Season 2 Episode 1 ('Amrok Time')

I think I saw Spock looking at porn, on this one. At least, he totally had some chick on his little screen and looked totally ashamed and hid it, when Kirk walked in. It was sort of adorable.

That's pretty much the tone of this whole episode, outside of the whole combat-to-the-death/Kirk-disobeying-Star Fleet Command thing. Apparently... Vulcans go full-on crazy when it is time to fuck. Yes, that was crass. So was the episode, a little bit, in its adorable sixties fashion.

Basically, Spock goes batshit-crazy cuz it is his mating season, so the Enterprise drops everything to get him married, and then it turns out his bride doesn't want him, so he has to fight Shatner to the death. Clear everything up? Probably not. But you can watch it and fill in the gaps that way, if you care!

Not Cold-War-y at all, and relatively unique so far, it wasn't really an interesting episode but it was at least not the same old crap. Bodes well for the new season!

Random Stats: a bottle of Argentenian wine, one shot of scotch, and two drinks with ginger-infused Skyy that really sucked.

Season 1 Episode 30 ('Operation: Annihilate!')

Second-cheesiest monsters so far; they went out on a high(low) note, in this season. Not quite as ridiculous as that Godzilla-monster-suit that Shatner went toe-to-toe with earlier, these pancakes are almost as bad. Yes, they look like pancakes. When they are captured, they kind of look like plastic pancakes made of blood-bags gone bad, when they are dead, they just look like pancakes. And they flop like one would imagine pancakes would, if pancakes ever dropped off of the ceiling.

Other than that, it was a decent episode. They do a psyche-out thing with Spock's blindness that is a little cheesy but it was fun anyways. They also killed Kirk's sister-in-law and brother, but left him a living son-in-law or nephew or whatever your brother's kid is. Did latter series ever do anything with that? Would seem a shame, a bit, if they didn't. There ought to be at least one appearance of Kirk Jr. in The Next Generation, I'd think.

Basic set-up: The Enterprise is investigating a civilization-killing phenomenon that, if it continues on its course, should be showing up next on a planet that it turns out Kirk's brother is currently living on. They check it out, and it turns out that it has, in fact, turned up. D'oh! The phenomenon turns out to be plastic pancakes that take over the nervous system of their host-bodies and cause them intense pain if they don't do what the pancakes want. What the pancakes want is to kill everyone and move on to the next star-system, which is a bit short-sighted/limited as far as parasitic relationships go, but certainly not unheard of in nature.

Good times! I finished writing up the first season! Awesome!

Random stats: 30 or 29 episodes watched, depending on how you count, 8 shots of Prairie Organic Vodka I'm hoping I don't regret tomorrow, 1 good time for 2 episodes tonight, and 100-percent completion of the first season. Now that I'm done with the re-watching of the last 3 episodes, I look forward to checking out season 2.

Season 1 Episode 29 ('The City On the Edge of Forever')

Back in the saddle again! I'm not gonna lie, it is hard to get motivated to re-watch these episodes that I had too many shots for to write about, a few months ago. But I'm doing it! I have the work ethic of a drunken mule. This one is probably my favorite in this season.

The Enterprise runs into some weird time-distorting thing that is messing up physical reality, and causing the whole ship to shake and rock like it always does whenever anything bad happens. In the course of treating Tsulu after a particularly jarring shock, Bones jabs himself with a drug that makes him crazy, beats everybody up and ends up transporting down to the center of the time-disturbance.

To make a long story short and avoid any spoilers (I know, that's silly, the show's been out for 40 years, I don't care; writing about entertainment shouldn't just be describing the plot, dammit... ), Shatner and Spock end up following Bones to 1930s Earth, so the episode mostly takes place during the Depression, and it also plays with time-travel in a way that could have been interesting. Time-travel stories always involve trying to undo changes to time that wreak havoc.

This one is, sadly, no different. There could have been a dichotomy between a change that erases the future, but creates a better future, or maintaining the status quo but making the future suck. This episode was written by Harlan Ellison, who is the most negative fucker to ever write anything, and doesn't believe in the possibility of better futures, only shitty ones. So they didn't go that route, and instead made it a choice between personal preference and duty. Just more of the same, but still, more complicated/emotional than most of the episodes in this initial season of Star Trek.

Took the Cold War thing to a whole new level, tho. That was interesting. I mean, this show has mostly been a paranoid, xenophobic, reflection of Post-War culture. This one actually dealt with The War head-on, in a way. Not in a philosophically interesting way or anything, but it was nice to see the stuff that had been subtext pop up in the overt-text.

Great episode, relatively speaking. I'm not sure how great it is in comparison to other episodes of other television shows (or even other seasons) but it totally stands out in this season of Star Trek as an emotionally complicated (for 60s TV) and intellectually interesting story.