Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1

As an admitted geek there has always been one badge missing from my nerd uniform. The Star Trek badge. I’ve seen the movies, a few episodes of The Next Generation and most of Voyager. But I’ve never seen The Original Series. The episodes never aired on a regular basis for me to catch on television and the DVD sets were always too expensive. But thanks to Netflix I can stream the entire series, and except for Enterprise the entire Star Trek television group can be viewed. I recently finished watching the first season and wanted to post my thoughts here.

Netflix has the original unaired pilot available for viewing. After watching it, all I could think of was how the hell did NBC greenlight this for a series. It had little action focused on a captain that was not played by William Shatner and was a very cerebral episode. The only cast member to be brought over from the pilot was Spock. Everyone else was replaced creating a very multi-ethnic group. The first several episodes followed a similar pattern to the pilot episodes. They focused on more cerebral adventures. Everything involved people manipulating the mind and not on physical danger of the ship. The first half also featured a two part episode that incorporated the pilot to display it as an adventure of the previous captain of the Enterprise.

The second half of the season really picked up the action and the story telling. I found three episodes from this half to be really good. The first is “Space Seed,” which is the prequel to Star Trek II. It introduced Kahn and now knowing the history of that character has upped my appreciation for the movie, the episode was also fun to watch. The next is “Balance of Terror” which featured the crew going up against a Romulan ship. It reminded me of the cat and mouse chase at the end of Star Trek II. The episode was great and I loved watching the crews of the two ships go head to head against each other. Finally “The City on the Edge of Forever” told a story that is very similar to Star Trek IV. Time travel is always fun when done in moderation and this story was fantastic.

Overall the season lives up to the myth that it had built upon itself. It really helps you understand the friendship that exists between Bones, Spock and Kirk. The season is 30 episodes but it was well worth watching and if you have ever been interested in the Star Trek series it is defiantly worth checking out. The first season gets 4 out of 5 stars