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This thread is about Star Trek, no bloody A, B, C or D. I've been watching through TOS over the past few months for the first time in most cases since I was a teenager watching it in syndication on Channel 43 in northeastern Ohio on Saturday and Sunday nights (WHY DO I REMEMBER THIS also drat I'M GETTING OLD). Right now I have about ten episodes left of Season 3. I despair of any of them being at all good at this point. (Though there were a couple nice surprises earlier in the season like The Tholian Web and Is There In Truth No Beauty, both of which were tons better than I remembered and even Whom Gods Destroy was at least watchable.) But then there's poo poo like The Empath, which I didn't hate because that would require having an emotional reaction to it and I just can't be bothered, and Elaan of Troyius which is somehow even worse than The Space Taming Of The Space Shrew would be expected to be. Most recent was Let This Be Your Last Battlefield which...okay, nice effort at a parable about hate (in pretty much exactly the same way Bioshock Infinite was), and some goddamn weird pacing to make a ten minute story last an hour, but I did appreciate that they went with an invisible spaceship rather than just a floating sign in space that read "WE DON'T HAVE THE BUDGET FOR ANY NEW SPACESHIP MODELS, SORRY". Also Leonard Nimoy's ABSOLUTELY gently caress ALL OF THIS expression when the one alien was explaining passionately that the other alien was inferior because he was white on the right side of his head, instead of being black on the right side of his head like all superior beings made all the rest of it absolutely worth it.
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Sep 29, 2021 15:57
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Lots of TOS isn't very good, isn't it? It's impressive how much it recycles its own plot ideas. I'm sure someone has made a full list of TOS's stock plots somewhere, but here's a start:
Note that many of these are also used in other Trek series! Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 29, 2021 20:19
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Silver2195 posted:Lots of TOS isn't very good, isn't it? Hahaha, and I could even add an episode or two from TOS to many of those categories (For The World Is Hollow And I have Touched The Sky - Totalitarian Computer, Miri - Parallel Earth For No Goddamned Reason, The Savage Curtain and Spectre of the Gun, not exactly gladiator fights but close enough, etc.) Not to mention the other common thread of Starship Captain Goes Crazy, Sets Himself Up As The Ruler/God Of A Primitive World (The Omega Glory, Bread and Circuses again, arguably The Paradise Syndrome, Whom Gods Destroy, sort of). A lot of it really does hold up though (even the ones that tread on very familiar ground). (Quite a lot of it is also really shockingly sexist even by late 1960s standards). Miri, for example, impressed me a lot more than I expected, and also includes "NO BLAH BLAH BLAH", which is the single greatest line of dialogue ever spoken on stage or screen. I might go through my thoughts on episodes in a more structured way later (or I might not).
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Sep 29, 2021 20:31
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Recently watched: Mark of Gideon: Cool premise (Kirk tries to beam down to a planet and ends up alone on a seemingly-abandoned Enterprise) completely undermined by showing the actual Enterprise like two seconds later, and the actual plot makes no goddamn sense, but by Season 3 standards this is Shakespeare In Space Love. That Which Survives: A much more interesting mystery that almost works (designing a security system to repel intruders with holographic women that can only kill one specific person feels suboptimal to me), and is appropriately tense in various spots, though they could have tuned down Spock's "LOL YOU SAID A COLLOQUIAL THING THAT I AM TAKING LITERALLY BECAUSE I HAVE NOT BEEN WORKING ALONGSIDE HUMANS MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE" responses a bit.
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Sep 30, 2021 21:22
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The Lights Of Zetar: Yup we're fully into "We Have No More Money For The Season" territory now. Scotty being head over heels in love with Lt. Romaine was cute; everyone else in the crew referring to her as "the girl" was less so. Not a horrible story (though slow as gently caress) but I feel like they'd have at least made it into something of an ethical dilemma that these were the last surviving members of their species who were acting out of desperation to live again in the series' earlier days. This also made me remember the novel Memory Prime which I recall liking back in the day.
