What do you think are the best/worst ST:TOS series/lines, etc.? Here are some of mine. The "top 10" lists are in something of an arbitrary order after the top two or three.

Top 10 episodes:
1. Mirror, Mirror (can't beat Spock with a beard)
2. "Matt, where's your crew?"
"On the third planet."
3. Balance of Terror
4. Enterprise Incident
5. City on the Edge of Forever (not necessarily my favorite per se, but very well made, obviously)
6. "The M5 is perfect!"
7. "I am Nomad."
8. Return of the Archons
9. Let that be your last battlefield
10. "A phase 1 search assumes that the man wishes to be found?" (Court Martial)

Best lines:
1. "What hit? What attacked you?"
"They say there's no devil Jim, but there is... right out of Hell I saw it!
"Matt, where's your crew?"
"On the third planet."
"There is no third planet!"
"Don't you think I know that? There was, but not anymore! They called me, they begged me for help! 400 of them! I couldn't...I couldn't..."(Doomsday Machine)
2. "Mister Scott....Mister Scott" (Also Doomsday Machine)
3. "Captain - he's turned the engines off." (the one with the virus - the Naked Time, I think)
4. The speech by Kirk to mirror-spock at the end of Mirror, Mirror
5. The furious excitement that Dr. Daystrom goes into at the end of the computer epsiode (i.e. "your starships... toys to be crushed!" )
6. "We are creatures of duty, Captain."(Balance of Terror)
7. "This is the Atavachron."
"Interesting nomenclature. May I be permitted to..."
"Oh no, no sir. When you are ready, I will prepare you through the Atavachron." (I don't know, I just like that dialogue.)

Funniest scenes:
1. Fizzbin
2. Confusing Mudd's Androids (VERY close second)
3. Explaning Spock's ears in the city on the edge of forever

Favorite non-Enterprise characters:
1. Nomad
2. Harry Mudd
3. Romulan commander in Balance of Terror
4. Mr. Atoz (someone pointed out that this is "Mr. A to z" - makes sense for a librarian!- he also reminds me of the character Chang in the old movie Lost Horizon)
5. Dr. Daystrom
6.Bele and Lokai

I like most of the episodes. Anyone care to share your favorite/worst lists?

__________________
"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

~They are alone. They are a dying show. We should let them pass.~

Kizarvexis
8)

__________________
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll

Uh... what? :-s

Ah, he's just trying to rain on your parade.

I always liked A Piece of the Action as an episode

"I would advise yez to keep dialin'."

Not much interested in the blatant moralization of some episodes.

From most TOS episodes:

He's dead, Jim.
Jim, he's dead.
Dead, Jim.
He's...dead.

All delivered by Dr. McCoy. I heard him saying on some t.v. program that there were just so many ways to tell the Captain that a crew member was dead and that it got to be a joke on the set.

Also:
Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor not a mechanic (or bricklayer or whatever.)

I thought Piece of the Action was very funny and entertaining but not necessarily the best of the episodes (most of those on my list were somewhat more serious). Nonetheless, it's hard to beat some of the scenes for humor, such as fizzbin, Kirk driving a car ("I believe they had a device known as a... a clutch."), which I should have put on my good scenes list, and "You'll be wearing concrete galoshes" by Scotty.

Bones never uses the expletive before addressing Captain Kirk. Common misconception.

__________________
"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars". - Edward Young, 1745

How could we forget my absolute favourite from Operation: Annihilate!, Ep 29/3287.2

McCoy in a low voice to Kirk:
"Please don't tell Spock I said he was the best First Officer in the fleet." Spock:
"Why thank you, Doctor."
Kirk:
"You were so concerned about his Vulcan eyes, you forgot about his Vulcan ears."

How that passed the censors in 1967, I'll never know. Glad it did, though

__________________
Does earth plug a hole in Heaven or Heaven plug a hole in Earth? -Peter Gabriel

What, is that like the lady to the little kid in the pirate costume "But where are your buccaneers?"

"On the side of my buckin' head, lady!"



Of the top of my head, "Doomsday Machine" and "Journey to Babel" for wonderful tight scripting (the latter is my class example of "keep adding trouble right up to the last reel") "City of the Edge of Forever" for the powerful sense of loneliness and loss captured in that first camera pan up into the night sky and never quite lost thereafter.

"Spock's Brain" for being THAT bad (and for giving us the classic "Brain and brain! What is brain?"

Mudd, of course. Mark Leonard, no matter what he's doing. Garth (and Decker, too, and Kirk far too many times) for being....intensely...insane!

And someting funny. Maybe it was all the Shakespeare quotes. But TOS is the only TV series I can actually remember the episode titles on.

