Look at that ep from a fans POV:
“We just saved Trek with the most intense letter campaign to date!! I have to give up my friday nights now but… YESSSS Season three I am reeadddy!!”
First impression: “These new uniforms suck and what is up with Scotty’s hair???”
Herbert.
That is all.
I don’t think the Space Hippies show is quite as bad as its reputation. In between the silly scenes, the script does raise some interesting questions about leaders and followers, rights and responsibilities.
Maybe, but the moral is conveyed in a much more sophisticated way in “Chicken Little.”
The episode is a prime example of “what were they thinking?” It’s an episode on hippies that was obviously written by a couple of Herberts. They do an episode on youth culture, complete with rock songs, evidently to appeal to kids, and then proceed to make the counterculture look totally stupid and obnoxious. And weirdly, it’s the emotionless Spock who “reaches” the hippies, rather than Chekov, who joined the show to appeal to a younger audience.
You preferred the velour that kept shrinking and had to be recut every week? :dubious: 
If you saw Doohan in any of his earlier work, you’d know that had been his hairstyle for some time.
I submit The Alternative Factor is THE worst episode. It makes no sense in any universe. It doesn’t even have internal coherence.
Sure, Spock’s Brain is Brain and Brain, but it is only number 2 worst. I think The Empath is barely top (bottom?) ten. It’s only stupid on the surface. Lights of Zetar, Omega Glory, All Our Yesterdays, FTWIHAIHTTS, ISITNB, and others - they are stupid at the core.
Patterns of Force and its brother in the Son Bread and Circuses are silly, but they have something to say. They make good commentary on the then-current culture, and maybe are still relevant. Especially B&C’s take on reality TV. 
I wanted to add - Spectre of the Gun is as historically wrong as Gill’s knowledge of Nazi Germany. No, I don’t mean the way-cool wall-less town of Tombstone, but the characters. None of the Earps or Doc Holliday are even close to being accurate. They don’t even have the correct Earps in town, or in the right job. And the events don’t play out correctly.
Since it comes from Kirk’s mind, maybe the episode can be forgiven. Maybe it can be chalked up to lost history. Kirk thinks he’s got it right - how would he know otherwise? (Maybe Mary Doria Russel’s book didn’t survive WWIII.)
But the episode writers should know better.
The Enterprise Incident was the Pueblo Incident where we won. As for morality, I believe some of those working on TOS at the time were less than happy with it. However the Romulans, just years before, launched an unprovoked attack on Federation outposts in violation of a treaty the purpose of which was to start a war. Swiping the cloaking device to prevent a new war seems hardly immoral.
you are not of the body
The character of Claudius Marcus from “Bread and Circuses” was extremely annoying to me. He really pissed me off! :mad:
What was up with his seeming turn against Merik, when he said something like “the thoughts between two men couldn’t possibly interest you”. Was he implying that Merik was possibly gay?
If I was Kirk, once they escaped back to the ship, I would have locked onto Claudius Marcus, beamed him up to the ship, and beat the shit out of him!
Yes, there are multiple layers (dimensions?) of its deficiency. Even half of all comic book references to antimatter are less absurd. Kirk would have died upon crossing over, of course. It’s only on the subatomic level that particle/antiparticle meetings need be symmetrical. * And the two forms of Lazarus were no longer physically identical anyway, as if that mattered. The inter-dimensional corridor added to the silliness.
One critic noticed something that had not bothered me on my own. The writer could be accused of not knowing the difference between a planetary system and a galaxy. (And if galaxy was actually meant, how could Star Fleet observe effects all across it?)
The whole production was terribly rushed (as has been noted on SDMB and elsewhere) and perhaps that’s why we see Kirk observe two very different personalities even though he had not yet met the good Lazarus.
We did get a few very jangling scenes (visually) with a lot of loud wind sounds, and an annoying superposition of a nebula. If anyone actually likes that sort of thing.
No, he simply meant that Merrick was a weasel who surrendered his crew to be killed in the games; while Kirk continued to fight even after being taken captive.
I have a positive feeling for the the Directive as far as interstellar cultures go. But it certainly has been taken to absurd lengths. In the ST:TNG episode with Worf’s brother, Picard was okay with letting a whole planet die, rather than contaminate it.
“Well, at least it died a virgin.” That doesn’t sound very enlightened.
In “Balance of Terror” the Romulans demonstrated their belligerence by sending a warship out to destroy a bunch of Federation outposts to check for weakness. It wasn’t like the Feds just woke up one day and decided to steal a cloaking device for no good reason.
In a story where Jack the Ripper is explained as being an immortal norcorporeal alien who hijacks the living and inhabits dead bodies while traveling across the Galaxy, this is the only thing you find questionable? :dubious:
And that’s why it’s far more forgivable in Miri than in The Omega Glory, IMO.
It’s a bit of silliness to justify the sets they shot on. You can roll your eyes at the idea, then once the story itself gets going you can ignore it, since it’s nothing but a minor cosmetic bit, no different than the sets and costumes in Return of the Archons, aside from that one line.
But The Omega Glory built an entire episode around a stupid premise. You can’t ignore the stupidity and enjoy the episode, because without the stupidity, there is no episode.
Bread & Circuses is almost forgivable, since it’s a pretty fun episode despite having the same problem, but the ‘Romans never had a sun god’ and ‘not the Sun, the Son’ compound the stupidity enough to counteract that.
Patterns of Force, like A Piece of the Action, are fine on that front, since the ‘parallelism’ is explicitly the result of contamination by humans.
You realize that Zarabeth was not native to the era but had been banished there with the Atavachron, presumably somewhere around the time of Mr Atoz?
The exact duplicate of Earth in “Miri” wasn’t necessary to the plot, but it does raise the question of how infinite the Universe is.
If it’s truly infinite, there are by definition an infinite number of possibilities repeated an infinite number of times. If you buy into that theory, the existence of a second Earth (and many more) is inevitable.
WHOA WHOA WHOA
All Our Yesterdays is quite good.
Spock reverts to a primitive emotional state, because at that point in history Vulcan is emotional. But McCoy doesn’t?
Time travel doesn’t work that way.
But Mr Atoz is a great name for a librarian.