Reviews

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    Star Trek: TOS – The Enemy Within (S01E05)

    ByAlex

    There’s a moment roughly halfway through “The Enemy Within” where good Kirk, gentle, compassionate, and increasingly useless, tries to give an order and physically can’t hold the sentence together. He knows what he wants to say. The words just won’t come with any weight behind them. It’s a small moment, easy to lose in an episode full of bigger ones, but it’s the most honest thing the episode does. The argument isn’t really about good and evil. It’s about what actually holds a command together, and whether the things we’d rather not own about ourselves are, inconveniently, structural.

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    Star Trek: TOS – Where No Man Has Gone Before (S01E03)

    ByAlex

    I came to TOS backwards, the way most people my age did. TNG was the Trek I grew up with, the one that was actually on when I was old enough to care. TOS arrived later, in the way things did before streaming made chronology optional, in chunks, on whatever channel was running it that week, in an order that made no particular sense. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was probably not the first TOS episode I watched, but it might as well have been. It’s the one that made me understand what the show actually was, as distinct from the show I already knew. The two things are related but they are not the same thing, and this episode is where you feel the difference most clearly.

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    Star Trek: TOS — Charlie X (S01E02)

    ByAlex

    The premise of “Charlie X” sounds like something you’d find stapled to a bus stop in 1966. Lonely teenager. Godlike powers. Spaceship full of people he makes uncomfortable. On paper it’s disposable, the kind of high-concept Twilight Zone material that could collapse under its own gimmick in twenty minutes. What Dorothy C. Fontana does instead, in her first Trek teleplay credit, working from a story by Gene Roddenberry, is turn it into something quietly unsettling.

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    Star Trek: TOS — The Man Trap (S01E01)

    ByAlex

    There is a specific kind of irony in the fact that Star Trek, a franchise built on the idea that humanity could sort itself out and reach for something better, began its broadcast life by killing the last member of a species and then moving on to the next episode. That’s not a criticism. Or rather, it isn’t only a criticism. It’s the most interesting thing about The Man Trap, an episode that is simultaneously the wrong introduction to Star Trek and, in its final thirty seconds, one of the most honest expressions of what Star Trek was trying to be.

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    Star Trek: TOS — The Cage The Show That Almost Wasn’t (Pilot)

    ByAlex

    “Too cerebral” was the phrase NBC used when they sent it back. As criticisms go, it has aged badly for them.

    Desilu delivered a science fiction pilot in 1965 that was slower, stranger, and more introspective than the network knew what to do with. They wanted something else. What came back was Star Trek as most people know it: Kirk, action, adventure, and the formula that would carry the franchise for decades. The original pilot went into a vault. Most people never saw it.