Episodes you once disliked and now love (or vice versa)

Used to hate but now like or love:
* "The Way to Eden". It probably stunk at the time with changing characters to fit the plot and being an arguably unsubtle reference to Herbert Armstrong, and stunk to degrees not dissimilar to Lost In Space's third season hippie-type outings (e.g. The Promised Planet, Collision of Planets). But having aged a while, it now feels more like (a) a time capsule reflecting on the groovy days because it was trendy, and (b) a story whose only real failing is trying to do too much at once. Not to mention, the personality archetypes of the hippies are surprisingly nuanced -- who's sincere, who's conniving, who's legitimately insane (Sevrin), and who the smarmy brats are. The story's still a mess with so much, with Synthococcus Novae being the icing on the cake, it just begs for more rather than glossing over oversimplified aspects for the sake of the story. Do I love it? No, this episode isn't in the same league as "Space Seed". But it's got a lot of lost potential.

* "Metamorphosis" - Seconding what @Farscape One said. Plus, some dialogue has some nice double meanings I'd never picked up on as a kid.

Used to love but now loathe or find middling at best:

* "The Trouble with Tribbles". The more I rewatch, the more the story is hinging on the comedic aspects over everything else. But on that initial watch? It's easy to see why it's heralded, and not wrongly so. Plus, the occasional lighter story compensates for stronger material. Every show mixes it up.

* "The Changeling" - all the action action action and how cool Nomad looked were great at one point... Even the rampage of Nomad, which reminds one loosely of "Charlie X", has some excitement... However, few people remain age seven forever and that's when the plot problems start to become apparent, such as: The "90 photon torpedoes" being the equivalent to one of Nomad's farts is an outlandishly stupid number, where only one fart would blow up the entire ship (since no other story outlandishly uses inflated numbers.) The alleged awe of Scotty being zapped and revived right on cue is not good drama. No worries, after Nomad's other magical ability of mindwiping (and instructing Uhura imperfectly about what he was about to do), Uhura will be fed a couple decade's worth of education and will be ready for next week's episode. Also, how does a biological being with telepathy communicate with the biological telepathic ability upon a mass of circuit boards? "Just because he's fiction"? Not when the new ability comes in against established character precedent (reasoned attribution to anchor the audience and set plotting limitations), or put in as lieu of "character development" - especially if never used again. Maybe if Nomad's memory circuits were magnetic coil cores and Spock could somehow feel and translate the magnetic field - not unlike how disk recovery services can scan the field of a platter without directly touching it - but I don't think a Vulcan brain field operates via a charged magnetic field, since being in proximity to a loudspeaker might wreak havoc. Or why you don't put floppy disks next to a speaker or next to the monitor that had built-in speakers. But 60s Trek and even some 80s/90s Trek pull the same stunt in various episodes (e.g. "Wolf in the Fold" plus a handful of eps involving Data and somehow Troi senses actual emotion from a walking SoC). Not to mention the blatant sexism that makes this story a pain to watch. Is it no wonder that the more compelling aspects of this story were retooled for "The Motion Picture" and done better there? That said, Kirk nagging Nomad to self-destruct never gets old.


Proof that even a terrible episode has a great moment within. Even if the computer that Nomad collided with didn't have a loopback filter to prevent locking up, or the computer it did bang with was able to do self-repairs and integrate-- oh piffle, just don't think into the episode and some of it's almost watchable.

 

A. Like when McCoy alludes to Kirk's ''affection'' for Spock in OPERATION ANNIHILATE.

B. It's a result of the TV policy of cliffhanging the audience before act three so they don't dare switch the channel for a sitcom.

 

Well, I'm on board with you again! I watched it a few days ago and I can't help but really enjoy that episode. Yes the set direction was great! I have really warmed up to this one. Again!

 

I never left. "Requiem" and "The Paradise Syndrome" were always big favorites of mine, for the music alone. The beautiful guest star ladies were icing on the cake.

It's true that Requiem does not uphold realistic standards of officer behavior, but in "The Enemy Within," a mind-altered version of Kirk assaulted three crew members, one of them a woman, and discharged a sidearm in the Engine Room, causing serious damage. If he didn't get a desk job for that, he wasn't going to get in trouble for socializing while M4 refined the ryetalin.

 

My first opinions of ‘Is There In Truth No Beauty’ were less than favorable, but gradually over the years I came to understand the story. I thought David Frankham was outstanding as Larry Marvick.

 

Yes if you take away some of the surface layers, RFM is a beautiful episode. (My fav as I'm sure you all know )

 

Do you mean they named the episode after you?

 

Episode I originally disliked: Shore Leave. I thought it was dumb, but then later on I realized that's the point. It was dumb in a fun kind of way.

Episode that I don't like: Trouble with Tribbles. I don't hate this episode, but I think Piece of the Action was a better comedy and TWT is just overhyped all the time. I didn't really find it funny.

