Canonical episode order for the Litverse?

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I actually still do watch television (including DVDs of DSC, PIC, LD, and [soon enough] PRO) on a standard-def CRT TV. Because I don't like throwing out still-functioning technology. But I don't mind one bit losing the static, snow, and other artifacts of the 1960s broadcast experience, nor the commercials (although I will note that for a lot of today's "monuments to Kitman's Law," the commercials are more entertaining than the programs).

I found that, bookwise, Alan Dean Foster's "Star Trek Log" series, which novelize Filmation's TAS in a different order, work much better than airdate order. ADF ignores the randomness of the onscreen TAS Stardates and gives his adaptations and original material all-new Stardates in the Logs.

I agree. I will point out that ADF was adapting triads of TAS episodes (and for the last four books, single episodes expanded with large amounts of original material) into novels.

James Blish also changed the sequence, even though he was writing short story (verging on sudden fiction in the early anthologies) adaptations, but there was no rhyme nor reason to his sequence.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" is the best example of how production order makes more sense as a chronology than airdate order for TOS. The cast used and production details like uniform designs are vastly different than the episodes that aired before and after that episode.

Quite!

 

[Christopher]

To use a movie example, my initial experience with The Dark Knight was poor because I was distracted by a girl far younger than 13 sitting on the aisle steps not far from my seat. I would not want to reproduce my theater experience on subsequent viewings.

Exactly. The way a show was initially broadcast is a separate thing from how it was initially made. It's not an analogy to the movie, but to the theater. It's important to remember that the people who distribute a show are not the same people who made the show, and sometimes they make choices that the makers wouldn't have agreed with, the same way that some movie theaters undermine the viewing experience by using the wrong sound settings or failing to replace a damaged screen or projector.

The advantage of home video releases is that you can get the pure show or movie without the adulterations imposed on it by broadcasters or theaters. You can strip away the intermediaries and engage directly with the unfiltered material. At least, if the people in charge of the video release do their job well, since they're intermediaries too and can make poor choices in the audio settings or color correction or, yes, episode order.

Case in point: the box set of the 1990 The Flash. It used airdate order, but that was very much the wrong order, because CBS sometimes aired the episodes in a way that worked against their proper continuity. For instance, episode 4 in production order, "Watching the Detectives," was aired a week before Episode 3, "Honor Among Thieves," even though "Watching" features a news clipping referring to the events of "Honor." More importantly, "Honor" treats the Flash as a relatively new figure just becoming known to the public, while "Watching" depicts him as a well-established urban legend who's had a private detective tracking him for three months. So the broadcast order is unambiguously wrong. Similarly, episode 13, "The Trickster," was aired the week before episode 12, "Tina, Is That You?", even though it directly references the events of "Tina," so that viewers in initial run wouldn't have understood the reference to an event they hadn't seen yet. That's a case where it was clearly wrong to use airdate order, but the DVD set used it anyway because of the lazy, thoughtless application of a blanket rule without regard for the needs of the individual case. There's no value in "recreating the original experience" in that case, because the original experience was damaged by the network's poor scheduling choices. This is frequently the case with older shows.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Of course (since"Smiley" brought up the theatrical experience), there is also something to be said for being in a large room full of people all enjoying the same film, especially if it's on a screen that fills your field of vision. This is far more true of the SW franchise than of the ST franchise (which is why George Lucas resisted television and home video releases of SW for as long as he did). That's also true of attending live performances: sure, you could go on YouTube and catch a 5-year-old video of Monica Czausz Berney playing her own organ transcription of the Dvořák Carnival Overture, Op. 92 on the Rice University Fisk/Rosales, and it would be a very worthwhile experience, all but looking over her shoulder, but it is not the same experience as sitting in, say, Disney Hall, listening to her perform a program of Kaputsin, Mendelssoh, Bach, Demessieux, Hakim, and Tchaikovsky on the hall's own Rosales/Glatter-Götz. Or you could watch a DVD of the original Broadway cast of Pippin, but it wouldn't be the same experience as seeing even a mostly-amateur live production, with actors running up and down the aisles at (at least) one point in the performance.

And actually, the design of a theatre can have an enormous effect on the experience: in 1957, when the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation commissioned its 34 minute VistaVision spectacular that redefined the whole "museum orientation film" genre, Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot (directed by George Seaton, scored by Bernard Herrmann, and starring a young Jack Lord), they deliberately designed the twin theatres at the CW Visitor Center to give everybody an unobstructed view, and minimize the feeling of being in a large group. Which suited the purpose of the film (now shown using conventional 70mm prints and projectors) quite well.

At present, unless it's a series I've never seen before, I usually don't go through the episodes in a DVD season (or series) set in sequence, anyway: I usually see one specific favorite episode. When I acquired the remastered DVD set of TOS, I concentrated on episodes that looked like they would benefit from new special effects. And of course, DVD sets and streaming libraries are much more random access anyway, compared to, say, a multi-episode videotape, so the nominal sequence isn't really all that important.

 

[Christopher]

Of course (since"Smiley" brought up the theatrical experience), there is also something to be said for being in a large room full of people all enjoying the same film, especially if it's on a screen that fills your field of vision.

