Kirk and Spock had to duel for something and Kirk died. Bones characteristically said to Spock, “Strange as it may seem, you are now the Commander.”
That was no something, that was his wife!
I could also choose “And the Children Shall Lead.”
I read Melvin Belli’s book Ready for the Plaintiff! Somehow he doesn’t come off well as a space villain.
That’s the point. The advance aliens planted the stuff there as kind of a puzzle.
The ST episode is actually a lot better than the Frederic Brown short story with the same name.
Probably. If you read the behind the scenes books, NBC cut the budget and the heavy special effects were expensive.
I vote for Alternative Factor. I watched Spock’s Brain a while ago, and while dumb it had babes and a plot. The Alternative Factor had neither. ST 365 says that Drew Barrymore’s father was supposed to play Lazarus, but he acted like a true Barrymore and didn’t show up the first day. That screwed things up. Then Lazarus was supposed to get the dilithium crystals through an affair of a woman in engineering, but they decided that this was too much like Space Seed, and the woman was African American anyway and the didn’t want to freak out Dixie. So they had a gigantic hole in the script, which is why Lazarus fell down cliffs a lot.
Bonus points for it being First Season when they should have done better.
Turnabout Intruder gets honorable mention.
BTW, the plot of Omega Glory was one of the ones proposed for the second pilot, so lucky for us they didn’t go with it.
Was that the one where the human and alien were in a force-field dome, separated by a force-field wall, in an arena with red sand (and blue lizards?)
I love that story…but the ending actually belies the premise, since the human finally wins by brute strength, not by his wits. (His wits put him into a position where he can use his strength, but, ultimately, it was Terran biceps, not the cerebrum, that won the day.)
(If that wasn’t the right story…never mind…)
That’s the one. Gene Coon did not base the ST story on it (at least consciously) but gave Brown credit because the plots were so close.
I feel the exact opposite. At least “Spock’s Brain” doesn’t drag on. There’s something interestingly stupid around every corner. Eden doesn’t have enough to joke about to sustain the entire 50 minutes or so.
Basically, yes. TOS’s budget was cut drastically after Paramount acquired Desilu. By the third season, Roddenberry didn’t have the heart left to fight it, and both Coon and Solow had departed long before. Everything was affected, from set design to the caliber of the writers.
The same thing happened in the final half-season of Batman. Watch one of those late episodes and you’ll be shocked at just how much the production values in that series had declined. 
The amount of money they got from NBC never did cover their expenses. TOS was basically deficit financed by Desilu.
On the other hand, Mission: Impossible, which was filmed right next door to TOS, never wanted for money, even when they went way over budget. They were (a) more successful in the ratings and (b) on CBS, Lucille Ball’s parent network.
I think I’ll add “The Deadly Years” to my list. Again, a cool idea and a hot blonde with big tits, but a very lame and derivative resolution of the crisis in the fourth act. :mad:
NB: *** Batman ***was filmed at Fox, not Desilu, but the problem was the same.
NB: There was an episode of Mythbusters where they tried to duplicate Kirk’s primitive cannon and homemade gunpowder. They failed miserably.
I would nominate For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, because at least the bad episodes were bad, this one was just nothing. Insubstantial. Not worth the first commercial. (Catspaw, for instance, is like a crazy-ass train-wreck in its over-the-topitude).
Wasn’t that the one where Kirk first* said “You’re a very … beautiful woman!” :dubious:
*In the order the episodes were filmed , not aired.
My thanks to you and Galen. 
My vote is for “The Empath”. Boring and slow. (Too much exposition.)
To be fair, I don’t recall much about “Turnabout Intruder”, as it doesn’t seem to get aired as much as some of the others.
In “Cat’s Paw”, Kirk tries to seduce the female, and it almost works until she used her telepathy on him, discovering his ruse. But up until that moment, she appeared to be enjoying his attentions. She shapeshifts a few times, trying to find the female form most pleasing to him. They even make out for a little bit, groping each other.
Later on, it’s revealed that the captors were wee little cthulu-looking plant aliens. So… how did the make-out session actually work? Did the female alien transmute her body, actually becoming human sized? Or was it all “in the mind”?
She used The Transmuter to take human form, of course. 
IIRC that ep. was a victim of a bunch of rewrites-the plot originally was supposed to focus on McCoy’s daughter.
At least the gal in The Empath was cute as hell.