Star Trek, The Animated Series: The Final Binge

Season 4, Sort Of
Yes, I had to be a completist when it came to binging Star Trek, The Original series, so I went through all twenty-two episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series as well (though I went through this one rather quickly on my own, while I had access to the series). My memories from the early 1970s isn't great, but it's possible that it was actually this show, and not reruns of TOS, that were my first true exposure to the World of Trek. I've given them the same grading scale as I did the rest of TOS, occasionally making allowances for the fact that, after all, we're dealing with horribly animated 25-minute cartoons. Still, mostly I take them seriously, and I think I'm justified in that; there is often genuinely good writing in these episodes, including some stuff that has become central to the canon.

Beyond the Farthest Star: A-
Wild, weird sci-fi with an evil, unknown alien (with the message from the other long-dead aliens it killed!); within the limits of the cartoon--and yes, the limits are atrocious--this is exactly the sort of far-out story that should always kick off a Star Trek series. And it leaves us with an ambiguous message, with the alien suffering from loneliness. Was that purposeful?

Yesteryear: A
Another winner--important to the Star Trek canon, and the death of the sehlat is sad in a way that was perfectly appropriate to a Saturday morning cartoon. And I am officially declaring Spock saving himself as where Rowling got the idea for the climax of Prisoner of Azkaban.

One of Our Planets is Missing: B+
Another excellent sci-fi adventure, nicely plotted, with great action with McCoy and Scotty and some real pathos and sacrifice. But the Vulcan mental trick in the end is pretty sappy.

The Lorelei Signal: B
Utterly dumb plot--they had a basic idea, then came up with the most direct way to accomplish it--but Scotty's singing is hilarious, and isn't it great to see Uhura take command?

More Tribbles, More Troubles: B-
A weak story filled with repetitive plot points (what, Sherman's planet still needs food?), as well as actually childish jokes, but it's still fun.

The Survivor: B-
A story that's been done many times (including in The Man Trap), and Anne Nored is stupidly helpless, but the basic outline of this sort of tale is strong, and this version of it works, with some sophisticated interplay with the Romulans.

The Infinite Vulcan: C
A choppy, somewhat rushed sci-fi story, with a pat ending. And what's with that "scrutable" comment to Sulu at the end? The snarky work of Walter Koenig, no doubt.

The Magicks of Megas-Tu: C+
Okay, that was really weird. They're at the center of the galaxy? The Enterprise certainly gets around. Lucifer? Holy cow, it's Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods! Still, it's fun to see Kirk use magic.

Once Upon a Planet: C-
In a story like this, the crappy animation and art design of the program really hurts; it would have been fun if this very basic story had had some real artistic craziness to it.

Mudd's Passion: C
I dislike this the least of all of Mudd's appearances, but the cheap sexism--and in this case the abuse of Nurse Chapel--is hard to take, despite the silliness. Points for some glimmers of Kirk/Spock slash and scenes with McCoy on the make.

The Terratin Incident: A-
Glorious, wacky sci-fi, with everyone acting in smart, problem-solving ways. Dopey ending, though.

The Time Trap: C+
Weirdly undramatic episode. Why does Kirk keep agreeing that Elysia is a "perfect society"--is there any society even there except wrecked ships stranded in space? They work together, they get out, the Klingons betray them, etc.

The Ambergris Element: C
Cool, space shuttles can go underwater! But the story was dull. Reminded me of Wink of an Eye--aliens can't help themselves, so need to bring help to the conditions they are stuck in.

The Slaver Weapon: A
Really great, because of the world-building involved, the sense of history it gives to the Star Trek universe, and all the cool stuff Sulu, Uhura, and Spock got to do. The story is pulpy--touch the ancient spooky weapon and be doomed!--but the image of that weapon is one of the oldest things I remember. I suspect I was drawing pictures of it when I was only 4 or 5-years-old.

The Eye of the Beholder: B
Cute episode, mostly because the aliens are adorable; much better than most of the other "meet the advanced race so far beyond the Enterprise crew that they don't know what to do with them" stories.

The Jihad: C+
Hey look, it's a Dungeons & Dragons quest! With a thief, a ranger, and a warrior! But unfortunately, a mostly kind of boring and predictable one. Nice to see someone hitting on Kirk when he wasn't interested for a change.

The Pirates of Orion: C
The stock shot of Kirk calling for McCoy in sickbay while McCoy was standing right beside him was annoying. Oh well. The motivations of the pirates made little sense. Why wouldn't they make a deal?

Bem: A-
Solid, straight-up, far-out sci-fi. Bem's alien-ness is obviously cartoonish, but well done, and if you're going to have a story about super-powered aliens watching over primitive races, this is the way to do it.

The Practical Joker: B-
Perfectly adequate joke episode, with a nice preview of the Holodeck. How did Kirk figure out how to get rid of the computer virus? Ah, who knows.

Albatross: C
Nice to have McCoy at the center of a story, but it was kind of a by-the-numbers trial story. Fun trick with the original hunt for evidence, though.

How Sharper Thank a Serpent's Tooth: B
Man, there's a lot of the Chariot's of the Gods in these animated episodes. But this version of dealing with an ancient god from outer space was better than TOS's Who Mourns for Adonis.

The Counter-Clock Incident: C+
Another indication that the teleportation device could make someone immortal. Oh well, as a morality tale wrapped up in sci-fi strangeness, it's fine.

And that's the end of 2020's journey through The Original Series (including the "lost" Animated fourth season) everyone. It was fun--some good reminders of the profound weaknesses of so much of the original story-telling and visual production when this franchise began, but more importantly, reminders of the great charm and power that science-fiction television can provide (even for, if my family's viewing reactions proved anything, TikTok-reading 14-year-old girls today).

