Star Trek TOS: reactions to many episodes from S1
While I wait for the new episode of Doctor Who to be legally available in my area, I'm going to talk about a different decades-old institution of SF television: Star Trek. I've been continuing my Star Trek TOS watch through, but I've been seriously negligent about posting episode reactions like I said I would. So here is a post about LOTS of episodes of Star Trek. (Where LOTS = twelve.) Mostly I'm just going to say a few sentences about each, though a few are longer if I have a lot to say or happened to make notes immediately after watching. I should note that I do a fair amount of pointing out plot holes and gentle mocking, but I'm enjoying this viewing of the show quite a bit. Spoilers abound, should you care about being spoiled for something almost 50 years old.
1x06, "Mudd's Women"
When the Enterprise crew realized that the women seemed to be having a hypnotic effect, why didn't they have crew members who weren't sexually attracted to women interview them instead? If Evie's final dose of the drug was a placebo, how come her makeup and hair were both done after she took it? Who thought this episode was a good idea? I'm so confused.
I think this episode was trying to make some some not-entirely-awful points about real beauty coming from within, but the execution was pretty icky with way too much gazing at the sexualized women and not very much seeing them as people. Mudd is an entertaining rapscallion, I guess. I hope somebody out there has done a rule 63 cosplay group of fem!Mudd and the man-babes.
1x07, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"
(I actually wrote up most of an entry immediately after watching this one, so this ep gets more detail than others.)
I enjoyed this one. It had a lot of stereotypical Star Trek elements: red shirts died, Shatner appeared shirtless and also kissed an android babe, really weird "futuristic" costumes were worn, and issues of what it means to be a person were considered. It was sort of weird that they seemed to be giving most of the cast the week off, with only Kirk and Chapel having lots of screentime and brief appearances by Spock and Uhura. Oh well. I can't say that I find Shatner credible as an actor, but he's a hoot to watch.
Some observations, thoughts, and gentle mocking:
-Kirk breaks off a stalactite to use as a weapon, and IT LOOKS JUST LIKE AN ENORMOUS PENIS. This is the most amazing thing to happen on this show so far.
-Before they beam down, Kirk asks Chapel if she's sure the voice the Enterprise is communicating with is Dr. Korby, and she is absolutely positive it's him. Because goodness knows the Enterprise has NEVER BEFORE ENCOUNTERED doppelgangers or beings that can fool perception of who they really are.
-LOLing forever at the oversized Grandma's bathrobe outfit worn by Creepy Android Ruk, and also the sexy colorful overalls Andrea the Android wears.
-I love the way Chapel side-eyes her fiance about his sexy android.
-Kirk gets stripped and strapped to a weird spinning bondage machine/android maker.
-I was impressed by Kirk's plan for when he was about to get duplicated to hold an uncharacteristically cruel thought in his mind so that the duplicate would spout it off and Spock would know that something was wrong. Though I think that Spock would have realized something was off even without the racist insult (see his reaction when android!Kirk walks past without greeting him.)
-I'm not entirely sure why Kirk's kissing the lady android when she apparently didn't want to be kissed caused her to develop feelings (or recognize preexisting feelings?)
-As meditations on the potential humanity of robots go, this is not particularly sophisticated, but it worked okay especially considering the time period.
1x08, "Miri"
They encounter a planet that seems to be an exact duplicate of Earth, but this REALLY WEIRD THING is never explained and barely even acknowledged after the initial setup. I am simultaneously confused, irritated, and amused.
Despite that plot hole the side of a planet, I enjoyed most of this. The semi-ruined city, the feral children, and the disease were thoroughly creepy. Miri was an interesting one-shot character. (However, it kind of seemed like Kirk was encouraging her adolescent crush on him and even sort of flirting a little in order to get her help, which was gross. I don't care that it was eventually revealed that she's actually centuries old, because the show is very clear that she is barely pubescent physically and in most ways emotionally.) I liked that Rand got to go on an away mission, even if she mostly played damsel in distress.
