Star Trek: The Animated Series

[starlady]

In preparation for Star Trek: Lower Decks (I'm just going to call it LDS, because the one with the whales is a perfect movie, and you can't stop me), I rewatched all of The Animated Series. It's wild to realize that the first and last time I watched it was ten years ago; you can find my reaction posts in the star trek tag. 

Rewatching, it was interesting to me how some things bothered me less and others bothered me more--I've always hated Harvey Mudd, and as far as I'm concerned Lorca should have shot his ass in that Klingon prison and saved us all the suffering--but I hated him even more this time around, with the fire of a thousand firey suns. Even as it was pretty hilarious to me how there was a very obvious "no homo!" moment in that episode which…is not convincing in the slightest. But I appreciated again how the character designs make all the women look angry, and how the fact that a good chunk of the episodes are follow-ups to TOS episodes means that they can be slightly denser than their 22 minute allotment would suggest. I also don't think the animation is actually that bad, aside from the parts where the QC obviously failed. It's not that much worse than any other 1970s cartoon, at any rate, particularly in comparison to contemporary animation. And the characters outside the Kirk/Spock/McCoy trio really get a chance to shine, which is a nice change from TOS.

Anyway. TAS is canon now, again--suck it, Roddenberry! And for that reason, if you like TOS, I think it's worth watching. There are only 22 episodes, you can binge the whole thing in a day or two. But if you want a guide to the truly worthwhile episodes, well, here's my thoughts as a dedicated TAS fan. 

• "Yesteryear" (1x02) - Spock has to travel back in time to save his own life by masquerading as a cousin. Mark Lenard returns as Sarek and suddenly it's obvious where DSC got the set design for their house on Vulcan in S2. D.C. Fontana penned what was for a while the only officially canon episode (except even that's not true, because Kirk's middle name comes from another episode) and it's good. It also reminded me a lot of Spock's World, one of the best Trek novels.
• "The Lorelei Signal" (1x04) - Led by Uhura and Chapel, the women of the Enterprise have to save the men from a race of immortal Barbie vampires, and it's so good. Unsurprisingly, a woman (Margaret Armen) wrote this episode.
• "More Tribbles, More Troubles" (1x05) - By far the funniest TAS episode. Koloth returns, and so do Cyrano Jones and the tribbles. David Gerrold only had one shtick, but it worked very well with the Trek characters.
• "The Survivor" (1x06) - A fascinating mix of weird (tentacles!) and touching with a pretty great female security officer and a plotline that ends happily in xenophilia, with some great trio character moments along the way.
• "The Infinite Vulcan" (1x07) - The script that Walter Koenig wrote by way of an apology for the fact that Chekov wasn't brought back for the show is actually quite good, and if you love Sulu (who doesn't love Sulu, the sword guy!), this is the episode for you.
• "The Ambergris Element" (1x14) - You will never convince me that Margaret Armen wasn't a fan of the premise, because she wrote this episode where Kirk and Spock turn into mermen. Once again, the aliens are interesting, and the mermen thing is quite something.

There are quite a lot of other episodes that are interesting, or have interesting elements--Kor returns in 1x12, the Enterprise meets Lucifer in 1x08, 1x01 has some really genuinely cool sense of wonder stuff, 2x05 was co-written by a Native writer and features the actual god Quetzalcoatl as well as a Comanche bridge officer--which is part of why I say it's worth watching all of them. And they can be quite unintentionally hilarious. And above all, warts and all, it's Star Trek.