if not always by name. I also had vivid memories of a vicious, albino, ape-like creature with a single horn on its head. Instead of being terrified, I always waited for that being—which, I later learned, was called a mugatu and appeared in the 1968 episode, “A Private Little War”—to make a return appearance. I was consistently disappointed.
Until I was at least seven years old, I thought the Enterprise crew’s enemies were the “Clee-ons.”
Through the years I would catch late-night episodes from time to time, and I’d see the movies either in theaters or on VHS. When The Next Generation started, I watched the pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint” and set my VCR for the subsequent two or three episodes—but I couldn’t keep up. I’d drop in and out of the series. “Oh, Scotty’s in this episode? I’m in.” But by my early twenties, geekdom had become ridiculously tribal. Remember what I had said earlier about choosing a side? I chose Star Wars because I was, at best, a casual fan of the Trek series (I hadn’t even seen a single episode of Deep Space Nine during its entire initial run) and the movies were usually hit or miss. The Star Wars prequel trilogy became closer and closer to becoming a reality (mid-’90s at this point) and that was giving me all sorts of warm and fuzzy feelings that I just wasn’t getting from Trek.
But when Star Wars episodes I through III turned out to be…well, not so good, I realized that maybe there was a little room in my life for Trek. The J.J. Abrams films arrived at just the right time for that. Eventually, I binged some series episodes (including the aforementioned DS9) and realized that, in a lot of ways, Trek was essentially Cheers in space.
If there’s one thing that gives me hope for the future it’s that when so many genre properties get so much wrong about the role alcohol—or, at the very least, synthehol—plays in everyday life, Star Trek gets so much right.
Diplomacy
Let’s jump back to the tenth episode of the original series, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” which first aired on November 10, 1966. The Enterprise crew encounters a spinning, cube-shaped entity in deep space and they soon make contact with the imposing, bald, big-headed alien Balok, who seems anything but friendly. The alien informs them that the cube—which shadows every move the Enterprise makes—is just a warning. Next up: annihilation. Our fearless Federation explorers eventually end up in a standoff with Balok and, after a series of bluffs on either side, a delegation consisting of Kirk, Dr. Bones McCoy and a young, somewhat whiny Kirk-in-training named Dave Bailey (actor Anthony Call), is beamed aboard the enemy ship for a confrontation with Balok. Our heroes immediately learn that the frightening-looking being whom they thought was Balok, was, in fact a puppet. The real Balok had the body of a follicle-challenged child—seven-year-old Clint Howard, whose brother, Ron, was still trapped in Mayberry at the time and had yet to give him a cameo in just about every movie he would later direct (including 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story—see, we all CAN get along). It wasn’t young Clint’s voice we heard, however, as he was dubbed to sound like a grown-up. (Pretty good lip-synching job for a seven-year-old, though.)
And, as it turns out, Balok is a pretty nice guy. All of his warnings and challenges were just tests to determine the Enterprise’s true intentions. What he really yearns for are diplomatic relations with intelligent races from across the stars (his ship was completely crew-less, so he was probably quite lonely and bored). They sealed the deal over a punch bowl full of tranya, the traditional drink of Balok’s home world, poured into some rather funky glasses with wide, multi-sided stems.
The practice of forging diplomatic relations over booze is as old as booze itself. It’s also about as cross-cultural as traditions come. In China, for instance, dignitaries have been known to toast with baijiu, the country’s traditional spirit distilled from grain—mostly sorghum, combined with wheat, rice, barley, and whatever other cereals are available. It’s known for its rather…shall we say, assertive flavor.
When President Barack Obama hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe at a state dinner in 2015, the President toasted the visiting leader with sake (Dassai 23 Junmai Daiginjo, to be precise). And Russians look for any excuse to say “na zdorovie” with a shot of vodka. Diplomatic meetings are just one of those many occasions.
If Star Trek is any guide, then the custom of bridging cultures (and even galaxies) by sharing a glass or two of adult beverages will survive at least a few hundred more years. After all, it did correctly predict in the ’60s that we would be commanding our computers verbally, among other developments.
Tranya may have become a liquid symbol of finding common ground, but, in the real world, it’s been the source of ongoing debate for more than five decades.
There’s a bit of controversy over what the props team actually put in the bowl and the glassware. Clint Howard has claimed that it was grapefruit juice, which he actually hated; he had to work really hard not to betray that fact on screen. William Shatner, in his memoir, Star Trek Memories, remembers it being warm apricot juice with food coloring. To the naked eye, it resembled unfiltered apple juice, so there might be some truth to that.
While Anthony Call’s Bailey character would never again appear on Trek—the Enterprise leaves him with Balok as an ambassador—tranya would pop up again decades later. Jadzia Dax can’t get enough of it at Quark’s Bar on Deep Space Nine.
The 2015 edition of Tiki Oasis—an annual gathering of Polynesia-philes in San Diego, (see Chapter 12) featured a symposium titled “The Interstellar Tranya: Drinking the Good Life and Beyond” hosted by Rod Roddenberry, TV producer and son of Gene Roddenberry, along with tiki expert Jonathan Knowles and others. They presented an encore of the symposium at the Fiftieth Anniversary Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas a year later in an area deemed, what else, Quark’s Bar.
Dueling recipes emerged from that event in a nod to the conflicting reports of the five-decades-old original drink. One was grapefruit-forward and the other, apricot-forward. Both had rum. Lots of rum. These are tiki drinks, after all.
A Sense of Normalcy
The history of exploration is soaked in alcohol, and it’s reassuring to find that the Federation appears to have learned from the past. Long journeys have, for centuries, involved some kind of booze. There’s a popular story about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock instead of their original destination, the Jamestown colony in Virginia, because they needed to stop to make more beer. There’s likely little truth to that tale which the craft beer industry likes to tell, but it is rooted, at least to some extent, in custom.
And then there are also rum and the Navy, which have been closely intertwined since about the dawn of sugarcane cultivation and distillation in the New World. They don’t call higher-proof rums “navy strength” for nothing.
Whenever there is new mode of transportation, you can bet that there will be booze on board. You think folks would have been willing to get into a metal tube that would hurl them through the air at thirty-five thousand feet and speeds of more than five hundred miles per hour if the flight attendants didn’t ply them with booze to help calm their nerves?
So, it’s perfectly logical that the Enterprise and other vessels in the Star Trek universe have bars. You can’t expect people to sign on for a five-year or continuing interstellar mission without a place to unwind, socialize and, yes, tie one on from time to time.
On the original series, we rarely got to see much of the Enterprise’s broader population outside of the bridge, save for a few extras walking down a corridor every now and again and the requisite Red Shirt about to meet an untimely end at some point before the closing credits rolled. The ’60s version of the Enterprise just seemed so…lonely. You can probably thank the modest budget of a series that its network never truly believed in. It frequently got the highest ratings of its Thursday night slot (okay, there were