1x09, "Dagger of the Mind"
This episode makes some points about the prison system and freedom of thought and generally handles them pretty well. William Shatner does some Very Intense Acting. The female doctor who comes along with Kirk to the prison planet, Dr. Noel, gets a good chance to do some active stuff like sneaking around the prison and kicking a guy who's attacking her into something electrified. Spock did a mind-meld. This was a solid episode, if not one of my very favorites.
1x10, "The Corbomite Maneuver"
Scary space cube! This episode is a bit slow but still quite tense, largely because it just lets the menacing weirdness be there unexplained for so long. Kirk does some impressive high-stakes bluffing. Sulu is so talented that he can do his job and the job of the featured crewman of the week at the same time whenever that dude has an outburst and bails out. (On the subject of that spot on the bridge next to Sulu that has thus far been occupied by a guest star ever week, having not watched TOS in the right order before I'd had no idea how long we had to wait to get Chekov. Actually I still don't know, because he hasn't shown up yet. I miss him!)
The ending twist was pretty neat, although I did question why that alien would assume that any other species he encountered would be more intimidated by the dummy face than his real form. How does he know what scares other species? Also, I find it really disturbing that they just left the featured crewman of the week guy with this alien that they just met, who has been hostile in many of his interactions and could well turn hostile again as soon as the Enterprise leaves.
1x11 and 1x12, "The Menagerie pts. I & II"
I know that these episodes made use of footage from the unaired pilot "The Cage," though I haven't seen that version of it. Overall I'm very pleased to have the crew Star Trek ended up with on the show, but still bummed that we didn't get a female first officer like they had in the pilot. I thought these episodes made pretty clever use of a framing device to incorporate that footage in a way that made sense in-story. Previous episodes of Star Trek have been linear in their storytelling, so it was good to see that mold shaken up a little bit. I was pretty invested in the story trying to figure out why Spock was acting so weirdly in the present.
I hope that after the serious business of the episode had passed that Kirk teased Spock about his past eyebrow grooming decisions. Seeing past!Spock's style must have been like finding a picture of someone you care about from 15 years ago with a mullet. Meanwhile, I have trouble believing that the technology of the future couldn't find a way for wheelchair-bound Pike to communicate anything other than yes or no. If he could make the light flash, then surely he could do so in Morse code, or people talking to him could point at a series of letters and he could flash the light when they got to the one he wanted, or something.
1x13, "The Conscience of the King"
I wish they'd done more with the Shakespearean references. Also, the fundamental premise of this episode is pretty implausible. So this guy Kodos used to lead a colony, killed a whole lot of people, and vanished, but he's been hiding out the whole time as a traveling actor. Why pick a profession that allows lots of people from all over the Federation to spend extended time staring at his face? The episode claims that there are very few people who saw Kodos in person, but photographs exist. Presumably someone could recognize him from those, so killing the eyewitnesses seems pretty pointless. That said, it's not a terrible episode. There was a twist that I didn't see coming but which made sense in retrospect.
1x14 "The Balance of Terror"
Romulans! This was an excellent tense episode, deliberately reminiscent of a submarine chase with the Romulan ship coming in and out of visibility due to their cloaking device. I was surprised to learn that none of the humans had previously known that Romulans were an offshoot of Vulcans. Way to conceal relevant parts of your species' history from your allies, Vulcans. Spock had to deal with a racist asshole from the crew, but it was clear that even when the Romulans' appearance is revealed Kirk never once doubted his boyfriend's first officer's loyalty.
The Romulan commander's feelings about Kirk seemed to go beyond simple respect for an enemy and into crush territory by the end. I guess Kirk is just naturally attractive to the pointy-eared.
I loved that we got to see a bit of a slice of life from the Enterprise with the wedding officiated by Kirk, even if it didn't end well. Also, points for having both the bride and groom wear their Star Fleet uniforms because they are both officers; I'm sure the costume designers must have considered putting the bride in a wedding dress, but they instead kept her looking professional with just a fancy hairpiece for adornment. Also, if I recall correctly, Uhura was navigating for a while. I kinda love how the whole bridge-crew has been cross-trained to step in just about anywhere if needed.
