It got cancelled because the ratings were never very good. A letter writing campaign saved it after the second season, but NBC moved it to the Friday evening graveyard and cut the budget, and that was that. The third season is much weaker than the first two episodes.
I was too young to watch Star Trek when it was first broadcast, but I saw it in syndication during my childhood on the old channel 11—my brother was a fan, but my Dad couldn’t stand it–and my appreciation of the show has waxed and waned over the years. Compared to the sci fi shows of the '70s that I watched as a child, such as Battlestar Galactica , Space 1999, or Buck Rogers, it was a much better show. It was on TV when I was in college, and I’d watch it after dinner most evenings. I mostly appreciated the camp factor and laughed at the hammy acting, and rolled my eyes at the sexism and dopey jokes.
When Next Generation first started, I was disappointed with how bad it was. The didn’t seem to know how to pace an episode, or even have any adventures–they just went in the holodeck all the time. My roommate and I wrote a crank letter to Gene Roddenberry that had the line, “you finally get a budget behind you and this is the best you can do?” We implored him to kill off Wesley Crusher, dump the Data/Pinocchio schtick, get rid of the holodeck, and “start beaming down to some planets and punch some aliens in the face.”
TOG got better, but some of the other series never seemed to get better–Voyager and Enterprise never seemed to figure it out. While TOS is dated, they knew how to put an entertaining hour of TV together. Some episodes are bad, sure, but most are pretty good.
Well, it really is a matter of taste, but I really liked the gritty feel of Enterprise. It had a sort of tactile reality to it that the other series (all of them) were lacking. The others were just too sanitary compared to Enterprise, and the acting was consistently good.
Speaking of sit back and enjoy the ride, I just finished “Metamorphosis,” and that’s exactly what Kirk told Commissioner Hedford when Shutlecraft Galileo got hijacked. With that idiom’s history and connotations, it kinda gave me the willies.
Aside from that, am I the only one that’s bothered by the fact that Kirk, Spock (!), and McCoy ended the adventure in a conspiracy to file a falsified mission report?
Well, thing about space is there is a lot of incomprehensibly weird shit out there. Most of what is out there is, as JBS Haldane says, “weirder than you can imagine” – far weirder than anything you will ever see on Star Trek, and at the same time, less startling to the average person, who will have no idea what they are looking at/experiencing. So, if a record looks odd or wrong-ish, Star Fleet will look at it and say, “Huh. Odd.” and that will be the end of it.
Sorry, I don’t buy that. Star Fleet are kinda sticklers for having their mission reports tied up in a little bow. He’s going to need to include something to reference the circumstances under which the Galileo took the commissioner on board and didn’t deliver her or her corpse anywhere.
that Zephram Cochrane looks nothing at all like Stretch Cunningham – the companion must have been grossly incompetent to have changed his appearance and demeanor that drastically in the process of restoring him to life
you can tell that Shatner is ESL when he pronounces it “Alpha Centuuri” rather than “Alpha Centauri”
there is no town near Bozeman called Alpha Centauri – it really makes no sense that the human who invented warp drive was from a place over a full parsec away from Earth
It is a deeply broken episode, and the part about the falsified mission report is just a tiny plot hole overall.
Khan’s ship went pretty far considering it got launched before warp drive got invented. So they were still pretty confused about distances then, though it could be possible that they had impulse engines before warp, which would make trips to Alpha Centauri kind of practical. You’d have to throw out First Contact, of course.
But remember back then there were no DVRs or even VCRs so no one studied episodes to nitpick them. I won over a Trekkie in my Writing class by recording Trouble for Tribbles for her - on a cassette tape recorder.
TOS was hardly the only sinner here. Watch old series and you’ll find all kinds of howlers, even good ones like Secret Agent / Danger Man.
The fan explanation I’ve heard is that he actually moved to a colony around Alpha Centauri after developing Warp, to get away from it all. Also usually there are some shenanigans where he gets younger.
Alternatively, the more pedestrian explanation is the talk about how record from that time are bad, as said in Space Seed. That maybe there was a Zephram Cochrane from Alpha Centauri who was a decendent who got mixed in with the Earthling.
To me, one of the most fun things with Trek is making it work. But then I like that in all fiction.
Our standing joke was to envision, when Spock does the palm-to-palm Vulcan salute with a female Vulcan (was that in “Amok Time”? or in “Is There In Truth No Beauty”? or with the Romulan captain in “The Enterprise Incident”? or later with Saavik?), that Vulcans have their genitalia in their fingertips.
Or more likely, depending on the needs of the particular story line.
In several episodes, when Kirk is not present, either Spock or Scotty is left in command. Invariably, Spock fucks up due to his assumption of logic on the part of the humans or the aliens adversaries as the case may be, whereas Scotty always takes a more intuitive strategy, taking into account the psychology of the “others” (Klingons or whoever) and does the right things.
Examples I can think of: Spock nearly gets everyone killed in “The Galileo Seven” assuming the aliens won’t attack them (until they do) and nearly again when the shuttlecraft can’t make it back to the mother ship until Spock in desperation jettisons the fuel, creating a fire flare, which the Enterprise crew see.
In “The Paradise Syndrome”, Spock eggs Scotty to push the Enterprise past its redline, burning out the warp engines and leaving them with only impulse power.
In another episode (I forget which – someone?) Scotty is in charge and, having been deceived by Klingons once, is not deceived a second time, saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
But also, I spotted a trend later in the series (in particular in the first batch of movies with the original cast), which others have noted too and I’m sure was deliberate: Little by little, Spock came to accept his human half and became (incrementally) more comfortable with his human feelings.
I thought this became most noticeable in that movie (I forget which one it was) that both begins and ends with Kirk, McCoy, and Spock vacationing in Yellowstone Park, sitting around a campfire, roasting marshmallows, and singing “Row Row Row Your Boat”. (When McCoy asked Spock to guess what you do after roasting marshmallows, Spock’s first guess was “Consume the Marshmallows?”)
This, after Spock had earlier (somewhere in TOS) put himself into a state of suspended animation, remarking that we Vulcans find it much more relaxing than your human “vacation”.
And another one of the all-time worst episodes, IMO, was that one with the Yangs and the Cooms (sp?) which ends with Kirk proudly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
He said he had already seen the first season, “The City on the Edge of Forever” is in that season so I assumed he had already figured out that was a good one. All the episodes I mentioned in this thread were second and third season.
Heh. You ever experience the phenomenon where you don’t really pay much attention to a show until it’s in syndication, and even then you only catch it sporadically? And on the occasions when you do watch an episode, it turns out to be one of the three or four you’ve already seen.
That’s me with “Space Seed,” “The Changeling,” “Amok Time,” and “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
So, yeah, I knew the episode. But truth to tell, I gave it a miss this time.
I have to be at work at 5 am and read the Dope over breakfast, because it makes me less angry than watching the morning news. I don’t know what anyone else’s excuse is.
