Sixty years ago today, Star Trek debuted with an episode called "The Man Trap," where James T. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise had to deal with a shape-shifting monster that kills people by extracting salt from their bodies. A TV viewer on September 8, 1966 would be forgiven for watching that one and being skeptical that this show would exist in some form so many decades later, and that there would be close to 950 episodes and more than a dozen movies in the franchise(*).
(*) The math gets fuzzy on the exact totals, due to things like how two-part episodes are counted based on how they originally aired versus how they're available now, how/if to count the quite bad Section 31 straight-to-streaming movie, etc.
Such a viewer would be especially forgiven for looking at "The Man Trap," a perfectly serviceable bit of space horror from veteran sci-fi writer George Clayton Johnson(*), and envisioning the sheer breadth of the kinds of Star Trek stories that would follow it.
(*) Have I mentioned I wrote a book about Rod Serling, who hired Johnson as one of the core writers for The Twilight Zone?
Among the wonderful things about Star Trek, first under the stewardship of series creator Gene Roddenberry, and then as many other hands took their turns steering the ship, is that it can be almost anything. Yes, there are theoretically some defaults, but even they're flexible. The stories take place centuries into the future — except when they occur in our present, or past. They involve a crew on a starship — except when the whole show (like Deep Space Nine) is primarily set on a space station, or (like Starfleet Academy, which has shown you can do Star Trek as a YA drama) at a school. There are usually aliens or robots involved, but not always. (Or, at least, sometimes they're incidental at most to the plot.) Roddenberry's pitch of the show to NBC as "Wagon Train to the stars" wildly undersold what Star Trek would be. It was never a pure anthology, because each show has continuing characters. But in terms of tone, structure, and theme, Star Trek can go to places that no one would have imagined from watching "The Man Trap."
Alan Sepinwall
There can be downsides to this elasticity, as we've seen in recent seasons of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. What began as "What if we just told classic Mission of the Week Star Trek stories again?" has become, "What if every episode was a different genre?," to increasingly diminished returns. But that's as much a function of shorter streaming seasons as it is the middling execution of these pastiches. In an average season of Sixties or Nineties Trek, there were so many episodes that a film noir or comedy story played as a refreshing palate cleanser rather than a frustrating waste of an hour that could have leaned into a particular series' strengths. But on the whole, this adaptability is itself one of Star Trek's superpowers.
I could try to celebrate the anniversary with a ranking of the best 10, 20, 50, whatever total you prefer, episodes of Star Trek. But there are some Trek shows I've only watched partially, or barely at all. Besides, the most interesting thing to me is to consider the many different types of episodes — highlighting one or more great examples of each type — and the ways they exemplify all that Star Trek can do, say, and be.