The maiden voyage, the final frontier

In Star Trek month, I am reminded of The Original Series, which sparked such a frenzy when it was aired on Doordarshan in 1984, that crowds gathered before public TV sets at the appointed time on Sunday mornings

- Poonam Saxena

It was the first science-fiction show on Doordarshan. Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS; 1966-69), beamed into Indian living rooms in the same year as our first homegrown soap opera, Hum Log.

The show was set in the 23rd century, with the crew of the USS Enterprise on a five-year journey to "explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before".

As this team traversed the galaxy at warp speed, they encountered hostile aliens, longdead cultures, god-like beings. They timetravelled and fought deadly space battles.

The show was like nothing we'd seen before.

September is celebrated as Star Trek month because it is when TOS aired its first episode in the US, in 1966. It ran for three seasons and enjoyed modest success, but it became a pop-culture juggernaut after it was syndicated around the world.

That's when the show's core trio became global stars too, an unusual thing for television at the time. They were, of course, the charming, decisive, daring Captain Kirk (William Shatner), his cool and logical half-Vulcan first officer, Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and the ship's skilled but irascible doctor, Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley).