Where No Man Has Gone Before

Did You Know?

• In 2013, Wired magazine ranked this episode one of the top ten episodes of the original television series.
• The episode was released on PAL-format LaserDisc in the United Kingdom as part of The Pilots collection, in April 1996.
• Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a 'B+' rating, describing it as "an awkward episode" but that "it's not without its charms."

Plot

The Enterprise, under Captain Kirk, is traveling toward the galaxy's edge on a survey mission. They discover a battered data recorder from the SS Valiant, a ship from Earth that vanished two centuries earlier. The recording is fragmented, but it indicates the Valiant was knocked off course by a magnetic space storm. The crew frantically consulted their computer for data on extrasensory perception.

The final moments of the recording suggest the Valiant's captain ordered the ship's self-destruction. Kirk decides to investigate, and the Enterprise crosses the galactic boundary. There, a strange energy barrier damages the ship's systems and warp drive, forcing a retreat. The barrier's effect kills nine crew members and knocks out helmsman Gary Mitchell and psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Dehner.

When Mitchell regains consciousness, his eyes glow silver, and he develops powerful psychic abilities. He grows arrogant and hostile, claiming to be godlike and using telepathy and telekinesis to enforce his will. Spock theorizes that the Valiant's crew experienced the same phenomenon and destroyed their ship to prevent the power from spreading. He advises Kirk that Mitchell may need to be killed before his abilities escalate, but Kirk angrily refuses.

Instead, Kirk accepts Spock's alternative plan to strand Mitchell on Delta Vega, a remote planet with an automated lithium cracking facility. The landing party attempts to confine him there, but Mitchell's powers have grown too strong. He kills navigator Lee Kelso by telekinetically strangling him, knocks out Kirk and Spock, and escapes with Dehner, who has now developed her own ESP. Kirk pursues them and appeals to Dehner's remaining humanity.

Before Mitchell can kill Kirk, Dehner attacks him with her powers, weakening him. Mitchell mortally wounds Dehner, but as he recovers, Kirk uses a phaser rifle to trigger a rock slide that kills Mitchell. Back aboard the Enterprise, Kirk logs that both Dehner and Mitchell died in performance of duty. He tells Spock he wants his friend's record to end well, adding, "He didn't ask for what happened to him."

Production and casting

In February 1965, NBC executives turned down the first Star Trek pilot, "The Cage." They had bought the show based on the pitch "Wagon Train to the stars," but felt the pilot didn't deliver the promised adventure and was "too cerebral" for a broad audience. Still, Desilu management, with Lucille Ball reportedly playing a key role, convinced NBC to keep the idea alive, and the network ordered a second pilot in March 1965. Gene Roddenberry drafted two story outlines: "The Omega Glory" and "Mudd's Women."

He wrote the teleplay for the first and handed the second to Stephen Kandel. Roddenberry also asked longtime colleague Samuel Peeples to come up with another idea. Peeples created the premise and the title "Where No Man Has Gone Before," and was given the assignment to write it. Roddenberry revised Peeples's script multiple times.

Peeples enjoyed working with Roddenberry, but after seeing the finished pilot, he liked his own original version better. There was a dispute over who thought up the title; Peeples insisted it was his, not Roddenberry's. Kandel fell ill and couldn't finish his script on time, so the other two were sent to NBC. The network chose "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as the pilot. "Mudd's Women" was later produced as the second regular episode, and "The Omega Glory" aired near the end of the second season.

Casting happened in June 1965. Jeffrey Hunter did not want to return as Captain Christopher Pike. Lloyd Bridges and Jack Lord were considered, but William Shatner got the role as the new captain, James Kirk. NBC demanded that the female second-in-command, Number One, be removed, and Science Officer Spock took on her emotionless personality.

The network also worried about Leonard Nimoy's "satanic" look and pushed to have him dropped. Roddenberry later said at conventions that he had enough leverage to save only one character, so he chose Spock. He joked that if he had saved Number One instead, he wouldn't have been able to marry the actress who played her—Majel Hudec, who later changed her name to Barrett and came back as Nurse Christine Chapel. In this pilot, Kirk's gravestone, made by Mitchell on the planet, reads "James R. Kirk," though the main series later used "James T. Kirk."

Original cut

Post-production for this episode hit a snag because Roddenberry was busy with another pilot called Police Story. It finally wrapped up in January 1966, and the episode went to NBC for approval, which came through the following month. That first version, labeled production number 02a, was different from the one that eventually aired on September 22, 1966 (production number 02b). For starters, each of its four acts had on-screen titles like "Act I" and "Act II," plus an epilogue.

Shatner’s opening narration was also much longer, and some scenes used different musical scores. To fit the standard 50-minute network broadcast slot with commercials, nearly five minutes of footage got cut. Interestingly, the public saw this original cut before the broadcast version—it was screened at the 24th World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 3, 1966, just ahead of Star Trek’s NBC premiere. The studio never kept a print of this original, and it was long considered lost.

Then in 2009, a German film collector found a copy and alerted CBS/Paramount. They released it as "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" – The Restored, Unaired Alternate Pilot Episode, included in the TOS season 3 Blu-ray box set.

Non-canonical related works

The story of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was turned into a short story by James Blish, appearing in the 1972 Bantam collection Star Trek 8. It was also the second Bantam Fotonovel, released in 1977. The Galactic Barrier from this episode later gets linked to the Q Continuum in Peter David's 1994 novel Q-Squared and Greg Cox's 1998 trilogy Star Trek: The Q Continuum. Gary Mitchell never reappears in the television series.

However, several novels place him in earlier adventures: Michael Jan Friedman's My Brother's Keeper, Vonda N. McIntyre's Enterprise: The First Adventure, and Margaret Wander Bonanno's Strangers from the Sky. The 2005 novel Harbinger, part of the Star Trek: Vanguard series, takes place right after the episode and shows a troubled Kirk reflecting on his friend's death. Friedman's Stargazer book The Valiant introduces two characters who claim descent from the crew of the Valiant.

In the alternate timeline of the 2006-2008 mini-series Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, Gary Mitchell is played by Daamen J. Krall. Actor Gary Lockwood reprised his role as Gary Mitchell in the 2024 short film 765874 – Unification, where he uses his godlike powers to help Kirk reunite with Spock during Kirk's final moments.