1x15, "Shore Leave"
Ah, we've reached an episode of Crack Trek! It's a relief to get something filmed outside instead of in a studio, even if this alien planet does bear a strange resemblance to Southern California. On this planet, people's thoughts tend to come to life, causing lots of havoc with Alice in Wonderland characters, knights, tigers, previous bullies, old flames, etc. running around. The show also gives us an image of a gun lying on the ground, and sure enough Sulu soon ends up firing it. It was a Chekov's gun, but still no sign of Chekov. There was a lot of silliness, and it was pretty entertaining in a preposterous way. Sadly there was some sexism in the depiction of that crewwoman who envisioned Don Juan and princess dresses. I am somewhat dubious of Kirk's decision to go ahead with shore leave for the crew once they'd talked to the ancient powerful alien in charge of this planet. There still seems to be a lot of potential for shit to go wrong.
However, easily the best and most important part of this episode was when Kirk thought he was getting a backrub from Spock and seemed disappointed when it was not Spock but a female yeoman giving the massage. The slash just writes itself, y'all.
1x17, "The Galileo Seven"
A crew of seven get into a shuttle to go study a quasar-like phenomenon (or something like that) and rapidly end up crash-landed, out of communication, and generally in jeopardy. There are some seriously dubious command decisions made here. Kirk sends out this research party instead of going straight to deliver some plague drugs, thus leading to a major time crunch and the potential need to abandon the shuttle when they are late coming back. Of course doing this scientific research is part of the Enterprise's mission, but couldn't they deliver the drugs and then come back to study the phenomenon? I am also baffled by the makeup of the shuttle crew. I think what was supposed to happen is that they were going to stay in space and take some readings, so to do this they had four people from outside the main cast (two white men, a black man, and a white woman), Spock, Scotty, and McCoy. Spock is the chief science officer and thus a logical choice, and I'll assume that the four new folks had useful knowledge or skills, but why the hell did they bring along the chief engineer and the ship's doctor? McCoy in particular is a pretty inexplicable choice.
Anyway, shit goes wrong and the shuttle ends up crash-landing on a planet, and yeti-looking creatures start attacking. Everyone (except Scotty) starts questioning Spock's command decisions and insulting him for not displaying emotion. This ship needs some serious diversity sensitivity training so folks can understand that not expressing emotion is just how Vulcans are. Spock does need to get better about taking the emotional responses of others into account when he decides things based on logic, but I'm never going to fault him for being Spock, and I think most of his decisions here are good ones, it's just that circumstances didn't always work out. I appreciated that the episode showed Scotty as not joining in the attacks on Spock and occasionally defending him. Scotty is definitely an emotional person himself, but he's also a practical-thinking engineer who respects Spock's logic, a professional who respects the chain of command, and a good guy who is content to let Spock be Spock.
As you may have gathered, Spock is my favorite character in TOS. (Uhura and Sulu are very close behind.)
1x18, "The Squire of Gothos"
Hey, here's an episode I vaguely remember seeing before! On this watch through, I was struck by how well Trelane (the incredibly powerful alien being who creates a fake 18th-century setting and kidnaps some of the crew there) is a commentary on the sort of white people who love history without ever looking at it from the perspective of someone less privileged or really bothering to understand much beyond the aesthetic. He's all about battles and empire and outfits and the appearance of good manners (without any of the respect for others that is the ultimate point of manners).
I wish Uhura had spoken up more about Trelane's gross fetishizing talk about her, but the look in her eyes speaks volume. I am amused that when he suddenly made her able to play the harpsichord, she pretty much just shrugged her shoulders and went with that bit. I mean, Trelane is an asshole, but who wouldn't want to instantly be able to play a new instrument?
Spock gets some great lines: "I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline; I object to power without constructive purpose."
