Star Trek featured a range of female personalities, from the innocent Angelique Pettyjohn, to the cerebral Marianna Hill, to the coolly professional Majel Barrett, to the supersexual Yvonne Craig. And of course there’s everyone's favorite yeoman Janice Rand, wilting from Captain Kirk’s lack of attention. And then there’s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura. As played by Nichelle Nichols she was the only fully realized woman on the show, and the most fully realized character after Kirk and Spock. She was African and American, spoke Swahili, was reliable at her job, was self-secure enough to freely express wonder and fear, could fight with deadly ability, could sing and play music, could navigate the ship, make technical repairs, and helm the science station. This is one of the best promo photos of one of television’s most capable characters. It’s post-Star Trek, probably 1974. 

Above is a promo photo of American actor Leonard Nimoy. We’ve been working our way through the original Star Trek and last night just finished the episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” Watching the show for the first time since childhood, it’s easy to see now that Nimoy was the best part of it. Shatner is great in that cheesy way of his, but Nimoy is the center of the Trek universe. He was especially good when his purely logical Mr. Spock was allowed to show emotion. In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” while possessed by a cloud-like alien named Kollos who'd never occupied a physical form before, he waxed, “How compact your bodies are. And what a variety of senses you have. This thing you call language though—most remarkable. You depend on it for so very much. But is any one of you really its master? But most of all, the aloneness. You are so alone. You live out your lives in this shell of flesh. Self-contained. Separate. How lonely you are. How terribly lonely.” Star Trek was greater than the sum of its parts. It was escapism, but it managed stunning insights into the human condition. Leonard Nimoy was often the conduit. He died today in Bel-Air, California of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease aged eighty-three.

One good Star Trek femme fatale deserves another, so here’s Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Janice Rand during Trek’s first season in 1966. Whitney, whose character harbored an unrequited (perhaps) lust for Captain Kirk, was unceremoniously fired from the show when the producers decided Kirk needed to have a new love interest each week. Since Uhura was a major character (and could fly the ship in an emergency), and Nurse Chapel was married in real life to creator Gene Roddenberry, Whitney got the axe. She described herself as incredibly bitter over the decision, but bridges were mended when she appeared in the first Trek motion picture in 1979. Above she’s in character as Kiki the Cossack from the great Billy Wilder comedy Irma la Douce, 1963.

We recently acquired every episode of the original Star Trek and Marianna Hill is just one of dozens of beautiful guest stars who appeared on the show. She was in the episode “Dagger of the Mind” playing the character Dr. Helen Noel, and later went on to guest on other television shows. She also had roles in The Godfather Part II, Medium Cool, and El Condor (memorably nude, FYI), and was also in the amazing Blood Beach, which we discussed a while back. She was born Marianna Schwarzkopf but overcame that nicely. The above shot of her is probably from around 1968, and the photo below is from 1966.

Curt Siodmak’s sci-fi classic Donovan’s Brain, first published in 1942, is a story of scientific experimentation gone terribly wrong: body dies, brain lives, scientist communicates with brain, brain takes control of scientist and makes him do horrible things. You already know this tale because it’s been recycled everywhere from Star Trek to The Man with Two Brains, but the German-born Siodmak’s first swipe at the theme is still tops. Highly recommended. The paperback version you see above appeared from Bantam in 1950 with uncredited, but very effective cover art. 

Publicity shot of American actress Yvonne Craig as Marta the slave girl from the Star Trek episode “Whom Gods Destroy”, demonstrating a primitive human dance called the Vogue. Craig turned seventy-two yesterday. 

Promo photo of William Shatner on the set of the seminal television series Star Trek, 1967. 

Science fiction always gets the future wrong. Or at least, it always gets the dates wrong. 2001: A Space Odyssey—sorry, haven’t seen a spinning bicycle wheel space station yet. Space 1999—we’re ten years past due on that sprawling moon base. And don’t even get us started on George Orwell’s 1984—we’re so far away from being a constantly monitored culture of brainwashed warmongers it’s positively laughable… Um, anyway, the original Star Trek series was set in like the twenty-third century or something, so its predictions still have a shot at coming true. Above and below are assorted matte paintings showing what that future will look like. Beam us up.

Angelique Pettyjohn as Shahna, in the Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” 1968. Pettyjohn went on to star in several x-rated films.