No proper ending --- good thing, bad thing?

Oh, ok. Thanks for that. Was not aware of the story.

 

Except that Star Trek did not air on Monday anytime during the first two seasons. The first season it was on Thursday night and the last two on Friday. At the beginning of the second season, NBC had originally offered Trek a Tuesday night slot, only to renege on that promise at the last minute. So the incident preceding the third season marked the second year in a row the network had shafted Trek.

 

I stand corrected. It's been a LONG time.

 

I think also the chances of selling a series into syndication were thought to be improved by not having a finale, so that the syndicating stations could run the show every weekday in an endless loop.

 

According to Inside Star Trek, Star Trek was supposed to go to Mondays at 7:30 for its third season.

IIRC, I think it was set for that time until the president of NBC's wife's favorite show wasn't being renewed. It was put into the Star Trek slot, and Trek went to Fridays at 10pm. That was the death blow for Trek (and Chekov's character in particular), since Trek's young audience was either out & about or in bed Fridays at 10.

 

Bingo! "Gunsmoke" was the NBC President's wife's favorite show during that time. Gene Roddenberry threatened to leave "Star Trek" if NBC moved his show to Friday Nights. That tactic failed, NBC would not budge, so Gene felt he only had his word to keep and did not produce the third season. The funny thing is, before NBC decided to moved his show to Friday Nights, Gene had promised NBC that "Star Trek" 's third season was going to be better than its first season.


Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
/\

 

Wow! Thank you, Therin of Andor and ToddPence! I do not know where I picked up the idea that "Turnabout Intruder" was originally planned to be a fourth season episode, but it somehow got into my mind somewhere back in the 70's (and not because I was doing any drugs back then.....). I wasn't sure of my facts, which I why I phrased it "My understanding is..." Thanks for setting my record straight!

 

But Gunsmoke was on CBS.......
Wasn't there actually a conflict in the NBC schedule that allowed "Laugh-In" to bounce "Start Trek" out of it's proposed early time slot to late night (or am I wrong again in this thread?)?

 

1966-67 Primetime Schedule

1967-68 Primetime Schedule

1968-69 Primetime Schedule

 

I checked out a few web sites and from what I can see, in the Fall of 1967 NBC began to talk about plans to move "Trek" from Fridays to their 8PM Monday slot to replace "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", which was not doing so well in the ratings. They seemed to flip-flop on this over upcoming months, and NBC put the new "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" program in the Monday slot in January of 1968. "Laugh-In" did so well in the ratings against CBS's "Gunsmoke" and ABC's "Mod Squad" that they left it in place, taking that plum spot away from "Trek".

 

What would a "proper ending" for the original Star Trek even have been on television? It wasn't a serial, so it's not as if there was years of character and plot development to wrap up. It wasn't even an episodic program like The Fugitive or The Incredible Hulk--television shows which were comfortable telling standalone stories, but also had a definitive ending in mind (Richard Kimble finds his wife's killer, David Banner finds a way to cure himself).

The show was about our intrepid crew boldly going where no man had gone before. Which is how the series ended. Later, when they "outlived their usefulness," the crew was retired, but the mission continues on, which was a good ending for the film series, but wouldn't have worked after three seasons on television.

 

You are correct "Gunsmoke" was on CBS, not NBC. I stand corrected.


Navigator NCC-2120 USS Entente
/\

 

One nice touch given to this episode by the CBS CGI staff is the final "fly-off" scene. Instead of the usual starfield, the Enterprise is shown heading towards a spectacular nebula. Sort of a "riding off into the sunset" scene. Very nice, and very fitting for the final episode.

 

I would have hated an "ending" for TOS. They were not in any kind of dilemma nor did they have any overarching problem(s) to resolve as part of the premise of the series.

Of course, I don't give a fuck about "story arcs" either. If you don't have the discipline to tell a gripping story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the hour I'm giving you today then don't bother asking me to come back week after week.

 

Danger Man / Secret Agent filmed two color episodes for a planned third year when Patrick McGoohan decided he was sick of it. Granted, this was not a network decision (the ITC shows were a done deal before we got them in the states), and anyone else but Lew Grade would have booted him from the premises. But the result of that jumping of ship was The Prisoner. Really nothing at all to do with anything, but it is an example of two episodes of a season being completed and then the show ending.

No truly episodic show needs a resolution. Too many shows these days give us presmise-ending finales which are sad or otherwise disappointing. It's one thing to close off a serialized drama, or an episodic show with a "searching" central premise (like Voyager), but otherwise, just let the shows end, with the characters where we always enjoyed them. Did I really want Captain Sisko dead, Odo and Kira separated, Jake without his father, O'Brien and Bashir separated, etc? Why is that fun? Thank God for Generations, because it left the TNG crew together at the end, sailing off into another adventure. Same with classic Trek: the final episode may not have been particularly good, but it left us with the thought that the characters were still together, seeking out and contacting.

Did I care of The Robinson's ever got home? Nah, then Dr. Smith would have to be executed for treason. If they found Alpha Centuri? Nah, it would have looked like every other barren planet they landed on.

The Fugitive was an amazing piece of work, very daring. Most producers and production companies at the time would have left it open eneded to keep the syndication market alive. But Quinn Martin kept to the premise brought forward by Roy Huggins and ended the series with the vindication of Kimble. The only other SF show I would have liked to see concluded from that period was The Invaders. And the only SF show that did kind of have one was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It's arguable, but the final episode of that show felt like a finale, even though it didn't need one. A pretty cool (for that series) time travel episode which destroyed the submarine and most of the crew in the first two minutes - but saved them because of said time travel. It could have gone on, but the show ended with a nice, less crappy episode. It left on a nice note.

For my money, the best all around final episode to any SF tv series was Babylon 5. It concluded the characters but set it 20 years after the series proper. So there were 20 years of stories to tell if anyone chose to.

 

>If they found Alpha Centuri? Nah, it would have looked like every other barren planet >they landed on.

But they DID find Alpha Centauri! Didn't you see the episode "The Promised Planet"?

 

This is EXACTLY what happened in the case of "The Fugitive". It was one of the most phenomenally popular shows of the 1960's, but because it had a planned finale bringing to a conclusion the overall story arc of the series, syndication distributors shied away from it. They figured, "Since everyone knows how this series ends, no one will want to watch it." This explains the near-complete absence of the series from major syndication markets for nearly twenty years until A&E began rerunning the series in 1990. It became one of A&E's more popular rerun programs as a new generation discovered the series.

 

And I dislike how people with short attention spans make it so I can't watch shows with stories that unfold over time, exploring facets of characters and situations that would otherwise be ignored (or relegated to second-tier "canon" in novels/comics/whatever, or just ignored by next week's episode: broken spine requiring massive rehab? all better!).

A TOS finale like TNG's "All Good Things..." would have been great. It closed out a significant chapter in the TNG crews' lives, but it didn't definitively say that the story was over.

Anyways, personally, I like to think of TMP as a sort of series finale. It's closer tonally and chronologically (in that it's set only a couple of years after the 5YM, but it's another ten years till TWOK).