Reviewing the original Star Trek is a bit like reviewing oxygen (you're not going to convince too many people about not using it), or Lord of the Rings. People are probably already going to watch it or have decided not to. I can't imagine there's too many people sitting on the fence over it. Still, having just watched the whole thing, reviewing it is only polite.
Perhaps the most succinct review of The Original Series, as it is now doomed to be called, came from Futurama back in 2002: "79 episodes, about 30 good ones." This is maybe a little harsh but also not entirely untrue. Airing from 1966 to 1969 (with an unaired pilot produced in 1964), Star Trek was a product of 1960s American assembly line television, producing a mind-boggling 29 episodes in its first season alone. Episodes were not so much carefully written as thrown together in a mad rush, with location filming being a rare luxury and decent visual effects an even rarer one. If anything, it's remarkable that the OG Star Trek holds together as well as it does, and when it works it's still excellent television.
The core of the show is the regular cast, particularly the triumvirate of William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock and DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy: the action hero, the logical analyst and the emotional heart. This trio works extremely well, with consistently outstanding performances from Nimoy and Kelley across the entire show (Kelley is easily the most underrated performer on the show and in the following movies, and is always a delight to watch; Nimoy's brilliance has been extolled so much over the years it's almost redundant to repeat it now). This focus on the core trio detracts somewhat from the wider cast: George Takei as Lt. Sulu, Walter Koenig as Ensign Chekov, Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura and James Doohan as Chief Engineer Scott (with frequent guest appearances by Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel, and a rotating cast of recurring actors as crewmen, some of whom play multiple characters). The wider group gets relatively little time in the sun compared to the core three, which feels a bit weird from a modern lens but was relatively normal practice at the time.
From a performance perspective, William Shatner is a fascinating study. He is, for the first half of the show, consistently very good. Kirk is authoritative, moral and decisive, balancing the logic of Spock with the humanity of McCoy to good effect. In the latter half of the series, starting late in Season 2, it feels like he's checked out a little. The much-lampooned cliches of over-enunciation, attempts at dramatic pauses (which just feel like he's forgotten his lines midway through a speech) and occasionally wild over-acting become much more pronounced. When he has a good day, or is in a good episode with good material, he is still great, but that does become less common as the third season goes on (his worst performance is easily in Turnabout Intruder, which mercifully is also the last episode of the series).
From a writing perspective, the show is often inventive, intriguing and relatively smart, at least in the early going. Later episodes tend to emphasise action and develop tropes that are so rapidly reused they become tedious: the godlike entity who can crush the Enterprise and its crew any time they want, but first they have to use Kirk and the crew as pawns in some game, and are eventually defeated either by semantic trickery or (less commonly) some kind of technological breakthrough. The Enterprise mysteriously loses the use of its weapons, shields and transporter so often that your eyes may roll into the back of your head. Kirk talks sentient computers into self-destruction frequently enough that you wonder why an anti-Kirk firmware update isn't in circulation in the sentient evil computer club.
But the show is also remarkably adept at employing metaphor: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield's commentary on racism is so subtle it flew over the heads of some people, who wrote into the studio to complain that the near-identical aliens hating one another on the basis of skin colour alone was stupid (right in the middle of America's Civil Rights period). It also sings when it moves away from the all-powerful aliens trope to more even engagements: Balance of Terror's WWII submarine-inspired tension is superb, and Space Seed's battle of intellect and wills between Kirk and genetically-engineered warlord Khan is excellently portrayed. The battle between two Federation starships and a powerful (but not unbeatable) planet-killer in The Doomsday Machine is outstanding. The Devil in the Dark is possibly the show's best statement on how to respect and treat sentient life even if it looks and acts nothing like you are used to.
Like most shows of the period, the idea of "worldbuilding" is absent as a conscious idea, but when it strays into it, it is excellent, such as with our first visit to Vulcan in Amok Time and the Federation conference in Journey to Babel. The Klingons and Romulans are both intriguing enemies, although the portrayal of the Klingons lacks depth (maybe aside from Michael Ansara in Day of the Dove); the Romulans appear less frequently but more memorably, with both Balance of Terror and The Enterprise Incident being series highlights.
The show also gives good comedy, with both The Trouble with Tribbles and A Piece of the Action emerging as comic powerhouses (and The Naked Time having its moments). Gene Roddenberry was definitely less keen on comedy episodes, feeling they encouraged people to mock the show, but it's something Trek has been consistently pretty good at over many different shows and episodes. The show is also adept at existential horror, particularly in the early going through episodes like Where No Man Has Gone Before and Miri which make you wonder how the hell Trek got its reputation as a family show with a lot of charm: these episodes are cold, bordering on the bleak at times. That concept doesn't really emerge until the latter part of Season 1 and really sings in Season 2. It's been said so many times as to be redundant now, but Season 3 sees a marked slump in quality, with some of the worst episodes of the show and the franchise like Spock's Brain. Excellent episodes still crop up amongst the dross, like The Enterprise Incident and All Our Yesterdays, but it can be hard going.
Production value-wise, the show is obviously almost sixty years old so doesn't look fantastic. Location shooting is a bonus, hugely enhancing episodes like Shore Leave and Arena, but most episodes are forced to rely on sets (of wildly varying effectiveness) to portray exterior locations. Makeup and prosthetics are mostly underwhelming, but imaginative design can help overcome that: the Gorn looks weak, but the drama of the script helps overcome these deficiencies. Modelwork and space shots are often decent, and the 2006 remastered version of the show is excellent for updating the space shots whilst staying true to the original design intentions. In a similar vein, the show has some wince-inducing dialogue and ideas about the treatment of women and minorities compared to modern shows, but in other respects, and especially by the standards of the day, the show is remarkably progressive (and later Trek shows aren't always fantastic in this regard either).
Star Trek: The Original Series (****) is, in some respects, dated. But in many others it is remarkably watchable, with frequently great performances. It mixes horror, comedy and SF action-adventure to good effect. It set the scene and groundwork for the most successful TV SF franchise of all time. Sure, there's a fair number of episodes which are poor and don't work very well, but when the show does work - such as in City on the Edge of Forever, Balance of Terror, Amok Time, The Doomsday Machine, The Trouble with Tribbles and more - it remains excellent entertainment. The show is available right now in most territories via Paramount+ and on DVD and Blu-Ray.
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