The Original Series continues its problematic relationship with female guests stars this week. In “Wink of an Eye”, our female guest star’s personality switches multiple times over the course of the episode because plot. In “The Empath”, the show manages to one-up that treatment and give us a female character with literally no personality. Oh, and she can’t talk. Yeah.
It’s not dead, Jim: The third season roars back this week. “The Tholian Web” features a new alien menace, growing madness among the crew, a disappearing starship, and Spock and Bones at each other’s throats. “Plato’s Stepchildren” features telekinetic jocks, the first (sic) interracial kiss on television, and a singing Spock. Plus! Scotty gets drunk and wanders the corridors of the Enterprise in a kilt at least once a week.
8 episodes into the third season of The Original Series, and we’ve cracked the code on why it’s so disappointing: everyone involved has decided to give us a steady diet of fight scenes, love scenes, and general half-assed pulp nonsense. In “Day of the Dove”, the Klingons and the Federation learn that the cure for violence is comedy. In “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, McCoy contracts a fatal illness called marriage.
In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”, the crew of the Enterprise wanders around for 50 minutes while a guest star does her best to convince everyone that she’s blind, and then she leaves. In “Spectre of the Gun”, the crew of the Enterprise wanders around for 50 minutes while guest stars do their best to kill them. In episode 31 of Trekabout, we wander around for 50 minutes because hell, third season of The Original Series, man. Also! Richard likes to use the word “eschew”.
Want some mild racism? Well you have it in “The Paradise Syndrome”! Want to feel a burning hatred for children? Well you have it in “And the Children Shall Lead”! Want to watch a better TV show? Well, you have to wait for us to get to Star Trek: The Next Generation in about six months. Also! Richard loves the name Melvin Belli.
Oh boy, guys and gals–we made it to the third season of The Original Series, and it’s all downhill from here for quite a while. “Spock’s Brain” isn’t nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be, and gives us some hilarious camp, while “The Enterprise Incident” is… pretty good? Which is about the best any third season episode gets. So look forward to that. Plus! How often can Vulcans have sex?
In this episode of Dialogue Tree, I speak with John Sharp, Associate Professor of Games and Learning at Parsons, The New School for Design, who gave the keynote at IndieCade East this past February.
This episode’s music:
Okay! We’ve reached the end of the second season, with “Bread and Circuses”, another Gene Roddenberry-penned episode, so, really, enough said, and “Assignment: Earth”, another exciting outing from our intrepid adventurers Gary Seven, Roberta Lincoln, and Isis the cat… wait, what? What the hell are we watching? Is this Star Trek? Also! Richard doesn’t like science.
What is nuclear war good for? “The Omega Glory” tries to answer that, and the answer is… Christ, I don’t know, look, this is one of the worst Original Series episodes, let’s just move on to “The Ultimate Computer”, where we learn that computers are not adept at starship command. Plus! Is Spock McCoy’s little brother?
Okay, we just have to come out and say it: we’re dealing with Nazis this week. “Patterns of Force” is a strangely funny episode, seeing as how it deals with, as we just mentioned, Nazis, but it’s also disturbing. “By Any Other Name” is neither of those, but it does present us with the idea of dispassionate Cthulhu aliens. Plus! Spock isn’t wearing a shirt.
Charles Wallace on Camazotz 