As you wish, but will anybody share the love for LIGHTS OF ZETAR?
While the concept was interesting, and it did give us Memory Alpha... I was always underwhelmed by "THE LIGHTS OF ZETAR".
Star Trek TOS Re-Watch
- Thread starter Commander Troi
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While the concept was interesting, and it did give us Memory Alpha... I was always underwhelmed by "THE LIGHTS OF ZETAR".
Moving on in Production Order
Spock's Brain **½
The first half is great. Awesome setup, very spooky with lots of good full cast involvement. The rear projected viewscreen scenes are great. Marc Daniels shows off this setpiece shamelessly but it adds greatly to the reality of the setting. Even allowing how off center the big chair and the helm console is.
Even once on the plant, it's good. So fun dialog and action (the music in this one is great). And then Zombie Spock beams down and everything starts to get weird. After that, it's really just kind of silly in a typical 60's TV sci-fi way. I mean, if this was an episode of Lost in Space with the robot in place of Spock, it would be a great episode. It's just slightly below average for Trek, but not nearly the train wreck people still say. I mean, jeez, ask any basement dweller on Facebook and they say "not every episode was great...anyone remember Spock's Brain?" like other episodes aren't worse.
Not that I'm defending Bad Trek but this is at least kind of camp fun at its worst. It's not boring. However, I still feel that this got the rep it has because this was the episode NBC "rewarded" fans with after a long hard fight to save the series. I still feel that if Spectre of the Gun aired first, this would just be "that crappy brain episode" and that would be that.
I've seen much worse Star Trek and from shows made a lot more recently. There are still some real gems yet to come this season.
Spock's Brain **½
The first half is great. Awesome setup, very spooky with lots of good full cast involvement. The rear projected viewscreen scenes are great. Marc Daniels shows off this setpiece shamelessly but it adds greatly to the reality of the setting. Even allowing how off center the big chair and the helm console is.
Even once on the plant, it's good. So fun dialog and action (the music in this one is great). And then Zombie Spock beams down and everything starts to get weird. After that, it's really just kind of silly in a typical 60's TV sci-fi way. I mean, if this was an episode of Lost in Space with the robot in place of Spock, it would be a great episode. It's just slightly below average for Trek, but not nearly the train wreck people still say. I mean, jeez, ask any basement dweller on Facebook and they say "not every episode was great...anyone remember Spock's Brain?" like other episodes aren't worse.
Not that I'm defending Bad Trek but this is at least kind of camp fun at its worst. It's not boring. However, I still feel that this got the rep it has because this was the episode NBC "rewarded" fans with after a long hard fight to save the series. I still feel that if Spectre of the Gun aired first, this would just be "that crappy brain episode" and that would be that.
I've seen much worse Star Trek and from shows made a lot more recently. There are still some real gems yet to come this season.
My wife actually hated "MIRI". Enough to call it the worst of TOS. Until I showed her "AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD". Then that became the worst. And remained the worst until "THE WAY TO EDEN". She then asked, "Why would you show me this? I thought you loved me." And then that became the worst episode.
My take:
• Miri is a damn good episode: eerie, shocking, beautiful, and affecting.
• The Way to Eden is a guilty pleasure.
• And the Children Shall Lead is poorly done, bad, and embarrassing.
"MIRI" - agreed, better episode than people give it credit for. Though it does completely gloss over a bigger story... a duplicate Earth.
"THE WAY TO EDEN" - yes, I know it is for some. But I just don't like it at all.
"AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD" - worst episode of TOS, in my opinion. (And, apparently, many others... it's won 'Most Disliked TOS Episode' four out of five times.)
So much wasted potential! Are there other duplicate Earths out there? Other duplicates of other worlds we know? How did they get there? Why are there duplicates out there? So many unanswered questions!
(The answer, of course, is
How do we know that the show's Earth isn't a duplicate, too?
It certainly isn't our Earth. 
Eden, to me, was written to ridicule hippies (many TV series at the time did this), written by an over-30 establishment person who doesn't understand hippies or hates hippies, and in the end tries to show that their philosophy is stupid or dangerous. The music, I thought, parodied and insulted the socially-conscious music of the times. Badly.