Converting all my grades to GPA scores, they come out as follows: Season 2: 2.75; Season 4 (TAS): 2.68; Season 1: 2.55; Season 3: 2.03. I don't think I expected those results, but in looking back over it all, it's clear that it took TOS a while to find it's groove, with Season 1 weighed down with several very middling episodes at the beginning. That was the season that gave us the greatest episode of them all, "City on the Edge of Forever," but the number of classics in Season 2 ("Doomsday Machine," "Amok Time," "Bread and Circuses") justifiably puts it up there. And Season 4 was a real delight to rediscover. Still, overall the level of quality was never great: Star Trek was, in its original iteration (both live-action and animated), really never better than B-/C+ television. But perhaps that can be said for all episodic television programming made in America between 1966 and 1974, especially from our perspective today? Whatever the facts of the matter, Star Trek: The Original Series connected with me and millions upon millions of others, and still does today, apparently. That's all that needs to be said.

Star Trek, The Orginal Series, Season 3: The Third Binge

Season 3
And, after Seasons 1 and 2, on to the third season we go! This one deserves its reputation, unfortunately--not that it was atrocious, but rather just characterized by 1) stories whose central conceits were weak or, too often, just plain offensive and stupid, or 2) stories with real dramatic or science-fiction potential that weren't realized, because of the budget cuts the show was dealing with, or because people just weren't able to or didn't care enough to give those scripts another run-through. I see only one real gem in this season, plus a handful of defensible episodes, and then a lot of dross. Oh well. As always, no summaries here; just a grade and a few sentences explanation

Spock's Brain: D-
Famously considered the worst episode of the whole Original Series, I'm not going to defend it. A dumb plot, with some casually atrocious sexism built into it without even the perverse value of being articulated as such. Add to that wooden acting, and an insultingly stupid ending. Blech.

The Enterprise Incident: B
Not a great episode, but a solid one. Spock playing the seducor doesn't work terribly well, and the Enterprise's escape from Romulan vessels was way too easy, but there's a lot of nice details in this espionage story.

The Paradise Syndrome: D
The bone-headed racism built into the story is carried off with such cringy earnestness that you want to give it a pass, but you can't. Meanwhile, the story is just so dumb. Why is bad weather a harbinger of giant meteorites? And when did Spock's mind-meld suddenly become an all-purpose magic power, complete with spooky theme music?

And the Children Shall Lead: C-
It's Children of the Corn in space! Or else it could have been. Hackneyed dialogue, wooden performances (though not from the kids!), and some stupid plot points undermine what is basically a supernatural horror story.

Is There No Truth in Beauty: C
Well acted, but the typical sexism of the Original Series is manifest in some particularly personal and cruel ways here, telling a story about resentment and love and ugliness that could have been fascinating, but hurts itself with its own abrasiveness. And man, the budget cuts really showed.

Spectre of the Gun: A
One of my favorites from the whole series. An example of making a silk purse from a sow's ear: the cheap sets and hammy dialogue are effectively stylized through the actors' performances and the lighting and music, turning a tired plot about proving to a powerful alien race that humans aren't all about violence into a weirdly effective story of pacifism and the power of belief.

Day of the Dove: B-
This one just needed a re-write; it's a better execution of the usual "super-powerful alien manipulates the crew into a fighting" trope,  with some nice story touches (Chekov's possession is good, and Kang is pretty great), but with the usual Season 3 ham-fisted dialogue weighs it down.

For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky: C
Classic television science-fiction ideas (intergenerational space travelers who don't know they're on a spaceship! matriarchal leadership with weirdly primitive technology! out of control computer!) mixed with what should have been a poignant love story; better than Paradise Syndrome, but it needed two hours to do its job.

The Tholian Web: B-
The episode had the making of a solid hard sci-fi/technobabble bit of Trek; the conflict between Spock and McCoy is unbelievable, given all that we've seen earlier, and the final escape from the Tholians is almost an afterthought, but there's some good stuff in here.

Plato's Stepchildren: C-
In many ways a deeply embarrassing episode, revealing once again of weak writing (Platonians? Why not Medusians again?). But there's potential for real, creepy, Purple Man-style horror here, though they probably had no intention of going in that direction, even if they could have.

Wink of an Eye: C-
A half of an episode at best. Super-fast aliens you can't see! They need to mate with others so they don't die out! They speed up Kirk, Spock figures it out, they get Kirk free, and then...the end. If they'd made it more light-hearted, maybe a sex comedy, that would have been something.

The Empath: D
This was a slog. You can imagine, especially early on, the story-boarders going for some classic, almost radio-style, melodramatic sci-fi, but there's just not enough story there, and the ending is terrible.

Elaan of Troyius: B-
You wonder if this is a version of Taming of the Shrew where Elaan is playing Kirk but then has an actual change of heart, which would make this series of sexist tropes pretty decent viewing. But you can't tell. Anyway, the battle with the Klingons is kind of clever, Elaan's costumes are fabulous, and the acting is mostly above par.

Whom Gods Destroy: C
A silly inmates-take-over-the-asylum episode, with some outrageous hamminess, but also some nicely understated world-building moments, which are unfortunately sometimes jarring, in that they're not part of anything that we've ever seen before.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield: C
An incredibly clunky and blunt allegory, frustratingly so, because the potential to turn this story into a grand tragedy was there. The rescue mission was a distraction, and the abilites of Bele (but not Lokai?) make no sense. Still, some solid, heavy stuff in here (an enslaved--and recently "freed"--population fighting on planets far away? might one of those planets be named "Vietnam"? hmm....).

The Mark of Gideon: C-
A ridiculously contrived episode. A potentially interesting idea, complete with a surprisingly moralistic, even religious, defense of their stupid strategy by Hodin (with Kirk as a potential, secular foil), but surrounded with dull, pointless scenes that do nothing to develop it.

That Which Survives: B
Spock's dialogue is annoyingly self-parodying throughout the episode, but other than that, this is a genuine hard sci-fi episode, with both mystery and drama. The power of the Kaladan machine is ridiculously immense, but in some ways that's okay (there are plenty of super-powered beings in this galaxy, apparently). And did Scotty survive basically what killed Spock in Star Trek II?

