Star Traders: a review

The short-lived television show Star Traders (1972-73) has long been legendary among fans of science-fictional TV with good stories and bad special effects. Canceled after less than two seasons, it was never widely syndicated partly because of the small number of episodes and mainly because of rights disputes in the wake of the bankruptcy of Silver Silo Studios. These rights disputes prevented any official video release until 1989, when a LaserDisc collection of six of the the best episodes had a limited distribution before being suppressed due to renewed lawsuits. There have been a few bootleg editions over the years; my first exposure to the show was via one of these, a set of VHS tapes with grainy video, echoey audio and Korean subtitles I watched in a friend’s basement some years ago. I recently became aware of a slightly higher quality set of AVI files in a torrent (obligatory note: I do not officially endorse torrenting of pirated content).

The show featured the crew of an interstellar trading vessel which typically visited a different planet or space station in each episode, looking to buy and sell various cargoes advantageously; variations in local laws and customs provide much of the plot conflict, as they find for instance that merchandise they had hoped to sell legally has been outlawed in the time since their last visit to a given planet. (The show wasn’t very consistent in its physics, but it took relativistic time dilation more seriously than Star Trek ever did. Decades of social and political upheaval passed on the planet Ereshkigal between the crew’s first visit there in episode three and their second in episode eighteen, while mere months passed for the crew.)

The crew of the Caravan included the jovial patriarch Captain Frederic Tunstall (Tim Siler); his wife Dr. Emily Tunstall (Ursula Kingman), the ship’s medical officer; dapper ladies' man First Mate Roger Enderby (Jeremy Walters), Dr. Tunstall’s younger brother; Chief Engineer Sven Larssen-Tunstall (Lars Svensen); his wife, Chief Steward Amy Larssen-Tunstall (Julie Siler); and a passel of other Tunstall cousins and in-laws in subordinate positions, and Tunstall children and grandchildren underfoot. It makes sense that if centuries pass on your home planet while you spend your career on a starship, you would bring your family along. First Mate Roger Enderby, the only unmarried character among the main cast, played something like the “Kirk” role in many episodes, being the focus of romantic subplots with a variety of women in various ports. The other main cast tended to be involved in intramarital drama B-plots more typical of a sitcom than a space adventure show, e.g. Dr. Tunstall’s constant efforts to get Captain Tunstall to cut back on the exotic alien pastries.

Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s character actors will notice that Star Traders did somewhat better than Star Trek in portraying women in positions of authority, but less well on racial diversity; all the main cast were white. In his defense, executive producer Quinn Siler pointed out that they were nearly all related. Critics further noted that much of the cast were hired from among Siler’s own extensive set of Hollywood hopeful cousins and in-laws, which undoubtedly helped with making the Tunstall family look like they were related.

The transgender element, my reason for reviewing the show here, appeared in the finale to season one and the scant six episodes of season two. In the final episode of the first season, the crew are on shore leave at the giant space station Raven-4 when a local terrorist group sets off a mind-shuffling device which affects everyone within a half-kilometer radius. Most people swap with someone fairly nearby, which means most of the crew end up in the bodies of relatives and shipmates (for instance, the Captain and the Doctor swap, as do the Chief Engineer and the Chief Steward), but some shuffle into the bodies of station natives or visiting crew from other ships, some of them nonhuman or even non-humanoid. (Non-humanoid aliens were generally represented by puppets, not very convincingly.) Nearly all were restored to their original bodies by the end of the episode, but the original body of First Mate Roger Enderby was killed in a riot, and he was stuck in the body of the lovely teal-skinned alien Siruanna (Raquel Lundquist, credited as a guest star in this episode). Walters left the cast as of the end of season one, while Lundquist joined the main cast and was added to the opening credits beginning with season two; several episodes of season two involve a B-plot focusing on Enderby’s discomfort with and gradual adjustment to his new body — not just his altered gender, but the new senses his alien body has (he’s empathic, and sees five primary colors including ultraviolet and infrared).

Various zines have published interviews over the years containing contradictory statements from Walters, Lundquist, and Siler about the reasons for the switch. Reading between the lines, it appears that Siler found Walters personally hard to work with, but decided, on the basis of fan mail, that his character was too popular to kill off. This unique solution allowed him to fire the actor and keep the character. Whether it was a good solution may never be known; I freely admit my bias, the cause of which will be obvious to my readers here, toward thinking the six episodes of the second season more interesting than most of the first season. Raquel Lundquist was a fine actress, too little remembered (chiefly for guest roles on M*A*S*H and Columbo), and could, I think, have done great things with the role of Enderby if the show had continued for another season or two. Alas, she was still growing into the role when the show ended, and most of the zine articles I’ve run across vociferously disagree with the producer’s decision. I note merely that these critics did not have to work with Walters; his tenure on two other shows was similarly brief and in 1975 he left acting for a career in sales.

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