Series Roundup: Star Trek
I’ve now completed Leg 1 of this epic journey: I’ve seen every episode of TOS. And I’ve got to say I liked it rather a lot more than I expected to. I thought it’d be good, and interesting, and have a few nice episodes, but it’s damn good, it’s got a ton of really great ideas, and it has some fantastic episodes.
Favorites
My favorites are the ones that everyone counts as favorites, as you can see by doing a search for those rated A and A+. Since Tumblr can’t actually search for plus signs (ugh!) here’s what I’ve rated A+:
- The Naked Time is the funniest great episode
- The Balance of Terror is the most suspenseful
- Space Seed has the best baddie in the series
- The City on the Edge of Forever has the best moral quandary
- Obsession has a great role reversal
- Bread and Circuses has the best counterfactual
- Wink of an Eye has the best female baddie
That the number of episodes I rated F is only four is really rather striking. I suspect that the vast majority of episodes fall somewhere in a rather mushy middle.
Characters
I knew going in that I liked Spock and McCoy better than Kirk, but I was surprised by how much I actually liked Kirk. He’s the square-jawed hero-scientist and doesn’t back down from the role ever, and there’s something admirable about that.
But Spock and McCoy get all the best lines, and all the best interaction, even if they (almost) never get the girl.
And boy are there a lot of girls to be gotten. Star Trek has surprisingly few Monster of the Week episodes, but it suffers from no lack of Love Interests of the Week. Every planet has a pretty young thing in outlandish garb waiting to be swept off her feet, since women are lame and need to be saved. The amazing amount of forward thinking ideas in this series is counterweighted quite effectively by how incredibly sexist it is.
As for the B characters: Scotty is freaking awesome. Sulu and Chekov could use more screen time. A couple recurring female characters with more heft would be good (see above).
Setting
It came as no surprise that they played fast and loose with continuity and little things like where the Enterprise came from and what group it was a part of, but this goes to some crazy extremes. The autonomy of the crew swings wildly back and forth, their level of technology changes radically, and nothing implied or explicit can be taken for granted next week.
But there is still a grand world here. The Klingons are reliably savage and bad; the Romulans are reliably mysterious, noble, and bad; computers are easily confused; slavery is widespread but bad and easy to end. The broad strokes of this vision are very familiar without being very explicit, because they mirror the mindset you think about when you think about the 60s, when the nation thought that most problems could simply be solved by being the right people to give the right speech at the right time. It’s a simpler world, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. It is less nuanced, but its forthrightness is one of its charms: the world of Star Trek is custom built as a world in which Roddenberry could tell morality plays, and in this endeavor it performs with aplomb.
Shortcomings
The greatest shortcoming of the show is its inconsistency. This is somewhat of an effect of the disregard for what nowadays we call canon, but is more just a matter of writers coming and going and Roddenberry not having or not exercising any kind of power in this regard. That he had such specific ideas for some things– no mass fighting amongst the humans being the most famous example– and yet left so much up to the random assortment of writers is slightly mystifying.
A close second is the small matter of women, which I described thusly:
When a woman appears, she’s inevitably a love interest for someone, and she often has some special skillset that the crew needs but that she neglects because she’s smitten.
This is a constant theme of the show, leading inexorably to the last episode’s women-are-too-weak-to-command-starships plot line. If I could change one thing about the show this would be it. I’m very interested to see how TNG fares in this matter.
Statistics
It took me two years, three months, and twenty-one days to watch all 80 episodes of the original series. That’s 844 days. That’s an episode every 10.55 days, which isn’t that bad, except that I way front-loaded things and finished the first half in 53 days. If I’d kept that pace (an episode every 1.325 days!), I’d be on episode 637 today and well into Enterprise.
Conclusions
I’m happy I’ve passed the first major milestone; now it’s on to the original-cast movies. Time to break out the Blurays!
