Favourite episodes?

I have this friend of mine who was interested in Star Trek but didn't feel like watching TOS because of his undeniable aging (it was a low budget 60s tv show after all) so I rewatched almost every episode to make a list of the unmissable ones.
I've condensed the serie and I presented him this list

1x10 The corbomite maneveur (I've chose this as the starting point don't hate me)
1x05 The enemy within
1x06 Mudd's Women (because the heavy sexism here makes me laugh genuinely)
1x13 The coscience of the king
1x14 Balance of terror
1x18 Arena (because of the best sci-fi battle ever)
1x22 Space Seed
1x25 The Devil in the Dark
1x28 City on the edge of forever

2x01 Amok Time
2x04 Mirror Mirror
2x06 The doomsday machine
2x10 journey to Babel
2x15 the trouble with tribbles

3x07 Day of the dove
3x09 the tholian web
3x23 all our yesterdays

All our yesterday was included just because "turnabout intruder" is one of the worst episodes of TOS imho and as a season ending it sucks so much that before "These are the voyages..." I had nothing to compare this episode to.

What do you guys think about this list? Would you add something? if so, why?

 

I can't argue with most of those episodes on your list, Fawr, but I would say you need to increase your margins to include many of the other ones too!
JB

 

I'd add The Menagerie, a great two-parter which includes footage from the first pilot.

Maybe add a parallel earth episode from season 2. I always liked Bread and Circuses.

 

That dismissive notion keeps rearing its ugly head year after year, but it's grossly oversimplifying things. Especially in the beginning, TOS was on par with other big-budget prestige productions. Star Trek was expensive. Just look at any other series of the era, and you will see that none of them have nearly as many optical effects as TOS required week after week, not to mention TOS's constant requirements for new props, models, sets, costumes, creatures, etc., which were not nearly as much of a concern on contemporary spy thrillers or westerns. With TOS, you really only see the effects of budget crunches in the later episodes, when the suits thought the expense outweighed the returns.

Kor

 

I see your point, maybe I really oversimplified things... What I really meant is that while the main details of the serie are good (ie the enterprise interiors) the alien costumes are not really cared for. They had some very ingenius choices for the one of a kind stuff (the alien dog from the duplicate episode for instance, laughable from today's standards but it was clever) but beside the Gorn from "The Arena" all the other aliens are just people with heavy makeup.
Roddenberry himself said that TNG klingons are more like what he had in mind for TOS if he had the chance to do them like that from the beginning (I don't have the exact source for this claim)

 

The fact that the original Klingons were so similar to us in looks makes them more believable!
JB

 

It wasn't.

 

"A Taste of Armageddon" is my personal favorite, and I have a lot of love for "The Omega Glory".

The first truth of Trek Club is that Roddenberry lies... a lot. Whenever it suits his purposes. The Klingon makeup is first used in one of his other pilots, I can't remember the name off hand from 1972 or 1973. Makeup technology didn't go that far in a few years, if that was what he thought of Klingons, they could've done it in TOS. Besides, the Klingons were created by Gene Coon, not Gene Roddenberry.

 

The Doomsday Machine is my all time favorte Star Trek story, franchise wide.

Planet Earth, the Kreegs, I think they were called.

 

It is a cool sci-fi thought that sentient aliens could look exactly like humans, but it doesn't really suit a show like Star Trek where you meet at least a new specie in every episode. At least to me, whenever I see a new forehead ridge I cringe badly, especially because most of the main alien protagonists from TOS and TNG were like that and stayed like that (Vulcans Romulans Bajorians etc). TNG Klingons were different from TOS ones, but at least their design was different enough from the other species to make them way more interesting!

I will look back to "A taste of armageddon" because I don't remember that episode, unfortunately I've almost finished a complete rewatch of everything from TREK (almost chronological order, ENT TOS+movies TNG+movies DS9 and VOY) and my mind is quite tired atm

 

The alien makeups didn't bother me until TNG forward, mostly because they DID have more money and technology and yet they still relied on boring forehead ridges. At least TOS' 3rd season made the aliens truly alien. Like Loskene and the Medusan.

The Star Trek alien makeups in the 60's were generally still better than the silver paint of the Irwin Allen shows. Although, I have a soft spot for Irwin...

 

Yes, a funky forehead ridge was first used for the Kreegs, who were mutant humans or something like that, IIRC.

Just about anything Roddenberry said should be taken with a boulder of salt, considering his repeated attempts to re-write history, take credit for other people's work, and make himself look like some kind of philosopher. But I believe that in this case his suggestion was more along the lines of "just imagine that they always looked this way" along with some hand-wavy stuff about budgetary restrictions, not that the Klingons were literally originally meant to have bumpy foreheads back in 1967.

Roddenberry himself certainly did not come up with the new look (or the original look, for that matter). Costume designer Robert Fletcher was involved in giving the Klingons forehead bumps for TMP, and Fletcher said he had to convince Roddenberry to go along with that design and make them appear more alien instead of just looking "like regular people."

There was simply no notion of Klingon forehead ridges at the time of TOS. The truth is that when the Klingons were originally conceived of for TOS (by Gene Coon, definitely not GR), there wasn't any really detailed instruction on how the they were supposed to look. The script for "Errand of Mercy" just described them as "hard-faced" and "Oriental," wearing fabric that looked like mail. So based on that vague description, John Colicos, who played Kor, and Makeup Designer Fred Phillips came up with what we saw in the episode.

Kor

 

Yeah I can agree on that. Although some of the best trek episodes feature very interesting and nice makeup choices, like the Childrens of Tama from Darmok (TNG S5E2) and in later seasons and series the makeup compartment became way better. I particularly love how DS9 potrays Klingons, Ferengi and whatever Morne is

 

Now that you mention, my most disliked episodes of TOS were written by Roddenberry and I couldn't understand why a man with such talent and positive vision of the future would "ruin" his own creation so easily.
Now I know

 

I give them the benefit of the doubt because they were trying to pump out 26 (and for a few years, 52) episodes every year. Besides, we saw what too much money and too much time gave us with the Discovery Klingons...

 

I'm enjoy Discovery for what it is, but yeah, they really went too far with the Klingons. I don't relate to them at all, and spending episodes reading subtitles over a nonsense language got tiresome.

But at least I know what Klingon breasts look like now...

 

Personally, I wouldn't dismiss the Klingon dialog in DISCO as "a nonsense language," since it was very, very faithful to the language that Marc Okrand developed for the TOS movies, unlike the gobbledygook "Klingon" that was spouted in TNG through ENT. I would say that the language is one of the few things that DISCO actually got right about the Klingons!

Kor

 

By "nonsense" I meant, it's invented for fiction. Sure a lot of work went into it, but it's not like French or Spanish or something people use outside of Fandom...

 

Where does the Marc Clingan, fellow police officer and friend of Roddenberry's fit in with that idea then?
JB