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I'm into season 3 and may have watched too many too quickly. I'm finding a few wpisodes have too little content to fill the time. And there's a few bad episodes and one absolutely awful one that involves creepy children who can control people. Nice idea but I thought it was executed badly, repetetive and just a chore to watch. Also it feels more like they keep finding civilizations based on available wardrobes, ancient Romans, Greeks, Nazis (though that episode was pretty great). Cracking music constantly though. Kirk's spacesuit when he fades in and out of reality isn't the best but made me laugh too.
There were recurrent themes:
(1) The danger of psychological inflation to archetypal level (Who Mourns for Adonis?, and the early one about the psychiatrist and the accelerated brain patient),
(2) immature psyches in power positions (That 'squire' one and the children's episode and others),
(3) resisting paradise and complacency,
(4) ego/shadow Jekyll and Hyde stories (Enemy Within, and the black/whites Gorshen thing),
(5) 'stuck' cultures,
.... and several other templates that were dealt with in more than one episode. This could lead to critics claiming repetitiveness. The five-year mission was really the journey into the unconscious.
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I'm into season 3 and may have watched too many too quickly. I'm finding a few episodes have too little content to fill the time. And there's a few bad episodes and one absolutely awful one that involves creepy children who can control people. Nice idea but I thought it was executed badly, repetetive and just a chore to watch.
You're referring to And the Children Shall Lead. Yes, that's one of the two worst episodes. Avoid The Way To Eden also. Just embarrassing.
Season 3 does have a few outstanding episodes, though.
The Enterprise Incident
The Tholian Web
Elaan of Troyius (with an great score by Steiner)
Have fun watching!
Way to Eden. The one with the space hippies, including Skip Homeier with a cauliflower ear! "We reach"! as one of them says...
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By the third season Roddenberry was out and the studio got more silly with the stories as it was trying to compete with LIS which was kicking their butts in the ratings.
Lost in Space was already off the air when Star Trek's 3rd season premiered. There was no competition in the slightest or any urging by the network to make the series on par with LiS. The third season episode quality was a result of the series being produced by men with no prior experience with the series; Roddenberry had left, Justman stuck around for only about half of the episodes leaving Freiberger and Arthur Singer alone to produce a series with a drastically reduced budget and shooting schedule.
The ambition was generally there, but there was a difference between what Roddenberry considered a good episode and what Freiberger deemed "good enough" to get on the air and focus on the next one. And even with all of that going against them - particularly a network which did it's best to kill the series with a poor tie slot and no promotion - many episodes turned out quite good.
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TOS was always a mixed bag of great, good, and terrible. Kinda like how Shatner's physique went from the beginning of each season until the end. 
By the third season Roddenberry was out and the studio got more silly with the stories as it was trying to compete with LIS which was kicking their butts in the ratings.
The Solium Absurdity
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TOS was always a mixed bag of great, good, and terrible. Kinda like how Shatner's physique went from the beginning of each season until the end.
By the third season Roddenberry was out and the studio got more silly with the stories as it was trying to compete with LIS which was kicking their butts in the ratings.
The Solium Absurdity
I maybe wrong about the two competing for ratings, but I'm sure LIS had something to do with the childish nature of a lot of the third seasons episodes.
No.
It usually came down to Paramount wanting to reuse previously existing sets to monetize their investment.
So, we get a lot of scripts based on sets, not plot lines ; i.e westerns. NY in the 30's/Gangsters/Ancient Rome etc.
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The backdrop of Ludlum's THE PARAMOUNT REDUNDANCY
THE PARAMOUNT RECYCLABLES
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I maybe wrong about the two competing for ratings, but I'm sure LIS had something to do with the childish nature of a lot of the third seasons episodes.
Nah, really, LiS had zero to do with it. Roddenberry even issued memos to Freiberger stating the need to be more mature and different than the recently cancelled LiS. The network didn't want them to get sillier, the network wanted them gone. Actually, because of the switch to Fridays at 10, Star Trek LOST the kids in the audience. So they actually had to go older - there was an uptick in spookiness and horror in the episodes. Also, they aimed for the female audience by adding more romance based storylines.
But, no, nobody at the network or on staff wanted to make it more like LiS. Even Space turned away from pure comedy in their final season after the camp craze burned itself out.
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It seems only in season 3 does Kirk go full Kirk with the ladies. Even McCoy gets the glad-eye by some desperate lady. It makes me wish their was more Spock/McCoy moments in the JJ Abrams film versions. Last episode was some foxy euro lady being brought to marry some green space person for planetary peace. The green space ambassador was a fusspot and good fun. The lady just wanted to be liked. Klingons attacked. Pretty good.
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Posted: |
Feb 20, 2018 - 5:39 AM
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By: |
Tall Guy
(Member)
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I'm not a Star Trek fan but i have seen all the films and probably half of Next Gen and only bits of the other ones.
I saw episodes of the original series as a little kid but mostly remember being a bit frightened of some scary faces in it. So i was either very young or very cowardly, or a bit of both. Anyhow before Christmas i started watching a few episodes of TOS and have since resumed.
It's actually really entertaining. Every episode kicks off straight away into an adventure. There's tons of action - i had it in my head they just stood around talking a lot then reversed phasers and that solved everything. The fight scenes range from not great (Gorn) to some genuinely decent fight choreography that looks like it hurts. There's some interesting camerawork in here too. Like the Mirror Universe episode where Shatner walks out of a lift and gets punched in the face.
The music is really good. It adds so much. Once again i hadn't realised it was so sweeping, thrilling and often quite memorable.
I even like the stylized alien landscape sets and the lush colour throughout the wardrobes. I hadn't realised everything was so colourful.
Shatner has tons of presence, Nimoy is fantastic, and Bones is great too. I like how Bones was portrayed in the JJ Abrams films, Karl Urban got him bang on it seems.
Starting the second series it's good to see how youthful and energetic Chekov was, he's a fun character. It's also fun seeing people like Reggie Nalder, David Soul, the barber from High Plains Drifter, Joan Collins pop up too.
I can see why people liked it so much when it first came out and why it endured. Good entertaining fun.
I'm just old enough to have seen this in its first run in the UK, and I agree with all your points. I'm neither Trekker nor StarWarsian, but if I had to choose, it'd be ST, but ONLY in respect of The Original Series and the JJ re-boots, which admittedly so far have produced diminishing returns, the first being much the best, and the other two each losing a few percentage points in turn. I was so disappointed seeing the 1979 incarnation that it instilled an apathy in respect of the rest of the films and all the series for the next 30 years! I did see a few of the films and odd episodes of TNG and other series, but they all seemed to be hollow and vapid attempts to re-capture the spark of something that The Original Series always had. And a large part of that magic was indeed the music.
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"LORD GARTH!!!"
Whom Gods Destroy was one of my favorite episodes as a kid and teenager - a comic book take on a serious issue that actually has a touching finale. Plus I love over-the-top acting and Ihnat was the match for Shatner that TOS coulda stood more of.
Um, I may not think it is a top episode any more, but it's one of my favorite third-season episodes. (The others are The Enterprise Incident, The Day of the Dove, Elaan of Troiyus, and The Savage Curtain.)
And, um, yes, Yvonne Craig.
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