Why Are So Many People So Down About Season 3?

[Harvey]

The budget cuts always seemed pretty apparent to me. There's only a single episode that went out on location ("The Paradise Syndrome"). There's tricks to avoid using new special effects or build new models (The Romulans using Klingon ships in "The Enterprise Incident;" the invisible ship in "Let that Be Your Last Battlefield"). There's the over-use of ship-based episodes (the exact duplicate of the Enterprise in "Wink of an Eye" is one of the laziest excuses to re-use standing sets ever). There's more tracked music, and fewer original scores.

Bob Justman wasn't off by much when he called the third season "a radio show."

 

[Gary7]

^ I think you mean "Mark of Gideon" when referring to the exact duplicate of the Enterprise. Yes, it was a lazy excuse, although the "near empty" corridors and bridge made for an interesting perspective. Still, I thought the whole premise was a joke. An industrial world like Gideon couldn't figure out that a lethal virus could be obtained from off world? That constructing a very elaborate replica of the Enterprise decks would be far more expensive to do than simply getting a virus from a donor? Or... how about this? Kirk beams down, has the meeting, then mysteriously comes down with an ailment that renders him unconscious--it's actually a drug, so that while he's unconscious they could draw blood from him. Then, simply culture the blood to produce as much of the virus as you wish. Of course, Odona ends up becoming the donor... something so simple. Thus, the premise of the episode was just so glaringly lacking. It's episodes like this that give S3 such a bad rap.

 

[Harvey]

That's right, "The Mark of Gideon." I often get those two episodes confused, for some reason.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Well, they do both have a "this is the Enterprise on drugs" kinda vibe to them.

 

[Warped9]

"The Mark Of Gideon" is an example of poor story idea and poorly executed. But I find a lot more good than bad in S3.

 

[plynch]

Mark of Gideon is "the Kirk-on-the-empty-Enterprise one." A gimmick in search of story. (Keep looking, fellas!) Same with Wink of an Eye. "The one-where-people-move-real-fast." But missing is the writing, the words we had in S1 and S2, no doubt.

 

[Warped9]

Mark of Gideon is "the Kirk-on-the-empty-Enterprise one." A gimmick in search of story. (Keep looking, fellas!) Same with Wink of an Eye. "The one-where-people-move-real-fast." But missing is the writing, the words we had in S1 and S2, no doubt.

Hell, the words and execution we got in the best of S3.

 

[plynch]

Mark of Gideon is "the Kirk-on-the-empty-Enterprise one." A gimmick in search of story. (Keep looking, fellas!) Same with Wink of an Eye. "The one-where-people-move-real-fast." But missing is the writing, the words we had in S1 and S2, no doubt.

Hell, the words and execution we got in the best of S3.

In the best, yes. Remember I'm pro-S3. but I also have to admit I like the bombastic rhetoric you get more in S1, when GR was rewriting so much. And there is more bad writing in S3, as everyone seems to acknowledge. But had it been the only season of Trek I think it would be well thought of, relative to much of what was on tv in 1969.

 

[AtoZ]

The budget cuts always seemed pretty apparent to me. There's only a single episode that went out on location ("The Paradise Syndrome"). There's tricks to avoid using new special effects or build new models (The Romulans using Klingon ships in "The Enterprise Incident;" the invisible ship in "Let that Be Your Last Battlefield"). There's the over-use of ship-based episodes (the exact duplicate of the Enterprise in "Wink of an Eye" is one of the laziest excuses to re-use standing sets ever). There's more tracked music, and fewer original scores.

Bob Justman wasn't off by much when he called the third season "a radio show."

And yet, given all of that - I'd still LOVE to have that all play out before me because it still beats the mindless offerings on television today, and I'd tune-in each week. I consider S3 as greatness in decline.....but greatness nonetheless.

 

[lurok]

I like to think of Season 3 as the 'surreal' season. I've also heard some unkind people call it the fat Kirk season.

 

[Harvey]

Oh, I think there are plenty of things on television right now that are better than the third season of Star Trek. There's certainly a lot, lot more that's worse, though. But that's always been the case.

I wouldn't want to write off the third season entirely, though. It has some genuinely great episodes ("The Tholian Web," "Spectre of the Gun"), and probably gave the series an extended life in syndication, which led to everything else later.

