If TOS ever, ever jumped the proverbial shark it was with S3 opener "Spock's Brain" with it's crazy, 60s zany way of some female goddesses taking the Vulcan's physical mind with them to their homeworld to lead them out of darkness and teach them the benefits of modern society. Wait...was I watching the same episode as you all were? lol Kind of like something out of Barbarella.
When Star Trek 'JUMPED THE SHARK'
- Thread starter Captain Tracy
- Start date
Oddly enough, that was the first episode I ever saw, September 1968 when I was almost 12. I knew about the show and had made a point to see the season premiere. I saw most of the third season first-run but never knew how good the series could be until the early seasons turned up in the five-per-week reruns a few years later.
I don't see where that has anything to do with...anything.
Just joking around, mostly. Playing the GR did it,said it or approved it card. Therefore it can't be bad.
I understand. It may not be the absolute worst episode Trek had to offer but it was a hokey plot straight out of 1960s "B" movies as far as I was concerned.
JUSTKATE - Well,... as long as we are all 'Fessing Up',... I too must admit a very strong fondness for this episode,... even though it grates against every fiber in my being it terms of it's overall 'dreadfulness',... you have to love it for the relief the sheer absurdity it provides LOL!
People don't seem to understand the "jump the shark" phrase. It's a point in a TV series where it gets truly terrible AND NEVER RECOVERS.
It's not something you can do, then 'unjump', then jump again multiple times. It is supposed to be a one-off moment/realisation where the quality slides and does not get any better from that point.
As such, Trek as a franchise has never really jumped the shark.
It's not something you can do, then 'unjump', then jump again multiple times. It is supposed to be a one-off moment/realisation where the quality slides and does not get any better from that point.
As such, Trek as a franchise has never really jumped the shark.
Sure, but there were still a few enjoyable episodes of "Happy Days" produced and aired after Fonzie's shark jump and many of the original cast had departed or been spun-off.
(I'll just never forgive the last episode for failing to resolve the "whatever happened to Chuck?" question. Mr C. talks about how proud his is of his "two children".)
So even the show to coin the phrase "jumped the shark" was able to recover, in some ways, from actually jumping the shark.
I don't think it means when a show gets terrible. It's a point where a show makes kind of a left turn away from it's original formula and into something different, and never recovers. Happy Days continued to be enjoyable after Fonzie jumped the sharks, but from that point on, the character could do ANYTHING. Whatever reality the show had was thrown over for crowd pleasing fantasy.
You could argue that Trek jumped when Frieberger took over, so for the audience of the time, that was Spock's Brain. The series was no longer jaunty fun, but an overly serious and operatic, less-consistently well written sci-fi series. As soon as Spock's grey matter was being passed around and he was telling McCoy how to put it back in, series credibility was trashed.
Other shows that jumped: M*A*S*H, Cheers, Dallas, SeaQuest, Get Smart, I dream of Jeannie, and so many more. It's that point when you say "after (such and such) happened, the show started heading in another direction." Like when they introduce a baby into the format. It doesn't necessarily mean the show suddenly got awful.
You could argue that Trek jumped when Frieberger took over, so for the audience of the time, that was Spock's Brain. The series was no longer jaunty fun, but an overly serious and operatic, less-consistently well written sci-fi series. As soon as Spock's grey matter was being passed around and he was telling McCoy how to put it back in, series credibility was trashed.
Other shows that jumped: M*A*S*H, Cheers, Dallas, SeaQuest, Get Smart, I dream of Jeannie, and so many more. It's that point when you say "after (such and such) happened, the show started heading in another direction." Like when they introduce a baby into the format. It doesn't necessarily mean the show suddenly got awful.
Yeah, while it's a colorful metaphor it's also a very inaccurate one since there have been many cases of a show being seen as "jumping the shark" yet go on to either redeem itself or continue to run for a long time. Star Trek TNG has been said to have jumped the shark with the sex episode of Season 1 (if not earlier when they remade The Naked Time or introduced Wesley in episode 1). Doctor Who is said to "jump the shark" every time a new Doctor or companion is introduced (no exceptions - dig into the history going back to the departure of Susan back in 1964). Daniel Craig supposedly jumped Bond's shark with Casino Royale -- until all the rave reviews came in and suddenly the critics rolled up and went away.
