Pick 1 Episode, Add, Modify or Delete One Thing To Improve It

Choose an episode that you think needs a little tweaking to improve it. Add, modify or delete something in it, be it a character, set, scene, prop, special effect, sound effect, etc.

Here goes nothing....I am not a big fan of Plato's Stepchildren, but I could tolerate it more if the Kirk horsey scene had hit the cutting room floor before the final print.

 

Revert Edith's on-the-nose talk about spaceships to Ellison's more realistic speech.

 

In "Spock's Brain" (I know, I know), lose the idea that the brain has to be removed and replace it with Spock being abducted and hooked into the Eymorg compound controlling system so his brain could run it (I actually thought the description of what Spock's brain was doing was pretty clever).

This would eliminate the brain-restoration scene, as well as the preposterous remote-controlled Spock bit. This hardly saves the episode, but it's something.

Guess we may have to change the title while we're at it.

 

Lose (or change a lot) the ending of The Omega Glory.

Arena: A Gorn suit that you could stage a proper fight scene with.

Galileo Seven: Get rid of that terrible fog overlay in one shot that I assume was for censorship reasons.

And for the whole series, get some stunt doubles that look like the characters.

 

The exact-duplicate Earth in Miri is pointless. Earth-like would have been sufficient.

 

The Gorn costume, designed and constructed by Wah Chang, was probably the best they could get, matching even similar suits in feature films at the time. The idea then was the look, not the participation.

Put in 1-2 lines of dialog in Act One of And The Children Shall Lead to get rid of the 'Spock doesn't know what's going on/yes he does' and the 'How did Kirk find out what the Gorgan is called' plot holes.

 

How about Spock's Skull Noodles?

 

"Where No Man Has Gone Before": don't drop a boulder on my head. That not only improves the ending of the episode, but the whole series.

 

Lots of television characters have problems with big boulders....

 

The thread is about what change could be made to an episode to improve it. "It's the best they could do" doesn't really apply here.

 

Give me a real knife in "Errand of Mercy" instead of that little letter opener.

Kor

 

More extras in the background of every scene where Engineering is shown (and maybe fewer 20th century wrenches) would help sell the notion that the Enterprise was a huge, powerful, futuristic vessel.

 

"The Conscience of the King" (because it was just broadcast tonight on H&I): Either give a reason for Tom Leighton to have that black thing covering most of the left side of his head, or don't make him wear it at all.

 

The Gorn suit was excellent in my book my friend! Shame they never brought them back or reused them or the suit in the later shows!
JB

 

The emphasis was that Kodos's guards probably injured Leighton's face back in the day I've always thought! Maybe he was shot at while escaping by a laser weapon or something?
JB

 

Spock making light of the sexual assault on Janice Rand has got to go. Replaced with an approach of sympathy and support.

 

The Corbomite Maneuver
Put the little dwarf guy in the end in some make-up. The "fake" alien head was way more alien looking and interesting than the "real" guy in the end. It's a nice episode, which IMO really suffers from the revelation at the end.

Balance of Terror
Ditch the "make no noise"-scene. Sound doesn't travel through space. Also ditch Spock's "the stronges material known" speech after which we breaks the material with his bare hands. Still probably the best ship duel episode in all of Trek though.

 

^^^He breaks to material to demonstrate what how powerful the Romulan weapon is. It effectively reduced steel to matzoh. Why would you want to cut that?

 

Eliminate Nona's kind of embarrassing semi-sexual gyrating at every turn in "Private Little War."

Make the "repair the timeline" method in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" something other than beaming people back into their bodies.

Replace the hip groovy songs of "Way To Eden" with a subplot about playing a cat and mouse game of avoidance with a Romulans ship.

 

If memory serves, that was explained in the Blish adaptation. But Blish was working from older scripts in some cases, and the final script turned out quite different in some ways (ie. at the end of "Who Mourns for Adonais?" Carolyn Palamas turns out to be pregnant by Apollo).

The only part of the music scenes is the absurdity that the blonde woman is playing a bicycle wheel. Give her a proper instrument with the same shape, and that would be interesting. Otherwise, I don't have a problem with this episode. It's fun.