 

[Ssosmcin]

For all the revisionist history and tell all books and so on, I feel the real reason why season 3 didn't live up to the previous two boils to Roddenberry leaving. I'm well aware of what everyone else had bought to the Trek table, but I'm of the mind that things went to hell was because Gene was no longer there polishing and rewriting scripts. Even Justman and Solow admit Roddenberry was an amazing rewriter, better at that than originating his own scripts. Gene Coon and DC Fontana were tremendous assets, but the show was still excellent with or without them. GR kept the characters and concepts on format. Even if an episode stunk, the characters were still on point. Without Roddenberry, Coon or Fontana, nobody in that capacity was qualified to keep things in line. Frieberger didn't grasp the characters, neither did Arthur Singer. So even the best episodes had weird moments where things veered off course.

With that in mind, once Gene split, there was almost not chance of Trek being the same show in the 3rd season. In this context, we're lucky some episodes were as good as they were, considering the situation Frieberger was stuck with.

 

[Harvey]

Keep in mind that Gene Coon was also doing a lot of re-writing while he was line producing the show. Roddenberry has been praised (and demonized) for his re-writing of other people's scripts, but he wasn't the only one doing it.

To say that the show as excellent without D.C. Fontana doesn't make a whole lot of sense; she was there from the beginning until the end of the second season. She wrote several of the best episodes of the first two years, and after she was hired on as script consultant she wrote important and insightful story memos for every episode.

The problems with the third season are difficult to explain away with a single reason. The budget cuts hurt the show (almost no location shooting, fewer original scores), the departure of key writers from previous years hurt the show (Fontana and Coon), and the frustration and eventual departure of key production personnel hurt the show (Justman and Finnerman). Certain additions during the third year didn't help much either, especially Arthur Singer.

 

[Ssosmcin]

I guess what I meant by that was, before she took an active script writing hand, she was his secretary, but you're right, I got the timing off, since she was writing from very early on in the series. Still, beyond that, had Gene stayed, the quality control would have been better. I guess "duh" since if he had hung on, the 3rd season staff never would have been in place to begin with.

Sorry, it's been that kind of day. I'm just gonna go sit down over there....

 

[Sindatur]

But at least you still had all those wonderful William Wear These outfits

 

[Gary7]

For all the revisionist history and tell all books and so on, I feel the real reason why season 3 didn't live up to the previous two boils to Roddenberry leaving. I'm well aware of what everyone else had bought to the Trek table, but I'm of the mind that things went to hell was because Gene was no longer there polishing and rewriting scripts. Even Justman and Solow admit Roddenberry was an amazing rewriter, better at that than originating his own scripts. Gene Coon and DC Fontana were tremendous assets, but the show was still excellent with or without them. GR kept the characters and concepts on format. Even if an episode stunk, the characters were still on point. Without Roddenberry, Coon or Fontana, nobody in that capacity was qualified to keep things in line. Frieberger didn't grasp the characters, neither did Arthur Singer. So even the best episodes had weird moments where things veered off course.

With that in mind, once Gene split, there was almost not chance of Trek being the same show in the 3rd season. In this context, we're lucky some episodes were as good as they were, considering the situation Frieberger was stuck with.

While I think Gene created some problems with Star Trek production, he did indeed bring some respectable writing talent. You can definitely see it lacking in S3. Although there were also some stupid lines of dialog in S2. In "The Doomsday Machine", at one point Kirk asks Spock "A robot weapon that purposely destroys entire solar systems. Why?" Like, how should HE know? And then it gets worse when McCoy asks "This whole thing's incredible. A robot? A machine like that, who would build it?" Again, how could any of the crew know this? He wasn't speaking rhetorically, and Kirk had to follow with "We don't know," and McCoy worsens it with "But why?" Kirk then asks him if he ever heard of a doomsday machine, to which he replies "I'm a doctor, not a mechanic." Like you can't be a layman and know what it means? This section of dialog was painful to watch, so idiotic to me when considering the men who were speaking those lines.

But when looking across S3, I do see more mundane than useful dialog being spoken. If there's one thing I really liked about TNG, was that there seemed to be more thought given on the content of what was being said, aside from the plethora of techno-babble.

 

[lurok]

But at least you still had all those wonderful William Wear These outfits

The man was a couture genius.