Classic episodes now considered "lame" - ?!

[Qonfounding Ghooool]

Back to the main thread, "Space Seed" is a little lame when you consider it was 1960s television trying to guess the future using some of our real-life history as a backdrop, but it was also being way too kind on the actual numbers - both in terms of genetic experimentation AND the date for the next world war starting. Other plot themes sorta hold up, some more than others, and some less. Some of this can be mitigated by accepting that Star Trek is not in our universe, which it isn't. It's its own. As the universe grows lager then more opportunities (and nitpicks) can potentially arise. Then add parallel dimensions and voila.

 

[Mr. Spook]

Some of this can be mitigated by accepting that Star Trek is not in our universe, which it isn't. It's its own. As the universe grows lager then more opportunities (and nitpicks) can potentially arise. Then add parallel dimensions and voila.

On one hand, yes. It's a fictional universe. We're not watching a documentary. They could easily have kept to that date and until the sequel shows, they did. That's where they had so make some changes. The problem is they can't do other kinds of time travel stories where the characters go back to the 21st century without showing the ravages of that war unless they change the date. So the Bell Riots would have to have been in the 80's roundabouts. But by the time DS9 came out, that would have blunted the message of showing a possible crummy future ahead of us.

 

[Sgt_G]

Screenshot-2025-10-04-231618 hosted at ImgBB

Image Screenshot-2025-10-04-231618 hosted in ImgBB

ibb.co

https://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/al...alance-of-terror/balance-of-terror-br-440.jpg

Okay, fair point. I forgot about that scene. Maybe I blocked it from my memory.

 

[Shawnster]

Ditto for "The Enemy Within" despite lack of shuttlecraft as that would have negated the episode entirely, unless Scotty found space bats nesting in all their shuttles

This one is easy. Wind shear. The winds above the landing site were too strong to allow a shuttle to land. The closest landing site was 20 miles away in blizzard conditions.

 

[Vagabond Elf]

Going back to the OP's question: I think tastes certainly change over time. Despite being a Trekkie because of my father, I had to guilt him into watching a couple TOS-R episodes with me because his memory was of the original 60s broadcasts and he just found the f/x too blatant these days. And I'm sure we've all had experiences of finding some show that we loved as kids or teens... and then trying to rewatch it as adults and going "this is awful." Some of it is just shifting cultural context of course, and storytelling changes - but there are definitely things that I used to enjoy in the past, and now find just... uninteresting. Not racist or sexist or bad f/x or any of that, just the story itself no longer matters to me.

Some of the things TOS discuses are universal, sure, but even then, you have to have some understanding of both the Cold War and the Counter Culture movement to really get the framework the moral lessons are attached to.

 

[bdub76]

Well, with that episode title, I guess today's younger viewers would expect to see the crew literally naked.

I heard younger viewers are anti-nudity these days. It's not the 70s and 80s anymore, where you had random nakedness.

Gen Z Teens Want Less Sex on Screen, According to New UCLA Study

Young people age 10 to 24 are looking for fewer sex scenes in television and in movies, according to a new study from UCLA.

variety.com

Anyway, I enjoyed TNG when it first aired, but on rewatch today, the first couple of seasons don't hold up that well anymore. There are some good episodes in there, but a lot of it isn't all that great.

 

[Takeru]

... but now has people calling The Menagerie "very, very lame," ...

Are they wrong? It's a giant clip show showing the pilot, that may have had its appeal in the past when The Cage wasn't available to the public but now that it's included with the DVD/Bluray sets and on streaming services there's no point to replay the pilot just a few episodes after people saw it in its original form. What remains is a framing story that mostly an illusion, Spock was never actually on trial. I don't blame anyone watching the show today if they think The Menagerie is lame.

