yup
Even the special effect for when they change bodies looks very Lost in Spacey.
TOS series finale
- Thread starter Captrek
- Start date
yup
Even the special effect for when they change bodies looks very Lost in Spacey.
Not a bad way to end TOS. Maybe the Phase II staff should look into this for their final episode.
Technically speaking, TOS open end was in TAS episode The Counter-Clock Incident(the final episode of TAS). Since David Gerrold mentioned that TAS was the fourth season that TOS should have had, it would make sense if TCCI were that open-ended episode.
A misunderstanding that has become a perpetual myth. THE TIME TUNNEL ended its first season with the episode "Town Of Terror". As with all episodes, a few-minute teaser for the next episode was inserted to fill out the time in the hour.
A second season had been planned, so the powers-that-be left the usual few-minutes in that final episode for a teaser about "Next Week."
Since the show was headed for reruns for the summer, a teaser was needed for the episode to be shown, which happened to be the pilot episode, the first episode, the one about the Titanic.
At the conclusion of the rerun season, if "Town Of Terror" had been the last episode shown before the new season, the producers would have inserted a new teaser for the first episode of the second season. This would have been done exactly like the way they handled LOST IN SPACE.
On the last rerun episode of the first season (in black & white), a color teaser for the first episode of the second season was inserted the week before that season was to begin. That was exciting to behold, as we got a taste of how the show would look in color.
Anyway, ABC's chief programmer was then fired and a new head of programming was brought in, who then cancelled THE TIME TUNNEL in favor of another show, THE LEGEND OF CUSTER.
Thus the final episode was left in the state it currently resides in, that of having a teaser for the Titanic episode.
But it was NEVER intended to be any kind of cyclical loop - just a promo for a rerun.
Harry
I don't know, I kind of liked "Turnabout Intruder" even of it was never meant to be the TOS finale. Anybody here read the novel The Joy Machine? i understand that would have been an actual TV episode after Turnabout had the series continued. Maybe that would have been a better finale I don't really know, just wondering is all...
That's just not the way he was written or played. The first thing he says to her is to call her a work of art, defining her by her physical beauty just as Plasus does. At that point, he knows nothing about her intelligence or education or demeanor, but he still baldly flatters her in terms that commemorate her looks. Then later in his voiceover thoughts (an oddity in itself), he thinks:
So according to the script, Spock is captivated by Droxine's looks above all else -- also her "purity and sweetness." Not a single mention of intellect or education. This is not the way Spock would think about a woman he found intriguing.
Then there's the fact that he casually blurts out the secrets of Vulcan reproduction to this virtual stranger, when just a year and a half earlier, he was willing to die rather than reveal the existence of pon farr to his closest friends in the whole universe. It was established clearly in "Amok Time" and reaffirmed in Voyager that Vulcans simply do not discuss pon farr with outsiders, except in the most extreme emergencies and only with the greatest reluctance. So it's ludicrous to suggest that Spock would violate that taboo just to flirt with a near-stranger he has the hots for. His casualness about it in "The Cloud Minders" is a gross continuity error as well as a gross characterization error.
Well, that's certainly selective reasoning, given that Nichelle Nichols is nothing like that type.
Exactly. It's too colloquial and casual. Not to mention that he's using it to refer to a planet. It's not very logical or accurate to call a planet "little."
And "The Counter-Clock Incident" is just as dreadful an episode as "Turnabout Intruder," if not more so. The original crew didn't have much luck with final episodes.
"The Joy Machine" was one of many outlines/scripts that ultimately went unused for one reason or another. It had been in development since the second season, if not earlier. We don't know if it would've been made if the show had gotten another season. And there's certainly no reason to assume it would've been the finale.
Based on my recollection of the novel, the reason they didn't make the episode may have been that it was too much like ones they'd already done. It's kind of a cross between "Return of the Archons" and "This Side of Paradise."
Well, he was educated the Vulcan way. Which means I suppose he's a know-it-all.
Actually, according to the movie, "Final Frontier", as they were going back to the ship, Kirk remarked on an old poet line, "Give me a ship and a star to sail by"
Spock immediately said who it was, McCoy argues, but Kirk acknowledges was right.
The good doctor asks how he knows this, and Spock replies, "I have been educated in the classic arts as well."
To which Dr. Mccoy replied, "Then how come you don't know 'Row, Row, Row your boat?'"
Ah. The giants.
You're right, Christopher. So with your knowledge of how the entertainment world works, how do we end up with such out of character writing in that ep? I know Mr. Gerrold was unsatisfied, and that the words on the shooting script page are not necessarily his (often true with the credited-writer.) But if Spock's character had become pretty consistent by then, where does this deviance come from? Just interested.
