Episodes you love until.....

Never mind we're still mates on here! Plus Curtis or Alley is a matter of preference whilst Plato's Stepchildren is a cause of great concern to me!!! Have you seen your Doctor lately?
JB

 

I love the opening to Catspaw: the corpse of Jackson, the melodramatic threat, and that wonderful triumphant post-credits score. Even the eerie planet scenes are well-played subtly by the trio, and the witches are truly chilling (aside from the special effect/lighting not going to plan), with their chanting and ugly makeup. As a kid, I often turned away when they made their brief appearance looming over the horizon.

I think things get a little boring once we meet the aliens of the week, and Kirk gets his tongue down Sylvia's throat. And I really would love to love that giant cat, but it's just not scary in the least.

The ending is silly - no one is scathed. But a good attempt with the puppetry, even though we do see the strings.

And Kirk's harsh reality check at the end is a rare occasion we lament over the week's deaths.

 

It could have been worse - Imagine if TOS had ever done a 'Christmas' episode...at least this Halloween episode was entertaining with all the various Halloween trappings and tropes.

 

Oh absolutely! I adore each and every episode for different reasons. I was just thinking of the best personal example episode that fits the thread's criteria.

 

Agree 100% about Catspaw. So atmospheric at the beginning. I really have trouble with the lighting in the castle. Aside from the dungeon the entire rest of the castle is way over lit. What's ironic is that the bridge is darker then the scary Castle in most of the scenes. I think Catspaw is about the darkest the bridge was ever lit aside from when the power went out. Also yes the cat does not work and overall the second half was a let-down for sure. And my biggest regret of the TOs remastering was it they didn't properly complete the effect of the witches. They were clearly supposed to be disembodied floating heads heads you are not supposed to see their bodies at all. Which is why they have the actors holding their arms behind their back so that as little of the velvet costume they were wearing as possible would be seen. Also why they're all wearing turtleneck sweaters. The scene would be so much more effective if they blackened out the actors bodies into the background. Maybe they didn't have a copy of the script on hand to look at where it was indicated that they were supposed to be floating heads.

 

This is on my prob-won't-ever-watch again. I am 53, just retired (transitioned) and as I write that, it seems very . . . final!

Anyway I looked up the bridge. Yes, very dark. This episode is really dull, to me. Just hanging out indoors talking to a couple weirdies. As a kid/teen, Sylvia was also . . . yuk. I went to Trekcore to see the bridge. Scotty was on the landing party. Why? (in-universe)

 

"Catspaw" is one of the reasons why I am totally cool with airdate order. Imagine the second season actually kicking off with this one. Just because certain characters evolve over time doesn't always mean the episodes themselves are best seen in order of filming. "Amok Time" was a far better choice to start off the second year.

Having said that, if they had kicked off the third season with "Spectre of the Gun," that season may have been better received.

 

I simply adored and was awed by "The Changeling" as a kid. How did they get the thing to float? One day, when I finally grew up and became a Toys-R-Us kid since collecting action figures since then is generally more of a thing for adults, I perchanced a rewatch of this episode, and... Zoiks - it's bloody awful, isn't it. The rampant sexism was a huge turnoff. The machine magically bringing back Scotty and forced dialogue about wiping Uhura's memory were just so cod and phony... Nomad's ferried on a string quite craftily, or on a trolley cart, and with cut shots to hide the trickery. It's still very nicely done. Though why they used red, blue/green, and yellow filters... is Nomad also an officer in Starfleet? Or a new traffic control device in testing phase?! And as much as Jackson Roykirk is still cool, James T Kirk nagging it to death is about as laughably bad as anything from the era could get. Yet it's still funny.