The Lights of Zetar: C-
Not aggressively bad, but a poorly executed, poorly acted episode, with a weirdly powerful alien presence which is easily defeated by a pressure chamber (why didn't it attack everyone and then go back inside Romaine? It's not like they couldn't hear what the crew was planning...).

Requiem for Methuselah: D+
An episode set up to be a big, meaningful tragedy (two lonely men...), but poorly acted and stupidly--even insultingly (has everyone just forgotten about the pandemic on the Enterprise?)--put together.

The Way to Eden: C+
I purposefully make myself enjoy this episode more than it deserves or I really feel, because I want to salute its acknowledgment of "the primitive" and its complaints about technology. And the music actually isn't bad. But too much of the plot is just boiled over stuff they've done before (how easy is it to take over the Enterprise, anyway?).

The Cloud Minders: C+
Very poorly paced, and the zenite gas element of the story partly undermines probably the only socio-economically critical story in the whole of TOS. But I give them credit for at least directly addressing matters of class.

The Savage Curtain: C-
Lots of nice details (the Enterprise crew's interactions with Lincoln, the portrayal of Surak, an abrupt ending that could be understood as weirdly ambiguous) can't save an uninteresting and unoriginal plot (they just did this in Spectre of the Gun weeks earlier!).

All Our Yesterdays: B-
A solid episode that starts with a massive lump of stupid (why didn't they just tell Atoz they were visiting aliens with a getaway starship in orbit?), and tries to set up a terrible tragedy with Zarabeth, but doesn't do the work necessary for it. Great and fun acting from Nimoy and Kelley, though.

Turnabout Intruder: D+
A masively offensive premise that is surprising well-acted (Shatner's hamminess is used to great effect), and even pretty well plotted, with so many fascinating missed opportunities along the way (why not a male-male romance between "Kirk" and Coleman?). A sad end to the season.

On to Season 4!

Star Trek, The Original Series, Season 2: The Second Binge

Season 2
Well, here's the next set. Once again, like Season 1, we watched them all the way through in original broadcast order. Season 2 of Star Trek isn't as strong as the first, but it has fine moments all the same. Just as before, no summaries here; just a grade and a few sentences explanation

Amok Time: A
Tightly plotted, with an impressive seriousness in the dialogue and performances (i.e., no sniggers about Vulcans and pon farr), McCoy is actually a smart, quick-thinking doctor, and the ritual makes sense instead of seeming needlessly Orientalist. Justly praised, and a great start to the season.

Who Mourns for Adonis?: B-
A pretty well-scripted effort, with good stuff for Uhura, Scotty, Chekov, and others to do, and a fun "Chariot of the Gods"-style story idea to boot, but not particularly well-executed.

The Changeling: C+
Oh wow: it's the first draft of Star Trek: The Motion Picture! Only not as good, because of plot conventions about how advanced computers worked that must have seemed goofy even in 1968. And really, there was no way to investigate Nomad's power, to learn from it?

Mirror, Mirror: A
A smart, fun episode; a great introduction to the Mirror University in Trek. The characterizations are delightful: Captain Kirk is quick-thinking and persuasively commanding, Uhura and Sulu are having a blast, and even "the Captain's woman" maintains her dignity, mostly.

The Apple: C-
If you ignore the colonialist mindset, I guess it's not that bad; our youngest daughter Kristen kind of liked it, but that may just have been the dragon cave. The actors playing the villagers were really committed, you have to say that.

The Doomsday Machine: A
A terrific script, with smart action, tension-filled performances, with Commodore Decker providing some real drama and pathos. One of the very best of the whole series.

Catspaw: C-
A Halloween episode! Nothing really original here--super-powerful and strange aliens studying humans get seduced by our emotions and sensuality, like always. What could have been fun was undermined by horribly cheap effects.

I, Mudd: D+
I don't know why anyone likes Mudd; is it just that there aren't any other recurring characters in all of The Original Series to cheer for? Anyway, another weak and deeply sexist episode, without much charm to help you look past it.

Metamorphosis: C-
What could have made for a really decent sci-fi episode--a genuinely alien creature falls in love with a human, who is repulsed by the idea once it is revealed to him--is undermined by an easy dodge in the direction of, and a shrugging acceptance of, heteronormativity and a little racism in the end, despite hints in at least one scene that the Enterprise crew was better than all that. Oh well

Journey to Babel: B+
Fun stuff--Spock's family, alien spies, and suicide missions. Sexist as always, but not annoyingly so.

Friday's Child: C+
A kind of confusingly structured episode. It's best understood, I think, if you just once again imagine the Federation (and this time the Klingons too) as a group of 19th-century imperialists trying to understand and bribe the primitives they want to colonize. Some fun stuff with McCoy though.

The Deadly Years: D
I feel like I've seen this one episode more than any others, and thus I have a weird fondness for it, but man, the ageism is terrible.

Obsession: B-
Not a great episode, but a basically nice sci-fi tale about a weird monster and an obsessed captain. Kirk's focus and the others' response to it is better and more believable than it was in "Conscience of a King" from Season 1.

Wolf in the Fold: C
Jack the Ripper as a space ghost! A crazy, goofball idea, carried off with more than the usual amount of sexism (women getting killed right and left, and did they actually bring Scotty to the planet just to get him laid?), but I guess it's okay fun all the same.

The Trouble with Tribbles: A
A great comic episode; probably their greatest. But it would have been better if Cyrano Jones have been played by Harry Mudd. Why not give him a decent episode to appear in for once?

The Gamesters of Triskelion: C-
Too goofy to dislike too much, but man, what was going on Uhura and Lars? Hey look, an Andorian! And man, Kirk can play the ladies. His gambling of the Enterprise itself is way out of character, but whatever.

