10 Times Star Trek Broke The Fourth Wall

There’s the metaphor of winking and the camera, then there’s literally winking at the camera. Often the overlooked series in the franchise, The Animated Series served to finish the five-year voyage of the Enterprise crew following the cancellation of its live-action predecessor. Whilst retaining the DNA of its original, the animated nature allowed Roddenberry and co to play around with the less physically plausible aspects of sci-fi, however wacky they may be.

The Infinite Vulcan is one such example of this, with Spock kidnapped by a giant augmented human on a planet of plant people so that he can clone the Vulcan and create a master race to keep peace. That is the most bizarrely sci-fi sentence I have ever written.

Once Spock is saved and the crew can return to their journey, Kirk asks Sulu to teach him a body throw that he had used on a plant person earlier in the episode. When Sulu remarks that you need to be inscrutable, Kirk jokingly responds that Sulu is the most scrutable person that he knows.

At which point Sulu turns to the camera… and winks. Notwithstanding trying to work out if Sulu’s being insulted or not (and that the Asian-American character is the one who knows martial arts moves - go figure), the wink is such a bizarre addition to an already bizarre episode. Sure it breaks the fourth wall… but at what cost?