Star Trek (TOS): Episode-by-Episode Thread (Part Two)

We are lacking a leader, puddin'. Any chance you'd be willing to step up?

My top episodes change every time I try to make a list, but today it's more or less:

1. Journey to Babel
2. Amok Time
3. The City on the Edge of Forever
4. The Enterprise Incident
5. The Tholian Web
6. The Doomsday Machine
7. The Menagerie
8. What Are Little Girls Made Of?
9. Balance of Terror
10. Space Seed
11. Mirror, Mirror
12. The Immunity Syndrome
13. Arena
14. The Trouble With Tribbles
15. The Devil in the Dark

 

Can't argue with this list.

 

I'll give it a go, in chronological order:

1. The Naked Time
2. Balance of Terror
3. The Galileo Seven
4. The Menagerie
5. Tomorrow is Yesterday
6. The City on the Edge of Forever
7. Amok Time
8. The Doomsday Machine
9. Mirror, Mirror
10. The Trouble with Tribbles
11. Assignment: Earth
12. The Enterprise Incident
13. The Tholian Web
14. For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
15. All Our Yesterdays

Benjamin and I agree on 9 of 15; not too bad. I'll have to check earlier posts to see if there are other lists. No doubt that will be a mistake.

 

Just for fun, here's my top 40 for Star Trek: The Next Generation...


All Good Things
Chain of Command
Darmok
Measure of a Man
The Inner Light
The Offspring
Unification
Yesterday's Enterprise
Best of Both Worlds
Frame of Mind
The Defector
Time's Arrow
Preemptive Strike
Face of the Enemy
Redemption
Cause and Effect
Arsenal of Freedom
Parallels
Time Squared
Coming of Age
Remember Me
Sins of the Father
Conspiracy
Family
A Matter of Honor
Reunion
Timescape
Disaster
I, Borg
Ensign Ro
Night Terrors
The Next Phase
Second Chances
The Game
A Fistful of Datas
The Battle
Ship in a Bottle
Conundrum
Evolution
Relics

 

wayneklein or Archtop: any chance one of you could be drafted to do maybe just the top 5-10 episodes of the first season of Next Gen?

 

I only know the original series. I'd be willing to try to wrangle that together, but that's rolling a boulder uphill, isn't it?

 

No Q Who? Just watched that episode last night. Such a good one. I'm not familiar enough with the titles to recognize most of the episodes on your list, but I definitely agree with your first choice.

 

If you're willing, please give it a go. Doesn't look like we have any other volunteers. But do you have the blu-rays?

 

I do have the blu-rays from about 3 years ago, but I was thinking you were looking for just a list of top 5. What exactly does "do the top 5" mean? I don't have a whole lot of time to watch those these days.

 

It would be a bit of a time commitment to run a thread on even just the top episodes of the first season of TNG—and so you'd better skip it! That's fine. Maybe someone else will volunteer. If not, probably we'll just let the idea go for now....

 

Finally started watching TOS with my son again this evening, and he chose "The Galileo Seven". I know people on here were critical of it, and it certainly isn't one of my favorites, but through the eyes of a 9 year old, he was riveted!!

Tomorrow night, he wants to watch "The Tholian Web".

 

The end of The Galileo Seven is one of my ten favorites of all the episodes.

 

It is certainly improved from the syndicated version I saw in the late 70s. This one definitely benefitted from the digital enhancements!

 

Slowly making my way through the DVDs, I'm halfway through Season 2. I used to have a negative stereotypical opinion of the whole Trekkie culture, but, when this show was good, as in episodes like "Mirror, Mirror" or "The City on the Edge of Forever," it was really, really good. "Metamorphosis" was maybe the best episode I have seen yet, it really made me stop and think about its theme of love transcending boundaries for the rest of the night after I watched it. I would say that the show only really hit such heights about once every four or five episodes, but that's not surprising, given what I presume was the brutal grind of filming a weekly show back then when the TV season was longer than it is today, and, of course, given the unique budget/special effects/set design challenges that this show faced in its day. Even the dumber/sillier episodes, such as "The Gamers of Triskelion," are entertaining.

 

Just watched "Return To Tomorrow" the other night, I would have to say it is maybe the best episode I have seen yet.

One you thing you notice when you marathon this series is how they repeat the same three or four basic plots over and over again: The Immunity Syndrome is basically The Doomsday Machine, Pt. 2, and is The Gamesters of Triskelion really that different from The Squire of Gothos?

Likewise, Return to Tomorrow is basically a synthesis of Space Seed (an advanced race of supermen place themselves into hibernation after nearly destroying themselves by atomic war, only to be discovered centuries later by the Enterprise - both episodes also feature a never-before-seen, never-again-seen female scientist crew member who is perhaps a little too eager to "go native" and become too involved with the alien race she is there to study) and Metamorphosis (an intangible alien life form takes a human body as a host in order to feel and express love).

