Thread by @EsotericCD

The second season of STAR TREK: TOS is a fascinating change from the first season: pretty much equal overall in terms of quality, but much more *even*, without the big highs or lows of S1 for the most part. It's obvious how the writers are settling into comfortable patterns.

All the cliches you've osmotically absorbed about TOS falling back on "planet of the [X]" plots? They largely come from this season. Planet of the Romans! Planet of the Nazis! Planet of Cold War Soviets & US! Planet of Vietnam allegories! Planet of the...wait, 20-century Earth?

Yeah, those are all from S2, and I didn't even mention the Planet of the Prohibition-era Chicago gangsters! (Thankfully, the Planet of the American Indians comes in S3.) So that means there are fewer high-concept true sci-fi premises, which make up most of S1.

What few there are famous and justly celebrated, however: "Amok Time" (the one where Spock goes into a Vulcan mating fury and ends up dueling Kirk when he's tricked into it by his faithless and coldly rational betrothed bride) opens S2 on a flawless note. Every beat is perfect.

But even some of the ridiculous "here's some earth history STAR TREK-style!" ones work. First of all, in "Patterns Of Force," (the "Planet of the Nazis" one) I have to give The Band's Robbie Robertson credit for trying his hand at acting before returning to his true calling.

Also, I have to wonder whether anyone else has pointed out that Quentin Tarantino TRANSPARENTLY stole the whole "good guys disguise themselves as Nazis filming a glamorous actress of the Fatherland (also a spy) to sneak into where the Fuhrer is" plot point. It's right there!!

No seriously, there is a zero-point-zero percent chance that Tarantino did not crib that plot point from "Patterns Of Force" for INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. It's too much of a dead alignment. Can't be accidental.

Also, that "Planet of the Vietnam Allegories" one ("A Private Little War," it's one with the poisonous white-furred unicorn ape, c'mon ya know what I'm talking about) is actually quite a brilliant episode, and very much a bitter pill to swallow, deviating from standard Trek.

What distinguishes most of TOS (and classic TNG as well) is its optimism about humanity's future in space. As Kirk said in A Taste Of Armageddon (another high-concept S1 classic), "we're killers, yes, but we don't have to kill today." The Corbomite Maneuver another great example.

Meanwhile, in "A Private Little War," Kirk returns to a primitive planet he'd spent time in as a kid (slumming it and pretending not to be part of an advanced civilization) to learn that the Klingons have given his host's enemies guns to exterminate them and take it over.

So what does Kirk end up deciding to do? Fuck it, the U.S.S. Enterprise is going into the shady intergalactic arms dealer business. They end the show by giving THEIR team even more guns. All in the name of 'equalization' you see, to keep both sides on an even bearing.

But Trek is smarter than that. And so show ends on a note more downbeat than any since "City On The Edge Of Forever," where Kirk asks Scotty to fabricate a hundred guns for the Hill People. Scotty is like "uh..wha?" And Kirk calls them "100 serpents for the Garden of Eden." Oof.

Season 2 of TOS is where so many of your favorite TREK tropes actually took place, and they're your favorites even if you don't like Trek.

Seriously: you don't have to have ever seen a single episode to get a "bearded alternate universe villain version of the hero" reference, that's how universal "Mirror, Mirror" has become. There literally is a band CALLED Spock's Beard because of that episode. And it's an A+ ep.

My single favorite part of "Mirror, Mirror" is how the action focuses on heroes in the evil alternate universe struggling to stay undercover and not let on that they're good guys, and you sit there wondering, "hey, what about Evil Kirk, Evil McCoy, etc. in the good-guy timeline"?

SMASH-CUT to Spock herding all the evil-version characters into the brig at gunpoint as they're screaming and shouting about it. The punchline is that the bad-universe guys just had no idea how keep their evil a secret. Spock figured them out immediately. It's hilarious.

Also it's hard to beat Evil-Universe Sulu as a rapist with horrible facial scarring, or Evil-Universe Chekov as an incompetent traitor who ends up getting Agony Boothed. And amusingly, Evil Spock is basically the same as regular Spock, just a slightly different flavor. Logic!

Another important aspect of Season 2 of STAR TREK is how, for the first and last time, they actually did 'comedy' episodes. There were none in Season 1; Trelaine in "The Squire Of Gothos" is a funny character, but he's also a nasty, spiteful little spoiled brat. Not a comedy ep.

