What would a fourth season have looked like?

[Lord Garth]

There are only a handful of TOS episodes I outright dislike. And a third of them I'd call "excellent". So if I were doing a three-way division, it would roughly come out to: 10% bad, 60% good, 30% excellent.

9 times out of 10, if I watch TOS, I'm watching something I enjoy.

 

[Spock's Barber]

I

There are only a handful of TOS episodes I outright dislike. And a third of them I'd call "excellent". So if I were doing a three-way division, it would roughly come out to: 10% bad, 60% good, 30% excellent.


9 times out of 10, if I watch TOS, I'm watching something I enjoy.

I do watch the poor episodes every once in a while...it makes the excellent episodes seem even better in comparison.

 

[Redfern]

Can't agree with this either. The half-constructed sets on Spectre, complete with a clever in-universe explanation, were very ethereal and added to the atmosphere.

Exactly! So many miss the point. the Melkots (Melkotians?) extract the image of the Wild West town from Kirk's mind, but Kirk's knowledge of that era is incomplete. So, we get this surrealist "dream-scape", buildings missing whole walls, saloon paintings suspended in mid air because Kirk can't remember (or just doesn't know) all the details.

Imagine how much more nightmarish the Talosians' illusions would have appeared if they had taken that approach. I suddenly have this mental image of Pike fighting the Khalar" (sp?) upon a stone spiral staircase leading nowhere, much like the famous sequence in "the 7th Voyage of Sinbad". Actually, Sinbad looked rather like Pike in that movie, doesn't he?

 

[Vger23]

When Harve Bennett was preparing for The Wrath of Khan, he watched all 79 TOS episodes. He said about 1/3 were excellent, 1/3 were okay and 1/3 were stinkers.

I think Bennett is a genius but I have never agreed with this statement. Going with 78 to make the math easy (78/3), 26 just okay and 26 stinkers? Nope. I don't think so.

Gotta agree with Phaser Two on this one. It's not even close in my opinion. Most of TOS was very engaging, entertaining and high-quality. I think the S3 "bashing" is very group-think-y and en vogue, but before I started reading that on the inter webs, I never differentiated S3 from any of the other 2 seasons. Each season has great episodes, and each has small littering of sub-standard stuff. I'm not sure I'd call anything a "stinker..." as I find there are interesting and redeeming things in even my least-favorite episodes.

I also don't think it's fair to blame Freddy F. He did what he had to do with a limited budget, less Roddenberry involvement, etc.

Honestly, I kind of like the look and tone of S3 the best. It has a really weird and other-worldly feel that I really like

S1 gets a lot of credit, but there are some substandard episodes in there (Mudd's Women, Alternative Factor) as there are in S2 (Who Mourns for Adonais, Catspaw, Bread and Circuses)...not to mention S2's proclivity for leaning on the "parallel Earth" stories.

S3 has some of my favorite episodes:

Enterprise Incident
Paradise Syndrome
In Truth No Beauty
Specter of the Gun
Day of the Dove
Lights of Zetar
All Our Yesterdays

And...26 "stinkers???" No frigging way. I'm sorry...but like I said, it's not even close.

The only episodes in the entire catalogue that I find sub-standard are:

Mudd's Women
Alternative Factor
Who Mourns?
Catspaw
And the Children Shall Lead
Plato's Stepchildren
Turnabout Intruder

 

[Spock's Barber]

I have to agree with the cast of TOS...Shatner and Nimoy especially voiced their concerns about quality of the 3rd episodes.

 

[Maurice]

Bob Justman should've written a script in S1 or S2. Just one. Then he could say, "See? I'm creative too! I'm not just a nuts-and-bolts guy." Then they could've held on to most of the writing staff. Gene Roddenberry might still have been off in la-la land but it wouldn't have been as bad. And they had a better grasp on Spock, which would be more likely to keep Leonard Nimoy happy.

He could have also handled the re-writes of scripts that were marginally acceptable, just like GR and Gene Coon did in S1 and S2.

