Apparently I have far too much free time (ha!), or perhaps I’m just a glutton for punishment, but I’ve decided to run something of a side-project with this. Some time ago I picked up the three omnibus releases (one for each season) of James Blish’s adaptations of the classic Trek episodes. I hadn’t gotten around to reading them yet, but this seems like a good excuse. So, in addition to watching the episodes along with the rest of you, I’m going to be reading the adaptations as well (for all save “The Cage”, simply because it wasn’t adapted on its own, but as incorporated into “The Managerie”).
Should be interesting, especially as Blish did his adaptations from the shooting scripts, often without having seen the final episode (as he lived in Britain), and there will be inevitable differences because of that, even before taking into account the little changes/expansions common to such adaptations. For instance, Monday’s episode, “The Man Trap,” is here titled “The Unreal McCoy,” at one point describes Spock as smiling, describes McCoy doing rather 20th-century sounding autopsies (including physically removing and weighing the brain, which makes Kirk a little queasy), and has a couple other oddities that I don’t remember from the episode (though I haven’t watched it in quite a while; I’ll be doing so sometime this weekend).
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