Live long and prosper, reader!
Nichelle Nichols, known best for her magnificent work as Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek series (1966-1969), passed away last week at the age of 89 years. I'll have you know that in addition to kicking ass in Star Trek, the trailblazing actress did important volunteer work with NASA and promoted inclusion of women and ethnic minorities in the space program. Her role as Uhura also had a major impact for diversity in Hollywood, as she was one of the first Black women to have a major role in a mainstream TV series, and the fact that her character was a high-ranking bridge officer ruffled more than a few feathers in racist circles while doing absolute wonders for social progress in showbusiness and the overall civil rights movement of the 1960's. In short, Nichols was an icon and a badass.
It's important to remember that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry specifically wrote the ensemble cast to be diverse, with Black women, Asians, Scots, Russians (remember, this was pitched during the height of the cold war) and even Vulcans being represented in the 7-person main cast. The studio wanted to change the cast into a more marketable group of white American men due to the racist and sexist norms of the time, but Roddenberry insisted that the series doesn't get made unless he gets his diverse cast - this was essential to Star Trek, as a message that in the utopian future envisioned by Roddenberry, humanity has found a way past discrimination and into harmony. This makes Nichols' role as Uhura all the more groundbreaking, not to mention the fact that Uhura's kiss with Captain Kirk (William Shatner) in a season 3 episode was the first interracial kiss in scripted U.S. television.
Anyways, to celebrate the legacy of Nichols and Star Trek overall, here are my top 10 all-time favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series! SPOILER ALERT: I will discuss specific plot points and ending resolutions - you've been warned.
My honorable mentions: The Corbomite Maneuver (Season 1 Episode 10), Shore Leave (Season 1 Episode 15), Space Seed (Season 1 Episode 22), The Trouble with Tribbles (Season 2 Episode 15), The Enterprise Incident (Season 3 Episode 2).
10. All Our Yesterdays (Season 3 Episode 23)
"A library serves no purpose unless someone is using it"
As the original series was sadly cancelled after only three seasons, the penultimate episode of season 3 ends up being the second-last offering of the entire series - and considering what a dud the series finale ended up being, one likes to imagine the creative and sentimental All Our Yesterdays as the true finale that Star Trek: The Original Series deserved.
Named after a quote in Shakespeare's Macbeth, this episode follows the classic trio of Kirk, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and McCoy (DeForest Kelley) as they arrive on a planet about to be destroyed by a supernova, only to find themselves trapped in the planet's past after entering a portal in an intriguing library. All Our Yesterdays mixes powerful storytelling with wonderfully imaginative sci-fi, as the writers really go places with the premise. The dynamic of the show's central trio is as entertaining as ever, and the episode's themes of history, legacy and preservation will stay with you long after the credits have rolled.
9. The Naked Time (Season 1 Episode 4)
"Well, we're doing everything that's possible"
"Bones, I want the impossible checked out, too"
The Naked Time is, for a majority of its duration, a pretty standard Star Trek episode. A mysterious disease spreads aboard the USS Enterprise, removing the emotional inhibitions of crew members to a dangerous degree as they start to spiral out of control. This leads to all sorts of alarming behavior, which makes for memorable scenes such as Uhura rejecting Sulu's (George Takei) inappropriate advances with a brilliantly badass comeback ("I'll protect you, fair maiden" / "Sorry, neither!") that was apparently ad-libbed by the late great Nichelle Nichols.
While most of the episode is quite average Trek, it has one hell of a mind-bending and groundbreaking ending resolution that spearheads The Naked Time into my top 10: the episode's problems are resolved in the final minutes with the franchise's first-ever instance of time travel. While movies and TV shows about time travel had been made before 1966, it wasn't the mainstream sci-fi trope it is today, and one certainly wouldn't have expected to see it in a hit series that isn't about time travel first and foremost.
