Rating: 
Summary: My Collection of The original Series
Review: "That Which Survives" is the reason I am adding Vol.35 to my collection. There are a lot of episodes I could not stand and will not purchase. I will purchase one or two more as they become available. Video quality of these episodes is incredible. They must have produced the original series in 35mm film.
Rating: 
Summary: Not too bad, but could have been better.
Review: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" probably has one of the cheesiest "special effects" from "Star Trek"....Bele's "invisible" ship. They could've saved themselves alot of embarrassment by saying, "It's cloaked". Other that, that, the message is desperately needed for today.
Rating:
Summary: My Collection of The original Series
Review: "That Which Survives" is the reason I am adding Vol.35 to my collection. There are a lot of episodes I could not stand and will not purchase. I will purchase one or two more as they become available. Video quality of these episodes is incredible. They must have produced the original series in 35mm film.
Rating:
Summary: My Collection of The original Series
Review: "That Which Survives" is the reason I am adding Vol.35 to my collection. There are a lot of episodes I could not stand and will not purchase. I will purchase one or two more as they become available. Video quality of these episodes is incredible. They must have produced the original series in 35mm film.
Rating:
Summary: Long After Their Races Have Died...
Review: ...some people just keep on pluggin' the same old paranoia."That Which Survives" suffers from terrible cheapness, though it benefits from an interesting performance by Lee Meriwether as the image of the last surviving member of a long-dead alien race, Losira, who is now nothing more than a computerized planetary defense system...for an entirely extinct race, that can no longer benefit from it. Losira begins appearing and disappearing aboard the Enterprise, killing various crew members and performing acts of sabotage. Kirk and Crew go on an alien hunt on the nearest planet, and there also encounter the strange woman, whom they correctly surmise is some sort of lethal hologram. The story hasn't got much plot, but it holds your attention, and Lee Meriwether was always first-rate eye-candy. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is a great episode, if heavy-handed. Lou Antonio and Frank Gorshin are the last surviving members of two severely prejudicial races living on the planet Charon, their polarized attitudes evident even on their very bodies: one is white on the right side and black on the left, the other black on the right side and white on the left. Antonio's race is the oppressed proletariat class, Gorshin's the decadent bourgeois - Antonio seeks asylum on board the Enterprise, and Gorshin, a Charonian policeman, demands his return for trial on several crimes. The aliens begin infecting the Enterprise with their enflamed rhetoric, and prove to be utterly consumed by hatred of each other and ruthless in the extreme as to achieving their separate goals. What's best in this episode are the performances of the two guest stars, the fiery Gorshin especially, and the all too memorable finale in which the perpetual antagonists deliberately throw themselves into eternal warfare rather than work out their differences - even once they know their home planet has completely destroyed itself in precisely the same useless conflict, and they, themselves, are its only surviving remnants.
Rating: 
Summary: Trekking with Catwoman and the Riddler
Review: Actors from the then recently cancelled Batman TV series turn up in Volume 35 of Paramount's complete reissue of Classic Trek. Lee Meriwether (one of three actresses to portray Catwoman) appears, and disappears, in a severely underwritten guest role in That Which Survives. Poor pacing, weak dialogue, and out of character behavior by the crew all but ruin an interesting premise. Spock, in particular, acts rather snippishly throughout the episode, being downright rude to Scott, McCoy, and Chekov. Leonard Nimoy was so distressed by some of his dialogue he sent third season producer Fred Frieberger a lengthy memo in protest. It was of no use, as Frieberger had little grasp of what made the first two seasons' best stories so noteworthy. Let that Be Your Last Battlefield is a very obvious allegory on America's black/white conflict. Too obvious, really. As with Patterns of Force, the parallels are so upfront that the story loses its effectiveness. Star Trek's social conscience worked best when The Message was integrated into an entertaining story (as in The Undiscovered Country) rather than being shoved down the viewers' throats. The ridiculous overacting by guest stars Lou Antonio and Frank (The Riddler) Gorshin makes William Shatner's performances look like paragons of subtlety. As with most of the rest of this series, picture and sound are fine.
