Since everyone is knocking themselves out to come up with the great and the awful, I’m going to suggest an absolutely middle of the road episode. . . one that the fans watch out of loyalty rather than excitement; that has all the features of both the best and worst of Star Trek.
If you can watch it on DVD (and I don’t know about Netflix).
The remastered version for broadcast shows some nice special effects (although the doomsday device still looks like ass - that’s a problem with the original design, not with the special effects per se), but it does so at the expense of cutting out some of the best, most iconic ST dialogue ever.
For instance:
“Vulcans never bluff.”
“No. No, I don’t suppose that they do. Very well, Mr. Spock, the bridge is yours”
I watched it on Netflix streaming, and I’m sure those lines were in there. Some of my favorites. Especially the look William Windom gives Nimoy. I thiink they were cut from the syndicated version.
Plus, the Constellation actually wobbles in flight. The damage to the ship is shown in great detail - it almost looks like a cut away model. None of that “AMT model kit modified by a flick of the Bic” from the original.
For other good eps, did Court martial get mentioned? A pretty good ep. In the remastered, you can see the damaged port where the ion pod came from, down by the shuttlecraft hangar.
There are episodes that are better, I guess, than “The Trouble With Tribbles”. But it’s still my favorite of TOS.
Scotty in the bar, trying to ignore the Klingon insults, and keep the junior officers from brawling, throws the first punch in the glorious barfight. Smashing bottles, throwing chairs, bodies flying over the bar counter, it’s still my favorite scene in all of the Trek series.
It had one of the best closing jokes. “What a doctor it would have made. My son, the doctor. Kind of gets you right here.”
It’s obvious that Shatner is Jewish from that line.
In The Changeling, a space probe launched from Earth designed to seek out and communicate with alien life forms collided with an alien probe programmed to gather and sterilize soil samples. The alien probe’s repair mechanism accidentally incorporated some of the Earth probe’s programming, resulting in an ultra-powerful mechanism programmed to sterilize planets of imperfect life forms.
Many years ago I made a comic strip parody of this episode, in which the leftover pieces coalesced into a device programmed to seek out and communicate with soil samples. Then it found Harry Mudd…
Actually, there was a recurring theme here. Kirk is away or indisposed and Spock is in command. Spock conspicuously uses pure logic to make command decisions, against the intuitions of Scotty and everyone else, and he fucks up. The same thing happened in The Galileo Seven as well, up until the end when Spock finally makes a move of desperation that saves them all.
In contrast, Scotty is seen in command in a few episodes. He makes cool rational but sometimes intuitive decisions, not so totally “logic bound” as Spock, and it always works out right.
When the show aired, there were quite a few people who said that Kirk should hand over command to Spock, who was clearly smarter. Galileo Seven showed why this would be a bad idea. I’m not aware of any evidence that Spock ever does get his own command (in our universe, that is) even after he has been promoted to Captain.