This is actually an innovation in the format: did THE TWILIGHT ZONE or OUTER LIMITS ever do purely comedic episodes? Nope, that wasn't their bailiwick. But on "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "A Piece Of The Action," we're going for laughs. And it works! Wonderfully!

If you enjoyed all those great X-FILES episodes that focused on the humor and not the plot tension ("Humbug," "Small Potatoes," "Triangle," "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'," "Dreamland," etc.), well here's the direct genetic predecessor of them.

Shatner has gotten brickbats for his hamminess as an actor over the years, some of them deserved: go back to S1's "The Enemy Within" for the first classic example of him noshing on the scenery. But he's a better actor than given credit for, and has great comedic sensibilities.

The Fizzbin scene in "A Piece Of The Action" (where Kirk makes up a fake card game to distract a bunch of gangsters with tommy guns holding him and Spock hostage) is just a delight of over-the-top comic line readings. You can tell how much fun Shatner's having with it.

And Nimoy (a more versatile actor in general, but without the same magnetism as Shatner) is also clearly getting a huge kick out of playing straight-man to Shatner. His reax shots during the scene where Kirk pathetically fails at driving a car w/ manual transmission are priceless

By the end of the episode, when Shatner is just full-on Shatening, pulling a hammy Chicago gangster accent while wearing a fedora, all reservations about the 'sci-fi premise' are out the window. This is just a ton of fun.

As for "The Trouble With Tribbles," well it's like one of a band's most known greatest hits being a somewhat lightweight frothy pop song. It's like the people who know Genesis for "That's All" and not for "Supper's Ready." The analogy holds because...it's still pretty great.

I do wonder how they thought people wouldn't notice that the main Klingon bad guy in "Tribbles" is the same actor who played Trelaine in "The Squire Of Gothos." That was one of the most beloved episodes (with one of the most memorably flamboyant guest-villains) in S1 of the show.

Nevermind that, tho'; even if you're not normally down for the idea of a sci-fi show basing itself around lovably fuzzy animals that do nothing except sit there and purr and reproduce and propagate faster than COVID-19, everyone in the cast is enjoying the hell out of themselves.

Shatner just sitting there as a mountainous pile of tribbles get dumped on his head, burying him up to the shoulders in (dead, as it turns out) furballs, is one TOS's classic images. His facial expression is a masterpiece of underplaying the ridiculousness of the situation.

And there's that little coup-de-grace near the end of the scene, one last tribble that comes tumbling out of the ceiling storage unit and bounces off his head. They probably had to do multiple takes on that.

Anyway, there's a lot more to season 2, much of it excellent ("Metamorphosis," "I, Mudd," "Obsession") some of it entertainingly ridiculous ("A Wolf In The Fold," "The Omega Glory") and some occasionally awful ("Assignment: Earth").

But there's only one "The Doomsday Machine."

I've already said it one of my earlier Trek threads: "The Doomsday Machine" is the perfect STAR TREK episode, the one I'd tell someone unfamiliar with the show to watch before all others. Maybe the greatest guest appearance in show history w/William Windom as Commodore Decker.

If you want a TREK episode without ANY of the "cheesiness," with only incredibly tense, tight plotting, perfectly believable plot developments, and some of the best acting by everyone in the cast? This is the one. It is actually the one ep where I can't nitpick a single flaw.

(well, I could have nitpicked the original 1967 episode's SFX, where the galaxy-destroying threat looked like a giant flaming Bugle snack, but they've fixed that in the remastered version you can find on Netflix.)

Windom, as Commodore Decker, is unforgettable: an able commander utterly destroyed & driven to madness over the loss of his crew to the planet-killing machine, which wasn't his fault in any way. It could have been a lame variation on Bogart in THE CAINE MUTINY. It's much better.

The way he tells his story when the Enterprise team finds him on the deck of his wrecked and abandoned ship is unforgettable. "No one heard...NO ONNNNE." -- you feel like a piece of his soul is leaving his body as he says it. One of the real tragic figures in show history.

KIRK: "Matt, where's your crew?"
DECKER: "On the third planet."
KIRK: "There *is* no third planet."
DECKER: "DON'T YOU THINK I KNOW THAT? THERE WAS, BUT NOT ANYMORE!"

What Decker does after that during the episode turns him into an antagonist, but never a villain. It's an important distinction. Realistic, plausible nuance that was unknown on most network television drama back then and even now.