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Oct 1, 2021 17:26
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Silver2195 posted:Lots of TOS isn't very good, isn't it? If you're being charitable, you could say that they were deliberately remaking the same episodes over and over as an attempt at refining the formula. Spectre Of The Gun is straight-up the exact same story as The Corbomite Maneuver, but done a little more interestingly. In other cases, the repetition gives a sense that they're working through some poo poo. In The Man Trap, the salt vampire is the last of its kind, but they just fuckin' kill her anyways. Then, in Devil In the Dark, they're like "maybe we should not kill the monster?" When you get to One Of Our Planets Is Missing, they're doing everything in their power not to kill the familiar Massive Apocalyptic Death Cloud.
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Oct 2, 2021 13:42
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Silver2195 posted:Lots of TOS isn't very good, isn't it? Despite my affection for it, no, no it isn't. You have to find it charmingly terrible to be watchable, imo. Watching it it's hard to believe it had the impact that it did.
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Oct 2, 2021 15:11
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It’s a double hit of nostalgia; it reminds me of when I saw it on tv as a kid in the late 70’s, and also evokes the mid-late 60’s perfectly in the meta (the instruments and orchestration, grain of the footage, the set materials, hair and makeup). But yes, it’s terrible. TNG only has two really good episodes, and they had twenty years to refine the formula, so it’s probably just impossible to make consistently good Star Trek.
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Oct 2, 2021 16:33
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I think there are a number of very good TOS episodes (but they are predominantly from the first two seasons, especially the second one).
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Oct 2, 2021 16:39
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SPACE HIPPIES yesssss
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Oct 2, 2021 19:12
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I mean, Man Trap is the first non-pilot episode and is basically an Outer Limits episode in Star Trek clothing, I don't expect it to have its morality banged out too well. The thing that always struck me was how much the Federation was its own utopian thing versus just a natural extension of the United States. They do well about that in a lot of episodes, but then there's that weird episode where the American Constitution is this holy document on some planet or another that always got an eye roll out of me. docbeard posted:SPACE HIPPIES yesssss You're gonna have to get more specific, because I think there was two episodes with that and only one was good (the one where Spock gets horny).
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Oct 2, 2021 23:12
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Probably Magic posted:You're gonna have to get more specific, because I think there was two episodes with that and only one was good (the one where Spock gets horny). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pNQYHvhnms
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Oct 2, 2021 23:19
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Ah, the bad one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQONBf9xMss
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Oct 2, 2021 23:28
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Probably Magic posted:The thing that always struck me was how much the Federation was its own utopian thing versus just a natural extension of the United States. They do well about that in a lot of episodes, but then there's that weird episode where the American Constitution is this holy document on some planet or another that always got an eye roll out of me. I vaguely remember reading that there was a bit of a fight early on because someone (can't remember if Roddenberry was for or against it now) wanted "U.S.S." to be "United States Spaceship". I'm guessing "against" since the abolition of individual nation-states on Earth seemed to be part of his whole utopian thing, but the show certainly believed that Federation Values were American Values (less racism, imperialism, the urge to kill, etc., though apparently sexism was still fine). But yeah, The Omega Glory (where the "Yangs" and the "Kohms" had nearly destroyed each other in the past, "Freedom" was a Yang 'worship word' and the American Flag and the Constitution were holy relics was one of the cases where it got weirdly specific. (The other one that was really on the nose this last playthrough was A Private Little War, which was an argument so direct in favor of American involvement in Vietnam that I half expected to see that Kissinger had a writing credit.) Also interesting in retrospect is that the stuff we later associate with the Federation (like the abolition of currency and scarcity) were very much not in evidence in the original series. I need to get hold of David "The Trouble With Tribbles" Gerrold's book about the making of Star Trek again, because I remember him making a lot of critical points about the show at the time, specifically that it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a Space Adventure show or a Space Drama show, to its detriment. e. Probably Magic posted:Ah, the bad one. Oh it was not good in the slightest but I enjoyed it a lot, in contrast to a lot of Season 3 episodes which were not good in the slightest and I hated them.
