Season One Top Five

Star Trek’s first season, although still finding its feet, offers an embarrassment of riches, and picking the five ‘best’ episodes is a tough call for any Trek fan – this ‘top five’ (listed below in transmission order) won’t be the same as yours, no doubt. The sheer variety of stories on offer – from the tense ‘shuttlecraft down’ storyline of Spock’s first, near-disastrous command in The Galileo Seven, to everyone’s favourite time travelling, tragic love story for Kirk in City on the Edge of Forever – is an early demonstration of the format’s flexibility before it ever bogged down in cliché or repetition, and the writing talent includes Gene L Coon, DC Fontana, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch and Richard Matheson.


The Enemy Within
Stardate 1672.1
Writer Richard Matheson gives us a space age ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ in which the transporter goes on the fritz and splits Captain Kirk into two. One Kirk is a maniacal would-be rapist (does Yeoman Rand’s way with a mini-dress mean she was asking for it?) running amok aboard the Enterprise, the other an indecisive wimp. Spock realises that his James T Kirk is actually, and interestingly, a fusion of the two – but how to bring them back together? Meanwhile, with the transporter out of action, Sulu and his landing party are freezing to death on the planet’s surface…
A great early episode in which a wild-eyed, mascara-wearing Shatner sets the bar for all future Star Trek scenery chewing, an alien creature is a dog with a horn glued on its head and McCoy first utters the immortal words “He’s dead, Jim” (about the dog).

The Menagerie Parts I & II
Stardate 3012.4
Worried about running out of scripts halfway through the season, Roddenberry decided to recycle the material shot for the show’s first, unscreened pilot episode The Cage. It was a pragmatic idea that paid off better than anyone could have expected, providing the original series’ only two-parter. Roddenberry created a brilliant framing story for the events of the pilot, in which Spock is on trial for betraying his captain and stealing the Enterprise. In flashback, we learn of the ship’s ill-fated earlier visit to the now-forbidden planet of Talos IV and of what befell previous Enterprise captain Christopher Pike there. Brilliant design, brilliant score, and green-skinned Orion Slave Girls to boot!

Space Seed
Stardate 3141.9
When the Enterprise comes upon a drifting Earth ship full of cryogenically frozen humans from the 1990s, little does Kirk suspect that they are about to defrost one Kahn Noonien Singh – self-styled and genetically-enhanced superman – and set in motion a chain of events that will only be played out to its conclusion 15 years later in Trek’s second big-screen outing, The Wrath of Khan. Ricardo Montalban’s arrogant but charismatic Übermensch is the perfect foil for Shatner’s Kirk – both are as fond of verbal as physical sparring, and here indulge in both – and we get a glimpse into Trek’s version of Earth history in the form of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. Great stuff.

This Side of Paradise
Stardate 3417.3
Spock in love! Clearly aimed at all those female viewers who believed they could thaw the Vulcan’s icy heart if only given the chance, this episode concerns a group of presumed-dead human colonists who are in fact living a blissed-out existence thanks to alien spores that remove both their inhibitions and their ambitions. The Enterprise crew soon succumbs, and Mr Spock, now emoting freely, hooks up with an old flame and tells his strait-laced and spore-resistant captain where to go. Although it’s largely Nimoy’s show, there are some all-time great Kirk-Spock moments in this lovely episode by DC Fontana, and it’s fun watching the rest of the crew turn on, tune in and drop out in what is essentially a swipe at the Flower-Power generation (and a damned sight better one than Season Three’s laboured and obvious The Way to Eden.)

The Devil in the Dark
Stardate 3196.1
Miners on Janus VI are being killed by a mysterious creature that can apparently move through solid rock, and Kirk and Spock are called in to investigate. Gene L Coon’s script is a winner – what starts as a horror story becomes a morality tale as, in typical Trek fashion, we humans are invited to examine our prejudices, and the ‘monster’ turns out to be an intelligent creature protecting her soon-to-hatch eggs in the only way she knows how. Spock’s mind meld with the Horta is a classic scene, eliciting a dignified performance from Nimoy and showing off a bit of Vulcan lore that would be used many times in the future but rarely to such moving effect.