We’re done with Season Two! What did you think of the season overall? How does it measure up to Season One?
We’re done with Season Two! What did you think of the season overall? How does it measure up to Season One?
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2 responses to “We’re done with Season Two! What did you think of the season overall? How does it measure up to Season One?”
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I felt similarly about how the episodes seem less distinctive than season 1. Not sure why.
Overall I was happier in many ways with Season I but I do think the Spock-McCoy and Spock-Kirk dynamics mature during season 2 and we get two great Spock-related episodes (Amok Time, Journey to Babel) as well as Trouble w Tribbles & Mirror Mirror which are pretty freaking awesome.
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Season two felt really different to me. I don’t think it was because the episodes were worse, exactly. When I go back over the episode list, there are many strong episodes and few that I would identify as outright stinkers. Even some of the least successful episodes for me from a writing standpoint, like “Catspaw” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” were at least visually and dramatically ambitious enough to lodge themselves firmly in the memory.
One problem is I have discovered I’m not a fan of Chekhov, who barely seems to cut it on the bridge, and always seems like a fish out of water when he joins a landing party. He doesn’t seem to have a strong take on his character or a lot of relationship chemistry with anyone except possibly Sulu, who was absent for almost half the season (that’s was another problem–I was a Sulu fan even as a young kid). Just having Chekhov around seems to diminish the verisimilitude of the Enterprise for me. They should have focused more on his backstory–what is such a young kid doing in such a prominent position? What made him want to serve on a starship? What makes him tick? Instead, he’s one joke and an unconvincing accent.
I also miss the sizzle of watching Star Trek invent itself before our eyes. Although some episodes like “Amok Time” and “Journey to Babel” are defining ones for later Star Trek franchises, the producers seem too often to be exercising an option they didn’t have in first season–imitating themselves. Even as the characters become more firmly established and the comedy becomes more assured, the show begins to feel incrementally more safe and formulaic, focusing more relentlessly on Kirk, Spock, and McCoy in their normal pattern of interactions at the expense of both supporting characters and life on the Enterprise in general.
Kirk seems like a less interesting guy in second season. You have episodes like “Obsession” that focus on his leadership, but the intense focus on him as an extraordinary person and extraordinary captain seems lessened. The Kirk of parody, an oversexed and slightly ridiculous figure, starts to emerge. Shatner may have lost some of his edge, especially in the second half of the season, but whether this is because of his performance or because of the writing would be hard to say. He still brings it in episodes like “The Doomsday Machine” and “The Trouble With Tribbles.”
When Marc Cushman releases the second volume of his _These Are the Voyages_ series, I suspect I will find there are two culprits: reduced series budgets, causing more cutting of corners, and diminished attention paid by Gene Roddenberry to control of the show’s message, characters, and rewriting of scripts. I’m currently about 200 pages into Herb Solow and Robert Justman’s book, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, which points out that Roddenberry was brilliant at rewriting other writers’ scripts (even as he antagonized them with some of his high-handedness)–his rewrites frequently turned out better than his own original teleplays. Roddenberry had a special passion for the Kirk character, and when I see Kirk going out of focus, I see Roddenberry’s focus being absent as well.
Still–a good collection of episodes overall, better than I remembered before I looked back carefully at the list. We’ll see what happens in Season Three, which begins with the notorious “Spock’s Brain.”
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