The One Thing You Could Change, TOS Edition...
- Thread starter Farscape One
- Start date
If they had the ratings M:I had, perhaps they would have. So, before they do that...
Try pitching to ABC before NBC. They seemed to focus more on adventure shows and might have helped Star Trek with a time slot geared towards younger viewers.
Paramount took the same budgetary knife to Mission that they did to Star Trek. Some of those later season Mission episodes that spend the whole time on the Paramount lot look pretty dreadful to me, although I must admit that I haven't seen every episode of the show (to date).
Typo!OOD... Officer of the Day.
Yeah, we know.
To be fair to the remasterers, TOS-R is now THE TOS version to almost everybody, so kudos to the team. I rarely watch TOS these days but I actually saw the OLD version of Doomsday accidentally recently when bringing up the old Digital Stream proposal online, and it threw me for a loop, it was jarring.Yeah, we know.
RAMA
I find it the other way around. I don’t find TOS-R holding up well. Indeed since then we have seen efforts to recreate the original TOS aesthetic while looking more finished and complete looking as if TOS had had sufficient time and money to do what they could have done.
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From 'The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier ' copyright 1991.
Except from Year One - By January 1967, twenty-five of the thirty-four series introduced the prior September had already been cancelled. Since Mission ended the season at 51 in the Nielsen ratings with a 29 share, many felt that its days were numbered. Despite audience reaction that could be called lukewarm at best, the network renewed the show almost immediately.
Except from Year Three - While in the number two position at Twentieth Century Fox, (Douglas S.) Cramer was asked by Paramount President John Reynolds to join Paramount Television. The requirements of the position were made very clear. "My job," says Cramer, " was to control costs on the three shows that were then on the air, and to also get new shows on the air. "
"The people doing Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and his his people, were open to conversations about budgets and weren't impractical; Mannix wasn't as not as complicated, and the producers, Ivan Geoff and Ben Roberts, knew how to do the show and could handle the scripts and the budgets." Cramer soon learned which of the Desilu holdovers would be his primary concern.
Paramount's concern over extravagant television budgets seems at odds in view of what was happening in the studio's feature division. No one explains the situation better than Peter Graves: "Charley Bludhorn bought the studio and thought he could produce pictures. He was a big executive who knew how to run a business, but he didn't know anything about the picture business, and he produced some of the all-time hits, like Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Catch-22, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever . . ." These features were enormously expensive productions; when released in 1969-70, their box office ranged from disappointing to disastrous. "He had two hundred and fifty million dollars worth of negative tied up that nobody wanted," Graves exclaims. " Nobody in the world! That's why they were cutting costs on Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, because Bludhorn spent all the money elsewhere. So Charley said, 'Yeah, we gotta cut costs here.' "
There's more to it, but to say the Mission had the support and budget of CBS and Desilu/Paramount is not entirely accurate.
The fact that Mission was almost cancelled after the first season and had its budget cut at the start of the third, which would ultimately lead to the departures of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain at the end of the third season and a loss of ratings, kind of shows how precarious both series were at CBS.
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Rand was supposed to be in the big 3; check the promo stills; didn't work out that way, though we got an elevated McCoy role, and Kelley was great. His emotion/compassion/fire anima balanced Spock's reason/cool animus. Of course an actual woman would have been great for anima with Kirk the in-dividuated (un-divided, integrated) complete human in the center of the squared circle (view the bridge form above).
Kirk had a confidant -- Dr. McCoy. You can see this as early as "The Corbomite Maneuver."
Yep. And considering that DeForest Kelley was a much better actor than Grace Lee Whitney, I'd say that it worked out for the best.
Yeah McCoy stepped up quite quickly to fill that role because he wasn't subordinate and the dynamic was legendary. I don't think that allowing Rand to develop could possibly ever have detracted from Bones and Kirk though. Hell, Bones would have had extra scenes with Rand himself. Uhura and Sulu had some great scenes with Rand too. I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest her continued presence about as often as Scotty, Sulu, or Chekov would have negatively impacted the others if she had actually been developed rather than left as window dressing.
