Today In STAR TREK History: June 4th

Prepare yourself for Warp-10 excitement!

Welcome to our round-up of the Star Trek episodes which received their premiere broadcast on this day throughout the show's long history, along with anything else of note that may have taken place. All viewing figures quoted are for U.S. premiere broadcast (unless noted).

June 4th
Premiering in US theaters on June 4th 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan saw Admiral James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise face off against the genetically engineered tyrant Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán), a character who first appeared in the 1967 Star Trek: TOS episode Space Seed. When Khan escapes from a 15-year exile to exact revenge on Kirk, the crew of the Enterprise must stop him from acquiring a powerful terraforming device named Genesis.

No more spoilers than that on the plot as apparently there are still people who haven't seen The Wrath of Khan (although why they haven't I can not say), but it was greeted with many positive reviews and considered by many to be the best film in the Star Trek series. A huge box office success, The Wrath of Khan earned $97 million worldwide and set a world record for its first-day box office gross, all on a tiny production budget (by today's standards) of just $12 million.

From the big screen to the small screen...

Transfigerations, the 25th and penultimate episode of the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (and the 73rd episode of the series overall) premiered on this day in 1990. 10.2 million viewers were watching as The Enterprise rescued a critically injured amnesiac who was undergoing a mysterious transformation.

Transfigurations was one of a long line of Star Trek episodes dealing with the effects of accelerated humanoid evolution, and the suggestion that to be an intelligence of such you'd no longer be bound by physical form, but instead constituted as pure energy. This concept was first explored in the second ever TOS episode Charlie X, but it was given more rhetorical force in Errand of Mercy. In several of these contexts, the highly evolved beings are gifted with extraordinary healing powers.

Join us again next time for another round-up of the episodes broadcast, the movie's released, the special events, the birthday's celebrated and anything else of note that went down on this day in Star Trek history.