With Star Trek TOS if you're going to use the "moment the show started to die" analogy, you need to go back to S01E01 - the Man Trap, which was the monster-of-the-week episode Roddenberry didn't want shown first, but was. I don't feel Star Trek, as an NBC series, ever recovered from that, hence its near-cancellation after season 1. Season 2 gave us the tribbles, which to this day divides fans as to whether it was "one joke too far". Spock's Brain is an easy target, but in my opinion TOS was doomed before the third season even started airing, so it didn't really matter what they did. Picking it as the season premiere was a bit dumb, though.
Alex
Trek wasn't jaunty fun the first half of S1, and much of S3 is as good as much of S2.
I claim "no jump."
If you assume that TOS did indeed "jump the shark" at some point, I say it would have to be well before "Patterns of Force". What about the duplicate Earth in "Miri"? Or the transporter malfunction creating the duplicate Kirk in "The Enemy Within?" Or the notion of a Venus drug turning women into sex goddesses (or a placebo doing it) in "Mudd's Women"? Or how about those cheesy flowers that spit confetti on everyone and make them goofy in "This Side of Paradise"? Of course, maybe you don't have to go past Gary Lockwood wearing tinfoil sandwiched between contact lenses to portray a mutant who would be God in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"... And maybe that "Space, the final frontier..." speech that only talks about men and not women seems pretty cheesy as well.
The bottom line is that a series like TOS is, by its very nature, both a pioneer and an experiment, week-by-week. It can never stop taking risks and never stop stumbling as a result. If you want a show that never puts out laughable blunders, you'll never watch TOS.
So did TOS "jump"? Maybe it was doing that right from the beginning. I'd cut it a little slack for being a daring pioneer, though.
The bottom line is that a series like TOS is, by its very nature, both a pioneer and an experiment, week-by-week. It can never stop taking risks and never stop stumbling as a result. If you want a show that never puts out laughable blunders, you'll never watch TOS.
So did TOS "jump"? Maybe it was doing that right from the beginning. I'd cut it a little slack for being a daring pioneer, though.
True. Strictly speaking one could argue that after TOS' first season it was never the same again, but that isn't to say it was bad.
I, too, tend to think of "jumping the shark" as the moment a show has just gone too far and never manages to win me back. Strictly speaking, though, that sort of thing tends to be more incremental as you hang in because you want to like the show but eventually reach a point you can't stomach or forgive anymore.
TOS never really did that for me. Although there were occasional episodes that failed to really win me over the series as a whole remained quite watchable.
This is debatable from an individual point of view rather than as an absolute.
I could argue that TAS had "jump the shark" moments because while there's a lot in TAS that I like there's also a lot I find disappointing, and that's taking into account the period and conditions when it was produced. For me the films "jumped" in TVH. The film was too much off the rails for me and the films never really got back on track even though there were still decent moments in them. Suffice to say I never cared for any of the TNG films.
It's tempting to say that TNG "jumped" in it's first or second season, but they really just took an unusually long time to get into their groove. Yeah, they had a few howlers in the first two seasons, but overall it did get better as it progressed, and some of my favourite stuff was in TNG's first two seasons. For me TNG started to jump in its forth and fifth seasons as blandness and formula began to cement in place and I wasn't finding it as engaging. That isn't to say there weren't still some quite watchable segments in the later seasons, but overall it just fell flat for me and I couldn't forgive it anymore. It's telling that I only have TNG's first four seasons in my Trek video collection.
I rather liked DS9 in the beginning, but rewatching it doesn't hold up as well overall as I once thought. Overall I like only a handful of episodes from the show. And I'm one of the few who bailed after the third season and never looked back. There was just something about how the show was written that just didn't appeal to me.
VOY and ENT "jumped" from the get-go for me as they never produced anything I could stomach or forgive. I thought they were terribly written and perpetuated everything I didn't like from TNG's latter seasons and nothing of what I did like.
So looking at it that way as far as I'm concerned the franchise "jumped the shark" sometime in TNG's fifth season. After that I never really felt the same about how Trek had developed.
Suffice to say this is still the case because I think ST09 jumped in with the sharks.
But this is all my individual perspective, of which I know I'm in the minority. Your own mileage may vary.
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Wait, Queen of Outer Space showed us the Women of Venus, why do you have a problem with a Venus Drug?
Wait, Queen of Outer Space showed us the Women of Venus, why do have a problem with a Venus Drug?
I'm more worried about those Catwomen on the Moon and their hypnotic powers.