Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 77 The Savage Curtain
Yes I’m back on this. I can’t start a project and let it fail after only completing 2/79 parts. It would be much more my style to have it fail after completing 76/79 parts. Also I personally own so many Star Trek t shirts that every morning as I get dressed I feel guilty for letting this series fall by the wayside and I have enough guilt for actual bad things in my life.
So the Savage Curtain. If there were one item to epitomize what was wrong with Season 3 it would have to be Abe Lincoln in space (yes, the suicide planet, hippies in space, and telekinetic Greeks all have their place but this one is at the top. For the record Spocks Brain was at the end of Season 2). Honestly, how does having Kirk and Spock dream up good guys and bad guys and get into a fist fight with them tell the turd monsters (sorry, the Excalbians)? What if Kirk had slipped on a rock and broke his skull open, leaving the Excalbians understanding of good and evil to a minor twist of fate?
(Honestly I don’t think good and evil are that hard to understand. I have an understanding and am happy to have chosen ev…I mean good!)
For that matter, who appointed Kirk and Spock as the universal representatives of good? Wasn’t it established in The Enemy Within that Kirk is comprised of both good and evil parts? I’d say a laundry list of intergalactic booty calls and half breed alien bastard children might have a thing of two to say about him from a moral perspective. Didn’t he let a super hot innocent girl walk in front of a truck in order to save his future? What about the other future full of people that he just destroyed? And Spock would let 1,000,000 people die if it meant saving 1,000,001 people. Not a lot of morality in that equation.
Finally, the real problem with this episode is they were really running out of ideas and opted to just remake Arena without the Gorn. I’m not saying I hate this episode. Only that the signs that the series was running out of steam were pretty strong. I sometimes wish for a fourth season but really when you think about it this shows the trend. Who knows what bad ideas would have arisen in season 4? A racist cartoon rabbit that talks with a lisp? Kirk being replaced by a captain with no hair? A complete reboot where the entire universe gets more stupid and Star Wars-y with no nod towards Gene Roddenberry’s vision? No, in those halcyon days such things were decades in the future.
Dave
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