I Watched All 79 Episodes of Star Trek So You Don’t Have To… But You Should

Because I didn’t watch Star Trek as a child, a few months ago I decided to binge every episode of the show. Star Trek (today referred to as Star Trek: The Original Series or simply ST:TOS) originally aired on NBC from September 1966 through June 1969, and consisted of 79 episodes.

When I say I didn’t watch the show, I don’t mean to imply I had never seen it. It was nearly impossible to grow up in the 70s/80s without at least some exposure to the show. Although I grew up a Star Wars kid, I definitely remember the McDonald’s Star Trek-themed Happy Meals released in the late 1970s to promote the release of the first film. I remember one of the kids in my neighborhood owned the Mego Star Trek action figures, which we played with. So certainly Star Trek was around, it just wasn’t my thing.

Through general exposure I was familiar with the show’s major characters going in, along with some of its most popular tropes that have permeated pop culture. I knew enough to know that beaming down to a planet while wearing a red shirt was bad, that there had once been an Evil Spock with a beard, and that no female human, alien, or android is able to resist Captain Kirk’s charm. Other than that, the only episodes I could recall were “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Everything else was new to me.

After watching 79 episodes in about as many days, here’s what I learned.

First and foremost, this show was wacky. With so many writers and so many hands in the pot, the end result was a pretty uneven series. Episodes like “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “The Doomsday Machine” were solid, classic science-fiction. Great episodes such as those are sprinkled amongst a bunch of really weird ones, like the one where the Enterprise gets taken over by the alien spirit of Jack the Ripper, and the one where the crew picks up a group of hitchhiking space hippies who play terrible folk music and manage to take over the Enterprise. Speaking of which…

The crew of the Enterprise has to be the most gullible group of suckers ever corralled onto a single starship. Time after time, episode after episode, the entire crew gets tricks by aliens. It’s a good thing the crew members never played space chess with anyone outside the ship as they would have been slaughtered. In one episode, Spock beams down to a planet based on 1930s Chicago, gets kidnapped, escapes, returns, and gets immediately kidnapped a second time! In another episode, the crew gets outsmarted by a group of space hippies led by a guy who is declared legally insane. A few weeks later, Kirk beams down to an insane asylum being managed by a doctor, where he is quickly tricked by the insane inmates. The only enemy Kirk faced that didn’t outsmart him immediately was the Gorn, a big lizard intending to smash Kirk’s head open with a rock, and even that seemed like an even match. A few weeks later, Kirk — captain of the ship — is convinced he is being contacted by Abraham Lincoln.

Star Trek also features a lot of repetition. On at least four episodes members of the Enterprise beam down to planets only to be forced to fight other people. There are a lot of episodes where it is revealed that what we thought were people were really androids. There were two or three episodes in which computers or androids were defeated by Kirk putting them into “logic loops” that short circuited their brains. Another recycled idea on the show was that certain people from earth’s history were actually aliens. The Greek god Apollo was an alien, Jack the Ripper was an alien, and in a shocking turn of events, we learn that Brahms, Leonardo Da Vinci, and several other high profile historical figures were all the SAME alien!

There were a lot of things I didn’t know about the show before diving it. I did not know just how many women Kirk fell in love with and/or attempted to seduce (a lot). I also wasn’t aware of the animosity between Dr. McCoy and Spock, which seemed to grow stronger as the series went on (leading to my dad’s favorite Star Trek quote, “Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?”). I also didn’t realize just how many episodes took place on Earth-like planets. Throughout the series the crew visited (an alien version of) prohibition-era Chicago, (an alien version of) Nazi, German, (an alien version of) the Civil War, (an alien version of) the Great Depression, (an alien version of) Native Americans, (an alien version of) the old west, and a few other time periods. Oh, and in one episode, Kirk went back in time and got accused of being a witch.

Any time you binge watch a show, lots of repeated plot devices jump out at you. While I was well aware of the trope prior to my deep dive, I tried to warn every member of the Enterprise wearing a red shirt not to beam down. Likewise, I found the transporter to be pretty reliable, except when it wasn’t. More than once, the crew beamed down only to discover their weapons or other gear didn’t beam down with them. (Trivia fact: the transporter was invented as a plot device so that didn’t have to film the crew flying back and forth in the shuttle on every single episode.) Along the same lines, it didn’t seem to be particularly difficult to jam or disable the crew’s phasers (it happened a lot). For that matter, it didn’t seem to be that difficult to take over control of the Enterprise (it happened a lot). It also didn’t seem to be difficult to trick the crew into going into areas where the transporter couldn’t reach them (it happened a lot).

For a show with so many uneven episodes and so many flaws, you might wonder what the appeal was, or is — and that is, the show was great. I really enjoyed my romp through Star Trek: The Original Series. In historical context, it was a show about hope and wonder — a show that began during the space race and was inexplicably cancelled the same month man landed on the moon. At times it felt like the writers had run out of original (or logical) plot ideas, which is crazy as multiple reboots and spinoffs continue to be made even today. As long as there are planets to be explored, enemies to be defeated, and female aliens to be “conquered” (ahem), there will be a place for the starship Enterprise and her crew to boldly go where no man has gone before.