|
|
|
Star Trek: The Original Series | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
tar Trek's second season on television begins with a cascade of space-age percussion and an elegiac trumpet. Back for more adventures are Capt. James T. Kirk (Shatner), Spock (Nimoy) and medical officer "Bones" McCoy (Kelley), the trio who lead the crew of the Enterprise; this time, however, they are joined by the likes of ship engineer Scotty (Doohan), communications officer Uhura (Nichols) and navigator Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), who enjoy expanded responsibilities exploring those strange new worlds and civilizations.
During the second season of the series, the writers delved more deeply into the origins of the characters, including a first look at Spock's Vulcan background (on "Amok Time") and family (on "Journey to Babel"), as well as expanded the universe of the Federation's most formidable enemies, the Klingons (on "Friday's Child"). Kirk, ever a man of action, proved his mettle on multiple occasions as both a lover and a fighter (in "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Gamesters of Triskelion," among others), while the remainder of the cast held true to the tenets of Gene Roddenberry's idyllic creation, combining cultures for a truly enlightened society that knows no boundaries of color or creed.
Season two also marks the debut of some of Star Trek's most famous episodes: "Amok Time," in which Spock battles Kirk on his native Vulcan; "Mirror Mirror," in which Kirk, Scott, McCoy and Uhura find themselves cast into a militaristic alternate reality after a transporter accident; "The Doomsday Machine," in which battle-scarred Commodore Decker takes command of the Enterprise to pursue a planet-swallowing robot ship; and, perhaps the series' most famous episode of all time, "The Trouble With Tribbles."
Slower than we remember
Indisputably, the second year of Star Trek's original series shows Roddenberry and his writers finding more comfortable rhythms for the characters and stories they developed in season one; Kirk became the leader we now know and revere, Spock's interminable facility with language bordered on poetry, and McCoy's irascible wit seemed to bang out one perfect punchline after another. But just as the characters became imminently better defined for antiquity, so too do the actors' idiosyncrasies: Shatner's staccato delivery begins to take form, locating hiccups between lines that the writers no doubt had little idea existed; Kelley's old-soul persona and cantankerous line readings suggest that the actor came out of the womb at 30; and Nimoy's super-cool Spock personified the perfect balance in a world facilitated by technology but run by humanity.
At the same time, the show's emerging narrative formula—Kirk and company encounter a strange creature, bring it aboard the Enterprise and fight it to save themselves from certain destruction—feels especially repetitive in the context of an entire, self-contained season. That isn't to say there aren't some truly terrific stories told—"The Doomsday Device" is about as good as TV gets—but, when watched back to back, the episodes feel too much like reiterations of the same script, recast with different actors. Additionally, some of the episodes are just plain boring—"The Gamesters of Triskelion" immediately comes to mind—and hold up poorly when compared to the pacing of more recent Star Trek series; half of these episodes could be told in half an hour or less, but are drawn out to such theatrical lengths that the story is fully told long before the last reveal is made.
The extras, as on the first collection, are top-notch, though the text commentaries by Michael Okuda (particularly on "The Trouble With Tribbles") are significantly less interesting than before; once the kinks were ironed out in the series' first season, there seems to be little of interest going on behind the scenes other than the assembly of Enterprises of various shapes and sizes. That just leaves the episodes themselves, which I frequently found more difficult to sit through due to their glacial pacing; but for completists and longtime followers of Roddenberry's universe, count these seven discs among the must-have collections of winter 2004.
I'm disappointed to say that significantly less of the material on this season-two collection holds up as well as the first set of DVDs; it would appear that while they were working out the costuming and design of the show, much more fertile ideas were being explored. But that doesn't necessarily lessen the effectiveness of season two's episodes; even though I found "Tribbles" to be more nuisance than outright trouble, there are still a lot of great stories being told here. "Amok Time" may be my favorite of the 26 episodes assembled here—if as much for its endless referencing on shows like The Simpsons as its actual content—but overall, this collection is only slightly less impressive than the first. —Todd
Also in this issue: Red Dwarf Series V DVD and Eyes Without a Face DVD
|
 |
|
| Home |
Copyright © 1998-2006, Science Fiction Weekly (TM). All rights reserved. Reproduction in any medium strictly prohibited. Maintained by scifiweekly@scifi.com. |