 

[johnnybear]

It's the newer fans to the series that cannot understand it's intricacies. Like them say watching Benny Hill ridicule a 70s prime minister or politician which as to them it means nothing and they've never heard of said persons. Trek was also based on incidents and events of the sixties which also is a time beyond their life and so means as much to them as the 1920s does to us.
JB

 

[ZapBrannigan]

It's the newer fans to the series that cannot understand it's intricacies. Like them say watching Benny Hill ridicule a 70s prime minister or politician which as to them it means nothing and they've never heard of said persons. Trek was also based on incidents and events of the sixties which also is a time beyond their life and so means as much to them as the 1920s does to us.
JB

Young reactors on youtube are always encountering vintage song lyrics or movie scenes with period references they know nothing about, and making up novel interpretations of what it must mean. And I've seen them with no clue of what lay behind "A Private Little War" or "The Enterprise Incident."

 

[Phaser Two]

Young reactors on youtube are always encountering vintage song lyrics or movie scenes with period references they know nothing about, and making up novel interpretations of what it must mean. And I've seen them with no clue of what lay behind "A Private Little War" or "The Enterprise Incident."

Right on. And a lot of "reaction" shtick—like, I suspect, whatever started this thread—is acting like you're smugly superior to what you're watching.** (Thankfully, there's plenty of more wholesome, open-minded reaction content out there, which is why this thread confuses me a bit.)

**This phenomenon has plagued That Other Franchise as well, even predating YouTube, etc., but now also quite amusingly featuring a complete turnaround from the horrifically toxic contemporaneous assessment of its 1999-2005 output.

 

[Ragitsu]

Well, Pike's not going to be performing somersaults any time soon.

 

[Mr. Spook]

Are they wrong?

Yes.

 

[Qonfounding Ghooool]

I heard younger viewers are anti-nudity these days. It's not the 70s and 80s anymore, where you had random nakedness.

Gen Z Teens Want Less Sex on Screen, According to New UCLA Study

Young people age 10 to 24 are looking for fewer sex scenes in television and in movies, according to a new study from UCLA.

variety.com

^^this

Anyway, I enjoyed TNG when it first aired, but on rewatch today, the first couple of seasons don't hold up that well anymore. There are some good episodes in there, but a lot of it isn't all that great.

Would you post this as a new post in TNG comparable to this one about episodes now considered lame? I don't want to derail the TOS thread with a big reply, and this idea you're bringing in really makes a fantastic TNG thread on the topic, as TNG seasons 1 and 2 were deemed lukewarm by many fans at the time (among other things )...

 

[Qonfounding Ghooool]

Are they wrong? It's a giant clip show showing the pilot, that may have had its appeal in the past when The Cage wasn't available to the public but now that it's included with the DVD/Bluray sets and on streaming services there's no point to replay the pilot just a few episodes after people saw it in its original form. What remains is a framing story that mostly an illusion, Spock was never actually on trial. I don't blame anyone watching the show today if they think The Menagerie is lame.

^^this

Usually, clip shows involve established episodes to pad out time with if the writers run into delays or other problems. Sometimes cost. But the scope of "The Menagerie", behind the scenes, is genuinely innovative. At the time, so young in the Trek universe's run, with no past apart from only Kirk episodes and how many of the audience believed that the Pike material was prepared specially for this 2-parter at the time, it was very novel. It was also as novel to see "past lore" given a glance, as well as a novel way to cut costs as Trek, up to this point, was the most expensive thing ever made by the studio, complete with two pilots and all, so why not chuck 'em in? At least to "The Cage"'s credit, they framed a story as opposed to chucking it in and making viewers wonder in abject kneejerk reaction why the bridge and uniforms now got a big change, only for the changes to go away forevermore the following week. (Which isn't to say WNMHGB isn't bad, but it would have been something of a shock and at least it was aired a couple episodes in, rather than episode 20, where peoples' heads exploding would require overtime on the part of those who had live-in housecleaners in order to neatly clean up... and you thought that Jr sneezing on the dinner table without hanky was gross enough...)

 

[ananta]

This isn’t really news, alas. Back when I was a kid and TNG was airing, 30+ years ago, most of my peers looked down on TOS as being dated and faintly embarrassing. (This was pre-internet, so I wasn’t really connected to the fandom in any way).

I didn’t agree. Yeah, it was obviously dated (like most things are decades later) but I enjoyed it and, over time, I actually came to prefer it to TNG.

