Walter Koenig, who steered the Enterprise as Ensign Pavel Chekov and then, a quarter of a century later, made the crew of Babylon 5 check their own thoughts twice as Psi Cop Alfred Bester, has died at the age of 90. He passed away of natural causes on Sunday 25 October at his home in North Hollywood, with his daughter Danielle and his niece beside him. His old shipmate George Takei shared the news on Monday, and his representatives remembered a man who grasped what Star Trek meant to people and threw himself into the community that grew up around it. The bridge of the original Enterprise is now a noticeably emptier place.
Koenig’s arrival on Star Trek in 1967 is one of those pieces of television archaeology that sounds made up. Gene Roddenberry wanted something for the teenage audience, the Monkees were rather popular at the time, and so a young-looking actor with a passing resemblance to Davy Jones was drafted onto the bridge for the second season. He was one of only two people to audition. The snag was that Koenig was thirty and his hairline had already set off on its own five-year mission, so the costume department built him a mop-top hairpiece. The studio’s publicity people, meanwhile, put it about that Chekov existed because Pravda had grumbled about the lack of Russians in space, a tale that has never stood up to much scrutiny but has comfortably outlived most of the facts.
Chekov was supposed to be a recurring part. Then the fan mail arrived, much of it from children, and Koenig found himself a regular. Roddenberry asked him to ham up the accent for comic relief, and he obliged by borrowing his own father’s trouble with the letter V, which is how the galaxy came to be stocked with wodka and, eventually, nuclear wessels. Linguists winced; everyone else did impressions in the playground. There was a quiet irony in it, too. Born in Chicago on 14 September 1936 to Russian Jewish immigrants who had trimmed the family name down from Königsberg, Koenig grew up in Inwood in Manhattan with a communist father who had been investigated by the FBI during the McCarthy years. Their son went on to become American television’s favourite friendly Russian at the height of the Cold War.
He had not set out to act at all. He studied pre-med at Grinnell College in Iowa, switched to psychology at UCLA, and was nudged towards the stage by a professor, ending up at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse alongside Dabney Coleman, Christopher Lloyd and James Caan. Before Trek he had already worked for Roddenberry once, on the Marine Corps drama The Lieutenant in 1964, and played a teenage gang leader for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
The early days on the Enterprise were not all wine and wodka. With George Takei away filming The Green Berets, Chekov had the helm largely to himself for a spell; when Takei returned the pair were made to share a dressing room and a single script, an arrangement that went down about as well as a tribble in a grain store. They became lifelong friends anyway, and Koenig served as best man at Takei’s wedding to Brad Altman in 2008.
Being dropped from the animated series in 1973 stung, not least because he found out from a fan at a convention, which is the sort of thing that only happens in fandom. Roddenberry bought a script from him instead, and “The Infinite Vulcan”, giant Spock clone and all, made Koenig the first member of the cast to write a Star Trek story for the screen. Writing became a genuine second career. He penned an episode of Sid and Marty Krofft’s Land of the Lost, scripts for Family and The Powers of Matthew Star, a diary of the long, stop-start birth of The Motion Picture published as Chekov’s Enterprise, a cheerfully self-mocking autobiography called Warped Factors: A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universe, the SF novel Buck Alice and the Actor-Robot, and the Malibu comic Raver. Few of the original crew left a bookshelf behind them. Koenig left a modest but honest one.
The films kept Chekov aboard for seven outings, from The Motion Picture through to Generations, and earned him Saturn Award nominations for both The Wrath of Khan and The Voyage Home. Khan handed him the franchise’s most memorable indignity, a Ceti eel burrowing into his ear, and also its most famous continuity hole, since Ricardo Montalbán’s villain somehow recognises an officer who had not yet joined the show when “Space Seed” first aired. Koenig liked to joke at conventions that Chekov had once kept Khan waiting outside the lavatory. The Voyage Home then sent him wandering around 1986 San Francisco asking passers-by for directions to the nuclear wessels, a scene that still turns up in pub quizzes up and down the country.
In between the films he took the jobs that come to a man indelibly typecast as a starship navigator: a Columbo with William Shatner as the murderer, a turn in the Canadian curiosity The Starlost, a cameo in Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes, and the 1989 lunar horror Moontrap, in which he and Bruce Campbell discover that whatever lives on the Moon is considerably less hospitable than anything H.G. Wells put there. It is exactly the sort of film that lives at the bottom of the VHS bargain bin and the top of the cult wish list.
Then came Babylon 5, and the second act most actors of his generation never get. J. Michael Straczynski had seen Koenig on stage, thought him badly typecast, and wrote a part for him. A heart attack in 1993 put him out of the running for that one, so Straczynski invented another: Alfred Bester, named for the author of The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, who strolled into “Mind War” in Psi Corps black, one gloved hand and an air of terribly polite menace. He was meant to be a one-off. He became a fixture across twelve episodes, the production company put him forward for an Emmy, and he was due to return in Crusade before that show was scuppered. Watching the cheerful lad from the Enterprise helm smilingly offer to rummage through your skull was a genuine shock, and a delicious one. Koenig said more than once that Bester was the role he valued most, and it is hard to argue: the man who had spent decades as the funny voice on the bridge had been sitting on a perfectly chilling villain all along.
Chekov never quite let him go, and he never seemed to mind. He reprised the role in fan productions including Star Trek: New Voyages, Of Gods and Men and Star Trek: Renegades, voiced himself in Futurama‘s gloriously daft “Where No Fan Has Gone Before”, and in 2023 turned up in the final episode of Star Trek: Picard as the voice of Federation President Anton Chekov, a quiet tip of the hat to the late Anton Yelchin. He received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012, the last of the original series regulars to get one. Away from the cameras he taught acting and directing at UCLA and elsewhere, and in 2007 he travelled to refugee camps on the Thai–Burmese border on behalf of the US Campaign for Burma.
His later years were shadowed by loss. His son Andrew, an actor and editor, died in 2010, and his wife of 57 years, the actress Judy Levitt, died in 2022. He is survived by Danielle, a comedian and writer, and her husband, the comic Jimmy Pardo.
Several generations of convention-goers will remember a softly spoken, sharp-witted man who kept turning up, decade after decade, to sign glossies of a twenty-something in a borrowed Monkees mop-top, and who could then tell you, with real insight, why the villain he played thirty years later was the better part. Here at SFcrowsnest we will be pouring a small wodka tonight and putting “Mind War” back on. Spasibo, Mr Koenig. Course laid in.
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