A Piece of the Action: A
Totally hammy, and totally fun. I really should go through the episodes and count how many times the Enterprise's mission basically involves finding a lost landing party, or fixing what some earlier landing party did wrong, or rescuing the planet from a landing party gone crazy or bad.

The Immunity Syndrome: B
A cool straight-up sci-fi episode, with far-out space weirdness threatening the Enterprise. How much better this would have been with better special effects! Plus, it has some wonderful interplay between Spock and McCoy.

A Private Little War: B-
This is a frustrating episode, because watching it with any open-mindedness makes it clear what a fabulous story they had here. Unfortunately, they dressed it up with a lot of unnecessary hamminess from the "witch," and failed to make clear the obvious critique of Kirk's and the Federation's mindset, as was present in the dialogue of the characters (I think this episode has the only honest to goodness debate between officers on the bridge). The mix of sex and violence as social corruptions makes the episode particularly heavy, and you wonder if there was supposed to be a parallel between the doctor treating Spock and the witch treating Kirk. Anyway, it has potential, but never comes together.

Return to Tomorrow: C+
A predictable and somewhat boring set-up--godlike super-beings again?--but once they've possessed the crews' bodies, you've got a cool sci-fi premise, with strange beings with unknown motivations wrecking havoc. Kirk's big speech about the purpose of space exploration is oddly out of place, and there's too much of the usual Star Trek romance, though admittedly serving a somewhat different purpose here.

Patterns of Force: A-
How many of the problems some may have with this episode are a function of the fact that we think the lessons of Nazism are different than what was apparently believed by television scriptwriters in California the late 1960s? Anyway, a thoughtful episode, a good bit of sci-fi plugged into the utterly lame economies of the television budgets of the time.

By Any Other Name: B-
Some straight up moralistic sci-fi, with some nice touches to capture the alienness of the Kalvens. But with a lame, completely anti-climactic ending.

The Omega Glory: D+
Yet another parallel Earth, and this is the worst from the entire series, I think. Not because of the acting--crazy Captain Tracey is actually kind of great--but the fight scenes and general plotting are filled with inconsistencies, bad cuts, and stuff that just doesn't make sense. And that ending? Oh man, that's just wingnut stuff there.

The Ultimate Computer: B
Talking the master computer to death, again--a trope that will never die! But while the automation vs. humanity plot points are pedantic, this one shows inklings of AI all the way back in the late 1960s, so I give them some credit there. And the character of Daystrom is genuinely compelling.

Bread and Circuses: A
Once again, a parallel Earth, but this one makes up for "The Omega Glory"; it's really the best conceived and delivered parallel story from the whole story. Lot's of efficient details make the typical Star Trek cheapness seem plausible ("Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development"!), and it manages to cram in some genuine satire as well as some dark and very adult uses of sexuality (is Marcus mocking Captain Merick because he's weak-willed, or because he's gay?). I know some don't care for the explicit--and rather reverent--mention of Christianity at the end, but I adored it, and still do.

Assignment: Earth: B-
Hey, Gary Seven is Doctor Who! Or at least has what looks like a sonic screwdriver. Anyway this is a manifestly half-done episode (why did Roberta even show up in the apartment?). I can't imagine it would have been a good television in its own right, but I give them points for trying, and for truly launching Terri Garr's career.

Star Trek, The Original Series, Season 1: The First Binge

Sometime in January it just occurred to me: I, a 51-year-old Star Trek fan of many decades, actually only know the Original (and best!) Series the same way practically every other Generation X nerd knows the series--as a rerun. For as many times as I've watched the original episodes--and we're talking many, many times--I'd never seen them in actual broadcast order. And for that reason, I knew there were a couple of episodes here and there that I barely knew, so rarely had they made it into the usual Saturday-afternoon rotations--or, for that matter, onto the ancient VHS tape collections I made decades ago and still have stuck in a drawer somewhere. Thus, a determination was born: since the entirety of the Original Series is available on Netflix in original broadcast order, why not just watch them all? And so I began. [Note that this was a determination that I came to months before any kind of coronavirus or quarantine talk; fortuitous to give myself a binging goal so early, don't you think?]

So what's this? My report on the complete first season, which we finished last night. Yep, that's right: we. To my surprise, my wife and youngest daughter (age almost-14) decided to come along on this ride. I'm grateful for them; they snark and ask questions and sometimes even get sucked into these more-than-a-half-century-old, 50-minute-long television episodes, making the whole experience that much better. I'm going to keep my comments to just a sentence or two about each; no need to provide any sort plot summary or extensive reviews, as there's a million people on the internet who have already done that much better than I. Indeed, if you somehow stumble onto these blog posts expecting any kind of thoughtful engagement, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I'm not looking for discoveries myself; just an attempt to re-familiarize myself, in a different way, with something so deeply a part of my pop consciousness that I couldn't extricate myself from it if I wanted to (and I don't). If you're in the same boat as me, though, well, enjoy!

[Additional note: now that we're stuck at home so much more than before, maybe it won't take us 2 1/2 months to get through each of the next two seasons. But really, who knows?

Season 1
"The Man Trap": B-
The very first episode broadcast. A decent premise, with some nice sci-fi touches (the alien appearing differently to Kirk and McCoy was well done), but overall a rather hammy execution.

"Charlie X": C
A spooky narrative concept, with lots of disturbing potential, and an ending that was genuinely sad and creepy. But with what was essentially an all-powerful immature brat onboard, wrecking havoc, why doesn't Kirk freak out? Kind of poorly acted, it seems to me.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before": C+
This is was the second pilot; you can't deny that Roddenberry & Co. didn't let anything go to waste. Once again, this one is built around a spooky--if predictable--science-fiction idea; mostly, the episode's story makes you think of a different, smarter Kirk which was never fully developed.