Rating:
Summary: More strange encounters with weird aliens for the Enterprise
Review: Holy guest stars, Batman, I did not notice the obvious common denominator to the episodes on Volume 35 of the Star Trek DVD series with the presence of Lee Meriwether and Frank Gorshin. "That Which Survives" finds the Enterprise checking out the surface of an unknown planet when a beautiful woman (Meriwether) shows up and kills one of the crew. Meanwhile, the Enterprise is thrown 990 light-years away from the planet. After the woman, Losira, comes back and kills another of the crew and then returns announcing she has "come for" Sulu, Kirk figures out she is "programmed" just to kill one particular person at a time. Kirk and the others discover an underground entrance and find another one of those pesky computers protecting the dead planet by creating deadly Losiras to take care of the unwanted visitors. Of course, if this computer is powerful enough to send the Enterprise across the galaxy I think it might come up with a better defense mechanism than a person specific assassin. But then if these computers did not have some sort of Achilles heel the Enterprise would be commanded by the second in command on the night shift in Engineering. Despite the nice title, "That Which Survives" is an average Trek episode at best. There is certainly nothing subtle about the social message at the heart of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." The Enterprise stops a stolen shuttle and arrests its pilot, a bichromatic being (white on the right side, black on the left) named Lokai. Then another bichromatic being named Bele (black on the right side and white on the left) beams aboard the Enterprise just as his vessel explodes. Bele (Groshin) explains that he is an officer of the Commission on Political Traitors from the planet Cheron who has come to arrest Lokai for murder. For his part, Lokai insists that his people are enslaved by Bele's race. Bucking this particular headache up the chain of command, Kirk is told by Starfleet not to extradite Lokai. However, Bele will not take "no" for an answer. It was always easy to remember how each side of Bele was colored, because of course the dominant race in this little allegory would be black on the "right" side. At first Kirk does not see the difference, since both Bele and Lokai are half black and half white. But Bele points out the difference and insists how it matters, which sounds just as stupid as any other claim of racial superiority based on skin color you have ever heard. Because the point of this episode is not exactly subtle, "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" is less than satisfactory, although I do appreciate the attempt to maintain ambiguity as to which one of the two bichromatic beings (you have to love that adjective) is telling the truth.
Rating:
Summary: Sensitive Trek
Review: Okay, so I missed the fact that both of these episodes include frequent Batman guest stars, but that was only because I was so overwhelmed with the emotional subtext of each episode. By now, any Trekker can tell you that "Let that be your last Battlefield" was a thinly veiled cautionary story about racial violence. Not playing obvious favorites between the two antagonists - the fugitive Lokei, and his pursuer, Bele (Frank Gorshin) - the script quickly boils down their anamosity to pure hate. The script tosses in some references - Lokei's people were once held a tier below Bele's, but received less than sincere aid as redress; also we'd sympathize with Lokei who was running - but soon blurs them to assure us that nothing really compensates for their shared hatred. In the end, Lokei and Bele return to their burned world - with the camera uncharacteristically bleeding in imagery of burned out cities. In "That Which Survives", the landing party (this is classic Trek, man - there are no "away teams") beams down to a strangely undynamic world. Unfortunately, the planet is actually a spaceship with its own built-in security system - one capable of flinging the Enterprise across the sector and marooning the landing party. The system also takes the form of Losira (Lee Meriwether), a the last of the race of aliens who built the planet. Both the landing party and the crew back on the Enterprise piece together the clues to the nature of the artificial planet and the ghost image that can inflict a very real death on anybody it finds (by "disrupting" every cell of her victims with but a touch; I've seen this episode a million times and I still don't know what "cellular disruption" means, but I'm sure it's got to be pretty bad). Yeah, this is another one of those episodes about an ancient or otherwise high-powered computer that achieves sentience ("ultimate computer", "Changeling", "Return of the Archons", "For the World is Hollow") and the end is again a bit of comedown (Spock to the rescue with a phaser) but the script creates one of the series's more intriguing example of artificial intelligence - you keep thinking that she'll cry before she has to kill somebody. The real Losira, the crew decides, must have been some woman. Luckily in recreating her, the computer copied her too well. (The same concept appears in the first Trek movie). Watch this trek, but make sure ypu've got something light and funny to back it up with Harry Mud or "A Piece of the Action".
