Star Trek - Season 1

The recent Trek film increasing my interest in the franchise finally paid dividends about a month ago when I started watching the original series. It's kind of slow and boring on occasion; the fact that it was made in the 60s leads to some painfully dated scenarios, especially any attempt by a character to fight another; and it sure seems like a lot of plot ideas get reused repeatedly. Almost every episode can be shoehorned into one of maybe half a dozen archetypes. Still, the show did enough to keep me watching through these struggles, and it's hard to deny its importance to science fiction. It succeeds for the most part because the cast is good. Scotty, Sulu, and Uhura are fine I guess, but the show is carried by Kirk, Spock, and Bones. All three are great in their own way, but also similar. They have a combination of intelligence and fearlessness that makes watching them tackle a highly sensitive and difficult situation at least interesting, and usually a lot of fun.

The show is highly episodic and was aired out of production order, and you could pretty much watch the episodes in any order and not miss anything. Cast members pop in and out and characters change their assignment between episodes without anyone noticing. Obviously this results in a situation where some episodes are really good, and some definitely aren't. Unlike the more serialized shows I tend to gravitate towards, the reason to keep watching isn't to find out what happens next, but the hope that the next episode is one of those good ones. Some of the better ones include "The Corbomite Maneuver", where Kirk protects his ship through the sheer power of his huge brass balls, and "Space Seed", which introduces Khan, one of the series' most infamous characters. The version I watched was the remastered one, which primarily features improved visual effects in the outer space scenes. Normally I'd prefer to see the unmolested original, but in this case I didn't mind because it never affected the story and was undoubtedly a vast improvement over whatever they might have mustered in 1966. The most interesting thing was how it didn't play to my expectations, of Kirk commanding a ship against a bunch of alien vessels and romancing alien women. The former was only an occasional situation, and the latter never happened at all. Either that stuff happened a lot more in subsequent seasons, or I've been highly duped by popular culture. In any case, I'll keep watching to find out.