I was too young to be a hippie when it aired (11 or 12), but at that stage I wanted to be a hippie (mainly for the free love aspect
), so I felt insulted by it.
I was too young to be a hippie when it aired (11 or 12), but at that stage I wanted to be a hippie (mainly for the free love aspect
), so I felt insulted by it.Look, as much as I love TWTE, I'll be the first person to admit it has many problems. However, I would not consider an intent to ridicule hippies, youthful idealism, 'dropping out,' or anything else associated with it to be one of these problems. If you are trying to ridicule hippies you don't have Spock, the most beloved, most 'hip' character on the show, espouse and defend their beliefs (even unto the closing words of the episode). And you don't have a love story in which the hippie shows no remorse whatsoever for having abandoned Starfleet (and our non-hippie Chekhov), and we as viewers are asked to accept her decision, not criticize it. That, to me, is actually a great strength of this episode: As corny as the hippies are, they (apart from Sevrin) seem to be both be legitimately having fun and to earnestly believe in a worthwhile cause. To me, that makes the depiction of the hippies plausible and therefore worlds apart from Dragnet's 'blue boy' and other "hey, man" depictions of hippies on TV. And where else in any ST series do we ever hear a criticism of the supposed utopia of the future as cogent as the one conveyed from the hippies to Kirk via Spock in the first act? Pity they didn't explore that more, and instead focused on the Svengali aspects of Sevrin's character in the last two acts.
And, god help me, I actually don't mind the music (apart from the "I don't know how to do it, but it's got to be done" part, which is odious). It's corny but charming. (I have seen wayyyyyy worse depictions of 'youth' music on other television shows, from the late 60s through to today). And as objectively "bad" as the music may be, I don't believe it was intended to be bad or to be seen as bad; according to Wiki it was written by two of the actors playing the hippies themselves, one of whom later included some of the songs on her own album.
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I have seen this stated here fairly frequently, and it always baffles me. Until I read otherwise, I would have guessed it was in most people's top 25. I consider it nearly flawless. But to each their own, of course.
We reach!
Not only were the "Eden" songs quite good, I'd say they were among the best things of their kind, meaning pop songs hastily written for an episode. Gilligan's Island had faux-rock in "Don't Bug the Mosquitoes," just for one terrible example.Lost in Space had an instrumental dance number in "The Promised Planet," and while I might love the crap out of it, it was never hit material. Maybe I was influenced by the context as a kid to like it more than it deserves. (But Spock's own instrumental in "The Way to Eden" does nothing for me, so maybe the LIS dance number really is good.)
But come on, the "Eden" vocal songs are intrinsically good, if just a little trite and old-fashioned after 55 years. I still play them sometimes, from the 15-CD box set.
Bewitched had a fantastic song in "Serena Stops the Show," but I dont' think it was written for the episode. So that doesn't count.
Indeed. The interactions with Spock and Servin's followers, as well as the dialog around the artificially sterile environments is quite interesting to explore, and worth exploring further in a franchise that touts itself, later on, as utopic.
I'll be honest... that part is really the only decent thing about "THE WAY TO EDEN".
But wow... the rest of the episode is a chore to watch.
For ship appreciation, The Way To Eden gives us the last appearances of Auxiliary Control and the Shuttlecraft Galileo (II). 
The episode did a good job using the internal Enterprise sets (Bridge, Quarters, Rec. Room, Dining Room, etc.) and even gives us a planet set. Sadly, no Main Engineering. 
The episode did a good job using the internal Enterprise sets (Bridge, Quarters, Rec. Room, Dining Room, etc.) and even gives us a planet set. Sadly, no Main Engineering. 
Agreed. It's Kirk that's presented as a stuffed shirt in comparison to the hip Spock who 'reaches'.
It's funny, we don't think of Kirk as being square, but he's a bookworm, a scholar, and a disapproving elder all in one.
And a military officer. Back in 1968-9 with the Vietnam War peaking, most military officers didn't "reach" with the hippie movement.
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