"Naked Time": B
Oh man, this episode is easy to mock, but it's really great fun. Filled with all sorts of 1960s-style sexism and stereotypes, it tells its story while playing all of them honestly and with great heart. A slight episode, but the show's first really solid one.

"The Enemy Within": B
Again, a ridiculously easy episode to mock, and again, one heavily dependent upon various sexist and deeply Freudian tropes. But the story itself is genuinely kind of scary as well as profoundly adult, deserving a remake today (consider what could be done with Yeoman Rand, a rape survivor who assumes she needs to cover up for her captain!).

"Mudd's Women": D
Their first real stinker. It's an offensive episode, more for its basic stupidity (the Enterprise ran out of power because it extended its shields around a cargo ship?) than its dumb, condescending, clumsily (as opposed to forgiveably dated) message.

"What Are Little Girls Made Of?": C
A decent sci-fi story (an ancient and long-dead alien civilization which left behind humanoid robots, good enough to replace the real thing?), but the whole thing is just weakly developed. Watch out for red-shirts falling into pits.

"Miri": C-
This one gets a lot of hate, but I don't think it's that horrible. Once more, a decent and spooky central concept (kids living on their own, their adolescence extended, eventually contracting the plague that killed all their parents when they hit puberty), but the casting is terrible--what, there were no 12-year-olds available?--and its ham-fisted treatment of "growing up" is just annoying.

"Dagger of the Mind": C+
Better developed than some; in Noel you have an actually competent 60s-era female character (and are we supposed to understand that Kirk was embarrassed or confused about his previous encounter with her, even before she messed with Kirk's memories?), elevating a by-the-numbers story of a megalomaniac needing to be stopped.

"The Corbomite Maneuver": B
This was supposed to be the first "official" episode after the second pilot was accepted; if you know that, then that'll help you look past the painfully obvious "morale of the story." Cheap sci-fi, but solid.

"The Menagerie," Part 1 and 2: C-
First part of this recycling of the original pilot is much better than the second part; it builds an interesting story out of the idea that Spock is faithfully executing one final order for his former captain. The second half drains any interest in what's going on, though, through various deus ex machina moves.

"Conscience of the King": D
Actually kind of boring, with an entirely predictable twist, and Kirk's supposed obsession isn't well communicated at all.

"Balance of Terror": A
This is Star Trek's first truly great episode, and the fact that nothing about it is original is entirely forgivable. It's pure adventure story-telling, a straight-up submarine battle, both nicely told and really well acted.

"Shore Leave": C
Dumb, but take the whole thing as fundamentally unserious, and you can have an okay time. (Man, McCoy is a horn-dog.)

"The Galileo Seven": A-
I'm not sure what the problem some people have with this episode is; it's one of my favorites, because Kirk is actually mostly off-screen, and we're given time to follow the development of Spock as a commander, and the others dealing with a non-human commander (the only really weak bit of writing, if you can ignore the ridiculous ogres-with-spears as the requisite monsters, is why McCoy was on the shuttle craft at all).

"Squire of Gothos": B+
Another slight and not particularly serious episode, but it's a genuinely fun bit of science-fiction, and William Campbell turns Trelane into a actual comic tour-de-force.

"Arena": B
Kirk's willingness to put ship and crew in danger to pursue the enemy is out of character, but the build-up to the stand-off is pretty good, overall. The actual face-off with the Gorn isn't pretty good too, if pedantically handled; it's kind of a small tragedy that the whole thing is so meme-worthy

"Tomorrow is Yesterday": D
Our daughter actually thought it was a funny episode, so I'm glad someone enjoyed it. I though the acting was wooden and the narrative is poorly thought through and has enormous, annoying plot holes (why won't Captain Christopher and the guard remember everything when they're put back in their own time?).

"Court Martial": C
This one has some nice scene-chewing by Cogley, but on the whole a potentially great story is wasted with a bunch of perfunctory scenes and passion-less acting (just like Kirk never showed much concern for Finney--hey, maybe it was a meta-commentary!).

"The Return of the Archons": B-
Once more, a story with lots of potential (it's the Purge, 50 years before the movie!), but none of that potential is really ever explained or worked out. Plus, it introduces one of the worst of all Star Trek cliches: outsmarting the computer!

"Space Seed": A
Deservedly praised. This is a tightly plotted story, with far fewer of the usual loose strings in Original Series story-telling. Khan is consistently brilliant but also arrogant and dismissive throughout, as he should be. It's also interesting to see, through the eyes of the script-writers, how 1960s sexists imagine what a "real man" would be like. For once, Kirk isn't the alpha male!

"A Taste of Armageddon": B
Another smart and genuinely cool sci-fi idea. The episode shows that the writers hadn't thought much about the "prime directive" yet; is Star Fleet a bunch of imperialists imposing their beliefs on an alien culture, or are they the British in India putting an end to suttee, freeing a society from a stagnate murder cult? Also, I liked that the predictable jerk ambassador is given redemption.

"This Side of Paradise": B+
Continuing a run of mostly really great episodes, this one gives us, upon reflection, a sad, desperate, and somewhat manipulative woman (interestingly, it was my wife who spotted the undertone of a wanna-be lover finding an excuse for imposing her choices on Spock), and a Kirk whose heroic escape from the spores really fit with his character, even if it wasn't developed enough. Needed more Southern doctor McCoy!

"The Devil in the Dark": B
A monster conveyed through awesomely bad "special effects"--my daughter actually remembered this one from when she was a child, when we would pull blankets over ourselves and pretend to be "hortas" sneaking around the house. Overall, it's a fun story, with hilariously hapless miners and a hammy Spock.

"Errand of Mercy": A-
This is a wonderful introduction of the Klingons, with great--and really well-scripted--performances by the Organians. It's probably the best of all the many "the crew of the Enterprise meets a super-powerful race that just can't be bothered with humans" episodes; in Season 1 alone, we have, besides the Organians, the Metrons from "Arena," the Thasians from "Charlie X," and Trelane's mother and father from "Squire of Gothos." And there's more to come!

