Anomalies in fandom

And the two that I mentioned not by name we're Lieutenant Radha at the helm in season 3 and Ensign Haines at the Science Station in season 2. So those were good roles for those two episodes. Too bad they couldn't have had more speaking parts for crew members in season 2 and 3 as they had in season 1

 

Did any female crewmembers take up arms in "Day of the Dove" -- I don't mean fight but just even hold a sword? And although a yeoman, Marta Landon did "karate kick" a dude in the "Apple"
I'm a big comic book fan and I don't think females heroes were even allowed to throw punches in the 1960s comics. I remember once Sue Richards "karate kicking" a guy in one issue.

 

All of these have a romantic sub plot though. Only the bridge officers delivering generic dialogue don't have a romantic sub plot come to think of it. And Doris Atkins.

Season one isn't much better. Masters was also going to have a romantic sub plot and it was only removed because it was too similar to to McGivers' plot. Other than that, I think it's just the last three yeomen.

 

Mulhall's romantic subplot existed only because a female alien in love with and married to another alien inhabited her body. Granted, Muldaur still had act out the subplot.

 

The Prime Universe Marlena is presumably a chemist like her Mirror Universe counterpart. Mirror Marlena mentions having to clean up in the chem lab after the ion storm.

I think it was less a question of "allowed" and more just a reflection of the prejudices of the times. Women throwing punches the same way that men did just wasn't considered "feminine" in the 1960s. Notice that characters like Saturn Girl, Dream Girl, Princess Projectra, Triplicate Girl, Phantom Girl, Shadow Lass, the Wasp, the Invisible Girl, and Marvel Girl all tended to have more passive powers than their male teammates. But I think it was probably more just unconscious sexism/chavanism than intentionally playing them down.

You saw the same thing on American TV in the 60s. Over in England, Kathy Gale and Emma Peel regularly performed judo against the bad guys in The Avengers, while over the U.S., Batgirl was limited to just kicking the occassional bad guy on Batman.

 

True but how cool is being an astrobiologist. Now for the rest of the episode you will be possessed by a housewife...

Ok, admittedly, she was a housewife who was good at robotics. ;-p

 

Yes, I’m sure these actresses were quite disappointed at having landed romantic lead roles.

 

Problem was that's almost the female guest crew members got was is romantic roles. Which is fine but virtually every single one of them was paired up with a male instead of just showing them doing their job. Marlena Moreau, Marla MacGyver's, Carolyn Palomas, dr. Ann Mulhall, Yeoman Marta Landon, Lieutenant Romaine, Angela Martine, and as somebody mentioned engineer McMasters was written as a romantic interest for Lazarus. And of course Rand herself. The Yeoman from Shore leave as well the Yeoman from Squire of gothos.
If a female Starfleet crew member had more than three lines she was basically she was basically somebody's romantic interest.

 

Or got turned into a styrofoam hexagon and then crushed to powder.

Kor

 

Occasional? It seems to me she fought in every episode of Season 3, usually saving Batman and Robin’s butts. In fact I would go as far as to say she was the main focus of her season, sidelining Robin, if not Batman himself (and elevating both Alfred and the Commissioner through her relationships with them). I love her character, and Yvonne Craig’s performance, and my kids much prefer Season 3 over the other seasons, because of her. But if we watch it too much, I start to miss the classic Batman & Robin format. Because Batgirl absolutely dominates.

Anyway, yeah, she kicked instead of punching, but, that’s okay. Kirk liked to kick, too. We just watched “Spectre on the Gun” last night, and I have been grinning all day because of the way after the gunfight he runs up and kicks Wyatt in the chest!

 

I watched them out of order as a kid and I waited with baited breath to see if Batgirl's bike was in the credits. I had no idea she was only in season three.

 

I was speaking colloquially. I didn't tally up every single punch and kick in season 3 before typing up my post.

 

She is pretty cool, and Austin Powers would have loved her theme song ("Batgirl, Batgirl! Batgirl, Batgirl!..."). That kind of thing is my bag, Baby. The only trouble was, they cut the third season budget so low that surreal, no-set sets became the norm. I remember a trial scene in which the courtroom had three pieces of furniture and no walls, just a blacked out stage like "The Empath." OTOH, I also recall never noticing a problem with it when I was little. My imagination filled in all the blanks, unbidden, so I was never even aware of it. Good times.

 

I think this would have been interesting (from the Writer’s Guide): “In a future story we will bring McCoy’s daughter Joanna aboard. She will be a lovely girl, and Captain Kirk, of course, is going to be involved with her. Dr. McCoy is suddenly going to discover he is a father viewing Kirk from a father’s perspective. An interesting and sometimes angry new McCoy-Kirk relationship will be seen.”

Does it sound like she would have been a recurring character, or a one-shot?

Don’t you love the “of course”?

 

This would have been D.C. Fontana's story outline, which ended up getting mangled beyond recognition into "The Way to Eden." Memory Alpha says the character of Joanna would have appeared again in Season 4, but there doesn't seem to be a source on that statement.

Kor

 

Since Fontana's original story was changed so much, I suppose she could've been planning to still get Joanna into the show in a variation of her original story. And indeed, Joanna does get a passing mention in TAS, which Fontana story edited.

 

I guess Crisis on Centaurus finally did something with this.

 

And The Better Man, and an issue of Marvel's 1980 comic series (where Joanna's engaged to a Vulcan!), and an issue of Marvel's The Untold Voyages miniseries... There are a fair amount of Joanna stories out there at this point.

 

I wish they didn't contradict each other so much!

 

I was nine, and knew Burton from Reading Rainbow, and if anything, it made it more difficult for me to buy his character, and made me take him less seriously. I didn't see him as an old actor in the vein of the TOS cast, but as the host of a children's show, well out of his element.