End Season One
After completing all of season one, I’ve gotta say that I can totally see both why people got obsessed with this show, and why other people think it’s the lamest thing ever.
It can be genuinely great. When it’s good, Star Trek shows you something about the human condition, and does so in a really smart way: McCoy makes you laugh, Kirk makes you feel, and Spock makes you realize what you’ve got. It can be just out and out silly and still make you think.
But it is just dripping with cheese. If you can’t get past the multicolored shirts or the reused sets or the lame props or the same stock shot of the Enterprise circling the same freaking planet, then you’re going to have trouble watching this show.
And I don’t think that that’s just “not giving it a chance.” These things genuinely bring you out of the action, cause you to take pause, and interrupt the flow of the story. They make it actively harder to watch. They are a detriment to the power of the scripts.
And, sometimes, so are the actors. Nimoy can pull of Spock pretty well, unless Spock has to play along the borders of having emotions, and then he tends to overplay his lines. Shatner overplays his lines all the time, except for the ones where he can be the boyishly charming guy, when both Kirk and Shatner really seem like guys you’d like to meet. Kelley is very rarely given a chance to actually act in any register but “concerned doctor” or “comic relief,” which makes his performance stronger (he pulls those two roles off well) and weaker (you get a little tired of those two roles, and wonder why he can’t ever be a normal guy).
But when they pull it off, there’s fireworks. And in unexpected places.
I like the character of Kirk a lot better than I thought I would. He’s supposed to be smart, which isn’t what I remember. He really is a guy who you’d follow down to the surface where the natives are gunning for you. You’d trust him to get you out of any situation, because he has done this before.
I also don’t remember it being as funny as it is. I remembered Star Trek being stuffier, more earnest. I’m glad that it’s not.
I’m glad that it’s just what it is.
