This is one of my posts where I “review” Star Trek episodes. I will be giving each one a star rating. I sometimes will make some comments about non-political parts of them that I like or don’t like. I’ll sometimes use the issues raised in the episode to discuss similar issues in real life. And I will sometimes simply high-light the progressive politics of ST. ST is in-line with the three original themes of this blog, as I explain in the first ST post where I offer some general thoughts about ST.
I have been more or less ignoring this- the need for me to become familiar with The Original Series. In general I don’t like much of what I’ve seen. In any case, I am now watching it and will be doing reviews of those episodes. I will be giving pretty low scores, probably no higher than three stars out of five- I just don’t like TOS.
Lastly. multi-culturalism is such a pervasive theme in ST that I only comment on it when it goes beyond the norm (i.e. inter-species partners).
“The Man Trap” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it two stars out of five.
“Charlie X” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it one star out of five.
“Where No Man Has Gone Before” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it one star out of five.
“The Naked Time” See this for a plot summary.
There is one thing that probably needs to be mentioned- I believe this is the first episode where we hear about Spock’s mom being human (in one earlier episode it was mentioned that some of his ancestors were human, but I can’t remember which episode). This takes ST’s multi-cultrualism a bit further than normal.
I give it two stars out of five.
“The Enemy Within” See this for a plot summary.
A non-political episode. I give it two stars.
“Mudd’s Women” See this for a plot summary.
I found this to be a fairly sexist episode (although the series in general, as far as I can tell, makes some progress on this, it is still fairly-very sexist).
UPDATE 11/17/11
I wrote the following in the most recent review:
"UPDATE 11/9/11 I think that with this post and maybe a couple others where I accused ST *TOS* of being sexist I went a little too far. I mean, there ARE two statements by kirk that are sexist, and I think the whole women crewmembers wearing skirts (or dresses?) thing is sexist. But when it comes to Kirk and in this case also Scotty, referring to adult female crewmembers as "girl" or "lass" I have to wonder, how often has kirk called adult male crewmembers "boy?" I think probably rarely or never, but I'm not going to re-watch the series anytime soon, so I don't know. It is possible I'm being too harsh with the characters and writers over the use of "lass" and "girl." And I could be wrong about the skirts."
I cannot remember much from this episode ("Mudd's Women") but wouldn't be surprised if I have mis-judged it and it's writers too. Especially if the only sexism came from Mudd, who is close to a villian in this episode.
I give it one star out of five.
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