The original Star Trek TV show is half a century old, and I’ve never loved it more. It is talky, stagebound, narcotically slow. The alien planets look like sets, or they look like hiking trails in greater Los Angeles. The characters never change, no matter how many times they watch a world die, no matter how often they watch a fellow officer get murdered by aliens carved from rubber and nightmares. There is no running story — though there are semi-abstract will-they-won’t-theys, Nurse Chapel and Mr. Spock, Captain Kirk and Yeoman Rand, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Science-fiction storytelling is now synonymous with serialized storytelling. We expect that events that happen in one episode will matter in the next episode. Watching the original Star Trek now, the characters’ complete lack of interest in their own history reads dispassionate, almost inhuman.