OH YEAH!

Put two or more hard core Trekkers in a room and what do you get? Well, within five minutes there is a debate over the best episode from the first season of the original Star Trek. In ten minutes it has degenerated into an argument. In fifteen minutes there will be a physical altercation if someone doesn’t intervene. That is just the natural progression. Trekkers are adamant when it comes to the best episodes, particularly the first season. The topic is as sacred as Spock’s ears.

I use to be like that. That is, until I went through the twelve step program. You know, apologizing to those I offended in the past. Calling my sponsor when I feel like punching someone that says J.J. Abrams makes good Star Trek movies. So forth, and so on. However, recently I fell off the wagon, so to speak. So, I will say with absolute certainty that Balance of Terror is without  doubt the best episode, not only of the first season, of all incarnations of Star Trek. There I said it.

If you’re not a Trekker I’m pretty sure you’re saying to yourself, “WTF is this idiot talking about?” Well, this idiot is talking about the holy grail of modern science fiction, the first season. it was the best written, best produced, and best all around science fiction television that ever existed. Just ask any Trekker, if you’re unfortunate enough to know one.

The first season was like falling in love the first time. The second season was like breaking up with your first love, and the third season was like a really bad divorce. There were a lot of reasons for this. Mainly, it was the networks jerking Roddenberry around so much he totally lost interest in the project and left it to others that just didn’t have the passion necessary to create a quality show. So, you get episodes like Spock’s Brain.  Truly, I shutter to think about some of the garbage that was put out on the air waves in the third season. If only the suits at NBC had the foresight to see the real economic potential of Star Trek maybe the series could have lasted at least five years. Oh well, I guess we’ll never know.

Sleeping With The Lights On

Rod Serling was the coolest guy when I was a kid. Unfiltered cigarette in hand, neatly tailored suit, fresh haircut. He looked like one of the Rat pack. Frank, Sammy, Dean, and Rod has a nice ring to it; like John, Paul, George and Ringo. There is one big difference though, Frank, Sammy and Dean didn’t scare me shitless, Rod did.

The Twilight Zone was an anomaly. It was an exercise in intellectual sophistication that was almost nonexistent in the late fifties, early sixties. Serling’s scripts had deeper meaning than the surface story. He dealt with issues of racism, bigotry, and intolerance in a subtle manner. You never felt preached at, and it was entertainingly scary too.

To this day I can’t watch It’s A Good Life without looking away when Billy Mumy turns that guy into a jack in the box. The first time I saw it, I had nightmares for a week. It’s not that the scene is so scary, the image is shown only in shadow, its how my imagination made it more horrendous than the actual image would have been. I’m sure Serling knew this and that just shows what an artists he was. Of course Jerome Bixby’s script was great too.

Night Call is the episode that made my butt pucker. When you’re seven and your parents tell you not to watch something, you should listen. I sneaked into my older brothers room, where there was a small TV, and watched anyway.  I actually peed myself because I was too afraid to go into the dark hallway where the bathroom was. Many years later, my mother told my wife  about this incident. So my wife, having a rather sophomoric sense of  humor, set the ring tone on her phone to the old style, like in the show, and gets  special amusement setting it off in the middle of the night. Guess I’ll never live that one down.

All things considered, I think it was worth the trauma of  personal humiliation at the hands of people I love, and the inability to sleep in the dark until I was eighteen to experience this one of a kind Television show.