Five Dumb Things From Star Trek First Year

People talk a lot about the third season of the original series, and how bad it was. And it was at times. Many of the episode were cheaply made, badly written, and in some cases just plain boring. But what I never got is, why does the third season get all the hate? Before Trek hit its stride at the top of the second season the series had some serious growing pains. Some things in the first dozen episodes are just plain..stupid. For instance, it took Nimoy to get Spock down right as he is clearly using emotions like smiling and grinning at times, other times shouting for no good reason. The first dozen or so episodes almost feel like a different show compared to the second and third season, and some things are just plain head scratching!

Here are five things from the first season of Star Trek that drive me crazy.





Special Effects

Yeah this may not be very fair, but if you watch the episodes in order one thing you notice is the advance in the effects. And no I am not talking about the dogital rematered versions they did, that’s another topic. I mean just on the show. The shots of the ship are awful and the aliens are weak. Compare the Gorn in “Arena” to the Mugato in “A Private Little War”. I am not saying it was perfect after, both “Catspaw” and “Journey to Babel” were second season episodes and are famous for the bad effects. But those early episodes really felt awful. The second and third season did a better job, and stopped using the same stock shots over and over!! So much so the remastered effects really help those episodes…and dammit I am going to discuss those one day!!







“But Unknown to Us at the Present Time”

It took a couple episode for the creators to understand what the Captain’s Log was for. And I don’t just mean reports for Starfleet, but as exposition for the audience. In other shows like Batman, you could have a voice over explaining things that the main characters are not aware of yet. But much like how Dragnet was actually what Friday was experiencing, so was Kirk’s log entries. Two times (“Naked Time” and “Enemy Within”) Kirk’s log tells us something he shouldn’t know (that a new disease is on board the ship and that an evil duplicate was created, receptively). This only happened twice so someone must have realized how stupid that sounded. And it did, how could Kirk log something that isn’t know to anyone yet?? It’s also an insult to the audience, I think we got it.









Kirk and Spock run the show.

I mentioned this in passing before, but let me explain what I mean. By the third season the creators had figured out that fans liked the other characters too and so they would do more than just sit there. But that took awhile to get going, and it was so bad in the early episodes that there are at least two instances where Kirk orders Spock to change a course…not to the navigator sitting right in front of him! There would also be conversations between the two right in the middle of the Bridge with no one else giving input. If you ever wonder why Picard had an office, watch some of the classic Trek and you’ll get it. And I can get why Nichelle Nichols almost left the show when she given virtually nothing to do.









Phaser control room?? What the hell is that?

In most episodes when Phaser’s had to be fired, Sulu or Chekov would press a button and that was it. But in Balance of Terror, there’s an entire room devoted to the weapons being fired. With two officers manning the room. So, when Kirk issues the order to fire, Sulu has to call down to the room to this guy who manages to get the phasers to work. Now to be fair, this was probably all to set up the final moment when Spock has to run into the room and save the people from a coolant leak (while Kirk shots through the halls for the two officers to fire the damn weapons already!) but this always made me shake my head. And it never appeared again. Oh and you gotta love how Spock saves the day, he just happened to be there, was there no other officer or Engineer anywhere around as a backup or something?







Yeoman’s

I loved Grace Lee Whitney, don’t take me wrong. And Rand had her moments when she shined. No I’m not picking on Rand but the concept…what the hell does a captain need his own personal yeoman for? To bring him coffee on the Bridge? To bring him dinner? WHAT?? He really needs someone to tend to him? One early episode had Kirk openly complain that Starfleet had stuck him with female yeoman, saying he doesn’t need another woman to worry about. What sexism? It’s true,  Rand had no other role, except to be pretty as I mentioned before. You’ll find that even when Rand was written off the yeoman’s still appeared for a few episodes before finally vanishing. By the end of the season and the rest of the series they’d pretty much faded away, and the lady’s who wore read were “lieutenants” with actual jobs on the ship besides maid service! Ok yes there were a few others over the other seasons but those roles were underplayed, we never got another Captain’s Yeoman like Rand was. There was one in third season’s “Wink of an Eye” handing out coffee but I’m willing to overlook that since it was a plot device for the episode. And the girl didn’t get a line. Heck I wonder if Mirror, Mirror was the series own attempt to lampshade this nonsense. In the mirror universe, Marlena was a captain’s woman like the yeoman’s of the early days (for the most part). In the real world she was a competent lieutenant just assigned to the ship. Interesting though…except the very end of the episode has Kirk walk over and hit on her.





Thankfully for those early days, the writing is still solid and the characters still clicked. While it’s true the shows feel old and like they were still figuring things out as they went, they are still well done and watchable.