Sunday, April 17, 2016

Star Trek: Season Two Redux

Yes, I've been blogging about the original Star Trek series for a while and I've just completed my last episode from its second season, so here is my list of the top 10 episodes of season two.
#10 The Apple - Kirk plays the role of the devil, casting out a civilization from paradise, but its okay as he needed to do so to save his ship. Oh, and Spock gets hit by lightning. I suspect that few others would put this in their top 10 list, but this is my guilty pleasure choice.

Favorite Line: "All the world knows about Vaal. He causes the rains to fall and the sun to shine. All good comes from Vaal."
#9 By Any Other Name - Alien invaders from another galaxy seize the Enterprise and learn what it means to be human. This is perhaps another guilty pleasure choice, but it's my list, so why not?

Favorite Line: "It's green."
#8 Mirror, Mirror - There's an alternate universe where Spock is evil and wears a beard. A beard! What's not to love? Well, plenty, but if you just go with it, it is pretty fun. This episode spawned a whole bunch of sequels in Deep Space Nine, Enterprise and an awesome one from Star Trek Continues too.

Favorite Line: "In every revolution, there's one man with a vision. "
#7 Obsession - Lots of Red Shirts die as Kirk must destroy a Killer Outer Space Vampire Cloud. Still, it is good stuff.

Favorite Line: "Mister Spock, why aren't you dead?"
#6 The Ultimate Computer - A classic Kirk vs. Computer Episode, only this time it's personal, as the computer, M5, may put Kirk out of a job.

Favorite Line: "We're invincible. Look what we've done. Your mighty starships, Four toys to be crushed as we choose!"
#5 The Trouble With Tribbles - Rapidly breeding, but adorable fur balls eat a lot of GMO grain and threaten a space station with ecological disaster through rapid population growth, while inadvertently uncovering a Klingon plot. It is oodles of fun.

Favorite Line: "Surely you must have realized what would happen if you removed the tribbles from their predator-filled environment into an environment where their natural multiplicative proclivities would have no restraining factors."
# 4 Who Mourns for Adonais? -  Michael Forest plays the Greek god Apollo, who demands that Kirk and his crew worship him. A wonderful episode, that also has a great sequel from Star Trek Continues.

Favorite Line: "I offer you more than your wildest dreams have ever imagined. You'll become the mother of a new race of gods. You'll inspire the universe. All men will revere you almost as a god yourself. And I shall love you for time without end, worlds without end. You shall complete me, and I you." - How's that for a pick up line?
# 3 Journey to Babel -  We get to meet Spock's parents as the Enterprise escorts a ship full of ambassadors to a peace conference that is threatened by dangerous foes. It's just awesome.

Favorite Line: "Mother, how can you have lived on Vulcan so long, married a Vulcan, raised a son on Vulcan, without understanding what it means to be a Vulcan?" Honorable mention: "Tellarites do not argue for reasons. They simply argue."
# 2 Amok Time - Kirk and Spock fight to the death. What more do I need to say?

Favorite Line: "The air is the air. What can be done?"
# 1 The Doomsday Machine - A wandering, automated planet-killing machine takes out the U.S.S. Constellation, will its captain bring the Enterprise down too? I pretty much love everything about this episode--the acting, the 60s effects, the music--everything. It may be my top TOS Trek episode from any of the three seasons.

Favorite Line: "No, I'm a doctor, not a mechanic."

Honorable Mentions: The Changeling was on this list, but got bumped. Return to Tomorrow was also a strong contender, if for no other reason, than for Kirk's Risk Speech. It's that awesome.

All-in-all, season two was pretty good. Yes, there were some turkeys, but most of them had something wonderful here and there.
It took me almost a year to cover the first season of Star Trek and almost two and a half years to get through blogging about season two. At this rate, I'll be finishing up season three.....well, who knows, but I'm planning on picking up the pace.

Since I'm covering the episodes in production order, season three will begin with Spectre of the Gun.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Star Trek: Assignment: Earth

Most of my posts recently have been about Star Trek and here's another one, as I take a look at the final episode of season two of the original series
Once again, it's a really clear day everywhere on Earth.
Assignment: Earth is a strange episode. It was put forward not just as an episode of Trek, but also as a hopeful spin-off series. As a result, it wasn't really good at either. The hopeful series didn't get picked up and the episode isn't the best that Trek has to offer either.

