I think if they need to tone down Harry Mudd with his curled moustache he could have been tying damsels to a railway track.
Revist of UNfavorite Episodes
- Thread starter Ssosmcin
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Just wanted to say I thought your whole post was fantastic. I didn't agree with all of it (we part ways on the comedy a bit and I love all of The Voyage Home), but you presented your arguments well. And the above is really well-written and utterly nails it, with the minor nitpick that I don't think Jimmy D. went too broad with Scotty in all episodes from Tribbles forward. He did in some for sure.
The Kirk-Scotty scene after the bar brawl, which you excellently summarized above, is one of my favorite scenes in all of Star Trek, between my two favorite characters. The dialogue and acting are letter-perfect. I don't know how many takes it took them, but goodness, did Shatner and Doohan hit that out of the proverbial park. Nice call.
I really appreciate you saying all that, thank you. I think that scene in tribbles and Scotty's "Jim!" in Mirror, Mirror are two fantastic moments for them. Regardless of Doohan's personal feelings (and who knows how he truly felt at that time), the chemistry between the actors was amazing.
I guess it could be argued that Doohan found the character at that stage and played him more emotional when provoked. He was quite good in Spectre of the Gun and was a joy in Elaan of Troyius now that I think about it. I prefer A Taste of Armageddon and Friday's Child Scotty. But yeah. characters evolve. Which is good, otherwise we'd have had 3 years of Shouty Spock.
IDK. For me it has one of my favorite exchanges in all of Star Trek:
^^^
Yeah at least for me that comedy bit worked very well and I thought everyone did a nice job with it. I laughed very hard the very first time I saw it. YMMV.
Didn’t David Gerrold have a hand in developing “I, Mudd?” That certainly gels with him also wanting to see more overt humour in Star Trek along with Gene Coon. The three comedy episodes seemed to have pushed Roddenberry to later decree to Frieberger that “Star Trek is not a comedy.”
And in the end I side with Roddenberry on this one. I much prefer the contextual humour rather than overtly playing it for laughs. It’s probably why I’m not a fan of TVH despite its popularity. With the exception of some moments TVH seemed modelled more along the lines of “A Piece Of The Action” with the crew being fish out of water. It certainly wasn’t a time travel story like “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” “The City On The Edge Of Forever” or even “Assignment: Earth.”
The stakes in a story also matter. In “The Trouble With Tribbles” the stakes are relatively minor. In “A Piece Of The Action” the stakes are the landing party’s lives and getting off the planet in one piece. Fixing Iotian society is incidental given the damage was already done. But in “I, Mudd” the stakes are the lives of billions of human and humanoid lives in danger of being essentially enslaved by the androids.
And in the end I side with Roddenberry on this one. I much prefer the contextual humour rather than overtly playing it for laughs. It’s probably why I’m not a fan of TVH despite its popularity. With the exception of some moments TVH seemed modelled more along the lines of “A Piece Of The Action” with the crew being fish out of water. It certainly wasn’t a time travel story like “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” “The City On The Edge Of Forever” or even “Assignment: Earth.”
The stakes in a story also matter. In “The Trouble With Tribbles” the stakes are relatively minor. In “A Piece Of The Action” the stakes are the landing party’s lives and getting off the planet in one piece. Fixing Iotian society is incidental given the damage was already done. But in “I, Mudd” the stakes are the lives of billions of human and humanoid lives in danger of being essentially enslaved by the androids.
Especially since it clearly disproves the belief that the Federation of the 23rd century doesn't use Money/Currency.
Unless Earth did a way with money but other planets in the federation did not. Tribbles leaned hard on "credits" in the next episode. Or they phased out money in the years between the series and The Voyage Home.
But honestly, the moment Kirk said "they still use money" I called shenanigans. McCoy had money in the previous film and the series talked about some kinda currency a few times.
I always found the comedy episodes hilarious in my opinion. "I, Mudd" it's silly but that's the point of the episode. You also can nitpick plenty of TOS episodes. The humor is one the things that makes it different from the later Star Trek shows. Sometimes they didn't took themselves too seriously and that's fine. "I, Mudd" works because it shows a great understanding of how the characters act, that's why is so funny.
Part of the issue with the comedy episodes, particularly “I, Mudd” and “A Piece Of The Action,” is that they catered to the mindset that became prevalent on shows like “Lost In Space,” “Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” Whatever serious intent those shows might have once had was lost to cater to camp and absurdity. Roddenberry might well have saw something like that happening and he sure as hell didn’t want it on his series so he cut it off at the knees, which apparently put him at odds with Gene Coon who had green lighted those episodes.
