In context, it’s just horrible. Laughably horrible, maybe, but horrible. You haven’t seen Star Trek at its best yet, when the show’s format had gelled and the main characters were developed. It gets MUCH better than this.
The reason a lot of Season 3 eps were so disappointing was that they were a definite step down from most of Season 1 and pretty much all of Season 2. Keep watching. You’ll see the difference.
ETA: Another reason Season 3 was so disappointing was that it only existed because of some very hard work and almost fanatical devotion by the show’s fans. The network was going to cancel the show after Season 2 but there was a HUGE fan reaction and an incredible letter-writing campaign (the first of its kind, I believe) and NBC greenlighted the third season.
You’re not going to get anywhere with Star Trek if you keep looking at it on this level.
There is absolutely no explanation for why everyone can speak English. At some point they make noises about a “universal translator” but it doesn’t explain why people’s lips make English-speaking shapes and the sounds come from their mouths instead of from the translator.
And they’re not wearing jackets simply because the show is not crafted to that level of detail.
Let it all go, Fusoya. Let it all go. You’re approaching this all wrong.
Star Trek was a traditional “frontier” drama in a sci-fi setting. It’s not hard sci-fi. Scientific question just aren’t answered for the most part. (Why are you worried about jackets when the starship has planet-like gravity?) And when they are answered, they don’t make any sense.
Many of the episodes are written as allegories or morality plays.
If you wonder how they eat and breathe and other science facts…
Repeat to yourself ‘it’s just a show, I really should relax…’
Remember, when Nichelle Nichols was thinking about leaving the show, Martin Luther King Jr told her to stick with it, because of what it meant to see someone of her gender and color in a position like that in the future.
(Technically, there wasn’t quite the first interracial kiss on TV in one episode, but many people remember it as such.)
And, to be honest, I liked Spock’s Brain. It’s goofy, but fun. And yeah, that’s as bad as it gets.
Not bad, really.
What’s funny about the hardcore Trekkies is that they can be incredibly pedantic WRT areas like ship and costume design (watch the film Trekkies to get an idea of this), but they don’t tend to ask the important questions like: why do everyone’s lips move in sync with English speech?
What I’ve realized with Star Trek is what I already realized with a number of other shows: they are nothing more than scripts written by people, and sometimes people make mistakes, and when they do, that’s when you get plot holes. Sometimes these plot holes are retconned away, sort of (such as the re-design of the appearance of the Klingons), sometimes they aren’t. I’ve always wondered exactly how Cyrano Jones got all the tribbles off of that space station, and how long it really took.
Of course they ask those question. They ask them all the time. That’s why they have such a bad reputation. But the sane ones at some point come to the realization that there’s no point in asking these kinds of questions.
I think you’re wrong on this. It’s not because humans are flawed. It’s because this kind of pseudo-realistic consistency isn’t the point of the work. There are some types of hard sci-fi where this is the point. Star Trek isn’t that kind of sci-fi.
I certainly don’t think that Star Trek started out with pedantic consistency in mind, but there’s no question that the writers have had to pay closer attention to plot consistencies now that there’s an established “canon” that the fanbase expects them to adhere to. Why else would they even bother to go back and explain why the Klingons from ST: TMP onward looked different from the ones in TOS? The explanation “we wanted to make them look more badass so we changed them” should have sufficed. And I don’t think it’s by accident that J.J. Abrams decided on the whole “there was a time-travel incident so my movie’s whole universe is totally new” angle when he made the 2009 Trek movie.
Bear in mind that I’m merely referring to consistencies within the Star Trek universe. I would agree that discussions over whether the science behind Star Trek is “good science” or not would be pointless. Surely the Bad Astronomerwould enjoy pointing out what they got wrong, but what would be the point?
Actually I was asking the questions about languages and clothing because I thought there MIGHT have been an explanation at some point in the series. I know there’s no story arc, but I also doubt they are going to say “you’re wearing climate controlled shoes which will keep you warm or cool, and a belt that helps you breathe oxygen on foreign planets” every single episode. I realize the show is fictional, and I realize that trying to question anything is pointless, but I was just wondering how much IS explained away and how much was just accepted.
They’ve never reused the life support belts from the animated series, continuing to use bulky spacesuits. The belts are just force field generators with a mini replicator which generates oxygen and heat (and recycles CO2), all technologies which have been firmly established by TNG era at the latest. But the FX costs might be prohibitive.
I think as far as technical aspects of the shows go, there is explanation in some cases (particularly in the TNG era and beyond), and broad hand-waving in others. For the most part, the narratives in Star Trek take place on “Class M” planets which by definition had atmospheric compositions and life-supporting potential on par with Earth.