The twist at the end about Trelane is great. I knew it going in to this viewing, but I think it's one that is led into well so it makes sense but comes as a surprise.
By the way, if you care at all about any incarnation of Star Trek, I highly recomment the fanvid Long Live by cosmic-llin. It's an amazing feels-inducing tribute to all the crews, to legacy, to the sense of exploration, to found family...just go watch. Potential spoilers for all possible Star Trek.
1x06, "Mudd's Women"
When the Enterprise crew realized that the women seemed to be having a hypnotic effect, why didn't they have crew members who weren't sexually attracted to women interview them instead? If Evie's final dose of the drug was a placebo, how come her makeup and hair were both done after she took it? Who thought this episode was a good idea? I'm so confused.
I think this episode was trying to make some some not-entirely-awful points about real beauty coming from within, but the execution was pretty icky with way too much gazing at the sexualized women and not very much seeing them as people. Mudd is an entertaining rapscallion, I guess. I hope somebody out there has done a rule 63 cosplay group of fem!Mudd and the man-babes.
1x07, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"
(I actually wrote up most of an entry immediately after watching this one, so this ep gets more detail than others.)
I enjoyed this one. It had a lot of stereotypical Star Trek elements: red shirts died, Shatner appeared shirtless and also kissed an android babe, really weird "futuristic" costumes were worn, and issues of what it means to be a person were considered. It was sort of weird that they seemed to be giving most of the cast the week off, with only Kirk and Chapel having lots of screentime and brief appearances by Spock and Uhura. Oh well. I can't say that I find Shatner credible as an actor, but he's a hoot to watch.
Some observations, thoughts, and gentle mocking:
-Kirk breaks off a stalactite to use as a weapon, and IT LOOKS JUST LIKE AN ENORMOUS PENIS. This is the most amazing thing to happen on this show so far.
-Before they beam down, Kirk asks Chapel if she's sure the voice the Enterprise is communicating with is Dr. Korby, and she is absolutely positive it's him. Because goodness knows the Enterprise has NEVER BEFORE ENCOUNTERED doppelgangers or beings that can fool perception of who they really are.
-LOLing forever at the oversized Grandma's bathrobe outfit worn by Creepy Android Ruk, and also the sexy colorful overalls Andrea the Android wears.
-I love the way Chapel side-eyes her fiance about his sexy android.
-Kirk gets stripped and strapped to a weird spinning bondage machine/android maker.
-I was impressed by Kirk's plan for when he was about to get duplicated to hold an uncharacteristically cruel thought in his mind so that the duplicate would spout it off and Spock would know that something was wrong. Though I think that Spock would have realized something was off even without the racist insult (see his reaction when android!Kirk walks past without greeting him.)
-I'm not entirely sure why Kirk's kissing the lady android when she apparently didn't want to be kissed caused her to develop feelings (or recognize preexisting feelings?)
-As meditations on the potential humanity of robots go, this is not particularly sophisticated, but it worked okay especially considering the time period.
1x08, "Miri"
They encounter a planet that seems to be an exact duplicate of Earth, but this REALLY WEIRD THING is never explained and barely even acknowledged after the initial setup. I am simultaneously confused, irritated, and amused.
Despite that plot hole the side of a planet, I enjoyed most of this. The semi-ruined city, the feral children, and the disease were thoroughly creepy. Miri was an interesting one-shot character. (However, it kind of seemed like Kirk was encouraging her adolescent crush on him and even sort of flirting a little in order to get her help, which was gross. I don't care that it was eventually revealed that she's actually centuries old, because the show is very clear that she is barely pubescent physically and in most ways emotionally.) I liked that Rand got to go on an away mission, even if she mostly played damsel in distress.
1x09, "Dagger of the Mind"
This episode makes some points about the prison system and freedom of thought and generally handles them pretty well. William Shatner does some Very Intense Acting. The female doctor who comes along with Kirk to the prison planet, Dr. Noel, gets a good chance to do some active stuff like sneaking around the prison and kicking a guy who's attacking her into something electrified. Spock did a mind-meld. This was a solid episode, if not one of my very favorites.
