Sic Transit...

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Title:	Sic Transit...
Creator:	Kay Anderson
Date(s):	June 1968
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
Topic:
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Sic Transit... is a 1968 Star Trek: TOS essay by Kay Anderson.

The title's reference: "sic transit gloria mundi" from the Latin and means "thus passes the glory of the world." It expresses regretful recognition that something has or is about to end, as all things eventually do.

Some Topics Discussed

• the end of the original Star Trek: TOS series
• what the sound stages looked like after the show's cancellation
• the appeal of the character of Spock
• the appeal of the show in general
• the show's special effects and music
• Star Trek as a show that stood out from other television programming

From the Essay

STAR TREK is gone from sight at Paramount almost as if it had never been, I was on the lot early last week and when

my business was finished I went to pay a sentimental visit on whatever was left of ST. When Paramount Pictures Corporation was combined with Desilu Productions a couple of years ago, redundant soundstage numbers resulted. During the shooting hiatus this year the stages were renumbered to end the confusion, Thus not only is ST gone from soundstages 9 and 10, they themselves are now known as 31 and 32. LOVE AMERICAN STYLE is being filmed inside stage 9, which once housed the interior sets of the Enterprise. In there only two traces of ST remain, the maskings painted on the floor to mark where the sets of various shipboard areas were placed and one lone wastebasket marked STAR TREK. A few sets, primarily the engineering area, were scattered forlornly along an on-lot street, neatly wrapped in heavy plastic and waiting to be taken away to some final resting place in storage. Strangers are in the production offices and the dressing rooms once occupied by Starfleet officers now belong to MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE people, and the whole disappearance of ST seems suspiciously like an IMF plot to disavow our memories.

Indisputably ST's greatest attraction to the greatest number of people was through the individual appeal of the characters, primarily Spock. Leonard Nimoy is a striking-looking and very talented man, not to mention sexy, but I think there was more than that to the appeal of Spock. In this age of unisex Nimoy/Spock's masculinity is a welcome change. And in this time of the anti-hero Spock was a genuine hero...a good and admirable person. He had intelligence, authority and respect for the authority of others, dignity, reserve, tolerance, and control, all of which are admirable enough in human beings. But best of all he was all these things in the matrix of being a totally believable non-human being. Believable aliens abound in literature and exist vividly through the imagination, but somehow it seems that in the transliteration onto the tv or movie screen they suffer a sea-change into something undoubtedly strange, generally with a zipper up the back, Spock bore one of the finest makeup jobs I ever saw, but even without the elegant eartips and the slanted eyebrows, he was still a superb characterization of an alien. It showed in the way he talked, in the quiet feline way he moved I in the extraordinary care with which he handled even such commonplacities as a tape cartridge or writing stylus, in his unnerving calm, in the sketchy but evocative expressions that momentarily crossed his still face.

STAR TREK had one of the largest casts of regular continuing characters I've ever encountered. Six central characters appeared in almost every episode of the three year run, and Walter Koenig, as Chekov, was in most of the episodes of the second and third seasons. All these people were fleshed out into rounded characters whom viewers knew well enough that they could spot an out-of-character line from across the room. In addition many of the minor characters appeared in enough episodes over the seasons that they became familiar faces and recognizing them gave the feeling of getting to know members of a large but numbered crew.

ST had an esoteric and intellectual premise and format to present to a viewing public which, the Neilsen surveys insist, dotes on hillbilly comedy. People don't really want to think when they watch tv, I've come to believe. Where would the educational specials rate if they weren't also pretty travelogs? ST was heady stuff for tv, and it tried rather valiantly to please everyone. Perhaps this as much as anything else was what did it in. It presented enough top-rate science fiction to whet the appetites of fans for more, but unfortunately some of the best sf presented on the series was low in adventurous action, which other factions of the audience wanted. The show always had, from episode to episode, an uneven quality, giving us at best some of the finest sf I've ever seen in a visual medium, and at worst tales reminiscent of the heavy-handed OUTER LIMITS stories. But even at its least superb ST always had plenty for me to enjoy, if only the sets or visual effects or makeup and costuming, and personally I wouldn't have missed a minute of it.