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Oct 2, 2021 23:29
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I actually kinda came away with a different feeling on "Private Little War," it does make the case that Starfleet's involvement is just compared to the Klingons more than a lot of episodes where they have to come together (like Errand of Mercy or Day of the Dove) but there is this despondency to the ending when the Enterprise just bails with the conflict unresolved, like the writer's group just didn't really know how the Vietnam War could possibly end well, which seems pretty prophetic all things considered. I remember reading the start of Roddenberry's novelization for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and it was way weirder than I expected, almost a little cyberpunk with Kirk having augments to deal with things in the future. My conclusion from that is Roddenberry was a weirder guy than even got showed off in the show and that always made me appreciate him more even if he got blamed from dragging the start of Next Generation down. You can definitely see tug-and-pull with the writing room about what Star Trek's ethos should be, how utopian it should be versus relevant to the modern day, how to resolve conflicts, etc. Since you're in Season 3 where Roddenberry baled, I can only imagine that's even more disjointed.
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Oct 2, 2021 23:35
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I think the academic curiosity of seeing the way TV was structured in the 60s covers for some of how slow it gets sometimes, while when the newer shows drag on, there's less else to focus on. The original series was incredibly weird, but it had no shame over being weird. The medium was still young and inventing itself as it went along. They made big, bold decisions about colors, lighting up walls in strange colors and giving the crew bright, colorful uniforms, because they were trying to show off that fancy new color television. And now, those big huge decisions also cover up how their fancy color filming technology didn't really work right. At least their uniforms still look like a set of primary colors.
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Oct 2, 2021 23:57
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60s sci fi paints over a lot of the flaws with sheer enthusiasm - and why wouldn't they? men were going into space! space, i tell you! there's a movie from the moon launch enthusiasm period called moon zero two that imagines a near-future moon colony and i think it shares a lot with TOS in that way. objectively not great (it ended up featured on MST3k for a reason), but really grappling for the first time with this idea of people actually living in space in a way that isn't campy buck rogers stuff. not to say that 60s sci fi isn't almost always campy from our perspective, but it's a totally different kind of camp.
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Oct 3, 2021 00:43
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Jazerus posted:in a way that isn't campy buck rogers stuff. not to say that 60s sci fi isn't almost always campy from our perspective, but it's a totally different kind of camp. Honestly, this is probably a big part of my problem with Star Trek. It takes itself a little too seriously; if it was more intentionally campy I'd probably like it a lot better.
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Oct 3, 2021 00:55
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One thing to remember when looking at TOS is that there were only 3 tv networks at the time. They manage to get around a lot of the limits placed on shows at the time but I'm sure there were still places too far for the network to allow to air / I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't the occasional directive.
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Oct 3, 2021 01:07
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seconding this. the whole aesthetic of tos, probably due to consistently being one of the few good things on when I was young, just does it. the painted backdrops, the music video set looking stages, the vacuum tubes and dials and huge lights and buttons, even the sound design and cheesy alien makeup, the whole thing is just of a time. it tickles the same sense of taste receptors as old dr. who. I suspect it's the same kind of feeling renaissance aristocrats had about, like, hellinistic greece, where it's all seen through the most glorifying lens possible. or like how george lucas claimed the star wars prequels where generally glossier because they were a nostalgic representation of the peak of an empire remembered as better than it ever actually was
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Oct 3, 2021 01:15
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Probably Magic posted:I mean, Man Trap is the first non-pilot episode and is basically an Outer Limits episode in Star Trek clothing, I don't expect it to have its morality banged out too well. It’s actually pretty consistent in some ways; the episode Obsession establishes Kirk’s hatred of cloud aliens is due to a traumatic incident early in his career. The same basic story is then repeated with minor variations: The Immunity Syndrome has Spock confront the cloud instead of Kirk, and then The Tholian Web does away with the cloud and makes the baddies merely a bunch of space assholes. The three episodes, together, tell one fairly repetitive story.
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Oct 3, 2021 17:44
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:Despite my affection for it, no, no it isn't. You have to find it charmingly terrible to be watchable, imo. Watching it it's hard to believe it had the impact that it did. It's very high concept compared to some of its competition, and the best of it is up there with Twilight Zone (another show that has its misses). As opposed to like, Lost in Space, which was loving dreadful.