1x10, "The Corbomite Maneuver"
Scary space cube! This episode is a bit slow but still quite tense, largely because it just lets the menacing weirdness be there unexplained for so long. Kirk does some impressive high-stakes bluffing. Sulu is so talented that he can do his job and the job of the featured crewman of the week at the same time whenever that dude has an outburst and bails out. (On the subject of that spot on the bridge next to Sulu that has thus far been occupied by a guest star ever week, having not watched TOS in the right order before I'd had no idea how long we had to wait to get Chekov. Actually I still don't know, because he hasn't shown up yet. I miss him!)
The ending twist was pretty neat, although I did question why that alien would assume that any other species he encountered would be more intimidated by the dummy face than his real form. How does he know what scares other species? Also, I find it really disturbing that they just left the featured crewman of the week guy with this alien that they just met, who has been hostile in many of his interactions and could well turn hostile again as soon as the Enterprise leaves.
1x11 and 1x12, "The Menagerie pts. I & II"
I know that these episodes made use of footage from the unaired pilot "The Cage," though I haven't seen that version of it. Overall I'm very pleased to have the crew Star Trek ended up with on the show, but still bummed that we didn't get a female first officer like they had in the pilot. I thought these episodes made pretty clever use of a framing device to incorporate that footage in a way that made sense in-story. Previous episodes of Star Trek have been linear in their storytelling, so it was good to see that mold shaken up a little bit. I was pretty invested in the story trying to figure out why Spock was acting so weirdly in the present.
I hope that after the serious business of the episode had passed that Kirk teased Spock about his past eyebrow grooming decisions. Seeing past!Spock's style must have been like finding a picture of someone you care about from 15 years ago with a mullet. Meanwhile, I have trouble believing that the technology of the future couldn't find a way for wheelchair-bound Pike to communicate anything other than yes or no. If he could make the light flash, then surely he could do so in Morse code, or people talking to him could point at a series of letters and he could flash the light when they got to the one he wanted, or something.
1x13, "The Conscience of the King"
I wish they'd done more with the Shakespearean references. Also, the fundamental premise of this episode is pretty implausible. So this guy Kodos used to lead a colony, killed a whole lot of people, and vanished, but he's been hiding out the whole time as a traveling actor. Why pick a profession that allows lots of people from all over the Federation to spend extended time staring at his face? The episode claims that there are very few people who saw Kodos in person, but photographs exist. Presumably someone could recognize him from those, so killing the eyewitnesses seems pretty pointless. That said, it's not a terrible episode. There was a twist that I didn't see coming but which made sense in retrospect.
1x14 "The Balance of Terror"
Romulans! This was an excellent tense episode, deliberately reminiscent of a submarine chase with the Romulan ship coming in and out of visibility due to their cloaking device. I was surprised to learn that none of the humans had previously known that Romulans were an offshoot of Vulcans. Way to conceal relevant parts of your species' history from your allies, Vulcans. Spock had to deal with a racist asshole from the crew, but it was clear that even when the Romulans' appearance is revealed Kirk never once doubted his boyfriend's first officer's loyalty.
The Romulan commander's feelings about Kirk seemed to go beyond simple respect for an enemy and into crush territory by the end. I guess Kirk is just naturally attractive to the pointy-eared.
I loved that we got to see a bit of a slice of life from the Enterprise with the wedding officiated by Kirk, even if it didn't end well. Also, points for having both the bride and groom wear their Star Fleet uniforms because they are both officers; I'm sure the costume designers must have considered putting the bride in a wedding dress, but they instead kept her looking professional with just a fancy hairpiece for adornment. Also, if I recall correctly, Uhura was navigating for a while. I kinda love how the whole bridge-crew has been cross-trained to step in just about anywhere if needed.
