It’s practically a first season episode. Shatner does his best slow-burn…talking under his breath. Great direction…after Scotty tells Spock the ship ‘feels wrong’, I swear he wanders around for a solid 60 seconds while his subordinates occasionally glance at him like you would your boss when you know he’s pissed.
And holy crap! I think Scotty gets more dialogue than in any other episode. Even Sulu manages to get a lot of dialogue.
Couple of nit-picks I never noticed before:
This SHOULD have been the shortest episode ever. “Stop! You must not transport to the planet!” Hey transporter dude! Cancel the transport! Okay…don’t just stand there and let this alien who suddenly appeared touch you! Idiot.
Okay at least McCoy tries to sleep leaning against the rock. I guess it’s possible, but Kirk is trying to use the rock as a pillow. Everyone who has ever camped out knows you use your arm or your arm and your shoes as a pillow. A ROCK Kirk??
That’s a lovely little episode. I love the quadrille near the end, where everybody dances with everyone else’s partner.
Maybe I was too young when I first saw it, but I’ve never really understood the hate for “Spock’s Brain.” It’s technologically implausible – but if we accept the Transporter, why not a brain transplant?
Even the episode I detest above all others – “The Omega Glory” – actually has one or two really nice bits. I love it when Cloud William smacks Kirk down with an iron bar to the back of the head, just when Kirk thought he’d made an alliance. Isn’t this also the first episode where Spock exhibits mental powers? And the caricature of Spock in the Holy Book is too damn precious for words!
No, IIRC “Dagger of the Mind” shows the first appearance of Spock’s ability to mind-meld, and that’s way back in the first half of the first season. However, “The Omega Glory” was one of the alternatives proposed for the second pilot, so that would make it “the first episode written where…”, assuming that the script was fully worked out at this stage. Also, this is the only episode where it was shown that Spock can exert a mental compulsion at range (he was able to use some other telepathic powers without physical contact, for which see “By Any Other Name” and “Devil In The Dark”).
Two of my favorites that I think qualify are Court Martial and Return to Tomorrow. Court Martial was one of the first episodes to expand the setting and is an interesting drama. Return to Tomorrow is just Hammy fun.
Are Court Martial and That Which Survives considered bad episodes? I’ve always put both on the “good” list. (Plus, the way Losira disappeared each time really freaked out my younger self.)
For my vote, I’ll add Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. I don’t find it as anvillicious as most do. I genuinely like the scene where Bele tries to explain, to a very mixed race crowd, the difference between him and Lokai, and they simply don’t see the issue.
Spock first admitted that Vulcans have “limited telepathic powers” in the middle of the first season (“A Taste of Armageddon”) and refers to the incident in “By Any Other Name.”
The mind-meld in “Dagger” was the result of a Roddenberry rewrite. The original script had Van Gelder being interrogated with hypnotism and drugs, and it took them a long time to get the information they needed.
I don’t understand the hatred for “Omega Glory” or “Spock’s Brain.” Yes, the whole Pledge of Allegiance and “E Plabnista” business was kind of dumb, but up until then it was a good Prime Directive episode. As for a bunch of horny retarded women wanting to steal one of Spock’s vital organs … well, I can imagine stranger things to base a script on.
I’ve always liked “Spectre of the Gun,” which has a very science-fictiony feel to it. I don’t understand why so many fans dislike it.
I’ll tel you why - the history is just a mess! They’ve got Wyatt Earp as Marshall, when it was Virgil (who isn’t even in the episode), they’ve got Morgan Earp as a mad dog killer, and Doc Holliday wasn’t the town doctor. And the famous gunfight wasn’t even IN the OK Corral! The whole episode is just one incorrect historical fact after another!*
Seriously, I kinda like that episode - I love the whole feel of the half-finished town, and how minor players come and go as if by magic. I’d read that the set was due to lack of money, but I think if that was so, then it was accidental genius. If they’d have shot on an outdoor old west town the episode probably would not have worked at all.
*Yes, yes, the Melkotians took the “manner of their death” from Kirk’s memories, and he probably learned about Tombstone from some old 20th century TV show DVD found in a bombed out building after the third world war.
See how easily the discrepancies are explained? If they had taken their information from the ship’s computers rather than Kirk’s memory, it probably would have been much more accurate.
Or maybe they just tweaked everything to suit their own purposes. It was clearly meant to seem more like a nightmare than an actual replay of history.
Spock even pointed out that the Melkots’ knowledge of the Old West was “fragmentary,” judging from the nature of the town.
Offhand, the only TOS episode I can think of that I’d call utterly lacking in merit is “The Alternative Factor”. I’ll check a list later for others, but this one specifically irritates me for being so overwrought and underthought.
I also liked “Spectre of the Gun,” incidentally.
Seeing “Spectre” at a young age left me always thinking of the Earps as the villains in any TV Show, movie, or book about the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Even historical documentaries. I know it’s incorrect, but I can’t shake it.
I’ve enjoyed the irony that the plot turns on Spock uncovering ANOTHER inconsistency with history: that Billy Claiborne (Chekov’s role in events) was the first to die in the tableau they were stuck in, but one of the only survivors IRL.
There were plenty of clues already, but I guess the clue that registers is the one involving a shipmate getting gunned down. :smack:
Still, I love the premise and the stagecraft of that episode, if not the nerd-sniping historical discontinuity of it.
I didn’t know “Spectre of the Gun” was disliked. I found it decent, if a little slow. But, if I’m going to watch a 60’s sci-fi take on the OK Corral, I’ll watch Doctor Who’s “Gunfighters” any day. That episode’s hilarious.
I actually liked “Miri.” I’m the one person. Something that’s a sticking point for a lot of people - that earth has an exact duplicate - I found rather fascinating. Mathematically, in an infinite universe, there should be infinite earths. I wish they’d expanded upon that and dropped some of the stuff with the annoying children, but there was still plenty there to like, especially the stuff between Spock and McCoy.
I thought “Bread and Circus’s” was pretty good. The religious stinger at the end was a groaner, but it didn’t ruin anything for me. And I like the idea of Rome with televisions.
I like Spock’s Brain, but I can see the reasons people wouldn’t. ‘Brain and brain, what is brain!’ is emblematic of the episode. It’s a deliciously silly line… But that much silly isn’t to everyone’s taste.
The Omega Glory on the other hand…it’s a good idea wasted by grafting it to a terrible one. Concentrate on the disease, the conflict between Tracey and Kirk, and the Prime Directive issues that link the two, and it would have worked fine. But, no, they had to go and graft on an anvilicious Cold War turned Hot and the E Plebnista jingoism.
Oh, how could I have forgotten about The Empath!? That’s one of my favorites, and it gets knocked all the time for its lack of sets. But the character moments between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were gold. Also, the trope of one person having to sacrifice themselves for others usually ends with a cheap cop out, but even though McCoy’s life is saved in the end, he and Kirk are actually horribly tortured. I like that there’s actual stakes in that story.
I was just having fun, but I do think the writers believed the events in the episode were an accurate representation of the events of October 1881. I don’t think the historical inaccuracies I listed were stylistic choices. Just mistakes.
The whole “We’re going to torture you to decide which planet is worth saving” thing is as ludicrous as the “We don’t believe in birth control, so we’re going to give everyone a fatal disease” bit in “Mark of Gideon.” I hate both episodes!
“Bread and Circuses” wouldn’t have been the same without all the references to “The Son.” But it would have been a lot better if they had focused on the insidious revolutionary effect Christianity had on the Romans, rather than its spiritual aspect.