 

“The Trouble With Tribbles” still kinda works within context of the TOS universe in that there are serious implications at play yet we get no sense that it’s really dire. The humour of “I, Mudd” completely undermines the gravity of what they’re facing. And the androids are ridicilous compared to how androids were depicted in the first and third seasons.

“A Piece Of The Action” is funny, but it’s so out there in plausibility it’s insane.

Taken as a whole I understand why Roddenberry was not fond of these episodes and made these kind of stories off-limits going forward. He appreciated contextual humour, but balked at outright silly comedy.

 

Ha!

 

I rewatched it last night per your post. It's grown on me a bit over the years, but it's far from a favorite.

For some reason, I noticed Muldaur's dialogue this time. Every sentence trails off to a whisper. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop hearing it! Now I've infected you, too.

 

I read on Ralph Senensky’s website that he was opposed to the insertion of the psychedelic images whenever Kollos opens his box.

 

Nonsense. The image is [pqerfeecttlly harmli;piqBEWVKBHKBk;bkv;wlq;bkvbkwD;BKVBKJHKQVBBHVEQBHBHCQBHVEQB;VH;KVCQBHKVBHKWBFDHDQHBVFBWHQDBHWEQBHBFQHHBHBVHBHIEB;KWahabbababbabbabaaababbabababababba!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

When I was a kid, I found both "The Corbomite Maneuver" and "Balance of Terror" rather slow and dull, largely because the crew is confined to the bridge for most of the episodes and they're more about the battle of wits between Kirk and the enemy commanders than about action or running around on alien planets. Now I love them both and they're among my very favorites.

I can't think of any TOS episodes I used to love that I dislike now.

 

Funny that a lot of folks have mentioned "Requiem for Methuselah." I watched it a few days ago for what I soon realized was probably the first time (all the way through) since I was a kid, when I had dismissed it as talky and melodramatic. On rewatching it, I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed it. Even Kirk's insta-love with Rayna didn't bother me too much-- it registered less as a true "love story" to me than a dramatization of character types: Kirk's emotionally laudable (but ultimately wrongheaded) impulse to fix the immediate problem in front of his face and to rescue the imperiled innocent, as contrasted with Spock's coldly rational (but correct) calculation to ignore Rayna's individual situation and get back to the ship. Foreshadowing, although obviously unintentional, of WOK. I had previously overlooked the scene in which Spock feebly tries to convince Kirk to allow him to go into the back room by himself, to spare Kirk the sight of the other Rayna models. And how wonderfully tragic is it that the last instance of the "Kirk beats the computer by imposing a logical impossibility" trope is the accidental death of someone whom he loved and to whom he only posed the logical impossibility precisely because he didn't recognize hers as an artificial intelligence. Great, weird, moody 3rd season TOS.

 

Brilliant essay! Thanks.

 

I suppose I didn't enjoy "The Empath" when I was a kid because I thought it was slow and boring, but now I appreciate it a lot more.

Kor

 

Hmm. I didn't merely dislike "The Man Trap"; I was traumatized by it. As a 5th grader. (See point #3 in the linked-to post for details). I was in my 40s or 50s before I saw it again. At one point, I wrote a fanfic short story as a sequel: "Interview with Dr. Ambrose Crater, or 'The Salt Vampire Ate My Parents'." I eventually got to thinking about the premise, and realized how ludicrous it is: common salt is exactly that: extremely common. There are very few water-insoluble chlorides. And even fewer water-insoluble sodium compounds. It is very difficult to remove NaCl from the environment, and I'm not aware of any reaction that would do so with a net release of energy. So the idea of a lifeform evolving the ability to metabolize it, much less to extract it from other lifeforms, is implausible. As implausible as Doc Smith's "Lensman" notions of iron (literally the most stable element on the whole Periodic Table) as an energy source, or radium as both a jewelry metal and a currency metal (even assuming he was utterly ignorant of the lethally deleterious effects of ionizing radiation, it does tend to spontaneously remove itself from the environment).

In fact, I think it was only after having read both versions of Doc Smith's Triplanetary that I realized how ludicrous the whole Salt Vampire premise was.

I still dislike "The Man Trap." Not so much because of the nightmarish premise of a hungry predator luring crew members to their deaths by mimicking trusted friends (or fantasies), nor because the Salt Vampire's "Young Nancy" guise resembled one of my teachers (although I'm hardly happy about either), but because the whole premise is so utterly ludicrous.

But all in all, there aren't a whole lot of ST episodes that I entirely dislike. Not even "Spock's Brain," "Wolf in the Fold," "Turnabout Intruder," "Masks," or "Move Along Home." I did activvely dislike DS9's "Li Nalas trilogy" (and have no inclination to dig out my off-air VHS tape of it; I think I put the whole trilogy onto a T-180) and do dislike most of the Dominion War, Section 31, and Borg episodes.

In fact, I'd say that "Move Along Home" and "Masks" (neither of which, of course, are TOS or TAS) are the closest I've ever gotten to initially disliking episodes, and having them grow on me.