Note: most of these are my posts copied over from a Star Trek group-watch going through the entire series in broadcast order, rather than properly written reviews.
TAS S01E01 "Beyond the Farthest Star" Stardate 5221.3 Broadcast date 1973-09-08.
Obviously the show is fairly low-budget, but they cover the cheapness up with showy effects and some cool ship designs and background art. No one's phoning it in, either - the performances are good and the writing hits that TOS vibe perfectly. There is some goofy stuff in there, though - poor Walter Koenig is replaced by some lumpy orange nerd, and the teleport bay is manned by a Victorian toff. Plus the villain came off as a bit silly, though probably not moreso than anything TOS ever did.
As for the story, the wonder of the ancient alien ship worked well, but it devolved into a very basic 'invader takes over the ship, tries to tell Kirk what to do' plot at the halfway point. Hopefully some episodes will take advantage of the shorter runtime to cram some more interesting stories in at a quicker pace than TOS...
TAS S01E02 "Yesteryear" Stardate 5373.4 Broadcast date 1973-09-15.
Cool opening - big chicken alien, wobbly portal, reckless time travel causing major problems, all in the first couple of minutes! There then follow another three minutes of everyone being too dense to realise what's happened.
Okay, the time travel stuff didn't make a lick of sense and the episode didn't even do anything exciting with it, but it was cool to see more of Spock's family life and Vulcan society and all that, plus Lenard back as Sarek.
It's a shame that we don't get the classic TOS theme on these - apparently we have Gene Roddenberry greedily fucking Alexander Courage over to thank for that...
TAS S01E03 "One of Our Planets is Missing" Stardate 5371.3 Broadcast date 1973-09-22.
I did enjoy it (as much as I expect I'm going to enjoy these at all, at any rate). I like how TAS is relatively chill, compared to TOS. This was a nice little story about dealing with (what seemed to be) a meteorological and logistical problem, then an ethical one, kind of a spin on the trolley problem, and then a cosmically diplomatic one. All the kind of stuff I liked in TOS.
Pretty funny how they have to speed-run the deductive process even more than in TOS - look, the giant space cloud basically works exactly like a human body, okay?
TAS S01E04 "The Lorelei Signal" Stardate 5483.7 Broadcast date 1973-09-29.
This felt like a vague mish-mash of previous episodes. It was cool to get a bunch of women crewmembers running the place, but they didn't get to do very much and it's a little embarrassing when they beam down and look basically the same as the hypnotic dolly-bird clones they're there to fight.
TAS S01E05 "More Tribbles, More Troubles" Stardate 5392.4 Broadcast date 1973-10-06.
I enjoyed MTMT, a good mix of typical Klingon strategic battle and goofy Tribble fun with an update to both (the stasis weapon and the size change). It did fall fully into goofiness in the second half of the episode but I guess they were hemmed in by the format.
Nice to have Adams back as Cyrano Jones, though it's a shame they couldn't afford to get the Klingon actors back as well.
TAS S01E06 "The Survivor" Stardate 5143.3 Broadcast date 1973-10-13.
The Survivor was good. At first I groaned at another Imposter Kirk episode, but they introduced enough quirks with the Romulan plot and the Vendorian taking on a lot of the emotions of its replicated counterpart. Also: sexy cat lady!
The one negative about this episode is that Spock's comeback to McCoy right at the end of the episode was terrible. Basically just repeated McCoy's joke back at him except meaner.
TAS S01E07 "The Infinite Vulcan" Stardate 5554.4 Broadcast date 1973-10-20
Just a jumble of loose ideas, really. Not surprised this was a charity hire for Koenig! Bizarre ending banter as well - I guess it was referring to the 'inscrutable Asian' cliché, but I'm not sure what the point or the joke was!
TAS S01E08 "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" Stardate 1254.4 Broadcast date 1973-10-27
Enjoyed it! It had a bunch of wacky concepts in there and strung them together well enough, so it was pacey without being a total mess. Also, ending with Kirk in a wizard's duel was great, wish they'd done this one as a live-action episode tbh.
Surprised that they suggested without much ambiguity that Satan was actually an alien, which kind of throws the rest of the Christian belief system into question as well. If I recall correctly, they had previously shied away from that line in TOS.
Oh, also, this is another example of the crew being a lot more reckless in their missions than in TOS! "Yeah, let's just fly into the centre of the universe, see what's up."
TAS S01E09 "Once Upon a Planet" Stardate 5591.2 Broadcast date 1973-11-03
Watched "Once Upon a Planet" - a fairly pointless re-tread of an old episode with some bog-standard sentient AI stuff thrown in. Uhura should have resolved this whole thing in two minutes tops. A little sad, too, that the solution was to convince the AI never to travel the galaxy, just sit on its arse and learn by serving others.
TAS S01E10 "Mudd's Passion" Stardate 4978.5 Broadcast date 1973-11-10
Watched "Mudd's Passion". I know that the ever-present danger of crewmember horniness affects the men as well as the women on this show, but I feel like the women are often portrayed as much more easily swayed by it and unable to resist, more easily morally compromised, and frankly more stupid. What the fuck was Chapel thinking?!