This presumes Justman was or had the ability to be any sort of screenwriter, and I've seen zip evidence of that. The ability to come up with an idea for a story is miles from being able to execute a teleplay. I've read a fair number of his memos, and for all his salient observations he made a lot of bad suggestions. If the Genes had listened to him they'd have "cut off" (killed) "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "The Doomsday Machine", both of which RHJ suggested abandoning.

 

[Spock's Barber]

This presumes Justman was or had the ability to be any sort of screenwriter, and I've seen zip evidence of that. The ability to come up with an idea for a story is miles from being able to execute a teleplay. I've read a fair number of his memos, and for all his salient observations he made a lot of bad suggestions. If the Genes had listened to him they'd have "cut off" (killed) "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "The Doomsday Machine", both of which RHJ suggested abandoning.

What about Fred Freiberger? I'm not sure what he actually 'produced' during his short tenure on TOS. Did he handle any of the re-writing of any rough 3rd season scripts, because Lord knows some of those scripts were B grade science fiction. Not as bad as his giant grasshopper flick "Beginning of the End", but....

 

[JonnyQuest037]

What about Fred Freiberger? I'm not sure what he actually 'produced' during his short tenure on TOS.

24 finished episodes of television.

 

[Ssosmcin]

Fred Freiberger was the spirit of death to established television series back in the 60s/70s! I mean he killed off Trek, Space 1999 and The Six Million Dollar Man and I'm not sure if he did in Kung Fu as well!
JB

Space:199 Year 2 wouldn't have happened at all without Freiberger. The series was dead, according to most reports, unless someone could come in an "Americanize" it. Freiberger walked in with Trek on his resume and Maya as a character and the seres was given a second chance. So, he didn't kill Space:1999. He actually kept it alive another year and some of those episodes were pretty darned good.

The Six Million Dollar Man was well past its prime when he got involved. And he produced every other episode with Allan Balter. Lee Majors wanted to leave (I believe he was coaxed into a final year and his performance betrays his boredom in those episodes), the transfer of The Bionic Woman to NBC took away the crossovers and there was really no life left in the series. Having said that, I still enjoyed the 5th season more than the "mustache" season.

Trek was dead no matter what. Unless there was a ratings spike, and at 10pm on Fridays, that was never gonna happen, Freiberger just did what he could to produce the doomed series on budget. And, again, some very good episodes were made.

Give the guy a break after all this time. He actually saved shows like The Wild Wild West...

 

[Maurice]

What about Fred Freiberger? I'm not sure what he actually 'produced' during his short tenure on TOS. Did he handle any of the re-writing of any rough 3rd season scripts, because Lord knows some of those scripts were B grade science fiction. Not as bad as his giant grasshopper flick "Beginning of the End", but....

Freiberger had tons of writing credits, as many as eighty before he joined Trek, as a quick glance at his IMDB would readily demonstrate.

I'm not defending his choices, but, c'mon, JDF Black and Steve Carabatsos and Coon and JM Lucas all had Roddenberry riding herd on them to one degree or another. Roddenberry arguably became something of an absentee landlord during Freiberger's tenure, so a change in the show's Trek-ness is hardly surprising.

Back to Justman, I'm simply saying he never wrote a script for any show he ever worked on, even after he became a full-on producer on Then Came Bronson.

 

[Lord Garth]

It's still too bad someone from within the existing writing staff wasn't promoted to Head Staff Writer. DC Fontana would've been a good choice, though it probably wouldn't have been considered as an option back in 1968.

 

[johnnybear]

The Six Million Dollar Man was well past its prime when he got involved. And he produced every other episode with Allan Balter. Lee Majors wanted to leave (I believe he was coaxed into a final year and his performance betrays his boredom in those episodes), the transfer of The Bionic Woman to NBC took away the crossovers and there was really no life left in the series. Having said that, I still enjoyed the 5th season more than the "mustache" season.

.

