Star Trek TOS Rewatch Binge — Annoying Recurrent PlotThemes

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In some ways the original series still stands out as superlative television from an age of pretty awful television suckitude. But after a couple decades of not watching it, which perhaps has had the effect of de-fanboying me and letting me make a fresh assessment… holy shit, their writing team could sure fasten onto an idea and keep making run after run at it and… well, I can imagine them turning to each other after each of these and saying, “Nope, I think there’s a good show to be made with this plot, but that wasn’t it yet, was it?”

We’re doing a consecutive-in-broadcast-order watch and are only around the halfway point, so I expect more iterations of these themes yet to come…

Tin God Syndrome – somebody has or acquires way too much power (usually can manipulate matter or hurl energy with a simple gesture) and becomes a tyrant

Charlie X
Where No Man Has Gone Before
The Squire of Gothos
Who Mourns for Adonis?
Catspaw

A Simpler and Autocratically Controlled Life – no individual autonomy and creativity for you! It’s for your own good, we have a benevolent tyrant! You will be taken care of and kept lovingly in your gilded cage whether you like it or not!

The Return of the Archons
This Side of Paradise
The Apple
I, Mudd

Computers will control everything! Welcome to the singularity, puny humans! (But you can defeat the computers by pointing out an error or inconsistency which will freak them out as badly as if you made them divide by zero)

The Return of the Archons
The Changeling
The Apple
I, Mudd

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My least-favorite recurring TOS plot is the “parallel Earth” story—a planet that has developed almost exactly like Earth, either by chance or because of some previous exposure to Earth culture.

Miri (in this case the planet is literally a duplicate of Earth!)
Bread and Circuses
The Omega Glory
A Piece of the Action
Patterns of Force

Wow, that’s a lot of parallel Earths! At some point they came up with “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development” to explain it.

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I think Hodgkin’s Law was invoked in “Bread and Circuses” to explain the parallel Roman Empire that survived into the mid-20th Century. “The Omega Glory” would presumably have the same explanation.

“A Piece of the Action” had “Patterns of Force” actually had specific justifications.

The native culture in “A Piece of the Action” had been contacted by an Earth ship before the Prime Directive was established, and the notes from that expedition indicated that they were extremely imitative. That expedition also accidentally left behind a book on the Chicago Mob of the 1930s (which for some reason they had taken on an early interstellar exploratory mission), so the imitative natives revamped their whole culture to match…

In “Patterns of Force”, an Earth historian had secretly come to the planet to study their society, found it to be a violent anarchy on the brink of planetary catastrophe, and introduced Nazi ideology and symbolism, devoid of anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy, because it was supposedly one of the best-run states in Earth history (all of the characters, including Spock, seem to accept this). But, patterns of force repeat, and the Nazi state inevitably devolved into a genocidal regime seeking lebensraum on a neighboring inhabited planet. Whose natives just happened to have names that sound a lot like European Jews…

Also, Plato’s Republic (aliens who had visited Earth and knew Plato and based their society on his writings), Tombstone from the American Old West (aliens using telepathy and matter manipulation to create a fantasy drawn from the crew’s memories), an 18th Century manor house (alien using super-science to observe Earth from a few hundred light years away), a spooky castle (aliens using telepathy and matter manipulation to create a fantasy drawn from the crew’s memories), an encounter with various historical figures including Genghis Khan and Abraham Lincoln (aliens using telepathy and matter manipulation to create a fantasy drawn from the crew’s memories)…

“Miri” really stands out because the cold open made such a big deal about the fact that the planet was an exact duplicate of Earth, but not only is no explanation ever offered, it’s not even mentioned again in the rest of the episode.

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It’s worse than that. “Charlie X” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” are specifically about normal humans who gain immense psionic powers which render them inhuman and unable to exist in human society, and originally aired back to back as the second and third episodes of the first season.

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Yeah, that’s what kicked off my initial “WTF, writers?!?” reaction! Well, that in conjunction with finding it a tiresomely unentertaining theme.

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In all of literature there are a limited number of basic plots. I give you:

Overcoming the Monster

Definition: The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) which threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist’s homeland.

Examples: Perseus, Theseus, Beowulf , Dracula , The War of the Worlds , Nicholas Nickleby , The Guns of Navarone , Seven Samurai ( The Magnificent Seven ), James Bond, Jaws , Star Wars , Attack on Titan .

Rags to Riches

Definition: The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all and gains it back, growing as a person as a result.

Examples: Cinderella , Aladdin , Jane Eyre , A Little Princess , Great Expectations , David Copperfield , The Prince and the Pauper , Brewster’s Millions , The Jerk .