Sorry, but that's not a story; that's just borrowing elements from previous episode and throwing in space battles.
I don't know what more to say than has already been said. Pretty much all the writers who had defined these characters -- Roddenberry, Coon, Fontana, Lucas -- were out of the picture. Roddenberry had stopped rewriting scripts and the others had all moved on. So Fred Freiberger and his story editor Arthur Singer were dropped into the show without much guidance on how to approach the series and its characters. The writing problems were not limited to this one episode; it was just a particularly egregious example.
As for why Spock got saddled with such an out-of-character romance, maybe that was due to notes from some network executive. Nimoy was the most popular cast member by far, especially with female viewers, so there was network pressure to give him romantic-lead stuff. Why it turned out so much more ridiculous here than in, say, "All Our Yesterdays," I couldn't say.
I'm clearly not Christopher, but the way this happens is that the Producer—in this case, Fred Freiberger—sets the tone for the scripts, and decides on what changes need to be made. In the case of Gerrold's script, it was rewritten in ways he didn't like, but the author has no say in the matter. It's the producer's decision.
This comes back to something I discussed with the late Carl Sautter—who co-wrote two WGA Award Winning episodes of "Moonlighting"—about how shows change after the first two years or so because the creators typically move on to make new shows and turn their series over to others. Those people often don't have the same background and familiarity with the scripts and scriptwriting process, and certainly not the same POV as the creator. The result is that the characters tend to get simplified down to their most obvious characteristics and the nuances get lost. The example Carl liked to use was The Golden Girls, and how Betty White's character was originally portrayed as naïve, but was reduced to being rather dumb. In the case of Star Trek's 3rd season, Spock often got reduced to super-Spock, he of the high intelligence but without the shadings that existed in earlier scripts.
Mind you, these after-the-creator-is-gone situations don't always return diminished results (as some would argue was the case with TNG), but it's common enough to be a truism.
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I'd say it was true of TNG in one respect, in terms of the Enterprise itself. The creators of TNG conceived the E-D as a sort of university village in space, a travelling research institute with a lot of civilian scientists and their families aboard, and the reason why there were families aboard is that the ship was designed for deep-deep-space exploration that would keep them away from home for years at a time, so it had to be an entire self-sufficient community. But the later producers forgot all about this. The E-D spent most of its time in familiar territory on diplomatic or political or relief missions, and the mixed Starfleet-civilian crew was all but forgotten, with everyone being Starfleet except for the occasional spouse or kid (and the Ten Forward staff). So I'd say the ship got simplified and the nuances were lost.
There is the joy of the new, and discovering characters as one writes and acts them. Then I suspect the grind of a show per week sets in, the novelty wears off, etc.
Gerrold writes about shows going wrong in his Tribbles book, iirc. Either there, or in Worlds of ST. He also writes well about drama in general. Sounds like he knows whereof he speaks, since his script was rewritten to put Spock out of character, and to end in a fight between Kirk and cloud-guy, with Trogs going back to being happy workers at the end.
How'd we get on this subject?
Gerrold writes about shows going wrong in his Tribbles book, iirc. Either there, or in Worlds of ST. He also writes well about drama in general. Sounds like he knows whereof he speaks, since his script was rewritten to put Spock out of character, and to end in a fight between Kirk and cloud-guy, with Trogs going back to being happy workers at the end.
How'd we get on this subject?
I never suggested "The Joy Machine" would be the finale, I merely asked how it would have fared had it been made into an episode after what we got as the finale, and maybe had been the finale instead. I apologise for the conufsion.
They're not his words because it's not his script. Gerrold shares story credit on that episode with Oliver Crawford, and Margaret Armen is the credited writer of "The Cloud Minders" script.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
Over the years I've often mused about Kirk and crew ending off their five year mission with a two-part episode that would see them go out the way they came in - via another encounter with the great barrier at the edge of the galaxy. The details of the story itself would need to be such that such a visit would make complete sense. They'd ultimately head back to Earth but the door would still be cracked open for the future of the franchise. But I think a final mission should have tie-in with their first mission as we saw them. I believe it would be fitting.
^Considering that the galactic barrier was already revisited in "By Any Other Name" and (sort of) "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", I don't think it would've really stood out as a bookend-worthy story.
A.V.I.A.F.
Captain
More specifically, I think it would have been cool to have them go back to Delta Vega (I'll it to your imaginations to develop the pretense), only to discover that Mitchell did not in fact die, but had emerged from his makeshift "tomb" waiting for an opportunity to leave the planet and take over the galaxy. I always thought that might have been a better idea for The Final Frontier movie as well.
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