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.