His Body Comes in Lots of Different Shapes
After making my way through Star Trek: The Original Series, offering up my thoughts on Season One and then moving on to Season Two, I quickly got distracted by other matters (as you know), failing to offer up any more thoughts despite the fact that I finished watching Season Three back in September.
With the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture upon us, though, this seemed like a good time to continue my ruminations...
All modern series-revival campaigns are built upon the template formed in 1968, when Star Trek narrowly avoided cancellation through the efforts of many dedicated fans (coordinated by überfans such as Bjo Trimble), who wrote thousands of letters to NBC and finally convinced the network to keep the show for a third season. However, another familiar template soon followed: NBC moved Star Trek to Friday nights and slashed its budget, effectively sealing its fate.
For someone watching TOS in quick succession, the budget-cutting effect is very obvious. Only one episode early in the third season ("The Paradise Syndrome") has any location shooting at all. All of a sudden, landing parties tend to be made up of just Kirk, Spock, and McCoy--without a redshirt in sight--for no particular reason except that they're the three stars of the show. Gone are the one-off focus crewmembers like Doctor Helen Noel, Doctor Ann Mulhall, or Lieutenant Dave Bailey, who show up once to do their thing and are never shown again. (Actually, Mira Romaine is one third-season example of this.) Kirk even stops having as many love interests towards the end of the season.
Where Season Two had many episodes with themed planets based on Earth itself, Season Three had outer-space variations on more traditional concepts. The Enterprise crew had already encountered Space Amoeba in the previous season, but now got to live through Space The Taming of the Shrew, met up with Space Napoleon, and famously encountered a group of Space Hippies.
Most people also tend to think of Season Three as having the lowest quality of writing overall, with cheesier, wackier concepts than what had come before. (This is the season of "Spock's Brain," after all.) Having said that, I think some of the achievements in Season Three are overlooked due to the Fromage Factor. An episode like "Plato's Stepchildren" is often remembered for moments such as Kirk neighing like a horse, or The Kiss between him and Uhura--and it's set on Platonius, yet another Earth-based planet, which might as well be called "Plato's World"--but it still contains one of my favourite lines in the entire series:Alexander, where I come from, size, shape, or colour makes no difference--and nobody has the Power.
That sort of Roddenberrian concept manages to make its way into these episodes in spite of the cheese, so that even when Kirk meets Space Lincoln, that Abraham Lincoln gets a line memorable enough to be mistakenly attributed to the real one in later years:There is no honourable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war except its ending.
Ideas like those are what Star Trek is all about, and the ultimate cancellation of The Original Series in 1969 (mere weeks before humanity actually landed on the Moon) couldn't stop them from living on, igniting the passions of people like me who weren't yet born when those episodes first aired--which is why the franchise has been revived in every decade since, right up to this year's feature film returning Star Trek back to its roots.
With the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture upon us, though, this seemed like a good time to continue my ruminations...
All modern series-revival campaigns are built upon the template formed in 1968, when Star Trek narrowly avoided cancellation through the efforts of many dedicated fans (coordinated by überfans such as Bjo Trimble), who wrote thousands of letters to NBC and finally convinced the network to keep the show for a third season. However, another familiar template soon followed: NBC moved Star Trek to Friday nights and slashed its budget, effectively sealing its fate.
For someone watching TOS in quick succession, the budget-cutting effect is very obvious. Only one episode early in the third season ("The Paradise Syndrome") has any location shooting at all. All of a sudden, landing parties tend to be made up of just Kirk, Spock, and McCoy--without a redshirt in sight--for no particular reason except that they're the three stars of the show. Gone are the one-off focus crewmembers like Doctor Helen Noel, Doctor Ann Mulhall, or Lieutenant Dave Bailey, who show up once to do their thing and are never shown again. (Actually, Mira Romaine is one third-season example of this.) Kirk even stops having as many love interests towards the end of the season.
Where Season Two had many episodes with themed planets based on Earth itself, Season Three had outer-space variations on more traditional concepts. The Enterprise crew had already encountered Space Amoeba in the previous season, but now got to live through Space The Taming of the Shrew, met up with Space Napoleon, and famously encountered a group of Space Hippies.
Most people also tend to think of Season Three as having the lowest quality of writing overall, with cheesier, wackier concepts than what had come before. (This is the season of "Spock's Brain," after all.) Having said that, I think some of the achievements in Season Three are overlooked due to the Fromage Factor. An episode like "Plato's Stepchildren" is often remembered for moments such as Kirk neighing like a horse, or The Kiss between him and Uhura--and it's set on Platonius, yet another Earth-based planet, which might as well be called "Plato's World"--but it still contains one of my favourite lines in the entire series:Alexander, where I come from, size, shape, or colour makes no difference--and nobody has the Power.
That sort of Roddenberrian concept manages to make its way into these episodes in spite of the cheese, so that even when Kirk meets Space Lincoln, that Abraham Lincoln gets a line memorable enough to be mistakenly attributed to the real one in later years:There is no honourable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war except its ending.
Ideas like those are what Star Trek is all about, and the ultimate cancellation of The Original Series in 1969 (mere weeks before humanity actually landed on the Moon) couldn't stop them from living on, igniting the passions of people like me who weren't yet born when those episodes first aired--which is why the franchise has been revived in every decade since, right up to this year's feature film returning Star Trek back to its roots.