Despite our having been there, done that, this was a fantastic episode, I thought. With the only "special effect" being some glowing balls that represent the consciousness of Sargon and the other two aliens, this episode tells an amazing, gripping story. You have to really give credit to Shatner, Nimoy, and Diana Muldaur for making the alien entities inhabiting their characters plausible and believable. Nimoy in particular really shines as the evil Henoch, and gets to show off a whole different side of his acting chops than he usually does as the stoical Mr. Spock. As with Metamorphosis, the theme of a super-powerful intangible alien being needing to inhabit a weak, fragile human body in order to feel love and emotion is thought-provoking, the final sacrifice of Sargon and Thalassa for the greater good is interesting and moving, and the plot twist of Spock's consciousness being placed in Nurse Chapel's body is clever, and also interesting from a larger series continuity point of view, given the hints we have seen of Chapel's attraction to Spock - the line about "their two consciousnesses were blended" seems like a nod to fans who ship them as a couple, or maybe I just imagined that.

Also Kirk's passionate speech about "starships are here to take risks" and the history of man's travel to the stars pretty much sums up the entire worldview of the series. A recap/analysis I read on another site pointed out that, in 1968, his speech about man landing on the moon and then traveling to Mars, etc. of course pre-dated the actual Apollo moon landing in 1969. I wonder how that was received by original viewers? I suspect it was pretty inspirational. Of course, the irony of watching Kirk's speech today is that, a half century later, we still haven't gone to Mars, and you wonder whether we ever will, or whether the future imagined in Star Trek will ever come true.

 

I just started season three last night. Spock's Brain.

 

Brain and brain...what is brain??

Forever seared into my ability to recall TOS dialogue.

And in retrospect, with the perspective of marriage, I now *totally* get the Morg musings on the Eymorg as "the givers of pain and delight".

 

I suspect that Edward D. Wood Jr. actually wrote and directed "Spock's Brain"

 

And after the triumph of Return To Tomorrow, we get … Nazis in space? Dear God. I'm predisposed not to like any of the episodes where they visit a planet that's miraculously just like twentieth-century earth: whereas I can suspend my disbelief when I'm watching the el cheapo special effects and set designs they use to create truly alien worlds, when they do this kind of episode, I can never get past the thought that "well, I guess the network was too cheap to fund another good episode, so they decided to use some surplus World War II/cowboy/gangster-movie props and costumes this week."

Having said that, this episode wasn't that terrible, even though the message of the week was laid on with a trowel. Any time Spock begins a speech with "Captain, a study of your twentieth-century earth history reveals X, Y, and Z," you know you'd better buckle your seatbelt and get ready for some heavy-duty sermonizing. At least the female resistance leader was a cutie, and … and … well, I'm struggling to think of much else positive to say about this episode. The "Nazis = bad" theme was treated much more obliquely and interestingly in The City on the Edge of Forever, where Edith Keeler had to die, or else the Nazis would win World War II, or at least that's how I recall the plot of that one. But the fact that even a 1960s show ostensibly dealing with the future would turn so often to stories about Nazi Germany shows what a looming presence World War II was over the next several decades - I was born in 1968, a few months before this episode aired, and by the time I was old enough to read books and go to the movies, WWII was still an omnipresent subject in popular culture. I remember being reprimanded by my second-grade librarian for checking out one too many books about WWII. The whole period between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall was still in the shadow of World War II, really, and, again, this episode of a show filmed a quarter-century after the war, ostensibly about "the future," reflects that: society couldn't stop looking back at the pivotal event of the century.

 

Agree whole-heartedly with the earth parallel episodes (This does not include City on the Edge, as they actually time traveled back to earth). Most of them rank in the lower half for me. The two exceptions are "Piece of the Action", which is fun in a Tribbles sort of way.

The best of these by far if "Spectre of the Gun". The surreal sets and dreamlike nature of it make for a memorable episode.

 

Assignment: Earth was pretty cool, an example of an episode where they come back to the twentieth century and it works. I read online that it was supposed to set up a series starring Gary Seven, or whatever his name was. That would have been a cool show.

 

Top Ten TOS:

1. Turnabout Intruder
2. The City On The Edge Of Forever
3. The Doomsday Machine
4. The Ultimate Computer
5. Balance Of Terror
6. Wolf In The Fold
7. The Enemy Within
8. The Paradise Syndrome
9. Return Of The Archons
10. Mirror Mirror

 

Just had a Guys Holiday Weekend with my son and due to the latest blizzard we mostly stayed in and played board games and watched TOS episodes. He particularly enjoyed "Spectre" (what 9 year old wouldn't?), "The Empath" and "The Paradise Syndrome", while "That Which Survives" and "Mark of Gideon" were okay!

 

Finished the third season last night so I decided to start over. Spock and Captain Kirk are playing chess right now in Where No Man Has Gone Before. Since it is gross outside today I plan on alternating between Star Trek TOS and Batman The Television Series episodes until I pass out.

 

Are DC Fontana's original scripts available to read somewhere?