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Oct 4, 2021 08:54
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Random thoughts on the last few: Requiem For Methuselah: I love the premise of this episode but it just gets super weird about halfway through, with Kirk falling so distressingly in love with a woman he met an hour ago that he can't function afterwards without Spock literally erasing his memory. The Way To Eden: It's terrible and I love it. The Cloud Minders: The Federation really needs to sort out their medical system, this is the second "disease completely incurable without element that can only be found on extremely terrible planet" incident in like three weeks. Not all that bad an episode though the idea of an actual Federation world that still practiced torture and slave labor feels off. The Savage Curtain: Did I just imagine that the rock monster was called Yarnek or something? Also this episode would have been a thousand percent better if they'd used Chekov's imagination to populate the 'good' side and the Enterprise crew had to deal with Lenin turning up. All Our Yesterdays: "I don't like that. I do not think that I ever have." gently caress yeah, Spock! Just got Turnabout Intruder left. Wish me luck, friends.
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Oct 4, 2021 13:57
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Turnabout Intruder: First, just to get it out there, whoever described it as  The Episode sure had it right. And it's maddening because changing maybe two lines of dialogue could have made it...not that. They could have made this a story about a person who was passed over for command because she genuinely wasn't fit for it without saying "oh if only she'd been content with her womanly place" as if simple ambition was what had made her a crazed mass murderer, but they sure didn't! (Also, given the way that drat near every starship captain in TOS but Kirk seemed to crack under the pressure or declare himself a living god or something, the bar really wasn't that high!) Not as outwardly gross as Elaan of Troyius or Mudd's Women, but insidiously hateful. I'll probably go back and do quick thoughts on the earlier episodes too. Because, again, there are actually good episodes of this series.
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Oct 4, 2021 18:59
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TOS is cool for starting a whole subgenre of sci-fi but yeah it has like 3 good episodes total it's still a fun watch but i doubt i'd ever rewatch it
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Oct 4, 2021 22:04
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Regarde Aduck posted:TOS is cool for starting a whole subgenre of sci-fi but yeah it has like 3 good episodes total Which three episodes do you consider the good ones specifically?
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Oct 4, 2021 22:30
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I love TOS, but when I was trying to create a curated list for my friend to watch through, it was a lot of, "drat, this is the same plot as this other episode but worse, isn't it?" Spock was such an icon for me as a little kid I can't ever really drag it, and its best is really good. I'm not sure I'll ever enjoy the remasters though, the old school effects are part of the charm, and a lot of the revisions just look horrid to me. It's probably my second favorite Trek behind DS9, honestly.
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Oct 5, 2021 01:07
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I'm a big fan of the melodrama of Balance of Power even if it's just a submarine film plot transplanted into space. Possibly even because it's just a submarine film plot transplanted into space.
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Oct 5, 2021 06:58
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Regarde Aduck posted:TOS is cool for starting a whole subgenre of sci-fi but yeah it has like 3 good episodes total Yeah, I don't see myself ever doing a full rewatch again, at least not anytime soon. There are definitely episodes I'll revisit though. And sure, I think the number is higher than three, but maybe not that much higher.
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Oct 5, 2021 13:36
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Balance of Power is so loving good. Star Trek really does work best when it's a submarine thriller, case in point its best films being Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country.
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Oct 5, 2021 18:16
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It's worth remembering that TOS was always desperate for shootable scripts. The show couldn't attract a lot of the established professional television writers, because many of them weren't interested in writing for a sci-fi show that they didn't think had much of a future; meanwhile, the professional science fiction writers would come in and pitch them stories that were either unshootable under the constraints of 1967 television technology, or otherwise unsuitable for 1967 television network standards and practices. Especially by the time third season came around and show was scheduled into a timeslot that was certain death, they couldn't afford to be picky about how much a story resembled a previous episode. Mode 7 posted:I'm a big fan of the melodrama of Balance of Power even if it's just a submarine film plot transplanted into space. Some of the best Trek episodes are adaptations of earlier stories, and that's perfectly okay. DS9 Duet is just a retelling of an existing play. What's important is that the telling is entertaining.
