No, it gets emphasized in novels and comics as well. It's one of those things they go back to that well on and it makes very little sense.
Beloved episodes you can't get into
- Thread starter Talos IV
- Start date
...The good parts?
Well Morgan Woodward is good. The concept of being trapped on a planet where you are in a besieged village about to be overrun is interesting. The Captain deciding to break orders and defend the village is clever. Problem was how to end it. Modern Trek may have just let Tracey be killed and our heroes beam up and let the conflict take its' course by having the winning side slaughter the villagers. The bad part was the Kohm and Yang angle.
That last starts to sound like the all too common TNG-era PD misinterpretation.
Ron Tracey paved the way for Gabriel Lorca, which makes it all the more tragic that his character twist was wasted on being a Mirror Universe transplant. There are also signs of Tracey in Captain Ransom from "Equinox, Parts I and II(VOY)."
"City at the Edge of Forever" - it has nice enough ideas, but I didn't believe the romance and that's crucial for the episode to work. To compare, Kirk's with Miramannee was one of the very few that felt authentic.
"Mirror, Mirror" - iconic or not, it's oversimplifying the idea of parallel universes and canonically says it's just theirs and the mirror one. But that's easier to swallow than all the of plot contrivances. I've rewatched "The Way to Eden" more times.
Most of the parallel Earth development episodes, which existed solely for the reuse of props and costumes to save money. Most of these episodes have the crew in awe over how rare the phenomenon is... so half a dozen such episodes later and they're still all gobsmacked the same thing? Okey dokey then... at least "The Paradise Syndome" chucks in The Preservers as the impetus, and they're neat idea that would be referenced/hinted at from time to time, rather than the usual shtick of sheer coincidence or, for more dramatic reasons, some dingbat in Starplop Command misplacing a book and now they all act like 1920s throwbacks or naziwannabes or notreallyromans or so on, though the Roman one wasn't half-bad either.
"Mirror, Mirror" - iconic or not, it's oversimplifying the idea of parallel universes and canonically says it's just theirs and the mirror one. But that's easier to swallow than all the of plot contrivances. I've rewatched "The Way to Eden" more times.
Most of the parallel Earth development episodes, which existed solely for the reuse of props and costumes to save money. Most of these episodes have the crew in awe over how rare the phenomenon is... so half a dozen such episodes later and they're still all gobsmacked the same thing? Okey dokey then... at least "The Paradise Syndome" chucks in The Preservers as the impetus, and they're neat idea that would be referenced/hinted at from time to time, rather than the usual shtick of sheer coincidence or, for more dramatic reasons, some dingbat in Starplop Command misplacing a book and now they all act like 1920s throwbacks or naziwannabes or notreallyromans or so on, though the Roman one wasn't half-bad either.
The Deadly Years is just hokum, with the reset button in the form of a plot-reversal anti-aging drug.
I liked this one better as a kid, but Obsession's fast and loose nature with vents is pretty bad (though a little headcanon can work around most of it)... but the one red shirt that dies at the start is doin' just fine later in the same story (and in later ones, woohoo!)
The Changeling is another alleged fan-favorite I loved as a kid, but a later re-watch had me balking over some insane levels of firepower of Nomad: With equivalency to 90 torpedoes per single volley and the ship can handle up to four hits? Really? If nothing else, it's a great exercise in attempting multiplication for the more advanced second-graders watching*...) Far worse, the casual sexism of that episode that drove me nuts. It became easy to understand why the good elements of this story were retooled as part of "The Motion Picture", which does it more justice and eschews the brazen claims (which rank up there with some of what some other TOS episodes pulled, but at least it's malfunctioning AI Nomad making the dumb claims and not beloved heroes Kirk or Spock or anyone else, good grief...) Not to mention Nomad's disco dance ability to travel at "multiwarp speeds", which ranks right up there with Voyager's gack-inducing treknobabble extraordinaire of "multispectral subspace engine design" (among legions of others). And, of course, how other episodes have Enterprise's shields succumb to a lot less firepower... 90 torpedoes... still, at least TOS got to chuck in "multi" before anyone else. TNG's era coined "quantum"... the day a spinoff outdoes Voyager with treknobabble is probably a scary day indeed. How does one outdo all of that...
