Early TOS themes and subjects you miss...

...and wish they'd used more in the prequels

1. "Why are we out here??" Seen in Naked Time and I think some in Corbomite Maneuver.

2. More of a sense of 1701 being a military ship.

3. Being on the frontier. Miners can buy planets, wash dishes by hand...

4. Things like start-up lists.

5. Finally....and man they should have hammered this in the first season of ENTERPRISE. Dead civilizations.

Imagine the following in ENT:

Archer: The Vulcans have been holding us back from day one...
Soval: And with good reason.
Archer: Such as?
Soval: You'll see.

And as ENT explores the surrounding stars and maps systems for colonization....they find dead civilization after dead civilization. Maybe Alpha Centauri has a population barely surviving and then we run into Prime Directive issues immediately. Bring in James Cromwell (with age makeup of course) as a proponent of saving the ACers and building a colony there. The theme of course being how lucky Earth was to get as far as they did and how they still arn't out of the woods.

Sorry...Im ranting.

 

Being on the frontier far from familiar territory and encountering lots of wierd shit. TOS really had that feeling in Season 1, and while it waned somewhat in Seasons 2 and 3 it never really went away. I feel TNG lost that near completely with rare exception and that was mostly in the first two seasons. DS9 could have really played with that, but that wasn't really the show's plan as they wanted to do the Dominion War. VOY was ripe for the unknown, but I simply couldn't get into the show--I simply didn't like anything about it.

ENT was a show I might have given more of a chance if a number of things had been different. But by then Trek was in a formula I didn't much care for. For me ENT felt very much like VOY redressed.

TMP and maybe TFF were the only Trek films that gave us the sense of not knowing what they were going to find. TWOK, TSFS, TVH and TUC were something other than the kind of Trek I would prefer.

I cannot comment on DSC and PIC because I haven't really seen any of it. And I don't talk about JJtrek.

There was a conciseness to much of TOS' writing as if they really respected the viewer to follow along without having to have every little thing explained or having everyone and everything connected to everyone and everything else. There were also things that while arising out of budgetary and resource constraints actually served to make the show better (in my view). TOS did lots of little things that really sold the idea of this massive sophisticated starship far in deep space, particularly during the first season.

It must be said that no show will likely ever again be written or produced like TOS simpy because the times have changed and there are such different expectations today by viewers and creators alike. There has been later Trek I have enjoyed in varying degrees, but I always come back to TOS.

 

Could not agree more.
The weird shit o-meter was especially high during TOS S1 in particular, as it highlighted the wonders and dangers of being out in deep space. Whole colonies wiped out by mental parasites, miners frazeled by living silicon carpets and (in S2) the Doomsday device and ginormous space Amoeba. As was discussed previously in this forum, elements of HP Lovecraft are definitely conspicuous in those early days. But I do think that TNG onward definitely lost that edge.
I also loved the sense of the big E being an active millitary vessel. Kirk was very much in charge and actually, quite a b#@^stard sometimes. Corridors were full of crew, and (if memory serves me well) one episode actually showed a corridor full of rushing people as red alert was sounded. And the Bridge always seemed to have crew changing shift or manning auxillary stations during alerts.
I loved it also that S1 could be construed as showing our heroes as a Terran/United Earth ship, with only one allied half-alien on board. It seemed to me that UE and it's colonies were just one part of a loosely federated organisation along with Vulcan, Andor & Tellar.
All these pointers for made TOS the amazing show it was, and never to be really repeated in any of the other shows that followed.
Their loss.

 

The cage showed crewmembers in civilian clothes. Where no man had kirk and Spock playing chess and sulu
Had a different station then navigation

I wish they kept that put uhura in navigation or Scotty

 

I wonder if they pondered any onboard civilian specialists to ramp up the drama. Maybe they did and just figured they'll use one-time ambassadors and such. Fox was an ass and out of line but I actually liked Commissioner Farris. He had a good point.