Of course, but then what you'd want is to recreate the good parts of the experience, not indiscriminately seek to replicate the good and bad parts alike. Releasing everything in airdate order, even when the original airdate order was stupid and hurt the show, is not a good thing. Of course, releasing everything in production order when episodes were sometimes intentionally produced out of story order is not a good thing either. In short, doing anything according to a invariant, uniform rule, rather than doing the work to figure out what's best for each individual case, is a bad thing.

Or as Captain Picard once said, "There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute."

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

"There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute."

I dunno. I wouldn't mind one bit if politicians (and their workers) convicted of deliberately seeking to keep people from voting (whether by violence, threats of violence, or disinformation) ought to have a mandatory minimum sentence that includes being stripped, for life, of not only their right to hold office, but to vote. That's pretty absolute (and I'm not a particular fan of mandatory minimum sentences in general).

And as to airdate order potentially hurting the show, I can only say that if "The Man Trap" had been the first episode I saw all the way through, there wouldn't have been a second. Just as if the particularly visceral and gratuitous invocations of the "eye-scream" trope had been my first exposure to DSC and PIC (much less my first exposure to ST), those shows would have lost me completely.

And incidentally I'm not kidding about the Monica Czausz Berney YouTube video to which I referred.

 

[Christopher]

I dunno. I wouldn't mind one bit if politicians (and their workers) convicted of deliberately seeking to keep people from voting (whether by violence, threats of violence, or disinformation) ought to have a mandatory minimum sentence that includes being stripped, for life, of not only their right to hold office, but to vote. That's pretty absolute (and I'm not a particular fan of mandatory minimum sentences in general).

Barred from office, yes, but I can't support taking away convicts' right to vote, because that gives legislators an excuse to invent laws they can use to convict members of their political opposition and thereby disenfranchise them. White supremacist politicians have been doing this to minority communities for generations. No one should be stripped of their fundamental human rights for any reason, and the right to vote should be fundamental.

And as to airdate order potentially hurting the show, I can only say that if "The Man Trap" had been the first episode I saw all the way through, there wouldn't have been a second.

"The Corbomite Maneuver" works far better as a first episode (and it coincidentally was my first episode when I was five years old). It defines the fundamental mission and worldview of the show, that these people are risking themselves in the name of exploration and peaceful contact and choose hope and optimism over fear and violence. "The Man Trap" is a much more conventional kill-or-be-killed story. I don't know how different my view of the show might have been if I'd started there.

 

[Avro Arrow]

This is an interesting topic, but it seems to have strayed well away from anything to do with Trek Lit at this point.

(Plus you made me think about the horror of a Firefly boxed set in airdate order. Shame on you. )

We should probably try to bring this thread back to the topic at hand.

 

[Tuskin38]

(Plus you made me think about the horror of a Firefly boxed set in airdate order. Shame on you. )

I was about to bring that up

 

[Sci]

This is an interesting topic, but it seems to have strayed well away from anything to do with Trek Lit at this point.

(Plus you made me think about the horror of a Firefly boxed set in airdate order. Shame on you. )

We should probably try to bring this thread back to the topic at hand.

Well, to bring the topic back to the original topic -- I'd say that all this back-and-forth illustrates what the original post suggested, that there really isn't an objectively correct episode order for TOS. It's a matter of subjective artistic preferences.

Also, if I'm Head Honcho of Paramount, here's my compromise option for TOS releases: keep the original airdate order for the BluRay box set of the original version of the show (with the original visual effects), and use the production order for the version with updated visual effects. There -- everyone gets something of what they want.

 

[Jinn]

I'm still pretty content with stardate order

 

[Christopher]

Well, to bring the topic back to the original topic -- I'd say that all this back-and-forth illustrates what the original post suggested, that there really isn't an objectively correct episode order for TOS. It's a matter of subjective artistic preferences.

I think there are objective reasons why production order works better. "Where No Man" aside, "The Corbomite Maneuver" is a much better introduction to the series than "The Man Trap," as I said. It's also clear in "Corbomite" that Rand being Kirk's yeoman is a novelty he's still adjusting to, so it makes far more sense as Rand's first episode than her sixth.

Metatextually, the advantage of production order is that you can watch the production and concepts get refined before your eyes. You can see how they didn't even give Spock's species a name until "Mudd's Women," and how that episode implied that a "part-Vulcanian" was distinguishable on sight from a full Vulcanian, which was later disregarded. You can see how they initially portrayed the Enterprise as an Earth ship before retconning in the idea of the Federation, and how it took about half a season before the Prime Directive was introduced. You can track the evolution of the uniforms, e.g. when Spock stopped wearing the high collar, and the changes made to the sets or the debuts of new sets. As I was growing up as an aficionado of the music of TOS, watching in production order let me track which musical cues debuted in which episodes, though admittedly that's not as important now that you can just buy the soundtrack set to find out. Basically, if you're interested in the behind-the-scenes aspects in any way, production order is far more revealing. Since so much about TOS was invented and refined along the way, it just flows better in the order it was made.

The only advantage I see to airdate order is that it avoids the problem of two consecutive trips to Starbase 11 with different commanding officers.

 

[mb22]

I People complained when the TOS VHS tapes came out in production order, so the DVDs went original airdate order instead. And different people complained. Kobayashi Maru.

From what I recall, the 1985-88 videocassette (VHS and Beta) releases were in groups of ten going by the airdates. The box spines were numbered by production order, though. Once the all the episodes were out, most people probably followed the numbering and arranged them by production dates.