The writing in the episode's climax is brilliant, as the manipulation of time comes as a totally out-of-the-blue surprise: when all else has failed, a series of events leads to the Enterprise going through an emergency restart that implodes and accidentally sends them three days into the past, thus giving the crew a chance to correct their mistakes. When thinking about the role time travel has played in Star Trek, as it has been a plot device in many of the finest episodes across the shows as well as the franchise's best movies, one has to appreciate the way the concept was weaved into the series in this episode's creative and out-of-the-box ending.
8. This Side of Paradise (Season 1 Episode 24)
"Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums"
In this season 1 classic, the Enterprise crew encounters a colony whose inhabitants should be long-dead, yet have been kept alive by mysterious alien spores that provide total happiness and satisfaction as a side effect. Needless to say, Roddenberry's genius writing utilizes this concept to present fascinating moral dilemmas that really make one think: would you rather live in a paradise-like bliss with no real struggles or real stakes, or take life as we know it with struggles and problems ever-present yet everything having more meaning due to the presence of loss and hardship as a constant?
Elevating the episode further is Leonard Nimoy, who gives his perhaps greatest individual performance as Spock in this episode (which is saying a lot, considering that I see Spock as the original series' greatest character and one of the greatest fictional characters of all time). The alien spores allow Spock to tap into his rarely-seen emotional and human side, and Nimoy portrays the character's descent from cold logic into blissful emotion, as well as the conflict that follows when he has to make difficult decisions, with aplomb.
7. Errand of Mercy (Season 1 Episode 26)
"Well, there it is - war. We didn't want it, but we've got it"
"Curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want"
Errand of Mercy is an important milestone in Star Trek history, as it contains the first-ever appearance of the Klingons, an iconic alien race that would grow to be a staple of all Star Trek shows and most of the movies, and one of the overall best-known fictional alien races in pop culture. While Klingon culture and lore would evolve and expand over the course of the series and its spin-offs, they are a very intriguing bunch from the beginning - we're immediately introduced to their honor-driven values, war-waging habits and other attributes, as well as the well-written and many-sided political conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire.
What makes this politically complex anti-war episode even better is its ending twist, as we're shown the true nature of the Organians, an alien species whose home world has been fought over between the Klingons and the Federation. While the Organians seem like a helpless and weak bunch for a majority of the episode, the final act reveals that they are in fact an ancient species so highly evolved and powerful that humans cannot even comprehend it (about as ahead of humans on the evolutionary scale as humans are from amoebas, as Mr. Spock puts it). What seemed like a helpless people staying neutral in the midst of a military conflict was in fact a deeply enlightened species being diplomatic and fully in control of the proceedings, and this resolution baffles the viewer just as it baffles Captain Kirk himself.
6. Journey to Babel (Season 2 Episode 10)
"Captain's log, stardate 3842.3. We have departed Vulcan for the neutral planetoid code-named Babel. Since it is in our sector, the Enterprise has been assigned to transport ambassadors of Federation planets to this vitally important council. The issues of the council are politically complex, the passengers...explosive"
Really, it's all right there in the premise. I've always enjoyed the well-written and engaging politics of the Star Trek universe - while they would reach a peak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), with the fictional Bajor crisis being about as complex as the real-life situations in Israel or Syria, things were already surprisingly complicated in the original series. And never more so than in Journey to Babel.
This is the first time we meet the Andorians and the Tellarites, the two other founding members of the Federation along with humans and Vulcans. Diplomatic representatives of all four species are present as the Enterprise is transporting them to a vital summit, and the debates and confrontations that follow are an illuminating look at just how rich and deep the world created by Gene Roddenberry was already in the original series - the 60's Star Trek may be corny and cheesy on many levels, but episodes like this have surprising amounts of nuance and intrigue that truly showcase why the Star Trek universe is on par with Tolkien's Middle-Earth in the category of my all-time favorite fictional universes.
5. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Season 3 Episode 15)
"There was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class"
"Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today"
It's never just an adventure-of-the-week with Star Trek - there's always some deeper theme, something to say about the world, in any given episode, no matter how filler it might seem at first glance. The original series has episodes paralleling the Vietnam war, criticizing humanity's abuse of the environment, and any number of important topics that weren't usually up for questioning in mainstream 1960's television (in other words, Gene Roddenberry was a badass who wouldn't keep his mouth shut about injustice). In one of the boldest social commentaries committed by the series, this season 3 episode took a serious jab at a topic that is all the rage these days, but was absolutely taboo and explosive for a TV show to say anything about back then - race relations in the United States.
Of course, with this being Star Trek, the topic is handled through metaphors in imaginative sci-fi settings. In this case, the Enterprise stumbles upon a conflict between two very similar alien races divided by the way in which they are colored - it might seem a tad obvious to viewers accustomed to the nuance of today's television, but when thinking about the context and the show's target audience in the 60's, I'd argue that the topic called for some shoving-progressive-views-down-the-viewers'-throats. I remember chocking up when watching the episode, as the script uses a far-fetched alien plot to make it painfully obvious how incredibly stupid it is to let the color of one's skin divide people - and this is made so much more powerful when considering that the episode aired in the late 60's, when America just really, really needed to learn this lesson.
4. Amok Time (Season 2 Episode 1)
"What thee are about to see comes down from the time of the beginning, without change. This is the Vulcan heart. This is the Vulcan soul. This is our way"
As much as I love the original Star Trek series, I do admit that there are instances where watching the more 60's side of it can be frustrating for a viewer accustomed to the cinema-like quality of the Breaking Bad etc. era of television. The absence of continuity and long-term storytelling, the corny dialogue and the overall 'everything must fit into this very narrow mold of what television can be' sometimes gets in the way of the show's visionary storytelling, powerful themes and other strong suits, which is why it is behind Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1993) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in my ranking of Trek shows. That being said, there are a select few instances where the original series was so far ahead of its time that you'll swear you're watching modern-day golden-age television, and such is the case with the action-packed season 2 premiere.
A new major character (Ensign Chekov (Walter Koenig), who wasn't a cast member in season 1) getting an exciting introduction? Check. Fleshing out Spock's origin and overall Star Trek lore by the setting being the newly introduced planet Vulcan? Check. Breathtaking set design, entertaining guest performances and an overall larger-than-life atmosphere when exploring the compelling world of Vulcan? Check. New soundtrack pieces that would go on to become staples of the show in tense action sequences? Check. The plot going into a direction where Kirk and Spock must fight each other to the death, with the viewer having no idea how they'll get out of it? Check. This episode has everything, and it kicks in the second season with adrenaline and wonder.
3. Mirror, Mirror (Season 2 Episode 4)
"May I point out that I had an opportunity to observe your counterparts here quite closely. They were brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous - in every way splendid examples of homo sapiens, the very flower of humanity. I found them quite refreshing"
It's the sheer creativity that does it for me. Once again, you have to remember that this was the 60's - the general view on what television can be and what can happen on television was very limited, as we didn't have the regularly groundbreaking and norm-twisting writing of today. That makes it all the more special when Star Trek did episodes like this one, likely born out of Gene Roddenberry going "F**k it, let's have a transporter accident take the crew to a mirror universe where the Federation is a barbaric empire". A script like that might be pretty standard for today's sci-fi television, but only because such revolutionary ideas were once normalized by Star Trek.
The episode really goes places with its setting as well - while nearly the entire episode is spent following four characters as they are trapped in the mirror universe, I love how there's one short scene where we see the evil mirror versions of those four characters dealing with their surroundings in the 'normal' universe. Also, in addition to Mirror, Mirror being a terrific standalone adventure, it gave birth to one of Star Trek's most intriguing ongoing narratives - the Mirror universe would be visited again in Deep Space Nine, as well as Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005), making for some of the juiciest and most fascinating episodes in these shows.
