Author: robert

Trek’s first two parter continues. The flashback story is at least a little faster moving than in the first part, but this is still a slow moving episode. When the network complained about it being ‘too cerebral’? They were kinda right. Later Trek showed a much better mix of the philosophical and intellectual themes with…

Star Trek was always a bit of a message show. The moral here? Be green, recycle… As most people who watch Trek know, this is a recycling of the original pilot, which was rejected by the network as being ‘too cerebral’. Most of the first part here is dominated by the set up, and it’s…

This is the episode I think of when I think of original series Star Trek. It’s not the greatest story, or the most entertaining. But it’s the one that I remember seeing first. I suspect the story probably had its origins in trying to keep the budget down – only a couple of guest stars,…

A so-so episode – there isn’t really much suspense or unexpected development. It’s pretty clear who the villain is early in the episode. There’s almost no sexual tension between Kirk and the doctor. And there isn’t anything very interesting done with the reprogramming of Kirk. Still, I did enjoy the part about Captain Kirk falling…

A slow episode, but some good SF, and a really nice use of unusual elements in the children. But there are some strange missteps on the way. The most obvious: why would you make this an exact duplicate of Earth? It serves no plot purpose, other than to try and justify exactly why the culture…

Ladies and Gentleman, we have the first official Red Shirt death: 309 minutes in to Star Trek as aired. And Red Shirt #2 at 11 311 minutes, just for spice. A really good SF tale. It’s the ‘mad scientist’ well, which is well explored. But it’s nicely put together, and it’s nice that the story…

This episode flirts with completely awful, but manages to redeem itself a little in places. The basic premise is irredeemably sexist and dated, the actor playing Mudd has to spit out scenery between takes. Plus the men of the Enterprise wandering around panting after the women is pretty awful. The entire first half of the…

Another solid episode. I find it interesting that Trek so far is consistently taking the more ‘character’ based approach. The simple way to do this episode is to have the ‘evil’ Kirk wander around for the whole episode fooling us. But instead he’s captured and secured for most of the episode, and instead the focus…

The first episode to really suffer due to the existence of the other series: I can’t help but think about the TNG episode (only a bit over a month away) when seeing this one. It’s a pretty fun episode, with some good (if a teensy bit overwrought) character development for Spock. There’s a level of…

Episode three, actually the second pilot for TOS. It shows, in the missing characters (Bones, most notably), the different uniforms. But what’s strangest is the overemphasis of the two guest stars: Gary Lockwood and Sally Kellerman seem to get most of the screen time, and certainly most of the interesting lines. The regular cast outside…