Category: Trekathon

Season 2 built well on the start of Season 1. Unlike Season 1 this really felt like Star Trek throughout. There’s a mix of good and bad in the individual episodes. Unlike Season 1, there are some genuine stinkers: Catspaw, in particular. But also some true classics, such as Mirror, Mirror and The Trouble with…

The 15 or so minutes of this that were actually a Star Trek episode weren’t that great. The other 35 minutes devoted to Gene Roddenberry’s attempted spin-off were worse. The episode starts badly: that incredibly difficult and dangerous time travel stuff? Yeah, let’s just boogie back to Earth for no clearly defined reason. By the…

This was a really, really interesting episode. The ‘modern’ Roman society was quite cleverly done. Little details like the glossy Time-like magazine really made the world come alive. It was certainly a lot more interesting than an exact analogue of Ancient Rome would have been. The ending kind of ruined things for me. The ‘lots…

That old Sci Fi cliche, the computer stealing everyone’s job. Oh, and then killing everyone to survive. Why can’t the job-stealing computers be peaceful for a change? This episode suffers today from the existence of *2001: A Space Odyssey*. Which came out a little over a month after this episode originally aired in March 1968.…

From super-powerful aliens on to a variation of the good old ‘officer gone mad’ plot. I think this is the first time we’ve really seen a Star Fleet officer gone bad (as opposed to other Federation personnel, which has happened a couple of times). The Yangs versus XXX subplot had me a bit more confused,…

This is one of those fairly rare episodes where I have no vestigal memory at all of what happens. I think that adds to the enjoyment of any given episode, although I think this episode was pretty good to start with. Firstly, on the plot side it had an interesting concept (aliens from another galaxy!),…

Nazis in Space! Every now and then I think there’s a Star Trek episode where someone in accounting said “Why can’t you just use these old sets and costumes we have lying around instead of buying new ones”. 1920s Chicago, 1960s LA, and here we are with the Nazis. Still, whatever the origin this was…

An episode that fell very flat for me. As it turns out, taking both Spock and Kirk off the board for well over half the episode (by having them possessed by aliens) just wasn’t very interesting. It was probably fun for Nimoy and Shatner to try something a little different, but they just didn’t have…

The Vietnam war analogy here could not be clearer. Mainly because Kirk takes the little time out two-thirds of the way through the mission to make it painfully clear through a direct reference. But that said it’s a pretty sophisticated analogy for the time (1968 in this case). Kirk is pretty clearly stuck with no…

Another slow developing episode, which turns out to really be about McCoy and Spock’s relationship. This is the first time that the real complexities have been clear, and it seems like this is an important building block in the relationship that can be seen in the Star Trek films. The competition between McCoy and Spock…