Star Trek

The Enterprise	The Premise?	The Other Premise?	Kor, Dahar Master

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Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship, Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The show that launched a thousand sci-fi conventions, Star Trek is only the best-known TV programme in the history of the genre. That having been said, it's a TV show from the '60s. The acting gets a bit theatrical, the music gets a bit overbearing, the stunts get kind of ridiculous, and more episodes than would probably be reasonable will end with a painfully-staged laugh from the main cast. However, heretofore common sci-fi tendency to override science with fantasy has been suppressed to the greatest possible extent. If something seemingly magical happens, Mr. Spock is right there with his scanner and Vulcan (Vulcanian?) logic to explain it in a contrived, yet still scientific manner.

I much prefer the home video remaster from the mid-'90s because the only enhancements made were to colour. Let's face it, 30 years is a long-ass time for that old film to just be sitting around, and the colour (while dazzling for its time) wasn't that great to begin with. Even though it was the first exposure I ever had to the original Star Trek, I don't care for the 2006 remaster project at all. Mike Okuda's heart was in the right place, but it turned out to be the vanguard of 2 generations'-worth of revamps, reboots, re-envisionings, and now, AI-generated fuckery and mediocre content for its own sake. I've never much liked the whole "new and improved" concept, because more than anything else, it's an insult to the viewer. It's billionaire media corporations laughing at you and saying, "You liked that? When it looked like this? Damn, you're pretty stupid, ain't ye'?" Unfortunately, the non-computer-generated, non-messed-about-with version of the show from 1966-2005 is basically lost media at this stage, since ViacomCBS itself threw away the old version when the new one was completed. Plus, with Paramount's new owner, hand-picked by the Trump regime, expect a new reissue of this programme where generative AI makes Uhura into a white girl because of "woke". At this point, I'm reduced to looking through the torrent aggregators to find the un-messed-about-with version of Star Trek, and it's entirely Paramount's fault.

First, the production numbers and release dates are all mixed up. All the DVD releases I've ever seen have the episodes arranged in order of original airdate, rather than production order, so that's the order I'm going to use here.

10/10 stars

What do you want here? It's fricken Star Trek! Sure, it's from the '60s, it's got some hypertheatrical bits to it, sometimes you have to stretch your imagination a little in order to accept the explanation given to something, but— right. Captain Kirk. Spock. "Bones" McCoy. The Enterprise. I've seen a lot of '60s TV, this one is easily the best one for the widest array of audiences. Like, The Andy Griffith Show is folksy and everything, but you kind of have to be white to enjoy it. I Dream of Jeannie is funny and all, but there's a lot of sexism and racism in that show. Dragnet is a "hero cop" police procedural. Though a couple episodes I could name haven't aged well in the least amount, Star Trek is the only live action show from that time period where the racism, sexism, and white supremacy are toned so far down that they almost don't exist, which, quite honestly, is amazing considering how much of a racist and sexist dong Gene Roddenberry was. Some of the plots, particularly in series 3, seem extremely contrived and almost slapped together at the last minute.

Everyone always drags S3E1-"Spock's Brain" through the mud for being the worst episode of the show, but I don't agree with that. "Spock's Brain" was just a hypertheatrical piece, but it was still basically science-fiction. While I could certainly name a few episodes that I feel far outpace that one in terms of overall "why the hell did they think that was a good idea?", but that's not the point of this page.

Definitely worth watching, but not on Paramount+. If you're a bit squeamish about piracy, then your local library probably has the DVD box sets.