2. Balance of Terror (Season 1 Episode 14)
"I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend"
The tension in this incredibly suspenseful episode could be cut by a knife. When a possibly hostile Romulan vessel appears on the edge of the Neutral zone, the Enterprise is sent to investigate and Captain Kirk must decide whether or not to engage and open fire. We spend the entire 50-minute runtime in this setting, with possible actions and angles being debated between senior crewmembers as the situation grows more dire. Gone is the silliness and corniness often defining the series, as for this one episode, everything is brilliantly dead-serious to really set the episode apart and make the stakes seem extra high.
Balance of Terror really highlights the pacifist nature of the franchise and Roddenberry's vision: in a typical sci-fi shows, encountering an enemy spaceship would gleefully lead to an entertaining laser battle sequence with heroic charges and stunning explosions. But with Star Trek? Forget about big battles - just the idea of firing on one ship without absolute certainty that the situation calls for combat is a major decision that must first be debated and speculated, as violence is always the very last resort for the diplomatic Federation. No matter how far-out and sci-fi the series is, it always had a foot grounded in reality due to the very human themes, and here we see how the idea of war should be taken seriously and avoided at all costs even when in fictional outer space realms. Truly powerful storytelling.
1. The City on the Edge of Forever (Season 1 Episode 28)
I can't begin to describe how powerful this episode is and how much it means to me, at least in a conventional sense. I'll just leave you with a set of lyrics that a teenage Veikko wrote, after watching this episode for the first time around 04:00 A.M. on a larger-than-life summer vacation night.
(Writer's note: while the lyrics are finished, the composition has been a sort of eternity-project for many years. I've envisioned the song as a prog rock epic similar to Rush's Xanadu).
"The Guardian of Forever"
Eternity
Everything and nothing
All at once
Beyond all else
This is it
Through the darkness
The vast unknown
There is only this
Forever
Yet only once
Beyond all else
This is it
Stranded
No way out
Must go through
Must go beyond
Reach past the stars
To an ancient world
The city...
Time itself
All must be saved
All must be sacrificed
Options weighed
Layers and points of view
Right and wrong
The hardest choice
On the most important day
The past, the future
All decided at once
Beyond all else
This is it
Did it work
Were we saved
Humanity would have been lost
Either way
Now what lies ahead
Haunted
By what's left behind
An impact on history
A mark on culture
A point of origin
More
Hate given a chance to flow
Love shattered
For a greater tomorrow
Help
Send help
Stuck in time
Red dwarfs and red giants
Beyond the stars
Lapses in time
The vision of the wise
Stone knives and bearskins
Peace and war
The concept of time
The tragedy of loss
What is it worth
A man's soul
A better yesterday
Brighter tomorrow
History in the making
Resuming its course
Restoring its core
Everchanging
He knows
He knows what he did
He knows
He knows
He knows what he did
He knows
In an other place
Where and how
Figure it out
Eventually
As it all comes together
Hear the screams
The city on the edge...
The experience
No breath, no words
Nothing to compare
The thoughts, the dreams
Just this once
Beyond all else
This is it
Insanity
That's what lead us here
Got them there
Put him where
It all went down
Do as your heart
Tells you to do
Millions will die
Millions will die
Innocents, peaceful men
Who did not die before
I am my own beginning
I am my own end
Answers couched in riddles
A gateway to all that exists
Further on
Logic to belief
Time is fluid
Like a river
With currents
Backwash
Locked with no hope
The beauty of it all
Poetic beyond measure
Piercing to the mind
Gripping to the heart
Human nature
ASSASSINS!
MURDERERS!
MURDERERS!
ASSASSINS!
ASSASSINS!
Run away when you can
Fly away
The hell out of here
Harness incredible energies
Hurl us into other worlds
And the men that reach out into space
Feed the hungry millions
Cure their diseases
Find a way to give hope
A common future
And those are the days worth living for
Where am I
What is the time
Lost far away
Interference
All is as it was
For us, time does not exist
The perfect moment
Silence all around
Nothing else in the world
The city on the edge of forever
The step through eternity
Everything that was and will be
All at once
Beyond all else
More...
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week, as I reflect on my summer job through the lens of movie reviews, with my post of the Top 10 Summer Camp movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment