Let's talk "Spock's Brain"

[Metryq]

One night the writers got sloppy drunk and said, "Hey, let's write the perfect episode for The Wonder Years to spoof years from now!"

 

[Khan Jr]

Everyone asks "what is brain?", no one asks "HOW is brain?"

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

See, Space:1999 had androids

One of Bain's key episodes ends with an unblinking 30-second series of still-frame-style shots of her ''emoting.'' If not the music, we'd be asleep too.Ten minutes before that she thought all the other Alphans were dead and cried like a pregnant moose.*

(*How would I know that? Good question.)

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

One night the writers got sloppy drunk and said, "Hey, let's write the perfect episode for The Wonder Years to spoof years from now!"

There are far worse things than being tortured by Danica McKellar.*

(*Perhaps the WALKER TEXAS RANGER episode she was forced to co-star in qualifies.)

 

[johnnybear]

I've never understood the hate this episode gets. No it's not one of the best but it's good and it has some unusual moments. I'd rather Plato's Stepchildren get the cold shoulder to be honest.
JB

 

[Metryq]

There are far worse things than being tortured by Danica McKellar.*

She blinded me with science. (Or at least math.)

 

[fireproof78]

I've never understood the hate this episode gets. No it's not one of the best but it's good and it has some unusual moments. I'd rather Plato's Stepchildren get the cold shoulder to be honest.
JB

They both deserve cold shoulder treatment.

 

[Ssosmcin]

I've never understood the hate this episode gets. No it's not one of the best but it's good and it has some unusual moments. I'd rather Plato's Stepchildren get the cold shoulder to be honest.
JB

I like Plato's Stepchildren as well as Spock's Brain, so, no cold shoulder from me.

 

[I am not Herbert]

Whenever I hear a self-described TOS fan bagging on Spock's Brain I think "this person's TOS fandom is really different from mine." Not better or worse, just very different. Spock's Brain is obviously not nearly of the same caliber as Mirror, Mirror or A Taste of Armageddon or something like that, and I certainly wouldn't show it to someone who was interested in checking out the series for the first time. But I nevertheless enjoy these tonally-inconsistent, 'grab-bag' type episodes, where the episode never fully comes together as a whole but there's a lot of stuff to enjoy on a scene-by-scene basis (SB; The Apple; By Any Other Name; Omega Glory). I think that's why I enjoy the 3rd season far more than most people. A lot of the episodes didn't quite totally come together, but at least they tried a lot of things (often somewhat offbeat things) they hadn't tried before, and as a result the TOS universe feels a lot larger than what you'd otherwise get with only 79 episodes. If the 3rd season happened today and the execs were trying to save the series, we'd have a bunch of Klingon episodes; a bunch of Mirror Universe episodes; Edith Keeler Somehow Lived But Now Has to Die Again For Some Reason; a two-part Balance of Terror-style 'submarine' episode; another Vulcan-based episode; and Female Romulan Commander 2: Electric Boogaloo. Instead, we get Kathryn Hays performing interpretative dance on a theater of the mind set, the cast watching Frank Gorshin and Lou Antonio perform a PSA about racial enmity, Space Hippies, Space Lincoln, Taming of the Space Shrew, Android Tempest and yes, Brain and Brain What is Brain. None of those episodes totally deliver but they're all weird as hell and (I would argue) enjoyably different from everything that came before.

 

[CoveTom]

If one believes the Cushman books, the critical reviews of Spock's Brain were actually positive.

But really, The Cloud Minders, Mark of Gideon, And the Children Shall Lead, Wink of an Eye, Whom Gods Destroy and Turnabout Intruder are all lower ranked in my view. I could pick a few form the prior two seasons I like less also. A least Spock's Brain makes some kind of story sense. It's never dull, has a great soundtrack and imaginative camera work.

Agreed on most counts. Although Yvonne Craig does give an excellent over-the-top performance in "Whom Gods Destroy."

 

[Metryq]

Agreed on most counts. Although Yvonne Craig does give an excellent over-the-top performance in "Whom Gods Destroy."

She got cold shoulders, except when the lights were on. They used some big instruments in that day.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

@CoveTom I agree that Yvonne Craig was outstanding as Marta, and it helped that she had been a professional dancer.

But can you imagine if they got an actress who couldn't dance? They would either have to cut the scene, or play it for laughs. Marta could have been like Lucy Ricardo, so desperate to be in show business that she bluffs her way through the performance without talent. If anything, that would have made her demise more of a gut punch, but the tonal shift would be so severe that viewers might be angry. So instead of dancing badly, I would have her give a longer dramatic reading. Any actress can do that.

 

[Maurice]

She blinded me with science. (Or at least math.)

True story: twenty odd years ago I had lunch with Thomas Dolby.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

True story: twenty odd years ago I had lunch with Thomas Dolby.

Sounds promising.

 

[Maurice]

Sounds promising.

It was a biz lunch. He had a business making ringtones for phones, and Namco had an app where we sold ringtones. My buddy, Matt, worked with Thomas and we set up a lunch meeting at our offices. He was a pleasant guy. Sadly nothing came of it.

 

[Set Harth]

Did he blind you with any science?

 

[Maurice]

Did he blind you with any science?

No, but he said he made so much money licensing that song that he didn't have to work if he didn't want to.

 

[PCz911]

An important note about Spock's Brain: if possible, you should watch with the original fx. At the very end, Kelley and Shatner perform a gag that the remastered edition omits, because it occurs during a film dissolve to the Enterprise. The remaster cuts away early to avoid the original fx in the dissolve. I missed it as a child but my father burst out laughing. He had to tell me what they did.

I have a little more to say on SB as well:

Much like "The Mark of Gideon" where they built a whole Enterprise mockup, "Spock's Brain" has an alien society doing something impractical that draws our heroes in.

• If you just need a humanoid brain, wouldn't your own planet be the place to get it? It's quicker, vastly cheaper, and a sure thing, compared to going out into the galaxy looking for one.

• If you go to all the trouble of mounting an interstellar space mission, what are your chances of running into an alien ship with a prime specimen like Spock on board? Seems more like an impossible dream than a sensible plan. Kara must have been heading for a specific solar system where she knows there are humanoids.

• If only a superior "brain from space" will do, then they should have preserved tissues from the old Controller and cloned him as needed. Or when they got the old one 10,000 years ago, they should have gotten some spares and kept them frozen for later use.

• It's not clear what Spock's brain could be doing in that box, that an electronic computer could not do.

I like "Spock's Brain" for its good points, but it also seems like a first-draft, wild-idea story that should have evolved into a more respectable plot about visiting Sigma Draconis, with no brain stealing involved. Who knows what it could have been, if more work had been put into the plot.

I don’t remember the gag. What did he do?

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I don’t remember the gag. What did he do?

It seems like Kirk takes the remote from McCoy and pretends like he's going to use it to shut Spock up.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

But he just turns off the TV instead.