"I, Mudd" really had me going as a kid. Mudd is back and better than ever before and by leagues! Funny scenes! Best episode ever!! As a teen (but eventually as an adult), the line of Chekov getting all excited because he could go at it with robot bodies went over my head and I wish it stayed there because people are where it's really at. And scores of other reasons. Yes, in part because I wanted to see more of Norman's sweatpants and not realizing why. I'll save that for later, it's a tad more complex... But fully as an adult, I witnessed how there must have been a real good sale on shower curtains for costumes (which still look great but I finally noticed they were shower curtains), and genuinely lame stuff such as more reused sets than in Lost in Space (even props in sickbay), one-dimensional dialogue even for 1967 standards, the twins were also in the worst-ever Batman episode, McCoy/Spock banter missed the mark by miles as well as not fitting into the show the way most of their arguments feel germane with (was the story subtly mocking its own franchise, perhaps)... and, of course, Stella/Harry's marriage is a stereotype cartoon leftover from 1955 - though why she would want to stay with him takes a real iron will and now there's 500 more of them so there you go... imagine that, a machine nagging a person to death - it's the inversion of the "Kirk nags computer to death" trope and one could argue Mudd is the anti-Kirk... again, show is mocking itself - it should just be content in letting the fans do that... But back to a good and big point: I think the actor who played Norman also, a few years prior to doing Star Trek, time traveled to the future to do that episode of "Spin City" made three decades later: https://spincity.fandom.com/wiki/Snowbound because the dude looks similar... at least from what camera angles allow for...

 

For a long time I thought they did. In David Gerrold's World of Star Trek, that's how the episode guide lists it. Or it did in the first printing, which is the one I have.

 

I thought the first half of Spocks Brain was a pretty good Star Trek episode. You had a problem, you had a bridge meeting, and then once we got to the planet and we got the Brain Brain What is Brain quote, that's when the episode started to really get dumb.

 

I quite liked Spock's Brain as a kid and I still do to be honest! This and The Children episode are two shows I still remember and from childhood! Occasionally I rewatch them and still find them good ones!
JB

 

Funny because the scrapped "early" version of the Enterprise cue is shorter than the one that ended up in the film. It seems like they extended the sequence late in the game.

The drydock is excessive. I've said it before...too much time is spent seeing too much of the ship through the dock before the big reveal, and all the cuts after that are slightly too long, plus you have the silly shot of the hexagonal light...who cares about the light?

 

Wouldn't say I love it, but I can somewhat tolerate "Breads and Circuses" until the last scene, where it turns into christian propaganda. And shits on another religion as "superstition" in the same breath! That scene is not only extremely stupid, but extremely hypocritical.

Similar story with the Omega Glory, really, this time with American Exceptionalim instead of christian Exceptionalism.

 

I agree and I disagree about B & C.

Uhura explicitly says 'the Son of God'...

However, Kirk says 'the word' which McCoy then refers to as love and brotherhood (Christianity is not explicitly mentioned). He also uses the word 'philosophy', which I interpret as a choice lifestyle, not an all-righteous religion. To me, the characters are referring to Jesus' all-loving message, not necessarily a religious doctrine.
Don't forget Gene (a non-believer) wrote this, so I doubt he would promote Christianity. On the contrary, I think he is extracting the good 'love all', from the belief in a divine being. To me, he is saying that we can do all this without some higher entity. Humans across the galaxy can and will learn to love each other. That's my interpretation anyway.

 

Will the actual subject of the thread is episodes that you really like until they go bad not episodes that you feel are just okay until they annoy you with some particular plot point

 

The word "christ" is. Nevertheless, the point would still stand if it was general to Abrahamic religions.

 

Agreed but Cromwell is a very good actor - just well he's not Cochrane.

I liked "That Which Survives" until Spock started being an idiot.
Which admittedly was pretty early.

 

I enjoy Bread And Circuses a lot to be honest! I love the opening scene with the debris of the Beagle and then the realisation of a world that watches gladiatorial games on television, itself an anachronism to the crew of the Enterprise! Plus when we meet the former Captain of the Beagle, he is a broken man and has been bribed with riches and other things to assuage his guilt over the years for allowing his crew to be brutalised or murdered if they did not conform to the ways of Rome! Plus when he finally gets his courage back before he is killed, he helps Kirk, Spock and McCoy to escape and he seems pleased that he has finally defied Claudius Marcus! Also I love the exclusive season two fight arena music!
JB

 

Yes ignore the parallel Earth improbability and its a good fun adventure with gladiators unless you were from the Beagle of course.

 

I don't like the ending of Space Seed and how Marla McGivers is tossed aside to go live with her captor Khan after some Stockholm syndrome type situation.