‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ at 30: The classic ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ episode that brought Captains Kirk and Sisko face-to-face

When “Star Trek” celebrated its 60th anniversary in September, it was a strangely muted affair. Sure, there were fan events, screenings, and even an attempt at a world record for the biggest simultaneous Vulcan salute in history, but the lack of a “Doctor Who”-style birthday episode felt like a glaring omission. It was like everyone had shown up for the party, but the organizers had forgotten to book the headline entertainment.

Luckily, there were rather more fireworks for the show’s 30th birthday, when both “Voyager” and “Deep Space Nine” marked the occasion in style. “Voyager” episode “Flashback” took Tuvok (Tim Russ) back to his days on the USS Excelsior bridge alongside Original Series vets Hikaru Sulu (George Takei) and Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney).

But it was “DS9″‘s “Trials and Tribble-ations” that turned out to be the more memorable voyage to “Trek” past, as Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) — with the help of some then-state-of-the-art digital trickery — came face-to-face with a young Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner).

While “Flashback” aired within days of “Trek”‘s September 8 birthday, fans had to wait a little longer for “DS9″‘s contribution to the celebrations. Showrunner Ira Steven Behr was keen to avoid disrupting the space station-set drama’s story arc for a comedic diversion, meaning that “Trials and Tribble-ations” didn’t debut until November 4, 1996.

In the wake of “Flashback” — not to mention Spock and Scotty’s comebacks in “The Next Generation” stories “Unification” and “Relics” — the “DS9” writers’ room had already decided they needed to take a very different approach.

Early on, “Battlestar Galactica” creator Ronald D. Moore pitched a follow-up to Original Series episode “A Piece of the Action” (aka the one where the residents of Iotia brought 1920s gangsters to life). In an extremely meta concept that predated “Galaxy Quest” by three years, the story would have taken the Enterprise crew to a planet of Kirk and Spock impersonators.

“For the thirtieth anniversary, you go back, and you’re basically going back to the planet of ‘Star Trek’ fans,” Moore recalled in “The Fifty-Year Mission” by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross. “They have conventions; they know all the adventures. It’s a phenomenon, and you could comment on ‘Star Trek’ as a whole. I thought it would be interesting. But [fellow writer] René Echevarria thought it was a dangerous show to do, that we would be talking down to the fans on some level, and perhaps it wasn’t the best way to go.”

Instead, Echevarria suggested telling a story in the vein of Woody Allen’s “Zelig” or “Forrest Gump” (then a zeitgeisty, multi-Oscar-winning box-office smash) and integrating the “Deep Space Nine” crew with the events of an Original Series episode.

“I thought, ‘What bigger treat could there be than to go back into the past and board the original Enterprise and have a mission there?'” Echevarria said in a 1996 making-of documentary. “And Ron immediately said, ‘It’s gotta be “The Trouble with Tribbles!”‘”

“The Trouble with Tribbles”, a 1967 episode from “Star Trek”‘s second season, is one of the most famous in the franchise’s history. As well as featuring some minor scuffles with Klingons, it sees the Enterprise and Deep Space Station K-7 infested with the eponymous tribbles — cute, cuddly furballs of calm that reproduce at a dangerously exponential rate.

In “Trials and Tribble-ations”, a timey-wimey incident involving the Bajoran Orb of Time transports the USS Defiant (one of the best “Star Trek” spaceships) back to the era of Kirk and Spock’s famous five-year mission.

As Sisko recounts the adventure to a pair of agents from Starfleet’s Department of Temporal Investigations (named Dulmur and Lucsly in homage to “The X-Files”), we learn how he, Dax (Terry Farrell), O’Brien (Colm Meaney), and Bashir (Alexander Siddig) spent a day playing Original Series cosplay on Kirk’s Enterprise. It’s “Star Trek”‘s answer to “Back to the Future: Part II”, as the crew interacts with established events while taking pains not to mess with history.

Although most of the guest stars from “The Trouble with Tribbles” had passed away over the intervening decades, one actor who’d played a pivotal role was still around. By the time he turned up in “Star Trek”, 20-something stand-up comedian Charlie Brill had already brushed shoulders with pop-culture legend, having shared the bill with the Beatles when they made their famous appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964.