The Quest

Definition: The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way.

Examples: The Iliad , The Pilgrim’s Progress , The Lord Of The Rings , King Solomon’s Mines , Six of Crows , Watership Down , Lightning Thief , Raiders of the Lost Ark , Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Voyage and Return

Definition: The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, they return with experience.

Examples: Ramayana , Odyssey , Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Goldilocks and the Three Bears , Orpheus, The Time Machine , Peter Rabbit , The Hobbit , Brideshead Revisited , The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , Gone with the Wind , The Third Man , The Lion King , Back to the Future , The Midnight Gospel , Gulliver , Coming To America .

Comedy

Definition: Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion.[2] Booker stresses that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing, but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. The majority of romance films fall into this category.

Examples: A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Much Ado About Nothing , Twelfth Night , Bridget Jones’s Diary , Music and Lyrics , Sliding Doors , Four Weddings and a Funeral , The Big Lebowski .

Tragedy

Definition: The protagonist is a hero with a major character flaw or great mistake which is ultimately their undoing. Their unfortunate end evokes pity at their folly and the fall of a fundamentally good character.

Examples: Anna Karenina , Bonnie and Clyde , Carmen , Citizen Kane , John Dillinger , Jules et Jim , Julius Caesar , Macbeth , Madame Bovary , Oedipus Rex , The Picture of Dorian Gray , Romeo and Juliet , Hamilton , The Great Gatsby .

Rebirth

Definition: An event forces the main character to change their ways and often become a better individual.

Examples: Pride and Prejudice , The Frog Prince , Beauty and the Beast , The Snow Queen , A Christmas Carol , The Secret Garden , Peer Gynt , Groundhog Day .

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Are these any worse than Twilight Zone (and remember, TZ was an anthology show drawing from many different writers, and with many different actors putting their own interpretations into the characters)? How many different TZ episodes involved some sort of Nazi- style government; neighbors who, under a thin veneer of civilization, were ready to kill each other; creepy kids or their dolls; inexplicably being transported to a different time, etc.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence that “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Charlie X” had to air back to back, but the sad truth was, they didn’t have enough episodes ready to go on the air. With a better production schedule, “Naked Time” and “The Enemy Within” could have moved up a couple of weeks, No Man could have been repackaged as a flashback episode (justifying the different cast members) and the first few episodes would have had better character development.

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I’m not good with episode titles, but almost every cast member had at least one episode where they go crazy or are processed.

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I’ve recently been rewatching The Next Generation (spurred on by this review series) and then Deep Space Nine, and frankly both shows have the same problem. Part of it is just the episodic nature of the show; every week the characters have to face a new challenge, and while I think the “Seven Basic Plots” @ThelmaLou references below is a bit reductionist, the truth is that there are only some many variations on a story that fit into the space of a 47 minute episode, especially one in which nothing of significance can actually occur to the characters because the episodes might be aired out of filming order and the creators don’t want to take dramatic chances. (Deep Space Nine is more progressive in this regard–they actually have character arcs that go across episodes which have the characters changing and being affected by their experiences, but it still has plenty of silly episodes that are basically a rehash of previous plots.)

So eventually the writers rehash ideas because, well, every writer since the author of The Epic of Gilgamesh has done that; Shakespeare arguably wrote nothing original, preferring to mine classic stories and steal plots wholesale from other playwrights (a common practice in that day and later), and ultimately the originality comes not from introducing a unique plot and resolution but the way the characters interact with each other and respond to the plot complications. The most memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone (which as mentioned below had a similar issue–you can barely find an episode that doesn’t have a twin somewhere in the five seasons) aren’t those with the unexpected plot twists but those that have great characters and performances which accentuate the twist ending.

If you start watching with a critical eye, you’ll see that the wider universe of Star Trek is actually one of absolute existential horror. Not only the horrifically genocidal societies like the Borg and the Dominion or the suicide-machine that is the transporter, but all of the really Lovecraftian-style horrors that the crew encounters through their journeys. At every turn something is taking the life of another nameless security team crewman and nobody even mentions the poor guy’s name because sudden death is so familiar to them. “Did you guys ever watch the show?”

Stranger

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And yet they never once ran into a parallel Vulcan, parallel Bajor, parallel Qonos, etc.

I’d give real money to see a few parallel Risas, though.

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Most of these points would not be as obvious in normal (1966-1969) viewing - a week between episodes, no recordings to review, etc.

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The Hero’s Journey, by Joseph Campbell, is the basis of many many many many many stories…

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There is also the one with the Earth-like Native Americans (“The Paradise Syndrome”?)