No “voice of the piece” this time. Below, I’ve collected the links to my five favorite and four least favorite episodes of Season 1. These are arbitrary numbers and ranking all of them seemed both excessive and an exercise in futility. I’ve always found it impossible to pick my favorite anything, so I cheat. The reason there are only four least favorites rather than five is that, honestly, there are only four episodes I can say I didn’t enjoy or find interesting on some level.
Before then though, I think it is important to offer some general thoughts on the season and show. As I said in the launch post, Star Trek was an unknown property to me coming in. Outside of the 2000s reboot movies and a random watch of The Wrath of Khan in high school, Trek was not something I’d engaged with at all. I grew up watching Star Wars and playing video games, not watching television from the 60s and 80s. The property had a reputation as a “thinker,” headier than Star Wars’s straightforward monomythic storytelling, engaged with the problems of today through the lens of the future, genuine science-fiction.
I’ve found that to be largely true, but not in the way I expected. Trek truly does take a few episodes to get going, which is funny considering that, in the early going, they hardly ever aired in shooting order. For around nine episodes, the show operates as a relatively basic procedural with surface level plots and some exceptional moments of characterization and subtext. From this initial run, “The Naked Time” and “Charlie X” stand out as the most ambitious, thematically thoughtful installments. But then, quite literally in an instant, the show crystallizes into everything it can be with “The Corbomite Manuever.” A positive, twisty episode founded on the ideas of cooperation, communication, and exploration, “The Corbomite Mauever” presents the moral viewpoint that the rest of the show will occupy, it’s general attitude and verve. From there, the remaining nineteen episodes iterate with that viewpoint in mind, not always successful but relatively consistent in their aims. Yes, there are still bad episodes after that point, but it’s almost always from a seeming lack of spark in the story rather than a confusion in what the show is. You can feel the bad episodes in the back half grasping and trying, but flailing.
My hope for Season 2 then is that, armed with experience and the solved set-up, and with the benefit of a break in the relentless schedule of television production, the show returns more confident in what its characters can handle and reloaded with interesting new problems to explore. What I’ve learned most of all over the course of the first season is that Star Trek is science-fiction as promised, and that such a promise is significantly rarer in television than you might expect.
I will be getting to Season 2, but expect a brief break of around a month from the publishing schedule while I order the season and get a bit ahead of production. By the end of this season, I was forced to write the week of, sometimes right up to deadline day, and I do not think that always served the quality of the pieces or analysis. Thus, I want to get a bit ahead and be able to take a bit more time with each piece while not being under a weekly deadline. Excited to see you all on the other side!
Five Favorites
William Shatner’s favorite episode of Star Trek is one of mine too. The typical Trek opening is abandoned in favor of a mood-setting horror piece reminiscent of It Came From Outer Space and other 50s sci-fi classics. Not only is the framing fresh and inventive for Trek, the episode goes out of its way to subvert its own set-up as the central monster is characterized and given sympathy over the course of the episode’s back half. That sympathy is accomplished not with an actor, but a living pile of rocks, inhuman, acidic, totally alien, and yet a person in every way that matters. While being thematically excellent and compelling, “The Devil in the Dark” also has strong parts for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, who spend the episode engaged in alternating bouts of moral debate and witty banter. This, more than any other, is the platonic ideal of a Star Trek episode.
“This Side of Paradise” has a surface level familiarity that it is not content to rest on. The crew encounter a series of mind and body altering plants that also sap a person of their ambition and drive. Content immortality is offered, but grand achievement foregone. The episode pits Kirk, firmly convinced of man’s need for drive, and Spock, relaxed into feeling love for the first time, squarely against each other for what looks to be a typical victory of the middle path between emotion and logic that Kirk represents. But the stinger, that despite it all Spock was genuinely happy, is so melancholic that you wonder if Kirk was acting with any emotion at all here. Complex, romantic, and ultimately tragic, “This Side of Paradise” is the only episode of the first season to make you wonder if there’s a hero in it at all.
As stated above, there’s nothing about Star Trek’s worldview that you cannot find in “The Corbomite Manuever.” The Enterprise’s encounter with a vastly more powerful alien spaceship is thrilling and terrifying, but ends with an endorsement of peace and understanding that feels revelatory in the midst of paranoiac politics and a procession of previous episodes that feature monsters, but little else. More impressively, this was the first episode of the show ever shot, and only network interference prevented it from being the pilot. I still think it should have been. You can feel production laying out the characters in simple, but very effective ways, the process is on display and is a joy to follow along with. By the end of the episode, you’ve seen Trek’s thesis statement. There was no point in delaying it.