In the episode the Enterprise has been sent back in time (!) "to find out how our planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968." Interesting, as 1968 would later prove to be a rough and tumble year in the U.S., but thankfully one that didn't see the launch of the orbiting nuclear weapons platforms that were supposed in this episode.
Just before the opening credits they accidentally intercept a powerful transporter beam with a human, Gary Seven, and his cat Isis (a familiar?). It seems that Seven has been sent from a planet whose existence will remain hidden even in the 23 Century "to prevent Earth's civilization from destroying itself before it can mature into a peaceful society." Can Kirk and Spock trust him? Can they stop him or should they help him? That's the crux of this episode.
That, along with showing us cool footage of the Apollo 4 launch of the first unmanned Saturn V rocket
And Spock hanging out with Isis the cat.
We also get to meet Roberta Lincoln, Seven's new groovy, but ditzy helper. The series they were trying to sell would have been the adventures of Seven, Lincoln and the cat, presumably saving the Earth from destruction every week.
I'm not sure it would have worked, especially without a T.A.R.D.I.S., but at least Seven has a Sonic Screwdriver. I think that you can make a good argument that Seven is in fact a Time Lord, but I don't blog about Doctor Who, so I'll just leave it at that.
We do get to see Kirk and Spock in civilian clothes, which is fun, and the episode gave us a genuine look at the future by showing us a voice-recognition typewriter, but the whole, "were here to figure out what happened in the past" argument doesn't work for me, especially when at the end of it all, Kirk explains that their record tapes reveal that everything happened exactly the way it was supposed to. So why didn't they look at those record tapes before their mission?

Or maybe history was altered and they just don't know it. Alas, there's no sign of a historian on this mission who might have been able to sort it all out. I guess they never replaced the one they lost in Space Seed.
 Assignment: Earth ended Trek's second season. In my next post I'll look at the season as a whole and present my top 10 episodes.

Friday, April 1, 2016

Star Trek Concert!

It is no secret that I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I'm also a big fan of movie and TV music and I have a large soundtrack collection. So it shouldn't be a big surprise that I was interested in attending the Star Trek 50th Anniversary Concert Tour which played in San Diego last night.
Overall, the experience was a lot of fun. The tour has a live symphony orchestra in front of a 40-foot projection screen which was showing clips from the TV shows and movies along with occasional narration by Michael Dorn ("Warf" from TNG).
It is likely that my expectations were different from the average concert goer. I was there to hear and see the orchestra. This was often difficult to do as there was sound to go along with the projection and at times it overwhelmed the orchestra. There was also a loud reverberation at times which was very annoying. However, the clips projected were mostly a lot of fun, though I was surprised that they re-used a few of them. We only needed to hear Kirk's "Risk Speech" once. The video also didn't give the audience much of a chance to applaud for the orchestra, as sometimes they would be starting another clip right at the end of some music when I felt it was time to give the orchestra some applause.

The orchestra was surprisingly hard to see. The shot above shows the stage (before the show). There were various set pieces to give it sort of a Star Trek feel, that mostly hid the orchestra from view. Often there was little or no lighting on the orchestra, so they were hard to see.

The best time to see the orchestra was after intermission when Trek composer Ron Jones was guest conducting the Enter'acte. There was no video as Jones was conducting and the orchestra was nicely illuminated. Composer Jay Chattaway was also on hand to guest conduct his wonderful Orchestral Suite from The Inner Light, which is perhaps the most famous and beloved music from all of the TNG franchise. The Orchestra really hit the mark for this piece, but the video presentation was very distracting from here and it felt somewhat rude to be playing dialog and sound effects over this while the composer was conducting his own work. Yes, I realize that this is the fate of music composed for TV and film, but I was hoping to hear this piece in particular on its own.
Thankfully, a lot of music composed for Star Trek has been released on CD, so that film score fans like me can listen to it on its own. Yes, the CDs above are my Star Trek music collection.
Speaking of CDs, there's one available from this tour too. The two disc-set was available at the concert hall and is online. I picked one up at the show, but haven't had a chance to listen yet. There are extensive liner notes, which I'm looking forward to reading. I should note that the conductor for the CD is different from Nicholas Buc, the conductor who is out on the tour.

As for the music in the concert, the show pretty much hit all the highlights with the major pieces by composers Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Dennis McCarthy and others being represented. I was especially happy to hear some of Sol Kaplan's music from TOS episode The Doomsday Machine, Jerry Goldsmith's Ilia's Theme from TPM, and Michael Giacchino's Enterprising Young Men from the 2009 Trek movie. 
Conductor Nicholas Buc, along with composers Ron Jones and Jay Chattaway (center stage) get a standing ovation at the end of last night's show. 

All-in-all it was a fun show. If you are a music purist then you might get annoyed at some of the other elements of the show, but if you want a fun evening of Star Trek, then take a look to see if this 100-city tour will be near you before the North American tour is done in early May.