"The Alternative Factor": D
Ending a wonderful run of mostly top-flight Star Trek episodes, this one is confusing, poorly plotted and developed (did anyone on the Enterprise ever even ask where Lazarus came from, or why he was on that planet?), to say nothing of following through on a science-fiction idea that they no means of depicting except with some truly terrible visual effects.

"The City on the Edge of Forever": A
The best, most mature, most serious, tightest, and most effecting of all the Original Series episodes. Everyone knows it, because it's true.

"Operation--Annihilate!": C-
Man, why did you have to end the first season with the stupid flying pancake/amoebas? As so frequently the case--but thankfully, less so towards the end of the season--you have weak acting and weak plotting here, and a reset (the secret Vulcan eyelid!) that wasn't foreshadowed at all. A let-down of an ending, for what was, for the most part, a really decent season of television.

Five Moments out of Fifty

I'm 47, not 50, so Star Trek--the television show, the film franchise, the pop culture property, the fan phenomenon--is older than me. I don't know how old I was when I first became addicted to the Star Trek, but considering my dim memory of sitting in a particular room in a particular house watching the show, I probably wasn't more than six years old. So Roddenberry's vision, in one form or another, has been with me my whole life, and has influenced my imagination of, and interaction with, the world around me accordingly. That's not a confession; that's a boast--I may not be a truly hard-core Trekker, but beneath Dungeons and Dragons and Harry Potter, a Trekker I was first, and a Trekker I remain. I've watched the shows, seen the movies, read the comic books and (a slight portion of) the novels. It actually wouldn't be hard to come up with 50 memories from the Original Series that have stuck with me for decades, but it would take a lot more time to write, and few would read it anyway. So here are 5 personal moments, in honor of 50 years of entertainment and (surprisingly often) enlightenment.

1) "The Deadly Years." Is it a great episode? No, more like one of their middling ones. But for some reason it sticks in my head as my earliest exposure to Trek, and I feel like I saw this episode in re-runs more than any other single episode. And really, it's not a bad introduction--the action, while minimal, is compelling, driven by bureaucratic ambition (Commodore Stocker pulling rank on Captain Kirk to claim command as he ages from one of those weird, random space-born diseases) and perilous legality (an arbitrarily drawn border with the Romulan empire that Stocker foolishly pushes the Enterprise across, despite Uhura and Sulu tosses shade at him). And the drama is thoroughly adult: self-conscious fears of weakness, joined with anger at one's own body and social structures--and friends, including the ever-logical Spock!--which seem to be conspiring to overlook you as your face your inevitable end. As a little kid, Kirk's defiant insistence, after the computer calculates his physical age as 60-something, that "I'm 34!" echoed in my head, both a promise and a threat.

2) "The Doomsday Machine." This one, by contrast, is heralded by many as one of the greatest of the original series's episodes, and I don't disagree; my older brother Daniel and I (we were the original faithful Star Trek fanboys in the family, until some of our younger siblings caught the Next Generation fever) loved and endlessly replayed in our play talk and imaginations every detail of the episode. The acting and plotting made it genuinely thrilling (has there been any James Bond moment cooler than Kirk staring into the face of death and calmly saying "Gentlemen, I suggest you beam me aboard"?), and the bad guy wasn't a bad guy at all; Commodore Matt Decker was a plausible, even admirable, character, driven to the point of helpless madness. I swear, just going through this old episode gets my heart racing and my eyes tearing up all over again. And, of course, the fact that it was all a horrifying Cold War parable just made it all the more memorable to a 70s and 80s kid like myself.

3) "The City on the Edge of Forever." The greatest one of them all, of course; I knew it when I first saw it as an impressionable kid, and it's been reconfirmed again and again as I've re-watched who knows--20? more?--times over the years. The climax is poorly staged and hammy, but it doesn't matter at all, because the personal and world-historical stakes had been so wonderfully enacted by the performers, sealed by the brilliant final minute of the episode, where the camera gets volumes of dialogue out a few terse words from Spock, a couple of slowly realizing glances from Uhura and Scotty, and Kirk's final command (as us Mormon kids looked at each other and said, "Uh, did Kirk just say 'hell'?"). Did my young, naive notions of adult humor, romance, politics, history, and more begin with this awesome 46 minutes of television? Probably so.

4) "The Lorelei Signal." Okay, fine, I'm cheating. But seriously folks, Star Trek: The Animated Series gets almost no love, and that's just wrong. First, it's canon, people; you can't deny it. Second, given the relatively few episodes produced over its two seasons, it actually has a better stinker-excellent ratio that the Original Series itself (though TOS's best episodes remain the best story-telling that any version of Star Trek has ever yet produced in my opinion). Third, some of its best episodes broke boundaries in a way that far out-paced even what ardent apologists like myself love to claim about TOS, this episode--with a race of energy-sapping female aliens brain-washing all the men on the ship--being a prime example. Is it a clumsy bit of 70s-era we-really-mean-it-okay-maybe-not feminism? Absolutely. But it's endured in my head for all these years--Uhura's no-nonsene assumption of command, the underplayed references to Nurse Chapel's love for Spock (complete with Kirk's single most Kirkest line-reading ever: "We...must...get...out...of here")--it's all awesome.

5) Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Shut up, haters; you're all wrong. Yes, I'm cheating again, and I don't care--I was there, sitting in the theater, all of 11-years-old, and I couldn't have cared less that there was little action, and even fewer character developments, in this movie: this was what The Original Series had been promising us all along. Or so I was certain of when I left the theater, brimming over with excitement and fascination for what I had just seen: namely, a genuine, puzzling, terrifying, beautiful science-fiction story, one with gloriously self-indulgent visuals and a plot straight out of the greatest I-reach-out-and-touch-the-face-of-God hard sci-fi of the classic era of Heinlein and Asimov. And the details! Spock with long hair! McCoy with a beard! Chapel with a decent hairdo! Sorry, while I'm fully cognizant of its weaknesses as a film, as a moment in the whole myth which is Star Trek? It was never surpassed, and never will be. Not in my memory, anyway.