Rating:
Summary: One true lemon, one thought-provoking show
Review: That Which Survives-Only the Sulu fan club (he features prominently here) could disagree that the best thing about this episode is Lee Merriweather-and she plays an automaton! A lot of the old tricks are here, like Kirk outsmarting a computer (come to think of it, even the computer console looks familiar!).
Basically, this should have been a half-hour show (actually it shouldn't even have been a show). Senseless dialogue is contrived, both on the planet and on the Enterprise, just to pass the time until the next commercial. Hard to find a worse episode, in my opinion.
Tidbit: For the remainder of the show, the final credits would
feature the 2nd season theme music. While this is a very minor detail in itself, it seems symbolic of other changes. The episodes become more formulaic as the parties concerned begin to see the writing on the wall for the show. The absence of new music, as budgets draw tight, also contributes an increasingly stale and defeatist feel to the late episodes. (1 star) Let that be your Last Battlefield-This episode, employing actors done up in half-black, half-white face makeup, is a none-too subtle statement about race relations. While Star Trek is to be commended for not ignoring controversial issues, the show's forays could be grossly oversimplistic; this episode is a case in point. Most viewers will have gleaned the difference between Lokai and Bele long before the crew becomes aware. This is also another talky episode, and while the actors do a good job expressing their choler through some truly acrimonious exchanges, the viewer gets the idea pretty fast.
The second half of the episode is not without its plusses though. The auto-destruct sequence was a nice touch, as were the montages of burning cities (which must have struck a cord in early 1969, as today). The conclusion leaves the viewer with much to ponder, both specifically about Bele and Lokai's fate, and more generally about hatred's powerful momentum. One other welcome aspect was the fact that the Enterprise and her crew were basically powerless here. This thankfully (in my opinion) spares us the need for a pat conclusion to such a complex problem. On the other hand, it is interesting to ask whether a first season episode would have been so pessimistic. The answer is almost certainly no. But a lot had changed in two years, and not just in the Star Trek universe. (3 stars)
Rating:
Summary: One true lemon, one thought-provoking show
Review: That Which Survives-Only the Sulu fan club (he features prominently here) could disagree that the best thing about this episode is Lee Merriweather-and she plays an automaton! A lot of the old tricks are here, like Kirk outsmarting a computer (come to think of it, even the computer console looks familiar!).
Basically, this should have been a half-hour show (actually it shouldn't even have been a show). Senseless dialogue is contrived, both on the planet and on the Enterprise, just to pass the time until the next commercial. Hard to find a worse episode, in my opinion.
Tidbit: For the remainder of the show, the final credits would
feature the 2nd season theme music. While this is a very minor detail in itself, it seems symbolic of other changes. The episodes become more formulaic as the parties concerned begin to see the writing on the wall for the show. The absence of new music, as budgets draw tight, also contributes an increasingly stale and defeatist feel to the late episodes. (1 star) Let that be your Last Battlefield-This episode, employing actors done up in half-black, half-white face makeup, is a none-too subtle statement about race relations. While Star Trek is to be commended for not ignoring controversial issues, the show's forays could be grossly oversimplistic; this episode is a case in point. Most viewers will have gleaned the difference between Lokai and Bele long before the crew becomes aware. This is also another talky episode, and while the actors do a good job expressing their choler through some truly acrimonious exchanges, the viewer gets the idea pretty fast.
The second half of the episode is not without its plusses though. The auto-destruct sequence was a nice touch, as were the montages of burning cities (which must have struck a cord in early 1969, as today). The conclusion leaves the viewer with much to ponder, both specifically about Bele and Lokai's fate, and more generally about hatred's powerful momentum. One other welcome aspect was the fact that the Enterprise and her crew were basically powerless here. This thankfully (in my opinion) spares us the need for a pat conclusion to such a complex problem. On the other hand, it is interesting to ask whether a first season episode would have been so pessimistic. The answer is almost certainly no. But a lot had changed in two years, and not just in the Star Trek universe. (3 stars)
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