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Oct 6, 2021 08:14
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There are nonetheless a dozen+ variations on the premise “god-aliens scan the crew’s minds and present them with materializations of their fears/fantasies as a test of goodness, or just to be dicks.” There are multiple different types of “good” in original Star Trek that only occasionally overlap, with the rarest type being “decent sci-fi.” Out of all those episodes, the only one that’s actually interesting would be Spectre Of The Gun - and that one’s interesting because even Spock is kinda bungling his way through the situation.
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Oct 6, 2021 19:52
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Remember though, you were meant at time of prodction to see these shows once every week for an hour, maybe, if there was not a football game on in the little black and white TV at the bar you were avoiding your family at
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Oct 7, 2021 02:31
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FunkyAl posted:Remember though, you were meant at time of prodction to see these shows once every week for an hour, maybe, if there was not a football game on in the little black and white TV at the bar you were avoiding your family at There is a sort of “metanarrative” in the particulars of the setting: The galaxy is under invasion by incomprehensible horrors from beyond - gigantic ‘lovecraftian’ insanity-creatures that dwell in the distortions of space-time outside the boundaries of the known world. Against these horrors, ancient aliens have spread humanity across thousands of alternate Earths, hoping to increase their chances of survival. Nearly all of these have projects have failed. Those humanoids who last longest achieve ‘singularity’ and morph into ambiguous cloud-entities, often indistinguishable from the insanity-creatures. It‘s in this context that Kirk champions an Earth-American military organization whose ideology is continually shown to be bullshit. One minute, he’s talking about how humanity has transcended war - the next minute, Starfleet is converting the Enterprise into an automated weapons platform. The Federation is constantly haunted by the recurrence of ‘past’ failures, as even robotic probes designed for peaceful exploration tend to go mad from the contradictions. I’ve seen the opinion that Tomorrow Is Yesterday serves as a better intro to the series that either pilot, and this is true. But the obvious conclusion to the series is City At The Edge Of Forever. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
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Oct 8, 2021 03:47
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:There is a sort of “metanarrative” in the particulars of the setting: I like this, but now missing from TOS is the episode where a hyper, future-earth visits the federation and chides them for being savages and misunderstanding the Magna Carta. Altho I suppose this is just "Q"
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Oct 8, 2021 18:07
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:It‘s in this context that Kirk champions an Earth-American military organization whose ideology is continually shown to be bullshit. That's true of every organization depicted in space opera 
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Oct 9, 2021 01:39
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FunkyAl posted:I like this, but now missing from TOS is the episode where a hyper, future-earth visits the federation and chides them for being savages and misunderstanding the Magna Carta. Altho I suppose this is just "Q" it would be funny if the Q were just future humans and Q himself just the most devoted to loving with this (to him, alternate) timeline
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Oct 9, 2021 02:12
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Jazerus posted:it would be funny if the Q were just future humans and Q himself just the most devoted to loving with this (to him, alternate) timeline It would make their civil war reenactment make a lot more sense. A LOT more.
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Oct 9, 2021 02:57
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Silver2195 posted:Honestly, this is probably a big part of my problem with Star Trek. It takes itself a little too seriously; if it was more intentionally campy I'd probably like it a lot better. Fan of the new Doctor Who, are you? I like TOS because it's so earnest, and I couldn't take the continual winking at the audience in NuWho.
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Oct 9, 2021 03:46
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:That's true of every organization depicted in space opera Until late-era TNG/DS9 you are meant to take absolutely seriously that humanity has truly ascended to a new era of peaceful, humanist community, even though this is constantly undermined by the plots of the shows and movies. It's a trope that every diplomat and ship captain outside the Enterprise is a deeply flawed idiot/insane dipshit, and anyone above captain in rank is some cartoonishly capitalist pig. Basically "we've ascended! Everything's different now!" is nominally true only within the confines of the ship. But then again it's not really sci-fi most of the time as much as it is morality-tale-of-the-week, and that's OK. It's not OK when the morality tale involves depictions of women that were skeevy and weird even at the time (TOS) or "there is a hierarchy of worthiness in cultures, and it's ranked on who's most like us" (almost any prime directive thing). To name two weird trek things.
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Oct 9, 2021 04:37
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