YESTERDAY’S ENTERPRISE: A Look Back At Susan Oliver
Star Trek’s original “damsel in distress” was anything but
Editor’s Note: This week we’re debuting a new, occasional feature here at Subspace Chatter to help usher in Star Trek’s 60th anniversary next year.
Taking its name from the epic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” this will be a look back at people and moments that helped make the franchise so special but might not be as familiar to younger, newer fans.
We begin with one of Star Trek’s most iconic guest stars, Susan Oliver.
Portraying the role of Vina in the original series pilot, “The Cage” — and later the two-part episode, “The Menagerie” — you could call Susan Oliver Star Trek’s OG damsel in distress.
Except that this woman truly was so much more in real life, particularly for the time in which she lived and the fact that her extraordinary life was tragically cut short due to cancer.
The truth is that there’s something about this enigmatic actress that’s held her in a recurrent fascination for decades, even though she played a single role in the franchise 60 years ago.
If she’s known in the wider Zeitgeist, it’s for that one scene in which she appears as Star Trek’s first green Orion slave girl in which she tries seducing Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter):
Yet she accumulated an amazing 125 acting credits in her abbreviated career, as well as TV directorial work and even experience as an aircraft pilot — all before her untimely death in 1990 at the age of 58.
Oliver flew a single-engine plane across the Atlantic Ocean in 1967, and is probably the first woman ever qualified to fly a Lear jet.
It’s amazing that Oliver didn’t become even more successful and famous as a Hollywood leading lady.
Still, despite her mysterious obscurity — or maybe because of it — something about her continues to fascinate, even decades later.
She is, after all, the only Star Trek guest star who has her own full-length documentary made about her, aptly titled “The Green Girl,” made more than a decade ago by filmmaker George Pappy.
(It’s available for streaming as of this writing through a subscription on the Prime Video service.)
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“Everything I kept discovering about her kept blowing me away as to how she could be so completely forgotten nowadays,” Pappy said in a video message for the crowdsourcing plea he made for funding to get the project made. (See The Main Viewscreen this week for that full video.)
Oliver recalled her experience making that iconic Orion slave girl dance scene in an interview with Starlog, published in 1988 — especially since she was not a trained dancer.
“They had a choreographer work with me a solid week, before I began filming,” she said. “There were different facets in this role, and the green girl was most challenging.”
In her autobiography, she remembered the day she showed up on the set made up as the Orion dancer.
Gone, she said, was all the friendliness from the crew.
“The usual, easy ‘hi, Suse’ banter was gone; the guys stood back and stared or averted their eyes as though it was immoral to look at such a woman,” she wrote. “There seemed almost to be a sense of their whispering, ‘Wow, Susan’s not such a nice girl after all, she’s maybe wild, evil.’ Even before the dance began and I was just standing demurely to the side, this feeling was in the air. Gene had touched on something dark in man’s unconscious; one could imagine doing things with a green mate that he would never dare with one of his own color.
“But the show was a very special experience and it was fun to do the wild dance; it also meant hard work. Believe me, it was not easy to be green.”
Even in a franchise full of extraordinary talent and, particularly, exceptional women, Susan Oliver still stands out.
And as we come into Star Trek’s 60 anniversary celebration, she deserves to be remembered for her accomplishments as a professional, as well as specifically for the unique role she played in launching the franchise in the first place.
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THE MAIN VIEWSCREEN
The Green Girl — Susan Oliver Documentary (Informational Video)
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