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Brought back for a second year despite middling ratings,
“Star Trek” had its second best season with a number of
strong, well written scripts alternating with some of the
worst and clichéd one could imagine. The cast had discovered
who their characters were during the second season and William
Shatner & Leonard Nimoy stopped jockeying for position as
to who was the star and recognized that they were an ensemble
cast with the trio of characters of Kirk, Spock and Dr.
McCoy (the superb Deforest Kelley)in the series being the
most important on the show. They realized that they needed
to work TOGETHER to prevent the show from being compromised
by the executives at NBC (which surprisingly were quite
supportive). With all of the recent issues that we've discovered
that the Trek cast had during production (Shatner's failing
marriage, Nimoy's drinking problem, Takei struggling with
his homosexuality) it's a wonder that the show ever had
the chance to take off and find an audience. ***
Among the highlights are Norman Spinrad’s marvelous
“The Doomsday Machine” with enhanced visual effects that
make the episode that much more convincing. David Gerrold’s
“The Trouble with Tribbles” demonstrated the diversity of
the show with a whimsical episode that nicely captured the
“feeling” of “Star Trek” and yet deviated from the formula
that could have limited the show. “Mirror, Mirror”, “I,
Mudd” (another whimsical episode that proved that comedy
could be tackled just as easily in “Star Trek” as hair raising
adventures), “Who Mourns for Adonsis?”, “Obsession” and
“The Deadly Years” presented more difficult themes/stories
for the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. ***
Other highlights of season two include: “Metamorphosis”
written by one of the key creative forces behind “Star Trek”
producer/writer Gene L. Coon, “Mirror, Mirror” written by
science fiction and TV veteran Jerome Bixby, “Amok Time”
written by multiple award winning science fiction and fantasy
writer Theodore Sturgeon, “Wolf in the Fold” and “Catspaw”
both written noted horror, mystery and fantasy writer Robert
Bloch (“The Alfred Hitchcock Show”, the novel PSYCHO which
was the basis for Hitchcock’s film). That’s not to suggest
that every episode was a classic as the season began to
wind down the quality of the episodes became spotty. ***
Episodes such as “The Apple”, “The Omega Glory”, “Patterns
of Force” and “A Private Little War” were horrible analogies
tackled themes related to totalitarian regimes to the Vietnam
War. By the third season with writer/producer Gene L. Coon
gone, Fred Frieberger in charge and Roddenberry largely
MIA, the series dipped even further in terms of quality
with the show’s budget cut even more. ***
What also continues to impress me is the sharp visual
sense that many of the directors and the director of photography
for the series were able to bring to the series. The lighting
for "Trek" during the first two seasons is always imaginative
as is the camera placement and the work with the actors.
One of the strengths of the cast is that they nicely balanced
each other out. Although Shatner as an actor got better
with each take and the time limit for shooting TV sometimes
prevented this, he does a fine job here projecting more
of his own personna into Kirk and making him a realistic
character. Likewise Nimoy and Kelley nicely compliment Shatner
as did the rest of the supporting cast particularly James
Doohan (a marvelous character actor who astonishes with
his various accents. Heck, when I hear him perform without
his accent it seems weird that's how convincing he was),
Walter Koenig (who was introduced during this season as
Chekov), Nichols (who should have been given more to do
as she's a wonderful actress) and George Takei (I wish they
had given him more to do during season two as well--he's
a gifted actor with a magnficient voice) proving that "Star
Trek" was always an ensemble show even if it did have Shatner
listed as the star. ---
Image & Sound:
First up those of you with first generation Blu-ray
players MAY want to make sure that you have the latest and
greatest firmware updates. Older players are having some
difficulty reading the discs. For example I have a first
generation player and a recent player and the former had
some issues while the later was fine. ***
The big question is this a huge upgrade from the DVD’s?
Well, yes and no. Certainly the image quality IS sharper
with better detail but the same high definition masters
used to prepare the DVD remastered second season set were
used here. The big advantage will be the fact that you can
toggle between the original visual effects and the new digitally
created ones. The contrast IS remarkable here—the original
visual effects due to the use of optical printers and multiple
generations from the original image (because of all the
composite elements) are EXTREMELY grainy with much of the
detail washed out. ***
Colors are robust and bright nicely capturing the look
of the original negatives. I sincerely doubt they ever looked
this clean. “Star Trek” was shot on 35mm film and the original
negatives were scanned into the computer to help with grain
management, color restoration, digital clean up and corrected
skin tones for scenes that have faded. Digital artifacts
are kept to a minimum with a nice, clean high kbps transfer.
***
Audio sounds extremely good with a nice 7.1 lossless
mix. Dialogue is front and center with sound effects primarily
occupying the surround speakers. ---
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