Alternate Gerrolds by David Gerrold Read Free Book Online

don’t know and I’m not going to speculate. Dorothy Fontana takes over as producer, and surprise, the show just gets better. Meanwhile, The Untouchables gets cancelled and Jack Kennedy is out of work again.
    The timing was everything here. See, Shatner and Nimoy were feuding. Not only feuding, they were counting each other’s lines. Nimoy threatens to quit. Shatner does too. They’re both demanding the same thing: “Whatever he gets, I get.”
    Bobby agrees and fires both of them. He starts looking around for a new Captain.
    He doesn’t have to look very far.
    In hindsight, yes. It was the perfect decision. John F. Kennedy as Captain Jack Logan of the starship Enterprise . The man was perfect. Who wouldn’t want to serve under him? But—at the time, who knew? It sounded crazy. Here’s this old fart who’s career is clearly fading fast—why cast him in Star Track?
    And Jack didn’t want to do it. By now, he hated science fiction so much, he once took a poke at Harlan Ellison at the Emmy Awards. He didn’t understand it. He had to have it explained to him. Once, he even called down to the research department and asked, “Just where is this planet Vulcan, anyway?”
    And that was the other thing—Jack had already seen how Shatner got upstaged by the Vulcan. To him, it was the goddamn Martians all over again. The man was almost fifty—he looked great, but he was terrified of becoming a has-been, of ending up like Ronald Reagan.
    But Bobby had a vision. He was good at that stuff. He promised to restructure the show in Jack’s favor. Jack agreed—very reluctantly—to listen. That’s enough for Bobby. He calls in the staff of the show and says my brother wants to be captain. “Make it so.”
    I gotta tell you. That was not a happy meeting. I’d just come aboard as story editor, so I just sat there and kept my mouth shut. Harlan argued a little, but his heart wasn’t in it. Maybe he was afraid he’d get punched
again. He didn’t like the Kennedys very much. Dorothy did most of the talking for us—but Bobby didn’t want to hear. He listened, maybe he just pretended to listen, but when everything had been said, he just answered, “Do it my way.” We were not happy when we left.
    For about three days, we were pissed as hell, because we’d finally gotten the show settled into a good solid working formula, and then suddenly— poof! —Roddenberry, Nimoy and Shatner are gone, and Bobby Kennedy is giving orders. But then it sort of hit us all at the same time. Hey, this is an opportunity to reinvent Star Track. So we made a list of all the shit that bothered us—like the captain always having to get the girl, the captain always beaming down to the planet, that kind of stuff, and we started thinking about ways to fix it.
    We knew Jack couldn’t do the action stuff believably. He was already gray at the temples, and his back problems were legendary on the set of The Untouchables, so we knew we were going to have to introduce a younger second lead to pick up the action. That’s where the Mission Team came from. So Jack wouldn’t have to do it.
    We really had no choice. Jack had to be an older, more thoughtful captain who stayed on the ship and monitored the missions by remote control. The Mission Team would be headed by the first officer. But this was perfect because it kept the captain in command at all times, and it also made it impossible for the first officer to become a sidekick, or a partner. Jack would be the undeniable star.
    We also figured we’d just about milked the Vulcan idea to death, so we eighty-sixed the whole Vulcan species and brought in an android to take Spock’s place as science officer. The android would be curious about humanity—kind of like an updated Pinocchio. The opposite of Spock; he wants to be human.
    Just as we were starting to get excited about the possibilities of the new format, Jack suggested adding families to the crew of the starship to attract a family audience.