Janice and Kirk

The Dagger in the Mind

The Enterprise brings aboard a Doctor Manette-type character; a smart man who’s been ruined by wrongful incarceration.  I enjoyed this one, though our poor Doctor Manette yells too much and it quickly gets annoying.  Also, in the future, flipping a switch in the wrong manner will instantly kill you.

The Corbomite Maneuver

Classic smart-aliens-are-testing-us-scenario, in which the Enterprise faces off against a spinning Windows icon and a menacing disco ball and everyone almost dies.  Uhura is suddenly wearing gold, not red.

The Menagerie, Pt. I & II

The classic human’s-been-captured-for-the-alien-zoo plot, played out over two episodes.  Spock pulls a hugely ballsy gambit to help a former coworker, and that adds lots of artificial drama to the storytelling.  The Federation has the technology to save the life of Captain Pike, who's been burned to a crisp and should be dead, but Future Medical Miracles! Unfortunately, future tech can't give us any communication from Pike other than one beep for yes, two beeps for no. Excellent appearance from Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett.

"I recorded you breathing at night
and made it my new ringtone!"

The Conscience of the King

Kirk investigates a former butchering dictator posing as a Shakespearean actor.  The actor’s great; his manic daughter is a walking crazy girlfriend meme, and Kirk’s the honey pot, using the daughter to get to the father.  Sidenote: I always love hearing Uhura sing.  

Balance of Terror

We meet Romulans (Romans with spaceships) for the first time, who are disciplined military strategy geniuses.  Kirk is effortlessly better at war than they are (because of course he is).  Also, why are there Romans in space?  Like, how could these Romulans have patterned their entire culture around Earth’s Rome?  

Janice and Kirk

"My hairdo? It's just naturally
like this when I wake up."

Might I mention that these six episodes are the last with Yeoman Janice?  I’m told that someone at the studio didn’t like Grace Lee Whitney and she got fired, though no one is owning up to being the person who wanted her gone.  I didn’t have any real problem with Janice, but it was jarring to have her replaced with no explanation whatsoever after being an important secondary character since the beginning.  

Major hair respect, Janice.  I’ll miss that basketweave hair fez you’ve been wearing.  

Janice and Kirk have a weird relationship.  Kirk’s evil transporter double tried to rape her because his id has a major thing for her.  Janice straight up admits that she wants Kirk to look at her legs in the episode Miri, when she starts getting twitchy about Kirk flirting with a prepubescent girl.  It’s obvious that the writers are setting these two up as the archetypical  OTP-will-they-won’t-they-unresolved-sexual-tension-couple.  In this set of episodes, Janice brings Kirk meals unsolicited, puts a linen napkin in his lap, stands weirdly close to him on the bridge when she thinks everyone’s about to die in Balance of Terror, and makes herself oddly scarce when Kirk’s wooing the actor’s daughter.  

Janice seems to exist to help us empathize with the loneliness of Kirk’s command - it’s totally obvious to everyone that Janice and Kirk wanna tear each other’s clothes off, but he’s not allowed to, because he’s a swell captain, dedicated to the standards of Starfleet professionalism.  Except for when he rides the elevator shirtless. (Why?  Why, Kirk?  You couldn’t put on a shirt for walking around the ship?)

"As per a yeoman's duties, I'll perform
the daily sniffing of your uniform, sir."

Janice gets credit for being feisty - every time there’s a creepy misogynist stalking someone on the Enterprise, you can safely bet that Janice is the subject of their obsession, and she does usually speak up for herself: not that anyone takes her very seriously, even when she’s been assaulted.  Still, as a feminist watching Janice, I can’t help feeling like even her feistiness is dialed way, way down, to a level acceptable to the patriarchy, leaving her pliable and easy-going enough to play opposite a real man’s man.  

Janice and Kirk, alas, were not meant to be, but that’s awfully convenient for our old-fashioned red-blooded captain, who needs to encounter a different sexy lady every week.  Still, the way Kirk’s been mooning over Janice, you expect him to at least mention why she’s suddenly gone from the Enterprise.

Captain's Blog, Supplemental: Color Bias

The weirdo green wrap-around number.

