@Tallguy
Since I promised I'd watch
The Lieutenant in February, and I have the extra time, that's what I'm doing. The full season playlist is no longer available on YouTube, and I can't find the series on Amazon Prime, but I did find one episode. So, I'm watching...
The Lieutenant -- "The Two-Star General" (S1E4)
Based on this one episode,
The Lieutenant feels much more like a workplace drama that happens to take place in the Marine Corps. This is what I imagine TOS would be like if it took place on Earth, in the 20th Century, without the science-fiction stories, without the action/adventure, and if the main character was a subordinate instead of at the command level making the big decisions.
By taking out most of what I associate with TOS, I can see how Gene Roddenberry relished at the chance to make
Star Trek and to be able to tell stories he couldn't in
The Lieutenant and really use his imagination.
The main character, Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice is played by Gary Lockwood, a.k.a. Gary Mitchell. "Tiberius" is obviously later Kirk's middle name. It's also interesting to note that William T. Rice as a name doesn't look that much different from William T. Riker, Kirk's counterpart in TNG Season 1. Metaphorically, if you go from Rice to S1 Riker to Kirk, it's essentially the same character at different stages of his career from Lieutenant to Commander to Captain. There's an in-joke I never knew of before in "The Arsenal of Freedom" when Riker encounters a facsimile of a Captain Rice.
To illustrate the difference between
The Lieutenant and TOS: At one point in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Mitchell recalls setting Kirk up on a date with little blonde lab technician who he almost married. For the sake of argument, we'll call her Carol Marcus. If this were
The Lieutenant, Kirk would be Rice, and the episode would be about Rice's friend setting him up with Carol, they'd fall in love hard and fast, and they'd almost get married, but something would happen so they wouldn't in order to maintain the status quo required by 1960s episodic television.
At one point, in this very episode I watched, Rice is dating a service brat daughter. The father, a superior officer, warns him to focus more on his career than on women. In what little I've seen of Rice, he seems in line with what I think of when TOS referred back to Kirk's younger days. He's a serious and uptight officer but had also been involved in a lot of relationships.
General Stone, who Lieutenant Rice is assigned to, is a Commanding Officer who takes risks and has a lot on his mind he a prepares for a conference in Washington. We don't see how Stone conducts himself during the actual conference, but the fact that he's a risk-taker is something that carries over into Kirk. After this meeting we don't see, he's promoted to a Two-Star General (thus the title of the episode). Stone also likes reading detective stories, similar to how Picard is a fan of the fictional detective Dixon Hill.
By looking at Stone's decision-making process, I can see how it translates into Kirk or Picard, and it's interesting to keep in the back of my mind when looking at the Roddenberry-created Captains. Rice, as Stone's aide, is trying to give Stone a letter from an officer's wife who Stone had to discharge. Rice says the officer's wife explained there were extenuating circumstances that the discharged officer didn't want to state. Stone cuts Rice off and says there are always extenuating circumstances. He also tells Rice that as a Commanding Officer he doesn't always have the luxury of being either fair or kind. Stone, not being a main character, doesn't have to be likable to an audience, so he can say these things that Kirk or Picard can't. With Kirk or Picard, most of the time, you have to look for subtext. But then Stone says a Commanding Officer also doesn't have the luxury of being wrong. So, when he sees what the extenuating circumstance was, he wants to have the discharged officer reinstated. The CO will do what he has to do but will make sure it's the right thing to do. That
definitely translates into what we'll see in Star Trek.
At the end of the episode, Rice's temporary assignment as Stone's aide is up and he's sent back to his platoon. There was a misunderstanding earlier in the episode that Rice's ambition was to be Stone's aide and works his way up behind a desk, but Rice wants to be with his platoon. For sure this is something we'll see similarly with Kirk. It gives me some new insight into Kirk in fact, if Rice is a template. In TMP, there might've been a misunderstanding that Kirk wanted to be an Admiral, he ended up in that situation, felt duty-bound to accept promotion, but regretted it because he really just wanted to be Captain. Earlier in Kirk's career, again using Rice as a template, I imagine Kirk was thrown into all kinds of situations and that's a lot of what made his career. Being brave, taking risks, standing firm, and knowing how to take control of a situation is the rest of what made his career when he was thrown into such situations.
Since I can no longer find the entire show readily available, I can't promise to watch more any time soon, but it
is on my Watch List now, and I'm glad I took the time to watch at least this particular episode. Even if I don't ever see the rest of the series, I think I got the gist of how it's part of Star Trek's DNA.
.
For me, it will be a lifetime achievement; if I live long enough. 
) would slosh out of a pool every three episodes, or so. Probably no pool.