 

The crew of The Enterprise reflected the times of the Federation I think with Earth and Vulcan being the main contributors to Starfleet! We didn't learn about the Tellarites and the Andorians until Journey To Babel and they seem to want to be out there in space on their own ships for the main part rather than integrating with humans and Vulcans despite what the Federation stands for! Apart from the Andorian in TAS Yesteryear have we ever seen either of these races on a Federation vessel?
JB

 

In TOS the Enterprise was “out there” where you wouldn’t see all the different things and kind of people that make up the Federation. In TNG the E-D became mostly about parading the Federation flag and where we got all kinds of Federation people actually visiting the ship.

 

Did we see any Andorians or Tellarites on TNG? I don't think we did although I've not seen all the episodes yet!
JB

 

JB, there are no Tellarites in TNG at all, I don't believe. There is one AndorIan in the background in the ep where Picard goes to Risa, and I think that's it. Roddenberry didn't want "friendly" Star Trek races on TNG for some reason. And considering the series' horrible handling of Vulcans, perhaps that worked out.

 

Alpha Centauri is far too close IMO. It would be one of the first places we visit - as it's next door to Proxima. Maybe something more like Delta Pavonis or Beta Hydri - around 20 LY away and 'below' us from the galactic plane; that could be the edge of human space around then.

 

It always seemed to strike me, that sense of danger, being out there, in the unknown, etc. I do feel like Star Trek: Beyond captured it reasonably well too. The Enterprise and her crew are vulnerable. TNG didn't really explore that much, though DS9, VOY and ENT at least occasionally inferred it (I do feel like both VOY and ENT could have done that more).

To me, that's the adventure of Star Trek. Out there in the great unknown, a long way from Earth, not knowing what you'll find.

 

1960s Cold War allegory.

Kor

 

One more thing that later ST lost (for the worse in my opinion) is that in TOS, humans and Earth (and (Earth?) Starfleet) seem to be very much in control, or at least the first among equals. But with First Contact and the whole ENT timeline that branched off of that (and I presume STD also, but only managed to struggle through a few episodes of that before I gave up caring) we are behind, and to a degree, controlled by the Vulcans.

 

^^ In TOS we are under the impression that Earth made it’s own way into deep space without a helping hand. Much of ENT felt like a rewriting of the subtext TOS gave us.

 

The ice cold but logical suggestion Spock makes in "Where No Man..." to kill Mitchell while they still can. Nobody even mentions solutions like that after the first few episodes.

 

Spock’s reading of the situation was spot on. He clearly saw that Mitchell lacked the wisdom and strength of character to handle such power.

 

Agreed completely. I was really struck by this when I first paid attention to watching in production order. The first half of S1 is almost spooky in its way-out-beyond-all-civilization feel. Human civilization on the frontier seems tenuous, and most humans encountered are misfits, isolates, criminals or worse. The Courage and Steiner scores are filled with loneliness, tension and foreboding.

That feeling of "if something goes wrong, there's nobody to come to the rescue, they are it" didn't last. After we saw starbases and other civilized worlds, they didn't seem that far away anymore. Encountering powerful, threatening aliens was just what they did week to week.

Also, most TV shows have a shaky start as they get into the routine, the performers get comfortable, the writers figure out what works etc. In the case of TOS, the uncertainty of making a new type of show could manifest itself to the benefit of the tone of the early stories. On the frontiers of television ≈ on the frontiers of space, maybe.

 

Early theme:
ENT listed the first colonies at their period of history which may suggest there were only three big ones or three official/member ones:

POL: Destroyed. They didn�t stop at your homeworld. They attacked every human outpost they could find. Mars, Alpha Centauri, Vega colony, all were destroyed.​

TOS gave the impression that they have grown to a lot more human colonies; some big and some small. Unless the colony is on the main trade routes, many are isolated being months or years from help. Frontier TV.

 

Spock mentions in Arena something like in this area of space there were no records, only space legends.
Whereas in TNG they went between galaxies, revived a bunch of 20th century humans and Picard wouldn't even bother to look up from reading some 'important' reports. There was no sense of wonder.

 

In terms of execution TOS had few rough spots out of the gate. They hit the ground running delivering a rather polished product even with the turmoil of meeting deadlines in production.