In an earlier post, I wondered aloud about Kirk's weirdo green uniform.  My phone recently told me "You've shown interest in Star Trek" and suggested I read an article about almost this exact question: Shirts and Skins in TOS

It turns out that the yellow uniform we're used to was actually green all along.  To summarize the article, film is complicated, and color perception is complicated.  Film especially sucked in the 60's and 70's, and post-processing of the film turned green uniforms yellow.  Colorists added additional "red bias" during processing to make people's faces rosier and healthier-looking.  (There's also a fascinating YouTube video about the history of film's color bias as it pertains to race: https://youtu.be/d16LNHIEJzs)

So anyhow, the weird wrap-around top that Shatner wore was created by the costume designer in a deeper shade of green after seeing how skewed the film came out.

The more you know.

So now you know, there were no yellow/gold/mustard uniforms in the original Star Trek.  Only green ones.  Crazy, right?

The Enemy Within / Mudd's Women / What Are Little Girls Made Of? / Miri

"Kirk likes eggs, so I hate 'em!"

Ugh.  Let's get this over with...

Synopses

The Enemy Within
A transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two antithetical people.  Sulu almost freezes to death.  Frost doesn't form until 117 degrees below zero.

Mudd's Women
The Enterprise interferes with a business supplying wives to rich miners.  "Venus drugs" are no more effective than a placebo.  The magic feather was just a gag!  You can fly!  Honest, you can!

Ron Popeil invented a machine that
clones people into robots AND
rotisseries chicken.

What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Nurse Chapel's former fiance starts turning people into robots with an ancient robot-making machine.  Robo-Kirk infiltrates the Enterprise to yell at Spock.

Miri
The Enterprise finds a band of orphaned children living alone an identical copy of Earth.  Kirk hits on a barely-pubescent girl.

Reactions

First off, there are two episodes in close succession in which there's an evil double of Kirk.  Really?

If they dressed me like that,
I would be angry, too.

Second, that dog.  That terrible, terrible, angry, weird dog in an alien-unicorn-dog costume.  Where was the Humane Society?

Third, "venus drugs" seem to just be pills that do your hair.

But mostly, I'm going to harp on the episode Miri.  Everything about this episode was wrong.

Kirk is really flirty with Miri, a girl who is just hitting puberty.  It's plainly wrong.  He's obviously flirting with her, and when she starts to show some affection for him, the rest of the away team has to explain that to him.  He's like, "Whaaaa?  She likes me?  Nah, that's crazy!"  You've been flirting with her basically non-stop since you got here.  Also, gross.

Then there's the fact that kids have been living alone, self-governing in weird little gangs, not aging, for 300 years.  And they just ran low on food.  What the hell kind of food have they been living on for 300 years with no agriculture or industry in their society?

No, no, no, no, no.

And lastly, we come to the captain's log at the very beginning: "In the distant reaches of our galaxy, we have made an astonishing discovery. Earth type radio signals coming from a planet which apparently is an exact duplicate of the Earth. It seems impossible, but there it is."  Nobody cared enough to ask why there was an exact duplicate of the Earth.  Not only is it ridiculous for it to exist, and more so for it to be quickly ignored, it was irrelevant to the plot anyway!

In summary, John Kennedy was a Catholic.

Where No Man Has Gone Before / The Naked Time

Recently we watched the third and fourth episodes of Star Trek: Where No Man Has Gone Before and The Naked Time.

Phenomenal cosmic power!
(Itty-bitty living space.)

Synopses

Where No Man Has Gone Before
While exploring the edge of the galaxy, the Enterprise encounters an energy barrier that gives two crewmen godlike powers.  Godlike powers seem to include immunity to phaser fire, but vulnerability to large rocks.

Oh my.

The Naked Time
The Enterprise crew is intoxicated by an inhibition-stripping contagion that causes Sulu's shirt to disintegrate.  Kirk gets jealous and rips his own shirt.  Scotty can't change the laws of physics, but accidentally invents time travel anyway.

Reactions
The godlike powers plot was really not that different from the previous episode (Charlie X) and left me a bit bored.  Parts of it were completely inexplicable, and the rest was just cheesy.

Seeing everyone lose their inhibitions was fun, but even that episode had its fair doses of "seriously?"  Like when they have to give Kirk a shot, so they rip his shirt apart.  And after traveling back in time three days, they basically say "Well, that was interesting.  Some day, we may try it again."  Just stuffed that little trick in their back pockets for a rainy day, I guess.  It felt all wrong.

I'm starting to get this feeling of "okay, let's just get this over with" in season 1.  To be fair, some of it's cheesy because it's fully 50 years old.  Some things I think of as cheesy now were probably new and interesting at the time, and have now been copied to death.  But I think some of this cheese is why I had a negative impression of the original series to begin with.  Here's hoping it gets better.