Yeah, it showed Star Trek had the flexibility to do that kind of humour, but Roddenberry didn’t want it becoming a habit, so no more outright comedy.
Yeah, it showed Star Trek had the flexibility to do that kind of humour, but Roddenberry didn’t want it becoming a habit, so no more outright comedy.
I'm thinking they're referring to physical money in the 20th century. Notes and coins. I actually think they are phasing out the use of cash in Australia since covid. Some shops here will only accept cards. So I think Scotty gets double his "pay" but its credit is in his bank account - he never sees the actual cash.
Even in the TNG era I saw Dr Crusher buying some material from an alien market so I think money had to exchange hands there. Still could have been credits though.
Spock and Kirk both had the snark turned to 11.
Oh goody: this again.
I still say they have credits for energy intensive expenditures like transporters and holodecks, and per diem for Starfleet officers who travel outside the Federation Iike Crusher in Farpoint or the DS9 crew, but otherwise we're moneyless.
I suppose if you can have transporter beams and time travel, you can have a moneyless human civilization. But in real life, human nature demands that accounts be kept. We need a convenient way to store value, and a way to translate the values of disparate goods into a common medium so exchanges will make sense. And that's what money does.
I'm hopeful we can grow out of that.
A common means of exchange is very useful.
Energy and fuel are not unlimited resources. You would have thought more species would trade those.
Roddenberry’s original vision for Star Trek was to keep the stories on the frontier and not get bogged down with fleshing out how things worked back on Earth and in known territory. The loose implication in TOS is that some sort of monetary system still existed only the familiar greed that went with it was a thing of the past, as evidenced by Kirk asserting that supposedly valuable jewels and rare stones meant nothing to them.
It was later in the films (TVH) and TNG it was asserted the Federation had a moneyless system. But that was contradicted right off in “Encounter At Farpoint.”
I assume that some sort of currency/exchange system does indeed exist to facilitate trade and dealings between member worlds and even non Federation worlds. The real distinction seems to be that generally the accumulation of personal wealth has become much less a thing as most people’s needs are easily met.
It was later in the films (TVH) and TNG it was asserted the Federation had a moneyless system. But that was contradicted right off in “Encounter At Farpoint.”
I assume that some sort of currency/exchange system does indeed exist to facilitate trade and dealings between member worlds and even non Federation worlds. The real distinction seems to be that generally the accumulation of personal wealth has become much less a thing as most people’s needs are easily met.
First off, I wish to compliment Ssosmcin on his post about Tribbles. Fantastic post! I agree that Tribbles is the best of the "comedy" episodes because the humor is situational and character driven.
I like ST:IV quite a lot, but the major flaw I see in it is not the light-hearted antics. This brings things back to the "unfavorite episode" subject, if you count the movies as further episodes. The overarching dilemma of ST:IV is like a bad Space 1999 episode. Some unknown thing, from some unknown place, for some unknown reason, menaces Moonbase Alpha. Then, 50 minutes later, for some unknown reason, just goes away!
This is the plot of ST:IV. It violates a cardinal rule of Trek: even if the crew isn't sure about the nature of the alien phenomenon they are encountering, we at least have some speculation from Spock about what it might all mean. In this case, all we get is "it's making humpback whale noises -- let's give it some humpback whales."
This has forced me to invent a plausible back story to explain the probe's actions:
At some faraway galactic university, the alien upper classmen have set the freshmen class on a "treasure hunt." Of course, the fun comes from the impossibility of getting several of the items on the list.
"Number six: Bring us a recording of humpback whales from planet earth" (snicker-snicker)
I like ST:IV quite a lot, but the major flaw I see in it is not the light-hearted antics. This brings things back to the "unfavorite episode" subject, if you count the movies as further episodes. The overarching dilemma of ST:IV is like a bad Space 1999 episode. Some unknown thing, from some unknown place, for some unknown reason, menaces Moonbase Alpha. Then, 50 minutes later, for some unknown reason, just goes away!
This is the plot of ST:IV. It violates a cardinal rule of Trek: even if the crew isn't sure about the nature of the alien phenomenon they are encountering, we at least have some speculation from Spock about what it might all mean. In this case, all we get is "it's making humpback whale noises -- let's give it some humpback whales."
This has forced me to invent a plausible back story to explain the probe's actions:
At some faraway galactic university, the alien upper classmen have set the freshmen class on a "treasure hunt." Of course, the fun comes from the impossibility of getting several of the items on the list.
"Number six: Bring us a recording of humpback whales from planet earth" (snicker-snicker)
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