Star Trek: The Original Series (Season 1)

Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForrest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Grace Lee Whitney, Majel Barrett, James Doohan

Creator: Gene Roddenberry

Genre: Sci-Fi

Rating: C+

This is going to be a bit sacrelige, but I didn't really enjoy the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series (initially known  as simply Star Trek).  There was a plethora of reasons, but the biggest were simply the overall writing, the horrible special effects, the overall plot (or lack thereof), and the acting.

For those who don't know Star Trek (are in the dark so to speak, probably owing to the rock on the far side of Pluto that they've been living on for the past forty or so years), the original series follows the crew of the starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) as they "boldly go where no man has gone before."  The crew is headed by Captain James T. Kirk (Shatner), first officer Spock (Nimoy), and chief medical officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Kelley), and rounded out by crew members chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (Doohan), communications officer Uhura (Nichols), helmsman Sulu (Takei), yoeman Janice Rand (Whitney), and nurse Christine Chapel (Barett).  In the first series, the crew encounter aliens, defy death (except for when they don't), deal with mutants, and watch as Kirk loses his shirt and sleeps his way through the galaxy.

I don't actually mind the general plot of the story, as it's really rather typical of science fiction (especially of science fiction of this time), and I can appreciate the ways in which it helped the genre.  I'm not a big fan of the writing though, simply because I found myself having to buy into a bit too much.  This probably could have been avoided had the show been less episodic and more serial; each episode essentially carried itself and was unaffected by the episodes that came before it - and thus had no effect on the episodes that came after it.  I'm not a fan of TV tabula rasa, which in my opinion is essentially what happens here.  Every episode the Enterprise crew come up against some new adventure, Kirk sleeps with some new woman, and people (often in red shirts) die.  Every episode the crew learns something - only to conveniently forget it by the next episode.  It is because of this that the show is able to be aired in a non-chronological order, which goes contrary to the order in which they were produced in.

The problem of the special effects is one that can be dismissed by the fact that Star Trek was created in the mid-1960s, until you realize that Planet of the Apes was created around the same time.  Some of the effects are actually pretty cool and I have to admit that I love the backgrounds that fill the show.  What I hate, however, are the aliens.  They're really kind of lame, and often really cheesy.  The worst, in my opinion, is the neural parasites in the season finale, which were literally created by covering novelty vomit in a plastic bladder.  Seriously: the special effects involved dollar store fake vomit.

The worst thing, though, is the acting.  While there are some good, possibly even great actors, here - I really have to say that I love Leonard Nimoy's Spock - most of them are a bit more on the mediocre side of things, and William Shatner... William Shatner is not a good actor.  He's entertaining, yes, but he's not exactly good.  The fact that he's the lead here just makes things worse, as does his manner of enunciating every word and thus making them into their own individual sentence. While I suspect that this is done so as to add emphasis and create dramatic tension, what it actually does is makes him sound as though he's constantly struggling to remember his lines.