Nowadays, if you can get past the unfortunate sexism of the time and whatnot, I don’t really see how it’s really any more “cringe” than much of the wacky shit SNW has been doing.

 

[Ragitsu]

When it comes to entertainment, I never understood the weight afforded to "It is dated."; everything inevitably becomes dated. Furthermore, inherent superiority by virtue of temporal proximity is wishful thinking at best. A work should be evaluated on its own merits...not what the (current) Committee for Creative Correctness decides is valid.

 

[Vagabond Elf]

When it comes to entertainment, I never understood the weight afforded to "It is dated."; everything inevitably becomes dated. Furthermore, inherent superiority by virtue of temporal proximity is wishful thinking at best. A work should be evaluated on its own merits...not what the (current) Committee for Creative Correctness decides is valid.

But at the same time, an older show is often out of step with a contemporary audience's values. 1930s Flash Gordon serials have an element of campy fun, but they're also full of anti-Asian racism. Lines that, when the movie was made, landed as cheesy one-liners today feel deeply disturbing and uncomfortable. The audience's emotional response is sharply contrasted to the show's clear intent, and the result is something much less enjoyable to a casual viewer.

Or heck, just the loss of localization means that some elements go right past the contemporary audience. When you see Sulu using a spray bottle on a plant, does your brain go "wow, that's some shiny new tech?" Or do you go "hunh, that's a weirdly prosaic thing for them to be using?" Or for a more classic example, today we tend to interpret "Much Ado About Nothing" as meaning "A big fuss over a trivial incident," but to Shakespeare and his contemporaries is likely meant more "All about the pussy."

I agree, everything becomes dated, and it's important to keep the context something was made in in mind when viewing it. But the more dated something becomes, the more work viewing it "in context" becomes - and the more work involved in viewing a film or show the less entertainment most people derive from that show. So, if one is to use "did I have fun watching it?" as the main criteria for "is this superior or inferior to other show" - which I'm quite certain is what most of us do, most of the time - then yes, temporal proximity does have a heavy influence on superiority.

 

[Ragitsu]

the more work involved in viewing a film or show the less entertainment most people derive from that show

Quite the assumptions (both what - precisely - constitutes "work" and the entertainment factor automatically diminishing). To this day, people still enjoy mythology, legends, fairy tales, folk tales, et cetera; not everyone adores, say, "reality television", despite the fact that it is fast food...mentally speaking (i.e., it requires little if any effort to process).

 

[DonIago]

If you're going to ask why some people have trouble enjoying media that they find "dated", then I think Vagabond's answer covers why some people have trouble with it.

Obviously other people do not.

Both approaches are valid. Personally I tend to have trouble with British media (even Doctor Who) for reasons I can't readily identify but that I've identified as a pattern.

 

[The Salt Umpire]

On one hand, yes. It's a fictional universe. We're not watching a documentary. They could easily have kept to that date and until the sequel shows, they did. That's where they had so make some changes. The problem is they can't do other kinds of time travel stories where the characters go back to the 21st century without showing the ravages of that war unless they change the date. So the Bell Riots would have to have been in the 80's roundabouts. But by the time DS9 came out, that would have blunted the message of showing a possible crummy future ahead of us.

The American Dystopia depicted in Picard feels increasingly familiar, but that would have been an easy guess for a scriptwriter in 2021. Predicting events 50 years in the future? Not even SF giant Robert Heinlein quite predicted the ubiquity of personal computers by 1996 in 1966's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - Mike was a mainframe AI that everyone on the Moon used as a sort of proto internet with apps, but he was close. But he definitely predicted Nehemiah Scudder and the society that made him, so I'll give him that one.

Assigning dates is hazardous unless it is some future date like 2001. Oops. (I still sorta consider 2001 the future, it was that for so long, instead of 25 years ago) Consider the dates of events an artifact of when the show was made for plot purposes, not some future that should have happened by now.

Vulcans won't pay us a visit in April, 2063. I feel pretty safe saying it won't happen. (imagine the power of film if it creates futures!)