Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Oh no, I love "Shore Leave." I think it imprinted on me when I saw it at a young age and did not know wtf was going on in it. The hallucinatory mood of it was was intriguing.

I love "Shore Leave". Along with "Spectre of the Gun", it was one of the first episodes I remembered seeing when I was probably 7. Both episodes had a main character "die" in them which left a big impression on little me.

I'm pretty much of the opinion there are almost no bad Star Trek: TOS episodes. Even the "bad" ones are classic. Season 3 has two of my favorites: "Plato's Stepchildren" and "The Savage Curtain", which if you don't find amusing I weep for your soul.

There is something to be said about this last statement. Case in point "Spock's Brain," to name one.

We just started S2 - Amok Time was great!. I had never seen it before despite knowing some of the cultural references

Same writer as Shore Leave!

you guys can love Shore Leave all you want. I know what I saw

agree w vg about "shore leave"-- cute but i don't like when this show spends an entire episode trying to be funny-- and of course about "the alternative factor" which is the worst TOS episode. i like "squire of gothos" tho. lacks the action to fill out its runtime and compensates by repeating itself but the ending is my favorite instance of its cliche and also it will always be significant to me that a banal line from it ("i'll go along with this charade until i can think my way out") was plagiarized for no reason by bob dylan. my least favorite s1 episodes are the most famous-- the interminable salvage job of "the menagerie" and of course "city on the edge of forever", a boring twilight zone that probably thinks it's talking you into shutting up about vietnam.

"the gamesters of triskelion" is p unpleasant but i do like its colors, including/especially of the gamesters' brains-- mentioning this cuz vg is otm about the color in general which is my fave part of this show.

in s3 i like "the enterprise incident" (best spock ep short of amok time) and "the cloud minders" (class!) v much, and "day of the dove" provisionally (fun to think about in context, and to compare to s2's delusional "a private little war"). "plato's stepchildren" is at least strikingly sadistic, tho its vaunted Television First does not seem particularly woke in context. "spectre of the gun" has the best+eeriest set design in the "crew beams down into a b-movie" genre of TOS episode; plus i think it's the one where kirk says "we come in peace" and immediately draws his phaser. remain soullessly unamused by "the savage curtain" (shore leave with animatronics).

fill out its runtime

'the alternative factor' and 'last battlefield' are brutal examples of this. i mean the endless running through the corridors of the enterprise in the latter . . .

will always ride for pittsburgh's own frank gorshin tho

IMO "City on the Edge of Forever" earns its stripes for having the sharpest, most clearly defined dialogue among the main trio.

"City on the Edge of Forever" is great.

I watched it purely because of the Discovery ep that it referenced, and liked it a lot.

OK I feel stupid I've only now realised that was Joan Collins in the ep *facepalm*

I envy your innocence.

xpost omg!

i enjoy City on Edge of Forever as a chance to see Kirk & Spock butch up in flannel shirts

omg! as in omg trayce not omg i didnt know

i am slightly salty about them ditching Yeoman Janice aka Baskethead as a recurring character early in season 1 bc apparently they wanted a parade of various attractive women yeomanning for Kirk instead of just her

i liked her! i also found they made an action figure of her :D

I think there is more to the story than just that.

Yeah, a rather disturbing one, and if the most common interpretation is true, one that reflects very poorly on Roddenberry.

ok i will do some extra curricular reading

Harlan Ellison, among others, tells some stories about what went on in that bungalow.

it will always be significant to me that a banal line from it ("i'll go along with this charade until i can think my way out") was plagiarized for no reason by bob dylan
I just looked this up and it said they were both citing an earlier source.

imo the worst season 1 episode by a long long way is mudd's women. not just sexist but really boring. (the other episode with harry mudd isn't that bad, iirc.) 

http://dylanfilm.atspace.com/tj.html

Bogart in a film called Tokyo Joe.

oh that does make sense for mid-80s dylan (just before brownsville girl). can imagine him catching that on tv one afternoon, as i had imagined him catching the squire of gothos. dunno why it crops up (slightly distorted) in the trek episode tho lol. think it was one of michael gray's books i got that loose connection from.

re mudd’s women i think of this post a lot

mudd's women was one of the three stories roddenberry pitched for the star trek pilot. he was using the fantastic allegorical power of sci-fi to tell the story of a pimp who lives in a cave.

― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Wednesday, August 10, 2016 8:10 PM bookmarkflaglink

ok i will do some extra curricular reading

I think people also talk about it earlier in this thread? Certainly ILE was where I found out about it.

Yes, there is some discussion upthread.

Vulcanian?

daily voyager repeats now on season 3 in the UK. they go back in time and space to... Earth 1996. that'll save on props. and i bet it'll be somewhere in the los angeles area... (see also ST:IV)

LA, yes. also with guest slots from sarah silverman and ed begley jr.

Lol.

Lower Decks S2 premieres next Friday... the 13th! BUM BUM BUMMMM.

wahoo

For a split second I wondered why you were telling us about the horny yacht crew programme.

need a supercut of

JR OFFICER: In visual range.

CAPTAIN: On screen.

(*a small blur*)

CAPTAIN: Magnify!

Have recently been watching Star Trek Continues, which faithfully re-creates the look & feel of the original series and has episodes which follow on from TOS as well, e.g. "The Fairest of them All" after the events of "Mirror Mirror".

All the episodes can be found here (are free to view on YouTube): https://www.startrekcontinues.com/episodes.html

some good guest stars too! Erin Gray, Colin Baker, Sophie Aldred. Getting Chris Doohan in to play Scotty was a nice move.

Didn't know this existed. Thanks!

Cool. How does that compare to Phase II?

oops, *not* Sophie Aldred, Nicola Bryant! Getting Ace and Peri confused. The makers were presumably Who fans, at any rate.

Lou Ferrigno plays an Orion slave trader. Guess he's used to playing green people.

How does that compare to Phase II?

Don't know. Haven't seen it.

I just watched the first episode (or I guess first two episodes) of Prodigy and it's actually pretty good: the lead is annoying but the rest of the crew seems interesting, the jokes mostly avoid being cringey (some were real lolz), and the reveal at the end really hit me hard, and I'm not even that much of a Voyager fan.

i tried but i felt like i was watching a videogame & ingesting sugary cereal through my eyes lol

This is fun:

The Trouble with NFT's pic.twitter.com/hEluFsA60Z

— Jellicle Josh (@joshuamartian) November 17, 2021

Magnificent.

love it lol

today's voyager was the civilisation that had never heard music until the doctor started singing. leader of this civilisation = paul williams, lol.

!

love that episode. Watching all of Voyager during the pandemic was a great move.

horror channel repeats are nearing the end, i think, and they are getting to be quite a bit more varied, possibly disjointed. Irish village in the holodeck, the doctor sings, the planet they are orbiting evolves 1000s of years in a month... might be less obvious if these were one a week and not one a day.

lol i also watched voyager for the first time over the past year and literally the only episodes i skipped were the irish village in the holodecks x2

fuckin hated how they reduced the borg to rubes tho

(nevertheless the planet that evolved 1000s of years in a month was *awesome*)

but honestly most of the characters (maybe all of the humans?) were annoying af. the doctor, seven and tuvok were maybe the only ones i cared enough about to care about

(i mean the doctor was largely an asshole but at least interesting about it)