Star Trek rewatched: the report

I told a few months ago of my watching a couple episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series after the series started showing up on our cable feed and B. recorded them all. Neither of the episodes I watched, which were both from the first season ("Miri" and "Mudd's Women") were very good, so since I didn't have B.'s patience to watch the whole thing, I made a list of what the web considers the best episodes and cherry-picked some of those. I've finished that watching and have some things to report. I'd seen a lot of the show in childhood, but not anywhere near all of it, and hardly at all since then.

First I want to credit the show with how awfully good it is when it is good. Episodes like "Balance of Terror" and "Devil in the Dark" in the first season, and "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Doomsday Machine" in the second season, are just outstanding drama all the way through: well-written and competently paced, efficiently directed, and impressively acted. The mirror universe is a stupid concept, but once given it's played out very well. "The Doomsday Machine" is really just Moby-Dick with William Windom's character as Captain Ahab, but it's a powerful plotline whoever uses it. Nor is some cheesiness in the production a real flaw. I hadn't realized just how nakedly based on the Romans the Romulans in "Balance of Terror" are (not just their name, which I gather is the Federation's name for this unknown people), nor that the actors for both the Romulan captain and his first officer showed up in the next season playing Vulcans. The terrifying monster in "Devil in the Dark" turns out to be just a rug with a sfx guy crawling around underneath it, and the mine tunnels all have the flat floors of a studio soundstage (also true of most rocky planet surfaces) but that really doesn't matter.

I want to pay tribute, too, to the three famous comic episodes of the second season: "The Trouble with Tribbles," "A Piece of the Action," and "I, Mudd." None of them are actually comedies: all feature serious dramatic situations of real peril, and the comedy is incidental. In "A Piece of the Action" it only really shows up when Kirk learns to talk in the local gangster lingo, puzzling his own subordinates. The wit and energy of this episode show that even one of TOS's tiredest tropes, the visiting a planet which looks exactly like a Hollywood studio back lot (used gratuitously in "Miri") can be employed effectively, and fortunately this is also not another of the tiredest tropes, a visit to the Planet of the Bad Acting.

"I, Mudd" - which is carried by the wonderfully colorful acting of Roger C. Carmel - renders palatable another tired trope, Kirk and/or Spock, using logic and/or illogic, forcing a malevolent computer into overload, upon which it emits smoke and breaks down. (See "The Changeling" for this trope sinking an otherwise good episode.) Note also that this episode solves one of the greatest Trek mysteries, which is, how did Chekhov, who wasn't in the first season where Khan first appeared in "Space Seed," recognize him in Wrath of Khan? Some say it's a continuity error, others say well, maybe Chekhov was there, we just didn't see him; it's a big ship. But in "I, Mudd," when Mudd appears and Kirk recognizes him from his first season appearance, Chekhov asks incredulously, "You know this man?" No, he wasn't there. Khan was a continuity error.

What about the legendarily bad third season? Even that had a couple of high points. I'd vote for the best episode of the season as "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," the one with the half-white half-black guy chasing the half-black half-white guy. It's well-acted (one of the guys is Frank Gorshin), has a startlingly bleak ending, and the only flaws are that the makeup looks stupid and that a subplot of the Enterprise "decontaminating" a planet (with what? DDT?) has to be inserted to spin the plot out and keep the episode from being over in half an hour. The message of the episode, which is that war is stupid, is shared with "Day of the Dove" which is also not too bad. Some consider the messaging crude and heavy-handed, but this was the middle of the Vietnam War era and the message could not be pressed too heavily. And other episodes make clear that pointless war is a different thing from defending yourself against attack.

Mind you, not all the supposedly great episodes of TOS turn out to be that great. To be continued later ...

Star Trek rewatched: the report pt. 2

continued from previous rock

As I was saying, not all the supposedly great episodes of this series turn out to be that great.