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

From The City on the Edge of Forever
Kirk:" I see you've noticed the ears. They're actually easy to explain."
Spock:"Perhaps the accident I had as a child."
Kirk:"Yes, the accident. He got his head caught in a mechanical...rice picker."

__________________
"It's time to receive our missions from The Head."

I would catch this, but I always noticed that when the Enterprise was in orbit around Earth (or the Earths' counterpart in Miri), there were never any clouds.

__________________
"It's time to receive our missions from The Head."

and any other planet was basically one colour, or a swirl of other colours with no decernable oceans/continents.

thats all part of the low budget charm, however.

what anoyed me is that despite all of their incredible technology they hadnt worked out how to put their ships into a stable orbit. A starfleet standard orbit seemed to require engines powering the ship in order to maintain it.

By far the worst episode of Star Trek was The Way to Eden...

Was that the episode with the styrofoam "Donut of Time" that showed black&white movies of Earth in the past?

__________________
Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

Yes, that's the one, with the Guardian of Forever. It also had Joan Collins as Edith Keeler.

__________________
"It's time to receive our missions from The Head."

And ya gotta love Kirk's last line from COTEOF..."Lets get the hell out of here", which (if I'm not mistaken) was the first time that the word "hell" had been used on broadcast television.

What was the episode with the people moving too fast to see? I liked that one, and the one with the multi coloured guys trying to kill each other?

__________________
All Moderation in Purple
To report a post (even this one) to the moderation team, click the reporting icon in the upper-right corner of the post:
─────────────────────────────────────────────
◄Rules For Posting To This Board ► ◄Forum FAQs ► ◄ Conspiracy Theory Advice ► ◄ Alternate Theory Advice ►

The only thing worse than space Nazis are space hippies!

__________________
I may have many faults, but being wrong ain't one of them. -- Jimmy Hoffa

Wink of an Eye

Let that be your Last Battlefield

When it first aired, I remember thinking...This is really stupid. Time has not changed that opinion.

Just about my favorite TOS bit:

Enterprise Incident when the Enterprise is given the surrender ulitmatim and Scotty's reply leaves no doubt he will open a HUGE can of donkeys on the Romulans long before he surrenders.

__________________
The law requires that I answer no!

Actually they weren't multi-colored. They were black and white, about a bilaterally symmetric axis/plane. One group thought they were superior to other because they were black on the right side and white on the left side. Great role for Frank Gorshin.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I'll have to think about this a bit.

But my son's favorite and least favorite were combined in one episode:

"Bread and Circuses"

His favorite part: the Roman TV station where the gladiatorial combats were accompanied by various prerecorded crown noises, including his number one choice, "CATCALLS".

This then became for him the worst episode when it was revealed that it wasn't the Sun the martyrs were worshiping. His response was "Oh, geez!" at which point he got up and left to do some more work on one of his RC sailboat models.

One thing to be learned from this episode is don't name your spacecraft "Beagle"!


[edit/typo]

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I'd completely forgotten about that. Frank Gorshin rules! If only he'd played Two-Face instead, this would have been doubly cool.

Worst episode? Definitely Spock's Brain, though it can be seen as a parody. Way to Eden would be a close second.

Amazing how I can still enjoy watching television episodes from almost forty years ago - even the bad ones - more than any of the brainless sitcoms on TV today.

__________________
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Welcome to the group!

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

I don't know...it's a stinker alright. But I do like the scenes on the bridge. There's just something about the way Kirk interacts with the secondary performers during the search that still appeals to me all these years later.

The studios discovered this. I bet it's a big moneymaker.

On a side note...I do happen to own all of the "Emma Episodes" of the Avengers...so that says something.

The end of Balance of Terror, when it fades to black with Kirk walking the corridors after talking to the newlywed widow. Its one of the more human moments of the series for Kirk.

No soliloquy, no profound meaning, just the ugly realization that it sucks to be the man in the center seat, sometimes.

__________________
The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

The planet was suffering from global... um... drying.

um....why would that have been censored???

I can't figure that out either. Is there something from the scene I'm forgetting?

My favorite episode by a good margin is "The Doomsday Machine." The story has great tension, and while Kirk plays a big part, he is far from the only character that is required to destroy the machine. I would love to see that with the special effects redone using CGI.

I'm also partial to "Where No Man Has Gone Before" - I liked the confrontation between human and superhuman.

I liked "The Cage" for the story and the different view of the Enterprise and crew, though it had plenty of rough edges.

There's "Assignment: Earth" for a decent time travel story and fun character interaction (also, I really liked Ter Garr).

"The Devil In The Dark" for an honestly nonhumanoid alien in a very unearthlike planet.

I liked quite a few, but those are some of the top ones that come to my mind off hand.