I liked this one better as a kid, but Obsession's fast and loose nature with vents is pretty bad (though a little headcanon can work around most of it)... but the one red shirt that dies at the start is doin' just fine later in the same story (and in later ones, woohoo!)
The Changeling is another alleged fan-favorite I loved as a kid, but a later re-watch had me balking over some insane levels of firepower of Nomad: With equivalency to 90 torpedoes per single volley and the ship can handle up to four hits? Really? If nothing else, it's a great exercise in attempting multiplication for the more advanced second-graders watching*...) Far worse, the casual sexism of that episode that drove me nuts. It became easy to understand why the good elements of this story were retooled as part of "The Motion Picture", which does it more justice and eschews the brazen claims (which rank up there with some of what some other TOS episodes pulled, but at least it's malfunctioning AI Nomad making the dumb claims and not beloved heroes Kirk or Spock or anyone else, good grief...) Not to mention Nomad's disco dance ability to travel at "multiwarp speeds", which ranks right up there with Voyager's gack-inducing treknobabble extraordinaire of "multispectral subspace engine design" (among legions of others). And, of course, how other episodes have Enterprise's shields succumb to a lot less firepower... 90 torpedoes... still, at least TOS got to chuck in "multi" before anyone else. TNG's era coined "quantum"... the day a spinoff outdoes Voyager with treknobabble is probably a scary day indeed. How does one outdo all of that...
* but is, comparably, an incredibly boring one for any number of high school kids on prom night, which was the one wordlessly and socially acceptable day for young adults of the day to engage in or at least attempt coitus without the need of a marriage license... at least by 1950s standards.
No, it doesn't. At no point in the episode do they say that the Mirror Universe is the only parallel universe.
The nearest they come to saying anything close to that is when Kirk says, "You're a man of integrity in both universes, Mister Spock," but even that doesn't mean that there are only those two universes. It just means that Kirk is only talking about their two respective universes.
TOS was glorious. At it's best it was some of the best one-hour science fiction on television you'd ever see. At it's worst it was laughably cringe. But it was almost never boring.
Someone hasn't had Chinese pizza...
Apologies for the tangent
Chinese pizza? My wife is Chinese and I am pretty sure I’ve NEVER seen pizza on the menu in any Chinese restaurant or in any cookbook . So, I am so curious, what is it? I can’t even imagine what the ingredients are.
Full disclosure: this happened when I was 10 and in San Francisco so if I get things wrong I apologize in advance. We went to a Chinese restaurant, and me being the picky kid, saw "pizza" on the menu and ordered it. It was basically flat bread, red sauce and cheese melted over it. What other ingredients I have no idea. It just looked and smelled quite gross.
As far as I know, that episode is only 'beloved' by those who love bad episodes.
Sadly, Jack Ruby's defense attorney was the best thing about that episode.
He arguably did a better job in Star Trek than in that particular case...
It was worth the shot.
What is it with Star Trek and names that could be pronounced as a 5-letter synonym for abdomen?
You've got a character named Bele (and a rather well known blooper, "I am Belly. No I'm not. I am BEEL")
And you've got a character played by a lawyer who, if you didn't know how he pronounced his name . . . .
You've got a character named Bele (and a rather well known blooper, "I am Belly. No I'm not. I am BEEL")
And you've got a character played by a lawyer who, if you didn't know how he pronounced his name . . . .
The one fan favorite I detest is Space Seed. I watched it recently, and while it wasn't quite as bad as I remembered, mainly because Marla saved the day in a more definite way than I remembered, it was bad enough to make me cringe. I just don't understand why the arrogant Khan is so popular with so many people. And if that's not all, I absolutely hated it when that other augment slapped Uhura.
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