1x15, "Shore Leave"
Ah, we've reached an episode of Crack Trek! It's a relief to get something filmed outside instead of in a studio, even if this alien planet does bear a strange resemblance to Southern California. On this planet, people's thoughts tend to come to life, causing lots of havoc with Alice in Wonderland characters, knights, tigers, previous bullies, old flames, etc. running around. The show also gives us an image of a gun lying on the ground, and sure enough Sulu soon ends up firing it. It was a Chekov's gun, but still no sign of Chekov. There was a lot of silliness, and it was pretty entertaining in a preposterous way. Sadly there was some sexism in the depiction of that crewwoman who envisioned Don Juan and princess dresses. I am somewhat dubious of Kirk's decision to go ahead with shore leave for the crew once they'd talked to the ancient powerful alien in charge of this planet. There still seems to be a lot of potential for shit to go wrong.
However, easily the best and most important part of this episode was when Kirk thought he was getting a backrub from Spock and seemed disappointed when it was not Spock but a female yeoman giving the massage. The slash just writes itself, y'all.
1x17, "The Galileo Seven"
A crew of seven get into a shuttle to go study a quasar-like phenomenon (or something like that) and rapidly end up crash-landed, out of communication, and generally in jeopardy. There are some seriously dubious command decisions made here. Kirk sends out this research party instead of going straight to deliver some plague drugs, thus leading to a major time crunch and the potential need to abandon the shuttle when they are late coming back. Of course doing this scientific research is part of the Enterprise's mission, but couldn't they deliver the drugs and then come back to study the phenomenon? I am also baffled by the makeup of the shuttle crew. I think what was supposed to happen is that they were going to stay in space and take some readings, so to do this they had four people from outside the main cast (two white men, a black man, and a white woman), Spock, Scotty, and McCoy. Spock is the chief science officer and thus a logical choice, and I'll assume that the four new folks had useful knowledge or skills, but why the hell did they bring along the chief engineer and the ship's doctor? McCoy in particular is a pretty inexplicable choice.
Anyway, shit goes wrong and the shuttle ends up crash-landing on a planet, and yeti-looking creatures start attacking. Everyone (except Scotty) starts questioning Spock's command decisions and insulting him for not displaying emotion. This ship needs some serious diversity sensitivity training so folks can understand that not expressing emotion is just how Vulcans are. Spock does need to get better about taking the emotional responses of others into account when he decides things based on logic, but I'm never going to fault him for being Spock, and I think most of his decisions here are good ones, it's just that circumstances didn't always work out. I appreciated that the episode showed Scotty as not joining in the attacks on Spock and occasionally defending him. Scotty is definitely an emotional person himself, but he's also a practical-thinking engineer who respects Spock's logic, a professional who respects the chain of command, and a good guy who is content to let Spock be Spock.
As you may have gathered, Spock is my favorite character in TOS. (Uhura and Sulu are very close behind.)
1x18, "The Squire of Gothos"
Hey, here's an episode I vaguely remember seeing before! On this watch through, I was struck by how well Trelane (the incredibly powerful alien being who creates a fake 18th-century setting and kidnaps some of the crew there) is a commentary on the sort of white people who love history without ever looking at it from the perspective of someone less privileged or really bothering to understand much beyond the aesthetic. He's all about battles and empire and outfits and the appearance of good manners (without any of the respect for others that is the ultimate point of manners).
I wish Uhura had spoken up more about Trelane's gross fetishizing talk about her, but the look in her eyes speaks volume. I am amused that when he suddenly made her able to play the harpsichord, she pretty much just shrugged her shoulders and went with that bit. I mean, Trelane is an asshole, but who wouldn't want to instantly be able to play a new instrument?
Spock gets some great lines: "I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline; I object to power without constructive purpose."
The twist at the end about Trelane is great. I knew it going in to this viewing, but I think it's one that is led into well so it makes sense but comes as a surprise.
By the way, if you care at all about any incarnation of Star Trek, I highly recomment the fanvid Long Live by cosmic-llin. It's an amazing feels-inducing tribute to all the crews, to legacy, to the sense of exploration, to found family...just go watch. Potential spoilers for all possible Star Trek.