Hey, I never noticed that before....

In "Spock's Brain," Kirk botches the stardate in his second log entry.

In Act 1 of the episode, it's Stardate 5431.4. In Act 2, it's 4351.5. And in Act 3, it's back up to 5431.6.

Hmmm. Maybe the Enterprise was going backward through time in the search for Spock's brain?

 

Certainly was going backwards in quality.

 

Fred Freiberger approved a remake of Spock’s Brain with an even lower budget...

 

I would have thought Marc Daniels would have caught that to be honest?
JB

 

1. The director doesn't pay attention to continuity, that's the script supervisor's job
2. Logs and looping were recorded in post-production and the director usually had nothing to do with it...it was probably all under Bob Justman

 

Well I suppose Bob was Just a Man?
JB

 

What a man he was. I have the utmost admiration for his service to TOS. For him to decide to leave in the middle of S3, there had to be some serious conflicts/problems on the set. IIRC, Justman said he was taking a chance of being blacklisted in Hollywood.

 

It was this futuristic stuff called velcro.

Thank you Sub-commander T'Pol.

 

Blacklisted at Paramount anyway. By rights he should have walked when Gene R. inserted Freiberger. The writing was on the wall that the career path Justman had hoped for with Trek wasn't going to be.

 

Would have been interesting to have seen what Justman would have done with the show. However given that he would have had to of worked with the same budget and resources as Freiberger the results might not have been too different.

You can say (maybe) better scripts, but the stories would probably still have had to of focused on Kirk/Spock/McCoy for financial reasons.

 

I’m on the pro-Justman side. A lot of ‘ifs’ involved, but at least he was with the show from the beginning. Maybe he understood what TOS was all about, more than Fred Freiberger.

 

No maybe about it, IMO. Justman would've had a better sense of what stories would work for TOS, and I bet he would've had the sense to play "Spock's Brain" as the light comedy episode it was intended as. I think he also would've been more respectful to D.C. Fontana's and David Gerrold's intentions towards their episodes "The Enterprise Incident" and "The Cloudminders," respectively. Who knows? Maybe he could've even gotten Gene Coon to write some more Trek scripts and we could've seen something closer to Fontana's "Joanna" instead of "The Way to Eden."

 

I’ve said it before on TrekBBS...I don’t think Bob Justman could have done any worse than Fred Freiberger. Every producer has their share of klunker episodes, but bringing Fred in from left field to play pitcher was a bad decision.

 

Yeah. I wonder how much effect Roddenberry sticking around might've had, too. I'm of the opinion that folks like Gene Coon and Robert Justman made much more difference in the overall quality of the series than GR did, but maybe Roddenberry staying on could've helped slow the decline.

 

I've never seen any evidence to indicate "Spock's Brain" was ever intended to be comedic. What's this based on?

 

That's right. If they were playing for laughs, we'd know. Tribbles and Fizzbin were never ambiguous about their comedic leanings. I'd say "Spock's Brain" was going for light horror and medium suspense, with doses of action and sexy women thrown in. The whole cast do a good, serious job, including Nimoy in a dual role as voice and body, and the outstanding music score is not comedic.

Edit: oh, the issue was early story intentions. Nevermind.

 

That's the rumor I've heard for years, but I can't recall the source right now.

 

I think that's fannish projection. Nothing I've seen in any official paperwork suggests that.

 

One rumor I've heard (and like) is that Gene Coon was thumbing his nose at how seriously Roddenberry et al. were taking the show by that point, and did indeed write "Spock's Brain" as something of a joke. One fan chimed in on that, saying something to the effect of "Craziest idea for an episode ever! They even filmed it!"

If you watch the episode from that perspective, it's quite entertaining rather than just plain awful.

 

It was reportedly inspired by the first heart transplant. Coon also wrote deadly serious scripts for the show ("Arena", "Devil in the Dark" etc.), so the idea that he'd camp it up in response to the more serious tone of the show after his exit seems of the face of it, preposterous.