Early TOS themes and subjects you miss...

And losing one starship?

The only minor reservation I'd have with that is fleet captain seems a little low to be orchestrating things; with Midway you have Nimitz as 4-star CinCPac positioning the forces beforehand. But Garth in Fletcher's place, sure why not?

 

Worf makes a similar recommendation to kill Deanna's baby in The Child.

 

All of this.

I really don't care about "Starfleet officers" taking each other's emotional temperatures in scene after scene.

 

It occurred to me that had Trek only lasted 15 or so episodes....they were SO GOOD and different, the show would still be famous in a "The Prisoner" sort of way.

 

It would definitely still have gotten a DVD release. If the short-lived Man From Atlantis could get a DVD set, you know Star Trek would have.

 

What if the majority of the episodes had been wiped which is the case for a lot of TV shows from the sixties?
JB

 

The shows that were "wiped" were on videotape, which could be reused. Film can't be wiped. It can only be destroyed or left to rot.

 

What if Trek had been recorded onto videotape then and hadn't lasted a full season instead of the seventy nine episodes?
JB

 

If so then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

 

No maybe not but we might be chatting about the six or seven surviving episodes of a long forgotten TV show that had just been released on DVD on another forum!
JB

 

What I find interesting, and I'm not sure I can articulate this well, is that a lot of the elements people are discussing here were present in the first two seasons of TNG.
One thing that stands out to me is that starting in TNG season 3, and throughout the rest of its run, Voyager and, to a lesser extent, DS9, the shows incorporated a certain juvenile high-school soap opera approach to characterization. Everyone pretty much knew everyone else's business, nothing was off-limits, there were no real mysteries and no interpersonal barriers. There was little complexity or depth. And almost nothing about human behavior that wasn't spelled out and dumbed down.
By contrast, the characters and cultures of the first two seasons of TNG were adults, fully formed, and not immediately open for understanding. Some examples:
Riker, given the power of the Q, is about to turn Data into a human. In later seasons, Data would have let it happen, remarked on what it was like, and ultimately rejected it. Instead, Data immediately told Riker where to stick it.
Similarly, in one very early episode, Picard is seen on the bridge worrying about Riker entering a simulation with Worf - suggesting there was a very real risk that Worf would kill Riker. The way it was played really created a Klingon mystique.
I've often said that TNG seasons 1 and 2 were the worst seasons of Star Trek -- and the last seasons of Star Trek.