Journey to Babel happening after Amok time is so incredibly funny because in that episode Jim learned that Vulcans have a heat cycle and his first officer has to fuck right now or he’ll die. Met Spocks WIFE and also learned that T'Pau the most influential person on Vulcan is related to Spock, got into a messy three way divorce arc between T'Pring, Stonn and Spock, then having to literally fight Spock to the death and DIED. And yet after all of that extremly personal drama Jim witnessed Spock still didn’t tell Jim who the fuck his parents are. Like the man is insane, your best friend and captain saved you from a fuck or die situation, got you out of a loveless marriage, literally died for you and you still won’t introduce him to your mom and dad.
Welcome to the time when there was no guarantee that episodes would air in any kind of specific order—and the affiliate stations showing them straightforwardly refused to give any kind of commitment to showing episodes in any order that the studio desired.
Therefore TV Then was nothing, nothing like TV Now.
Episodes had to be able to stand alone when shown in any order. None of them could refer specifically to any other, because there was no way to tell which eps an affiliate had already shown. (Or not shown.)
People do know that order-of-showing of any kind in syndication didn’t even start until Hill Street Blues, yeah? That the concept of the “episode arc” was first implemented then, in the early 1980s?
If you didn’t know that, please know it now.
Therefore: if you were only young in the 1960s, or not born yet—as regards episode arcs and the logical results of anything you saw in any one given episode—please let ST:TOS off the hook.
Thank you. :)
I actually prefer when shows were episodic. If you only felt like watching one episode, you could actually watch one episode, without having to commit to any more, and without having to watch a bunch of others first just to understand this one.
Now… I was born in the 80s, so by the time I started watching TV shows, 1. already a fair number of them had story arcs, but 2. the only way to watch them– short of buying a giant stack of videotapes or learning how to pre-program a VCR– was to happen to be available to watch TV at the time the show happened to be on.
Meaning, if the show wasn’t episodic, and did have story arcs, I had pretty much zero chance of being able to understand or enjoy it.
Which may have shaped my opinion somewhat.
That said…
Star Trek did make some really strange choices on the “episodes have to make sense in any order” front.
Besides Spock’s wedding and Spock’s parents, there’s also the bizarre situation of Nurse Chapel confessing her love for Spock when she was still (according to the air-date timeline) desperately searching for her lost fiance.
But honestly? I love what this can do for fan speculation!
I mean, I’m a hobbyist at plothole spackling, and maybe I’m weird. But isn’t it compelling to try and theorize the reasons for these things? The inner turmoil of Chapel when the virus dropped her inhibitions and forced her to let out the growing attraction to Spock that had so far been successfully repressed under her nobler feelings for Corby? The absolutely deranged dysfunction of Spock’s relationship with his family, when all Kirk knew of his human blood up until Babel was that offhand comment about “one of my ancestors”??
I dunno. I love it.