Every single romance plot in this series just sucks the big one, and that destroys the renowned "The City at the Edge of Forever" for me. Even more putrid is the almost as worshipped "Amok Time," which is just excruciatingly bad. The fundamental problem is the writers' desire to tinker with Spock. In the first season, Spock is unbrokenly emotionless, and Leonard Nimoy is utterly uncanny in his ability to maintain this. But in the second season, the writers couldn't resist the temptation to play with Spock. They'd have him make sardonic remarks, which works in an openly comic episode (like "The Trouble with Tribbles"'s "He couldn't believe his ears") but undercuts the preternaturally reactionless Spock of season one. This is also when the famous logic/emotion arguments between Spock and McCoy really get going.* But worse, the writers start finding excuses for Spock to act emotional after all, and Nimoy turns out to be not as good at that. It starts with mind-melding in the first season, which is tolerable, but it doesn't stop there, and Spock in the grip of pon farr is just hideous. The stupid illogical rituals on Ye Olde Primitive Planet Vulcan are even more hopeless.

The third season goes further, when the beautiful women (often alien priestesses or whatnot) who used to chase Kirk now start chasing Spock instead ("The Enterprise Incident," "All Our Yesterdays") or even McCoy ("For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky")! But losing the attention of hot women is not the depth of Kirk's degradation. David Gerrold in his book about writing "The Trouble with Tribbles" tells how he got a rise out of Bill Shatner by saying he was writing a script in which Kirk loses his voice in the teaser and doesn't get it back till the tag. In "The Tholian Web" that pretty much actually happens. Kirk disappears in a rift in space-time and isn't even seen for most of the episode.

This misforturne occurs as a result of another of the tiredest tropes, the "Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to an unknown ..." one. This kept the stars at the forefront of the action, of course, but it was to correct the ludicrousness of this practice that TNG invented the "away team." Here I should mention the hoariest of all Trek tropes, which is that redshirts get killed on away missions. This happens less often than you'd think, actually; but one thing redshirts on these missions almost never do is speak a single word. There's a budgetary reason for that: if extras have speaking parts, you have to pay them more.

A few more things I noticed about TOS:
1) I really liked the episodes in which military protocol plays a part (the courtmartial episodes, "The Doomsday Machine") or in which there's a sprinkling of techy behavior. In "The Doomsday Machine" Kirk actually gets down on his back and tries to fix the wiring himself, and there are other examples. Real techy talk (far beyond Scotty's "The dilithium crystals canna take any more"), just as hasty asides and not taking over the action, also occurs in some first and second season episodes: it's an inexpensive way to convey that there's more to the Enterprise, and to the characters' knowledge of it, than you see.
2) In the first season there are lots of bit-part officers, conveying the extent of the crew. Often they sit where Chekhov would go later, and take the com when Kirk and Spock leave the bridge. But there's more than that: for instance, "Balance of Terror" uses a chaste engagement between two walk-on officers as a subplot to frame the episode. Later, probably for budgetary reasons, this type of character mostly disappears, and when Kirk and Spock are away, Scotty takes the com. Though he's properly subordinate as engineering officer, when facing danger in command Scotty is both extremely belligerent and amazingly fearless about it. He'd make a dangerously hotheaded captain.
3) It's often complained that Uhura does nothing but open hailing frequencies. Actually, sometimes she does do other things, but you wish she hadn't: she reverts to infancy ("The Changeling"); she gets tempted by android immortality ("I, Mudd"), and when she later fakes a recurrence to fool the androids, gets squeezed awkwardly by Kirk for her good acting; and she causes the Enterprise to be overrun with cute fuzzy critters ("The Trouble with Tribbles"). For that reason, Uhura is one character who doesn't seem to get a fair shake.

*Did you notice, by the way, that McCoy is a racist? He regularly uses Vulcan physical characteristics - the ears, the green blood, etc. - as personal insults against Spock. Try that with human races and see how far you get.