A sensitive, action-packed, and ultimately mournful examination of the Cold War, “Balance of Terror” is Trek at its most overtly political and declarative. A showdown between the Enterprise and a Romulan Warbird armed with a new superweapon is presented from both viewpoints, but crucially, neither side can speak with the other. It’s the best paced episode of the show yet, structured around one series of escalating tactical maneuvers between Kirk and the unnamed Romulan Captain who proves his near equal. Despite all of this action and excitement, the episode begins with an aborted wedding and ends with a funeral. Without communication, loss is the only true thing violence begets. If “The Corbomite Manuever” is Trek’s thesis, this is something like its antithesis, and a necessary one at that.
As good as promised, “The City on the Edge of Forever” is Trek’s only straight love story. Spending much of its runtime devoted to the romance between Kirk and Edith Keeler, who is fated to die in order that the future be saved, the episode functions rather unconventionally for a Trek episode. Rather than spreading its plot out over a series of problems to be analyzed and then solved, the episode instead presents one unsolvable problem and forces its characters to accept, even facilitate, a cruel result. While the show is typically optimistic and devoted to our characters’ ingenuity, “The City on the Edge of Forever” is an essential representation of their limits and humanity, with a haunting ending providing sympathies that linger over the entire show.
Four to Forget
“Court Martial” fails by focusing on all the wrong things. The episode seems to actually think the audience may believe James T. Kirk, hero and lovable protagonist for 19 previous episodes, would murder someone over a personal grudge nearly a decade old. At no point does its false suspense become close to convincing, and while there are threads involving man’s skeptical relationship to technology, they end up going nowhere slow. Instead, we are left with dramatically inert court room scenes while being teased with better ideas that it leaves unexamined. “Court Martial” is emblematic of a bad Star Trek episode in that it either thinks the audience is stupid or, at best, is not interested in what the audience is thinking at all.
Essentially a one-man show, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” forces Captain Kirk underground to interact with some rather uncompelling guest stars, while leaving the rest of the crew behind. Without the broader cast, the episode becomes entirely straightforward and plot reliant. There are no dueling perspectives or ideas to be presented, instead Kirk must overcome mostly physical challenges all by himself. While Shatner is game, the central conflict is left entirely unexamined beyond its ability to complicate the plot, meaning there’s little for him to do. One diagnosis for one problem does not make for an examination, it makes for treatment. And treatment is pretty boring, just like this episode.
Similar to “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “The Alternative Factor” presents purely physical problems for the crew to tackle. While made slightly more engaging due to the presence of the whole cast, the episode’s plot is extremely repetitive and reliant on a guest actor who was a last minute fill-in due to the unexplained absence of John Barrymore. But even if Barrymore had been present, star power is all he would have added; “The Alternative Factor” has nothing interesting to say about alternate universes or doppelgangers. It is content for the problem to be literalized as a simple wrestling match, and while there are some interesting visuals dressing it up, effects won’t take you through 50 minutes, especially when you have to re-use them multiple times.
While it’s probably the “best” episode of these bottom four, “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is forgettable and without any real perspective. A time-displaced pilot from 1969 boards the Enterprise and adjusts entirely too well to his situation. There’s little conflict beyond the mere problem of getting our affable guest star back home, and the episode takes no interest in the potential frictions that may arise between people separated by over 200 years. Entirely serviceable but without a genuine hook, “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is Star Trek filler without much to recommend.
Two Honorable Mentions
“A Taste of Armageddon” is a thorny episode that I find messy but undeniably compelling. I struggled with the piece here more than most, simply because I think the episode struggled with presenting its viewpoint as well. It tackles difficult problems involving the costs of war and appears to endorse Mutually Assured Destruction as a general policy, but not without complicating that endorsement in ways both intentional and accidental. It’s an episode I have not gotten out of my head, and one that I find almost admirable in its ambition.
“The Naked Time” is Star Trek at its most thematically light, but one of the few episodes that succeeds purely on the strength of its characterization, plot, and execution. When the crew gets infected with a kind of super-alcohol that destroys their inhibitions, the Enterprise becomes a stage for hijinks, threats, and grand declarations of emotion in kind. Featuring one of Leonard Nimoy’s best performances, and the scene that made Spock a star, as well as committed minor turns from George Takei and Majel Barrett, “The Naked Time” is a soapy romp and an excellent episode of television.