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 ...
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