Was she, though? Or was she simply the pretty face to promote? The character of the doctor as confidant, whether it was Boyce or McCoy (Piper was just "there"), was in the format from the pilot. The yeoman role was window dressing. Pike needed two other women to fantasize over him, that's the reason Colt was there. Smith was non-existent. I can't imagine anyone was thinking "Rand will be the third lead." In fact, there was no "Big Three" plan to my knowledge. That came organically as Kelley's star rose over the course of the season. Kirk was the lead, Spock was less so until they saw his potential, but there were two headliners at the start and neither of them was named Grace Lee Whitney. Actually, it seemed as if Scotty was going to be a larger part of the mix than he was, but the Trio was something they wound up with. It really felt those promo shots were like "we need to sex this up a bit, because that Satan guy is gonna scare the fundamentalists." And even if Nichelle was cast at that point, they were gonna go with the white woman for the same reason...
I think it comes down to the execution. She was intended as the female lead but many female leads had limited roles all the way through the eighties and early nineties especially in action shows.
I don't think Rand could ever have competed with McCoy. His niche as both the ID, Kirk's confidant, and the medical expert give him so much story potential. Scotty has the engines. What does Rand have? They painted her into a corner for sure and there is anecdotal evidence that they actively tried to keep her there (adjusting scripts where she was at another station, not leaving her at the helm, giving her meaty action role to another character) but this thread is about what we would have liked to see rather than what would have worked with the formula they actually adopted.
Looking more at how writers have finally sussed that you can write a decent character who just happens to be female, that's some of what I would have liked for Rand. Storywise, there were lots of opportunities for her to contribute to episodes by barely updating her character at all so putting a modernised gloss on her - giving her the opportunity to use Starfleet training and technical skills that we know she must have, could have been all it would have taken.
The problem was the job. A yeoman isn't really necessary in the format. Did Kirk need an administrative assistant to organize his schedule and take care of the minor tasks? Probably. Did that character serve a necessary function on the series? Not really. Grace was fine, she just needed a different job on the ship. Had she been in engineering, or transporter chief or part of the security team, she would have been easier to write for. She had no skills other than what we saw: organizing Kirk's logs, delivering coffee to the bridge and giving Sulu a plate of celery.
I think this is where the sixties sexism comes in. Naval yeomen are in administration but did they need to confine a Starfleet yeoman to that? Pike's yeoman, for example, was killed in combat.
A natural expansion of the yeoman role would be to accompany the captain on diplomatic missions. Straight away the character has a specific niche off the ship.
One of the jobs of Rand was to act as Kirk's valet. This is a step away from a naval yeoman and a step towards the role of an army batman, who functioned as a senior officer's assistant, driver, and personal bodyguard. On other threads, there has been the suggestion that a more flexible interpretation would have been to diversify the Starfleet yeoman to be more analogous to these real world counterparts.
So now we have Rand accompanying Kirk as standard on diplomatic missions, piloting the shuttle whenever Kirk is on board, dealing with his administration, and accompanying him as a security escort (possibly in charge of a security team if they aren't officers) on landing parties.
I think that all the above was in keeping with the real world position she was portraying and would have given enough scope for her to be involved in storytelling with the need to be kidnapped, stalked, and sexually assaulted.
Well, we don't know what really happened. We don't even know why there were on Rigel VII. His yeoman could have been down there to assist during some diplomatic discussions that went wrong and was one of the people killed in a surprise assault. There's nothing to say he/she was combat trained. Could have been a case of "wrong place/wrong time."
I do agree that sexism was a huge factor. Even with somewhat of an expanded roster of duties, I can't imagine Yeoman on its own being all that necessary in the series, but since they kept hauling them out for various landing parties, she would have had a chance to develop. It's a shame Rand could have been Yeoman Tamura in "A Taste of Armageddon." She had little to do, but she was tough enough to not take any crap from Mea-3.
Ahem *Bullshit* ahem.
Actually, you see it as early as The Cage, and even earlier, going back to some of the navy movies that inspired Roddenberry. Roddenberry was determined to have that dynamic no matter what.
Similarly, it's very interesting to see how he transposed so many of his ideas about the characters from Phase II (and TMP) to TNG.
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