Three years later he’d swapped Lennon and McCartney for Kirk and Spock, playing a Klingon spy masquerading as human Arne Darvin, whose cover is ultimately blown by the famously Klingon-phobic tribbles. In the newer episode, the older Darvin travels back in time to assassinate Kirk, plotting his revenge with a bomb implanted in an unfortunate tribble. Thwarting the evil scheme — and preserving the timeline — forms the basis of Sisko’s mission.

Brill’s return was seemingly written in the stars. When planning the episode, Behr and the other writers met for lunch at Mulberry Street Pizza in Beverly Hills and noted that the actor was alive and still working in the business. Then, just as they were talking about him, they happened to spot Brill across the very same restaurant.

“What were the chances that we would be talking about this old TV episode from 30 years ago, and the guy who we were talking about to bring back on the show would be standing there ordering a slice of pizza?” Behr recalled at the Trek Talks telethon (via TrekMovie).

But however strong its story, “Trials and Tribble-ations” was always going to live and die by its recreation of ‘ 60s-era “Trek”. The production team subsequently pulled out all the stops, with Behr suggesting at the time that it may have been the most expensive hour of TV ever made.

The actors were kitted out in era-appropriate primary-colored outfits and given ’60s hairdos. The make-up team also recreated the appearance of the Original Series’ Klingons, whose very different look — “We do not discuss it with outsiders,” says Worf — would later be explained away in a “Star Trek: Enterprise” two-parter.

The late Walter Koenig (who’d featured as Chekov in “The Trouble with Tribbles”) showed the younger officers how to flip open a communicator, and the stunt team choreographed fights to look like the cheesy, Western-inspired brawls of a bygone era.

Behind the scenes, production designer Michael Okuda and his team used a mixture of original plans and scans of the episodes to painstakingly recreate the sets, while the visual effects team constructed an exact half-scale replica of the original 11-foot Enterprise shooting model housed in the Smithsonian.

The biggest magic trick, however, was dependent on CG technology — then very much in its infancy — making everyone believe that Sisko and co were walking the same corridors as Kirk. VFX supervisor Gary Hutzel had provided proof-of-concept early in the process:

“He showed us a clip from the old show,” said Behr. “We looked at it and said, ‘Okay, that looks good, but what does that have to do with us?’ And he said, ‘Well, you see that guy coming in through the door? That’s not from the 1967 episode. That’s one of our people!'”

Shooting in front of blue- and green-screens, the actors’ performances were meticulously matched to the Original Series episode. Early on, Moore had identified two sequences from “The Trouble with Tribbles” that would be perfect for selling the concept: Kirk dressing down a line-up of officers after a bar room brawl and Tribbles raining down on Kirk from a storage container.

O’Brien and Bashir were digitally pasted over the original actors in the former, while the latter was explained away by Sisko and Dax’s madcap dash to find the elusive explosive tribble. In most other shots, the DS9ers became background observers in existing scenes.

But there were still debates to be had over whether the two captains should meet. “It led to one of the most vociferous arguments we’ve had,” said Behr, a passionate advocate for the “yes” camp. “We were so deadlocked, and there was so much emotion in the air, we actually turned to the writer intern and said, ‘What do you think?’ End of stalemate. Of course, being an intern and being a smart guy, he sided with his executive producer. And life went on.” (The scene in which Sisko hands Kirk a duty roster for approval was actually lifted from another Original Series episode, “Mirror, Mirror”, with Brooks replacing Barbara Luna (Lt. Marlena Moreau) on the bridge.)

It was all worth the effort. “Trials and Tribble-ations” was the most-watched episode of “DS9″‘s fifth season, bagged nominations for three Emmys and a Hugo, and is now widely regarded as one of the best “Trek” episodes of all time.

David Gerrold, who wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles” and appeared as an extra in “Trials and Tribble-ations”, described it as “possibly the best episode of ‘Star Trek’ after the Original Series,” and various members of the writers’ room have described it as a highlight of their time on the final frontier.

“From the writers to the director to the lighting, costumes, the set, sound effects, visual effects — everybody really put in so much time on that episode to really recreate the original Enterprise in any way they possibly could,” said Moore. “Everybody was staring at film clips, doing research into [prop/costume] materials. It was a mania, and everybody just threw themselves into it. They wanted to make it great. And it shows.”

‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ and ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ are available to stream on Paramount+ in both the US and UK.