matter-to-energy conversion and back physical transporter.

  • Darmok

    After Captains Picard and Dathon are transported to the isolated world’s surface, the Tamarians use an ionospheric particle scattering field to block all attempts by Enterprise-D technicians to beam Picard back from the planet, and to make any communication with the two men impossible.

  • Arena

    In the pre-Klingon and pre-Borg Original Series episode Arena, Captain Kirk is involved in a one-on-one duel against an antagonistic and radical alien Other, the Gorn commander. The episode is entitled Kaijû Gôn tono Taiketus, or Duel With the Monster Gorn, in Japanese dubbing.

  • Amok Time

    On their way to Altair VI (in the solar system visited by Forbidden Planet’s United Planets CruiserC57D) to represent the Federation at a postwar presidential inauguration on a rebuilding world, the Enterprise senior officers must contend with an increasingly irritable and violent Mr. Spock.