Cast
- William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk, commanding officer of the USS Enterprise
- Leonard Nimoy as Lieutenant Commander/Commander Spock, the ship's science officer and second-in-command. Spock is the only character from the original pilot to appear in the aired series.
- DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, the Enterprise's chief medical officer. He also carries a rank of Lt. Commander during the series.
- James Doohan as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, chief engineer and third-in-command
- Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, communications officer
- George Takei as Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, helmsman
- Walter Koenig as Ensign Pavel Chekov, a navigator introduced in the show's second season
- Grace Lee Whitney as Janice Rand, the captain's yeoman. Although Rand appears in several promotional images for the show, she stopped appearing midway through the first season.
- Majel Barrett as Nurse Christine Chapel. Barrett, who played the ship's first officer in "The Cage", also voiced the ship's computer.
It was intended that Sulu's role be expanded in the second season, but owing to Takei's part in John Wayne's The Green Berets, he only appeared in half the season, with his role being filled by Walter Koenig as the relatively young, mop-topped Russian navigator Ensign Pavel Chekov. When Takei returned, the two had to share a dressing room and a single episode script. The two appeared together at the Enterprise helm for the remainder of the series. There may be some truth to the unofficial story that the Soviet Union's newspaper Pravda complained that there were no Soviets among the culturally diverse characters. This was seen as a personal slight to that country since the Soviet Russian Yuri Gagarin had been the first man to make a spaceflight. Gene Roddenberry said in response that "The Chekov thing was a major error on our part, and I'm still embarrassed by the fact we didn't include a Russian right from the beginning." However, documentation from Desilu suggests that the intention was to introduce a character into Star Trek with more sex appeal to teenaged girls. Walter Koenig noted in the 2006 40th anniversary special of Star Trek: The Original Series that he doubted the rumor about Pravda, since Star Trek had never been shown on Soviet television. It has also been claimed that the former member of The Monkees, Davy Jones, could have been the model for Mr. Chekov.
In addition, the series frequently included characters (usually security personnel wearing red uniforms) who are killed or injured soon after their introduction. So prevalent was this plot device that it inspired the term "redshirt" to denote a stock character whose sole purpose is to die violently in order to demonstrate the dangerous circumstances facing the main characters.
Read more about this topic: Star Trek: The Original Series
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