carmen_lj | top five tos

So all the Trekness is reigniting my enthusiasm for TOS. Generally I forget that I do quite like it cause there is an awful lot about it that annoys me. Then I remember there's also a lot that I love. This happens a lot with Star Trek shows.

Anyway, here are my five favourite episodes:

The Enterprise Incident - My very favourite TOSed of them all. It's because of the Romulans (I do love Romulans). And particularly The Romulan Commander (II): here we've got a female guest star who's intelligent, strong-willed, has authority and exercises it effectively. She's clearly interested in Spock but that doesn't stop her ordering his execution. She puts her duty first and is perfectly calm and composed in the face of her own death (when she orders her ship to fire on the Enterprise while she's onboard).

Also there's some stuff about Spock and Kirk doing spying that's quite good too.

Balance Of Terror - The other Romulan episode, with another Romulan Commander what I think is awesome. Also he's Mark Lenard. It's basically a submarine thriller in space (...submarines are thrilling, dammit!) and goes for presenting Kirk with a complex and nuanced foe instead of drawing the more trad Trek line of Good and Evil. And it's all dramatic and exciting and stuff.

Journey To Babel - More Mark Lenard, hurrah! The episode that gave us Sarak and Amanda, two tryly fantastic characters, both marvellously performed. It's also get a plethora of alien species, not just more Vulcans, but Andorians and Tellarites, and gives a little insight into internal Federation politics.* Mostly though, it's about Spock and his family and their relationships and it's a fabulous character episode that everyone with the slightest interest in Spock should totally watch.

Mirror, Mirror - The original Trek AUverse episode. Spock has a beard and thus we know he is Evil and we are in an Evilverse. It's a proper ensemble episode which makes me Glee Mightily and my very favourite Uhura episode. She's awesome in this. I love how she gets a chance to show her courage and initiative but is still allowed to be vulnerable. And that she's comfortable and confident enough to express her fear to Kirk who's all "only you can do it, Uhura!" Damn right. That communications console is complicated. (Which reminds me about this rant I keep meaning to write about how come Uhura gets snark for being "the receptionist" but no-one has a go at Chekov for pressing the fire button or Sulu for pointing the ship in the right direction and pressing go? SOD OFF. We see her at the helm, we see her doing engineering stuff, we know she encrypts and decrypts stuff and there's no way I'm going to believe that consists of "just pressing a button" anymore than I'm going to believe Chekov sits there and presses a big red button marked Fire as opposed to Having Skills. Ahem.) But, yes, she does go to the bridge OF EVIL and tells EVIL Sulu to back off, she gets the info our dudes need re Kirk's orders, she distracts Sulu from his console and then pulls a knife on him, she gets into the fight against Spock in sickbay (HOW MUCH do I love that she gets right in there with Kirk, Scott and McCoy instead of flailing on the sidelines?) and actually ends the fight by picking up a vase and she's the one who disarms Marlena when she pulls a gun on them all.

And Takei seriously brings it as evil!Sulu.

Turnabout Intruder - This episode has major problems. As a rule, you're gonna encounter sexism if you watch a TOS episdoe, but in this one it manages to descend into outright misogyny. It's possible to fanwank (trad old skool Who definition) the line about "there being no place for women in your world of starship captains" as being about no place for relationships for captains, but the fact that we're told the reason that our antagonist, Janice Lester, is insane is because of her intense hatred of her own womanhood is, um, yeah. Nice one, dudes.

But, if you can ignore that, then what is left is a very fine character piece. It's a fantastic look at who James Kirk is, what his crew mean to him and vice versa and particularly at the relationship between Spock and himself. And Sandra Smith gives a fabulous performance as Kirk (in Lester's body), a performance, one might argue, that is considerably more nuanced than Shatner's Kirk.

And Shatner gets to totally ham it up as a crazy lady.

*The Onion mocks but it's true: the big meeting scenes make EVERYTHING BETTER. Politics are interesting dammit and, yeah, it's possible to get it horribly wrong (halo thar Star Wars!) but the Big Meeting Scene with all the Starfleet top brass in Undiscovered Country sets up the premise of the movie and quickly and efficiently gets all the exposition out of the way. Plus it makes it feel a bit Epic. And then you've got the Big Meeting scene at the end with the diplomatic conference and it really does feel PROPER AWESOME AND EPIC.