J.J. Abrams: Theologian (Or, Fate Has Everything to Do with It)

Merry Christmas, everyone. The gifts are open, so let's talk spoilers about The Force Awakens, which we saw as a family as our Christmas Eve movie yesterday. For the record: we all loved it, though to varying degrees and for varying reasons. Here are mine.

My mostly positive reaction to this fine, fun space-opera-action movie essentially begins with my overwhelming negative reaction to this horrible, space-action-without-the-opera trailer for this summer's looming Star Trek horror, Star Trek Beyond:



Obviously, it's just a trailer, and even one of the stars of the film has told us fans to hang on for the traditional "Star Trek stuff." But it's hard to doubt, on the basis of the mess of Star Trek Into Darkness, that this is where J.J. Abrams wanted the whole property of Star Trek to be: uprooted from the broad, even sprawling, complex, organization-based, thoroughly human (and humanistic) context of the United Federation of Planets, and forced into an enclosed, operatic, action-based mold of lucky/tragic/magical/fated heroes and heroines facing off against universe. A lot of us saw this coming with J.J. Abrams's original re-boot Star Trek, but that first movie included such winning reconstructions of the core characters that even those deeply devoted to the original Roddenberry vision of Trek--and I'm not nearly as devoted as many--gave the coincidences of that film a pass. But those coincidences and retreads became simply clumsy and manipulative in the second film, and even though Abrams has handed off the director duties for the third, my hope that it'll avoid giving us even more of the same is weak, and thus I am fearful that one of the essential science-fiction story-telling properties of the 20th-century is going to be weakened further.

Was Star Trek really science fiction? Yes, it often was, of a particular, rather optimistic sort. I once described it as "human-science-meets-the-infinite, I-put-on-my-space-suit-and-plug-in-my-time-machine-and-touch-the-face-of-God" type of tales, a way of telling stories cinematically in which ordinary human organizations and bureaucracies interact with and are challenged by the unknown, and those challenges--even when they are tragic and chastening--are ultimately positive. There are, to be sure, lots of other types of science-fiction tales, but Star Trek's is--hopefully not was--an important source of one of them. The Star Wars movies is the source of another--one much more in line with Abrams's basic perspective--more dramatic, more individualistic, more heroic, more outrageous, more enclosed (zipping across the galaxy in mere "parsecs"!). And The Force Awakens demonstrates that particular perspective very, very well.

The primary knock against TFA--which, to be clear, is a very minority perspective; just about everyone has said how much they enjoyed this rollicking adventure down memory lane--is that it's not adding anything to the Star Wars story-line; it's just repeating everything that the first film did. I respect those who want to take the film on its own terms and suggest how Abrams hurried, plot-hole-filled reset of the whole original story-line could be, with a few tweaks, made to work. While I was watching the First Order march about and Supreme Leader Snoke pontificate during the movie, I kind of did the same thing, imagining a way of making a couple of weird assumptions, shifting a couple of story arcs, and leaping directly from The Empire Strikes Back (the Empire disorganized but still powerful, the Rebel Alliance presumably settling in for the long haul under the leadership of Leia and Luke) directly to The Force Awakens, and seeing if that might make an equal amount of sense. But ultimately, I forgot about all that. Such re-jiggering of the sloppy, confusing, but utterly delightful film that Abrams made simply doesn't matter much to me.

Instead, I dug seeing Abrams play around in a story-world that clearly fits him. He gave us a storm-trooper--Finn--who suddenly, somehow, realizes he wants to be good, and dives into that heroic life without really knowing why or how, almost consciously acting out a script that is not his own. He gives us an angry, immature, scarily powerful yet undisciplined, striving yet divided young man--Kylo Ren, who hates himself for his dividedness and hates his family even more, the sort of dangerous punk who would put ridiculous laser guards on the hilt of his light-saber, because wanna-be tough-guys always dress up their monster trucks that way, don't they? Finally, he gives us an obviously blessed individual--Rey--who may or may not be Luke's daughter, and who becomes the linchpin of the whole story, a plucky and resourceful and independent thinker and actor, and through whom the wonder and the desperate fate of the whole galaxy comes to depend. Along the way he gives us either new chapters or ending chapters for characters that we fondly remember from decades ago. (For the record: I managed to avoid the spoiler of Han Solo's death entirely, but I knew what was coming the moment he walked out on the gangplank towards his son.)

Most of all, Abrams embraces unapologetically and unambiguously the magical character of The Force. Maz Kanata, even more than Yoda, insists that the Force is a mystical but also natural law, a balancing agent that operates wherever and however it will. (Note that there is nothing, in any kind of philosophical or theological sense, "natural" about Star Trek.) No miserable mitochlorians here; whether such pseudo-scientific explanations come up in the subsequent movies or not, in TFA it is simply a given that there is this power that picks people out, makes them special--capable of fighting with a light-saber, flying a junky old starship, or taking command of people's minds. Is that, ultimately, the moral theology of the force which Abrams was suggesting in the way he portrayed the torture scene between Ren and Rey, and their later light-saber duel? That the former idolizes his grandfather Darth Vader because he's come to believe (thanks to the corrupting suggestions of the evil Snoke, no doubt) that he knew how to use that power to control others, to force the universe to work the way he wanted it to, and he, in rebellion against his parents, wants that too? Whereas the light side of the Force is one that is reflected in the end of Ren's and Rey's fight--the planet falling apart around them, and a chasm emerging exactly between them, like the universe making its point clear. Nature itself is insisting upon the real differences here, both demanding a ultimate distinction, while also delaying the fated final confrontation.