Aside from that, this almost could have been a good episode if they'd kept it to friends/enemies rather than the creepy love aspect (why are Mudd's stories always creepy?) and had a bit more time to spend on the comedy aspects rather than cramming too much story into 20 minutes.
TAS S01E11 "The Terratin Incident" Stardate 5577.3 Broadcast date 1973-11-17
A fun idea but they didn't do anything interesting with it and there was barely any story - just people stupidly falling off things (Chapel, you fucking idiot), and then the situation basically resolves itself.
Kudos to the writers for the lack of spiders in an episode set on Planet Arachna, though. And no terrapins either.
TAS S01E12 "The Time Trap" Stardate 5267.2 Broadcast date 1973-11-24
As with many of these episodes, it's a fairly interesting set-up that just doesn't get an interesting treatment. It's like someone scribbled a few ideas on a napkin and then went straight into production!
TAS S01E13 "The Ambergris Element" Stardate 5499.9 Broadcast date 1973-12-01
A slog. Starts out as a bog-standard adventure story and just gets duller and duller.
TAS S01E14 "The Slaver Weapon" Stardate 4187.3 Broadcast date 1973-12-15
Boring. Incredible that they manage to make it feel like a budget-saving bottle episode. There were a smattering of interesting things, like Spock using the Kzinti's culture against them or a shape-shifting weapon with loads of different functions. But mostly just a bunch of people in a room talking in circles. Also, you'd think that Federation uniform wouldn't include high heels seeing as they make crewmembers twice as easy for aliens to capture.
TAS S01E15 "Eye Of The Beholder" Stardate 5501.2 Broadcast date 1974-01-05
EOTB: another concept given a very slight treatment. 'Caught in alien zoo, trick them into giving a communicator back, leads (somehow) to child alien getting teleported away and sorting everything out.' Another one where it feels like the writers wanted to get away early for the weekend.
Side-note: I'm getting He-Man flashbacks with a lot of the creature design and a few sound effects which I think are used in both, probably pulled from the same library.
TAS S01E16 "The Jihad" Stardate 5683.1 Broadcast date 1974-01-12
The Jihad is a very straightforward fellowship adventure. Could have done with more conflict, drama, character work. Anything, really.
TAS S02E01 "The Pirates of Orion" Stardate 6334.1 Broadcast date 1974-09-07
Solid but unremarkable. They end up at an interesting situation with the Orions once they catch up with them, but then it gets resolved pretty easily. I feel like TOS had more restrictions on being able to do stuff like that with the teleporters, but perhaps not...
Pretty good for the most part, then it lets all the air out when Bem leaves the cages. That planetary intelligence felt extraneous and like a deus ex machina all at once, would have been much better without it. (Apparently Roddenberry is to blame for that one.) Good to see Uhura in charge and not taking any shit!
Interesting to hear the "this one" third-as-first person construction that I'm familiar with from Game Of Thrones, and maybe the ASOIAF books as well, can't remember - wonder if GRRM took it directly from this episode...
TAS S02E03 "The Practical Joker" Stardate 3183.3 Broadcast date 1974-09-21
Really enjoyed this one! A fun, different idea executed well, with a clever Brer Rabbit resolution. This could have worked well as a TOS episode with a beefed-up B-plot and maybe some expansion of the in-fighting and 'rec room' stuff. (Speaking of which, we finally get to see the holodeck that Roddenberry wanted in TOS! Didn't realise they actually got to it before TNG.
TAS S02E04 "Albatross" Stardate 5275.6 Broadcast date 1974-09-28
Fairly rubbish. Not much happens and a lot of what does happen doesn't seem to make much sense.
TAS S02E05 "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth" Stardate 6063.4 Broadcast date 1974-10-05
I guess one of the writers just had a fight with their kid, then.
It's difficult to make a winged serpent alien god boring, but TAS managed it. Just another captured by a powerful alien/alien zoo/ancient culture's god comes back story, with the worst adventure game puzzle ever in the middle of it.
Reading memory-alpha, nice to know that the lead writer on this was Native American, even if he did want to write about space parasites but was pushed into doing a story about his culture instead! Also, turns out this was intentionally similar to Who Mourns For Adonais?.
TAS S02E06 "The Counter-Clock Incident" Stardate 6770.3 Broadcast date 1974-10-12
For the last time ever, I can say of a TAS episode: 'mildly interesting premise, shame they did nothing with it'. Get pulled into another dimension, get told how it happened, proceed to re-explain, mansplain and Vulcansplain that about eight times, then recreate the conditions and go home.
I think the 'use teleporter savepoints to cure people' thing has been used before, but still, seems very overpowered!
My skiplist, as posted on Blue Sky:
Look, it's not really worth watching these, they're not very good. But if you're curious and fancy a sampler, I'd recommend: S01E02 "Yesteryear", S01E08 "The Magicks of Megas-Tu", S02E03 "The Practical Joker". That's about an hour's worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment