Here at The Holodeck is Broken, we were starting to have a wee bit of a crisis of faith (of the heart?) during our march through Star Trek: The Original Series. The one-two-three punch of “Patterns of Force,” followed by “The Omega Glory,” and then “Bread and Circuses” led us to wonder if Kirk and company had started to tread water…
And I, your trusty first officer, Mac, knew things were only going to get worse once we drifted into the much-maligned third season of the show.
So we decided to skip it. We weren’t going to watch The Animated Series, so the bounds of our mission to watch “all” of Star Trek from the very beginning were arbitrary. A (first of many?) COVID year under our belt, and with a desire to not tread water ourselves, and we immediately moved from our episode covering “Assignment: Earth” and “Spock’s Brain”* to covering Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
But I just couldn’t help myself. I went ahead—podcast be damned—and watched the remainder of Season 3…
…and we definitely made the right decision.
Produced largely so that NBC and Paramount (which had recently purchased the floundering Desilu) could stem the tide of angry fan mail demanding that the five-year mission of the Enterprise continue unabated, almost every moment of these twenty-four episodes feel less-than.
Gene L. Coon—who had shepherded some of the finest hours of season 2–had left the series for greener, less Roddenberry-filled pastures. Roddenberry himself was so incensed by indiscriminate budget slashings and a shift in the time slot to Friday night that he opted to become a producer-in-name only** and moved on to write and produce the feature Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)***.
The resulting shows—run by Fred Frieberger—had an almost uniformly slapdash quality. Sure, there’s a glimmer of adventure and a larger sense of the Trek galaxy in the season’s second episode, “The Enterprise Incident,” but things never quite recover from there.
I had long since feared watching “The Paradise Syndrome” with my fellow away team members, as its resoundingly tone-deaf treatment of indigenous people really shouldn’t sit well with anyone.
Re-tread ideas from previous episodes are still the order of the day with “And the Children Shall Lead” and “Plato’s Stepchildren.” That latter episode has the distinction of featuring the Kirk-Uhura kiss that shocked the nation. Given that notoriety, I had always thought it aired in one of the earlier seasons. Now I tend to discount the potency of the controversy. Were enough people still even watching the show? That doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that their moment is entirely coerced, with not a scintilla of consent between them.
Someone from the production once said that they had almost enough money to do a really good radio show. Almost. There are episodes so preposterously cheap looking, that it’s a marvel they even aired in the first place. “Spectre of the Gun” and “The Empath” have all the production value of bad community theater.
And then there’s the sexism. Oh, my word, the sexism. “Elaan of Troyus” makes “The Enemy Within” feel like it passes the Bechdel Test. And say what you will about “These Are the Voyages…”, but I don’t think its controversial to say “Turnabout Intruder is the worst series finale of any of the Treks…
And, yes, I’m begrudgingly including “Endgame” in that distinction.
The world did not need to see William Shatner’s interpretation of a woman, and Janice Lester’s (Sandra Smith) assertion that women aren’t allowed to be starship captains sparked the fire of every bad-faith belly-ache about both Voyager and Discovery.
Indeed, the only time I found myself consistently enjoying the season was during a sustained run where we were treated to successive guest stars Yvonne Craig, Frank Gorshin, and Lee Meriwether… But that’s entirely a Batman-related thing.
So, no. I don’t think our away team will miss much of anything by skipping the third year of the first Star Trek series. We want to have fun with this rewatch, and if our reactions to the TOS movies are any indication, brighter days lie ahead…
…although I do have some trepidation about TNG Season 1, if I’m being completely honest.
*Watching “Spock’s Brain” helped us get over any remaining qualms we might have had about omitting season 3.
**To be fair, the Great Bird of the Galaxy had largely taken a hands-off approach to his creation after the early days of season 1. But he was really absent for that third year.
***I’ve seen it. It’s every bad instinct Roddenberry ever had, with none of the virtues Trek possessed.