The issue of language translation is confusing, because in some cases I think you’re to assume that a general “universal translator” is in use, but at other times, characters are alluded to having multi-lingual capabilities. There’s an episode of TNG which features a race called the “Binars” - they are able to communicate with the Enterprise crew in “English”, but speak to each other using unintelligible (to us) jibberish. And then there was an entire Klingon language created for the show - although Klingon characters are usually shown speaking in “English”, occasionally some Klingon phrases or whole conversations will be heard (again, this is almost totally from TNG onward).
The “undiscovered country” wasn’t an actual place. Originally it referred to death in “Hamlet.” In TUC, it actually paralleled the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had broken up, the Berlin Wall fell, and there was a gradual thawing in relations between the East and the West. The story actually used the Federation and the Klingons as allegorical figures. It was a journey by Kirk, who had a deep hatred of Klingons because his son had been murdered by Klingon officers, (or “Klingon bastards,” as Kirk viewed them) to set aside his feelings and to help bring about peace between the two sides. Kirk revealed that a group of insurgents within the Federation, Klingon Empire, and Romulan Empire had conspired to sabotage the peace efforts and to retain the state of war that existed between the Federation and Klingons. The Klingon Chancellor, Azetbur, who had taken over from her murdered father, said that Kirk had restored her father’s faith, and Kirk responded that she had restored his son’s.
In Little Green Men, the malfunction of the Ferengi’s translators caused them to not be able to communicate with the hu-mons. It’s also a funny episode.
TOS were little morality plays that talked about the big issues of the 1960s in allegory. The producers were trying to show that liberalism with respect to race and sex was progress and a wonderful future. I didn’t see them until the early 70s when I was 8 and older.
Personally, I felt that strict adherence to canon was the reason that Enterprise failed to entertain. By being set in the subjective past of the familiar Trek universe they were constrained from going out in any new story direction. (I understand there was a Xindi Arc, but I had lost all interest by then.)
Very few writers have the talent or skills to say something innovative and still pander to the fanboys.
[QUOTE=Albert Walker]
For this, the second installment of The Worst of Trek, I decided to take on “Spock’s Brain”. And I’ll be straight with you, the only reason I picked this episode is because of how little most Trek fans think of it. I would guess that there’s two big reasons why this episode is looked upon with such contempt.
This episode is goofy. Like, really goofy. Watching it, you will find yourself filled with inescapable despair once you realize this is the same cast that performed mini-epics like “The City on the Edge of Forever” or nail-biting thrillers like “Journey to Babel”. However, as a B-movie fanatic, I can pretend this isn’t really Star Trek, but rather a futuristic take on the “lost tribe of women” genre of movies (a genre that includes The Wild Women of Wongo, Mesa of Lost Women, Prehistoric Women and Thor and the Amazon Women) and enjoy it on that same campy level. Heck, all you’ve really got to do is put the estrogenic culture found in this episode in buckskin bikinis and you’ve got yourself One Million Years B.C. In Space. (Of course, had this truly been a B-movie, the title of this episode surely would have been They Saved Spock’s Brain!)
This episode is incredibly sexist. Even for the chauvinist atmosphere of late 60’s TV, some could say this episode crossed the line. For only in the darkest, most patriarchal corners of Trekdom could an idea such as this one germinate and spread like a fungus to living rooms across the country. See, the message promoted here goes like this: When women are separated from men for any length of time, they will become mentally retarded. Feeble. Too stupid to breathe. And their only hope for survival lies in their ability to cravenly steal the brain of an Alpha Male in order to ensure their lifestyles of shopping, baking cookies, and picking the kids up from school in the station wagon.
Which is not to say that I disagree with either of these points. Clearly, this episode is deeply flawed, and should have never been made in the first place. But unlike the wheezing, gasping invalid struggling to reach its conclusion that was “And the Children Shall Lead”, “Spock’s Brain” is a brisk fifty minutes that never bogs down or makes you stare at the clock praying and hoping for it to end. (Your life, that is, not the episode.)…
[/QUOTE]
I’m inclined to agree that the reputation of “Spock’s Brain” isn’t so much the result of its low quality (there are several other episodes, such as the aforementioned “And the Children Shall Lead”, that are worse) but the result of the kind of badness it exudes – the kind that reinforces all the worst popular images of bad sci-fi. As a result, the fen find it to be painfully embarrassing in a way that other lousy Trek episodes aren’t.
Seriously, you’re worried about the translation but are just fine with the fact that there’s a military somewhere where the group of “people who go down to the unknown possibly hostile planet” includes the group of “people crucial to operation of the ship, including the only doctor and the captain”? There’s no point - you have to approach it from where it is.
