From: ottoh3@CFSMO.Honeywell.COM (Otto Heuer #3)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.misc
Subject: Re: Series' beginnings
Date: 16 Apr 92 16:16:07 GMT
Article-I.D.: tyrell.9204161616.AA20591
Organization: Hack-Man's Hangout
To: rec.arts.startrek.misc (rec.arts.startrek.misc)
Posted-Date: Thu, 16 Apr 92 11: 16:07 CDT
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Michael Rawdon writes:

| ottoh3@CFSMO.Honeywell.COM (Otto Heuer #3) writes:

| >Jason Snell posts:

| >| Now, to flame point #2: "Where No Man Has Gone Before," which, in my mind, is
| >| one of TOS' best episodes.
| 
| >Let's see if I can even IMAGINE something from the show that could have
| >made it even an AVERAGE episode of TOS...  hmmm.... any humorous
| >interaction between the crewmen?  nope...
| 
| Yeah, least of all that exchange in the elevator after Kirk beat Spock at
| chess. :-)

yipes... that was a painful scene.

this was the "humor" that people were talking about?  maybe the *episode*
needed smilies.

| >                                         any deep thought-provoking plot?
| >nope...
| 
| Kirk has to kill his best friend and first officer.  Yeah, pretty lame. :-)

They didn't do a very good job of showing us that Gary was his best
friend.  Did they *say* that Gary was the first officer?  I musta missed
that...

| >      any deep look into a major character?  nope...
| 
| Kirk watches his best friend become inhuman before his eyes, is forced to
| kill him, argues with Spock about this point, even as Kirk has to begin
| relying on Spock as his de facto first officer.  That's pretty deep, I think.

Dunno...  didn't do anything for me.  And the (regular) actors can't really
be blamed, since  they *did*  have a  lot of  later episodes  that had deep
looks into major characters.

| >Okay, feel free to try to convince me why this episode is so good.
| 
| I dunno; maybe you're right. :-)

Glad to hear it!  ;-)

| >| You've got a mysterious force which kills a few
| >| crewmembers, and seriously injures others,
| 
| >"mysterious"? sorry... didn't even cause me to CARE.  Maybe if they had
| >concentrated on exploring WHY this was happening at the barrier it 
| >would have held my interest, but they just decided to abandon it and
| >focus on this minor character that we aren't even led to care about.
| 
| I disagree.  I felt that Mitchell was built up as a very sympathetic
| character, and a look at WHY the barrier did what it did I think would have
| been disastrously tedious.  As in "Yesterday's Enterprise", the more
| exciting option is to deal with the effects rather than explore the causes.

I don't  think either  of us  will be  able to  convince the  other on this
point, so I'll let this one drop.  

Otto:  The character interaction didn't work, so they  should have resorted
to the "exploring where no man has gone before" aspect.

Mike:  The character interaction worked okay for  me and  we shouldn't have
to see the crew dealing with space exploration.

| >| The evil-looking first
| >| officer, who is not really close to the captain,
| 
| >Maybe that's another reason I didn't like it.  It doesn't mesh with
| >the rest of the series.  Inconsistencies...
| 
| Actually, the rest of the series didn't mesh with it.  "WNMHGB" came first,
| remember.

Yeah, but I think (MHO) that the charaacter was changed for the better.  It
might have been interesting to see what the rest of the series (and movies)
would have been like  with "Dark  Spock", but  personally I  don't think it
would have  been  as  good  (though  it  may  still be  interesting) as the
interpersonal relationships between "Spock & Kirk" and "Spock & McCoy".

| I think Spock was visually more interesting in this episode than in most
| of the rest of the series.  The uniforms were better too.

Don't remember  the  uniforms...    I  *do*  remember  the silly mircophone
attached to the captain's chair and the annoying echoing when Kirk used it.
Glad they axed that right away.

| >| "WNMHGB" is classic trek,
| 
| >"WNMHGB" is classic drek, with cardboard characters (Mitchell and the
| >doctor, not to mention the worst acting I've seen from Kellerman in her
| >entire career).
| 
| Gee, I hate to think of where that puts the rest of the series. :-)

in pretty good shape, actually...

| >| as well as being a pretty
| >| solid action show.
| 
| >They had at least 10 better show that were "action" oriented:
| [some deleted]
| >Patterns of Force
| >A Piece of the Action
| >The Savage Curtain
| >Spectre of the Gun
| >Dagger of the Mind
| 
| I can't buy any of these as being even in the same nation, much less the
| same ballpark. :-)

neither can I, but obviously on the other end of the spectrum.  ;-)

| >Even if we steer away from the "action" episodes, there were many that were
| >better that WNMHGB":
| [Again, some deleted]
| 
| >The Paradise Syndrome
| >Wink of an Eye
| >By Any Other Name
| >I, Mudd
| >The Way to Eden
| 
| Ditto these.  In fact, except for the first, I find all of these episodes to
| be very poor; mind-candy at best.

some classic  humor  episodes,  and  some  classic  episodes  that  made it
*without* having  to  rely  on  "shoot  'em  up  action"  or "total humor".
Wouldn't trade 'em for the world.

| >I really do find it painful to watch DM.   When Decker  starts drooling and
| >spitting on the cast members as he utters (with no sense of  acting at all)
| 
| We obviously have different definitions of the word "acting". :-)

Guess so.  I call what RM did in Space Seed  and ST2  acting.   I call what
Frakes did in BoBW1 acting.  I don't call Decker's ramblings of Troi's "the
paaaaain" (in early episodes) good  acting (or,  possibly--just bad writing
or directing).

| Personally, I think "The Doomsday Machine" is the best episode that Trek
| Classic ever produced.  (And second only to ST2:TWOK in all of Trek.)  It
| just doesn't get much better than that. 

Fortunately, it did.

| I certainly don't think that any
| of the 20 episodes you listed above approach it in quality.

Luckily, none of those came even *close* to being as bad as DM...

                --Otto "HACK-MAN" Heuer
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