Yes it's true that Majors wanted out and Martin Caidin wanted Monte Markham to take over the show as the Seven Million Dollar Man but the producers stuck with Lee! Love the comment about the mustache season too!
JB

 

[mb22]

That’s kind of funny. Fred thought Trekkers are worse than Nazis.

Hyperbole. Here's more from Fred: https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-039/page/n47

 

[johnnybear]

I read that article years back! Problem is I wonder if I still have that issue?
JB

 

[22 Stars]

Hyperbole. Here's more from Fred: https://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-039/page/n47

Fun to read this again, thanks for posting the link!

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm wondering could the scripts produced for TAS be extended for 52 minutes for a hypothetical 4th season of TOS?

"More Tribbles, More Troubles" and "BEM" already existed as proposed/rejected episode synopses intended for TOS.

Also, Alan Dean Foster wrote a two-part Klingon script, which he was asked to resubmit if TOS was renewed for a fourth season. He has now long-forgotten the episodes' title (I asked him, via a friend). As mentioned in the five-part serialised essay in the opening of the anniversary trade paperback ombibuses (see "Star Trek Logs Seven/Eight"), ADF was able to novelize that two-parter for the expanded scenes he had to write, when Ballantine asked for the last four TAS scripts to be expanded into full novels. All the scenes featuring Kumara the Klingon, Kirk's former roommate from his time in a Starfleet exchange program, are from that script. Sadly, ADF no longer has his copy of that script, but he was very grateful to have it on hand when suddenly expected to turn a 22-minute animated script for "The Counter-Clock Incident" into a novel-length story ("Star Trek Log 7")!

EDIT: Slightly revised due to foggy memory.

 

[Phaser Two]

Ah, the capacity for disagreement among reasonable minds in the universe (to say nothing of unreasonable minds! ).

NBC slashed the budget for S3. Fred appears to have enjoyed Star Trek and I believe he did the best he could under the circumstances. Plus, just because there are some eps in S3 that almost everyone here hates, so what? There are also gems like Tholian Web, Day of the Dove, All Our Yesterdays, Wink of an Eye and (although I don't consider it as such, most do) Enterprise Incident. I recently decided upon rewatch that Cloud Minders is outstanding. Then there are many others with flaws that are still thoroughly enjoyable, like Spock's Brain and Lights of Zetar. The Empath, too. Savage Curtain has fantastic dialogue and Spectre is very clever. And then there's the best part for me - because of the budget constraints we get to see a ton of the Enterprise!

Soapbox dismounted. An S4 incorporating the best elements of S3 would have been great.

 

[Harvey]

Alan Dean Foster had been asked to supply a two-part Klingon script for a fourth season.

• Alan Dean Foster would have been 24, unpublished (his first short story in 1971; his first novel was in 1972), and completely unknown in Hollywood during a hypothetical fourth season of Star Trek (1969-70).
• With the exception of "The Menagerie," which was produced under special circumstances, the show had a policy of not producing any two-part episodes, which could gum up an already tight post-production pipeline and threaten their deliveries to NBC.
• Star Trek was totally "bought up" by the end of the third season, and no story or script by Alan Dean Foster had been purchased as part of that season. The producers never got to the point of buying stories or making any concrete plans for a fourth season, really, since the show was cancelled in early 1969 and the writing had been on the wall for quite some time before that point.

In short, if Alan Dean Foster had a script lying around for a fourth season of Star Trek, it's something he had written on spec before his professional career got started, not something anyone asked him to write for the show.

 

[Harvey]

NBC slashed the budget for S3.

No. Paramount slashed the budget for season three. NBC paid more than ever for the third season. Contractually, their license fee went up every broadcast year.

 

[Phaser Two]

No. Paramount slashed the budget for season three. NBC paid more than ever for the third season. Contractually, their license fee went up every broadcast year.

Yes! Quite right. Thanks for the correction, Harvey. I was erroneously conflating networks and production companies, as they often exist today, without really thinking about what I was typing.