monetizeyourcat:

roddenberry was just an engine for connecting campy high-concept sci-fi scripts to period-appropriate beefcake

It’s not just sexual - before the show accidentally pioneered fandomdom and started crawling up its own canon, the idea was kind of a stock troupe onto which any conceivable SF plot could be projected, from thinky to swashbuckling.

Into I think the Voyager era, the Trek franchises were the only shows left that would actually buy and film unsolicited spec scripts and pitches, decades after the practice fell out of general favor and the staff writers would do every episode (except 1 per season per WGA rules, which is usually rewritten to the point of unrecognizability - neo-BSG didn’t have the time or budget to, which I think was where those weird left-field episodes like Apollo’s secret prostitute family came from)