Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing well. So this week I wanted to review an episode of Star Trek that I've seen a few times but am not a huge fan of, "Space Seed". I also decided to do this in tandem with a review of the movie it spawned, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That review will be coming out on Saturday. I figured I'd get this done before I dove head first into the modern era of Doctor Who. So let's get into it.
While I watched Star Trek when I was a kid, as it was on every Saturday morning around 11 on CBC for a long time, I always preferred Star Trek: The Next Generation being that the second Star Trek series was airing brand new when I was a kid and I preferred Captain Picard over Captain Kirk. Not that Kirk isn't a good character, most of the time, but he felt a bit formulaic and hardly deviated from that formula. Plus William Shatner chewed the scenery a little too much while Sir Patrick Stewart rarely did so as Picard unless it was for a specific purpose like trying to get Lwaxana Troi back from the Ferengi in the season 3 episode "Menage a Troi". And while I love the dynamic between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and Spock is my favourite character on TOS, I related more to Data. Which made it really cool when Spock and Data were on screen together in the TNG fifth season episode, "Unification".
"Space Seed" is not an episode I remember watching when I was a kid. I remember it more from seeing it a couple of times in reruns on Space Channel when I was a teenager, as well as watching it on DVD with the TOS Season 1 box set as well as the The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series Volume 2 DVD release that came out around the time the first JJ Abrams Star Trek movie came out in 2009. It's a good episode, but it's not great.
I think what really brings it down for me is Marla McGivers. She's not a bad character, but I have to question why she joined Starfleet if she had feelings for the tyrants of old Earth such as Khan? Like you'd think Humans would've given up that misguided obsession with dictators and people who commit such evils by the 23rd Century. Especially if they intend to join Starfleet as that kind of thing goes against the Federation's philosophy.
The episode also makes the rest of the crew look incompetent because they couldn't figure out who Khan was until it was too late. I thought most Starfleet officers were required to have some passing knowledge on all subjects, including historical figures. And it's not even a matter of Khan being smart enough to hide his identity from them either. It's a simple matter of Kirk and Spock not figuring it out as soon as Khan introduces himself as Khan even though McGivers did figure it out pretty quickly. Especially when Spock is supposed to be the most intelligent person on the Enterprise! I don't know if that's because the episode's writer Carey Wilber, just didn't understand how to write for Star Trek and wrote the crew to be more incompetent than they usually are, or he did it deliberately to demonstrate how intellectually superior Khan is. Either way it didn't work even though both Gene L. Coon and Gene Roddenberry rewrote the script once each as per standard operating procedures in the Star Trek production office at the time.
I get why Khan is an alluring villain. He's strong, smart and perfect in every way. But that doesn't make for a good character. Simply because there really isn't anything behind that. In a way Captain America is like Khan in that way. But what makes Steve Rogers interesting is the humanity behind him. When Steve got injected with the super soldier serum and it was successful, he easily could've become full of himself and gained a superiority complex, similar to John Walker in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. But he didn't. Instead he dedicated his life to fighting evil, be it Hitler during World War II or whatever threat the Avengers faced. Khan is a criminal and has only two modes: Dictator, and revenge seeker. I'll talk about that more in my review of Star Trek II later this week.
Probably my favourite part of this episode is the back and forth between Kirk and Spock. Whenever people talk about TOS they always talk about the verbal sparring between Spock and McCoy but they never mention that Kirk and Spock go at it from time to time too. In this episode Spock says, "I fail to understand why it gives you pleasure to see me proven wrong." and Kirk responds with, "An emotional Earth weakness of mine." Later in the episode, Kirk suggests that the Botany Bay was used to ship criminals off of Earth, and Spock responds that that is impossible due to the dark age that Earth found itself in in the Star Trek Universe version of the 1990s, and then is later proven wrong once Khan is revealed. And yes, Kirk smirked a little when that information was discovered.
Like I said "Space Seed" is a good episode but definitely isn't in my list of favourite Star Trek episodes of all time. There are other TOS episodes that I like alot better than this one. The crew's incompetence, coupled with Khan being a one off antagonist that gained undeserved importance by returning in the second movie, and McGivers being too easily manipulated by Khan, just makes this episode weak in my opinion. The writing is still really good despite it being a cheesy '60s Science Fiction series. But it being a cheesy '60s Science Fiction series is the reason I don't discount TOS as a whole it's just I prefer TNG.
And that's going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow for my review of the comic that Brad dropped off for me on Saturday. So until then have a great afternoon and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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