Interestingly, “A Piece of the Action” (originally titled “President Capone”) was one of the “springboard” story concepts presented in the first draft of the series proposal. I think the issue being addressed was how easily organized crime can cause “conventional government” (Kirk’s phrase) to break down. It was also a good defense of the “non-interference” directive.
I won’t deny the scripts got worse as time went on (“Mark of Gideon” was one of the worst offenders), but it’s impossible to understand the series without considering its social aspect.
From the beginning of language humanity has been using stories that draw parallels to their current existence. But they’re supposed to be interpreted by the reader, not printed onto an anvil and then dropped on your head. Most stories have some sort of satire, allegory, analogy, or commentary on issues more familiar to the audience. But they don’t say "okay, so these guys are the comms… like… communists! Get it! They’re like the communists in our real world! And the Yangs… the yanks!!! like Americans!!! Are you guys getting it yet!!!
And… okay… these other guys… their faces are white on the left and black on the right and the other group is the opposite! And they totally hate each other! And… how silly is that, right, it’s just a skin color difference! But that’s like Earth! We do that on Earth too! ARE YOU GUYS GETTING IT YET? DO I NEED YOU HELP YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY?"
Points taken, but I would argue that '60s commercial television was hardly a medium of subtlety. The point was to get the show in the can and delivered to the network on time, even if it means appealing to the lowest common denominator. How many other shows took the time and care to polish their scripts to the degree really needed? They couldn’t. They didn’t have the time or the money. Even Twilight Zone went downhill after the first couple of seasons.
Sure, McCoy was replaced. But that wasn’t a big deal; there were “replacements” created every time they used the transporters. The original McCoy was long dead by that point.
Not many people remember it now, but at the time this episode was made there was a cheating scandal that rocked the world of top-level fizzbin players.
A surprising number of TV writers have no clue about the genre they’re writing for, and that was even more true back then.
We also had some amazingly bad writing in that period, it’s just that no one remembers most of it (which is probably a blessing). I’ve got a couple of TV series from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s and while all of them have some good episodes they all also have some extremely shitty ones. My conclusion is that series writing back then was even more uneven than it is today.
I console myself with the knowledge that the worst Star Trek episode in any series is not nearly as awful as the Lost in Space episode “The Great Vegetable Rebellion”
I forget, is your quite from Spockl Must Die!? Because (IIRC) that was the first time I ever heard of the transporter duplication issue. (I did not read Rogue Moon for several more years, (was that the first use?)).
Two TOS episodes stand out for me. From memory:
(1) The Enterprise is visiting a farm planet, a plant of which puts out spores that cure diseases and bring happiness. Even Spock is happy. Unaffected is Kirk alone on the ship. Because people aren’t supposed to be happy, Kirk finds a way to destroy the plants.
(2) There are some aliens aboard the Enterprise who move so fast that they’re invisible. They never flicker into view when they pause take a drink or use the facilities. They apparently don’t create any suction behind themselves when they run. And regular people can, with an injection, attain those speeds.
Am I close on these?
The first is This Side of Paradise. It’s not that “people are supposed to be unhappy”, but that perople apparently lost their sense of judgement. Everyone just decided they were going to go, and that’s that. It was never mentioned, but the spores might just not give “perfect, perfect” health, but manipulate their victims. The unintended by product of this episode is that they now have the ability to cure every medical condition: infect someone with the spores, and then after whatever they have is cured, make them angry and kill the spores. “Man need not die …again.”
The second is Wink of an Eye. Science went running away as fast as a Scalosian on speed in that episode. No air friction heating eveverybody to the burning point (something the similar themed Wild Wild West episode actually got right). Plus the time differential makes no sense. Also, the most notorious episode for Kirk bedding the babe of the week - showing him actually pulling his boots on was a detail I can’t imagine how they snuck past the network censors.
I remember reading somewhere that William Shatner once went through a near-death experience and claimed he no longer feared death. He said he’d been there and knows now that it’s nothing.
Has anybody else heard this? Or was it just some Enquirer-level writer’s imagination?
The premise could have been OK (if not exactly scientifically plausible) if they had done anything remotely interesting with it. In particular, for the reason the Scalosians had to kidnap Kirk and the Enterprise they used the extremely hackneyed “dying race that needs new breeding stock.”
No, Kirk was not unaffected. He has the spore bliss, but, while doing something on the ship, he becomes angry or morose or some stew of negative emotions that counteracted the effect of the spores, so he beamed Spock up and got him into a fight to debliss him.
Remember that this was only a few years after federal troops were needed to get a Black kid into college, so perhaps being subtle wasn’t going to work.
Circa 1975, a certain friend of mine raised the obvious question: Why doesn’t the transporter keep back-up copies of everyone/everything it transports?
(Obvious answer: It would have nullified the story lines of several episodes.)
