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The thing you have to know about Star Trek, beyond the obvious it-forever-changed-how-we-envision-the-future stuff, is that when the original series first aired in 1966, it was just about dead in the water. Audiences didn’t love the original pilot episode, and the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, had to fight to convince NBC executives to air more episodes of this weird, forward-thinking show about space exploration. The network and let him air a second, new-and-improved pilot (with the role of Captain James T. Kirk recast with William Shatner) and then a whole season, and then a second season, but although the show was slowly gaining viewers, the ratings were still pretty low, so NBC announced its cancellation.

Bjo [Trimble], however, would not hear of it.

“It really annoyed me,” she said on a recent episode of The Real Story on the Smithsonian Channel. “I think we had a moral prerogative not just to save the show, but to let these networks know that the public had an opinion.”