The best understanding of the Star Wars science-fiction world has always been, I think, more religious that scientific. Science, with all its presumptions and possibilities, was a Star Trek concern. That means the best of Star Trek really was better science-fiction than Star Wars, because it is only with those scientific presumptions and possibilities can you communicate a real sense human-grounded wonder, confusion, and amazement. Star Wars is more about thrills, more about adventure, more about the existential realized through the world around you: less, in other words, about confronting the unknown and more about confronting one's fate. It really is a "space opera." Abrams gave me that this Christmas, and I'm delighted with it. So stick with Star Wars, Mr. Abrams, please, and leave Star Trek alone--I want both kinds of stories, and I'd rather the streams not cross, if we can avoid it.

Getting Star Trek Mostly Right

I'm not going try to compete with Matthew Yglesias's tremendous survey the whole Star Trek mythos. (Well, actually, as he admits right at the beginning, it's not the whole mythos--he looks at only the canonical stuff, the television shows and the movies, ignoring millions of pages of novels and comic books and fan art and fiction, which is an entirely reasonable decision, despite the fact that it's arguable that much of the canonical stuff has been influenced and shaped by the fan stuff.) I can claim some cred for having come from an extended family of Star Trek-loving nerds, I've made it clear that at least two shows from the Star Trek franchise (the original Star Trek series and Deep Space Nine were hugely important to me, and I had many concerns with the grand J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot which parallel those that Yglesias mentions. But ultimately, he's watched all this stuff, and I haven't. (I bailed on Voyager after only one season, and on Enterprise after only one episode.) So I'm going to take his views seriously, especially since he gets one of the very most important things right:

Even if commercially successful films saved the franchise, Trek’s true home has always been television. The cinema demands what Abrams has delivered: action, suspense, drama. But it’s less well-suited to the signature thematic project of the franchise: to depict, in a sustained way, life in a better tomorrow. Utopia requires moments of peace and quiet. Random episodes about an android bonding with his cat, say, or a bartender’s schemes to increase his profits. You can’t make a lucrative sci-fi flick about people sitting around in a conference room debating options for resolving the situation peacefully--but something that can be accurately teased as primarily consisting of thrilling space battles is not the real Star Trek. A bunch of friendly folks using advanced technology to help people? That can only be profitable, I suspect, on the small screen.

Exactly true--Star Trek, for all the ways it evolved and experimented in its various presentations over a 35-year period, was always fundamentally a progressive, organization-minded, deeply and complicatedly human vision of the future, and the sort of summer movies which the reboot are apparently content in delivering to us can't possibly capture that kind of developmental, essentially liberal attitude. Just the same, I wouldn't call what the television versions of Star Trek gave us "utopian" exactly, because I think Yglesias is using that term in a somewhat limited and banal sense, communicating only the idea of a society that has achieved equality, justice, and peace. The appeal of utopia is--and, I think, this is even the case deep within the liberal heart of the Star Trek ideal--more than that; it is the idea of achieving or experiencing something which is truly alien, truly other, truly beyond, truly different. (It's for this reason that "utopia" is so often a mocking insult, or that those who are really grappling with genuine socialist and communitarian alternatives insist that they are looking for "realistic utopias.") The usual geek classification is that Star Wars is the mythos with a sense of myth, of transcendence or mysticism, whereas Star Trek is for those for those earth-bound liberals who just want to see the Department of Health and Human Services extended infinitely into outer space--but that geek classification is wrong, and Yglesias does the Star Trek mythos a (slight) disservice by somewhat buying into it. Because he's not recognizing that Star Trek, above and beyond the 60s-style-New-Frontier-Cold-War liberalism which it so obviously reflected, was a work of science fiction--and, even more than that, had some of the finest science-fiction authors of the day pen its best, earliest episodes.

To downplay the human-science-meets-the-infinite, I-put-on-my-space-suit-and-plug-in-my-time-machine-and-touch-the-face-of-God, character of the Original Series (and the echoes of it which continued with decreasing frequency through The Next Generation, going through a slight revival in Deep Space Nine, but disappearing almost entirely thereafter) leads Yglesias to miss noting probably the greatest accomplishment of the whole mythos: it was a way of telling stories cinematically in which ordinary human organizations and bureaucracies interact with and are challenged by the unknown, and those challenges--even when they are tragic and chastening, are ultimately positive. (The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke looms over the best of Star Trek's science fiction; Ray Bradbury might be more of Star Wars guy.) Yglesias, to be sure, isn't the only person to be more engaged by complicated, well-plotted soap operas and political dramas in outer space than by real science fiction; it's this sort of thing which leads him, like so many others, to consider The Next Generation "in most respects the 'real' Star Trek"; or to rank the original series (which, yes, sure, had some atrocious episodes, but which also have us the best, purest science fiction which any Star Trek franchise ever produced) even lower than Voyager; or--and this is one of my greatest peeves with all Star Trek fandom--to have so little respect for the Star Trek movie,  Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was probably the purest realization of the whole mythos's attempt to put entirely human organizations and technology and bureaucracy up against (indeed, even connect it to!) the ultimately unknowable, that he ranks it lower than a genuine piece of crap like Star Trek: Nemesis. Fine, I will grant that there are all sorts of visuals in ST:TMP which just plain drag, but really, if there is a purer expression of what Star Trek purports to be about than the climactic reveal in the final minutes of that movie, than I don't know what is:



A small complaint, maybe--and if Ygelsias wants to stand by his judgment, I'm not likely to watch a hundred or so additional hours of television to attempt prove him wrong. And as I said above, he gets the most important stuff right, and so let's just argue with him about whether we think Khan or Gul Dukat was the better villain, or whether our favorite crew members were Worf or Spock, as we wait for the opening of Star Trek: Into Darkness tonight. But let me just insist: the utopia which the Star Trek mythos represents may be a liberal socialist one, but beneath that it is a science fiction one, with all the sense of wonder which that conveys. Miss that, and you may miss the core truth of the mythos altogether.