You Could Be Happy There on Earth
Despite my managing to make it through Season One of Star Trek: The Original Series before the new movie came out, my episode-watching pace quickly dropped off after it opened, and I'd gone several weeks without moving past "The Deadly Years," which happens to be the exact halfway point of the series.
The combination of an abundance of free time with a Labour Day weekend Star Trek marathon on Space to provide inspiration, however, pushed me to pick up the gauntlet again and finish off Season Two, where more creative decisions inspired by real-world production issues seemed prominent.
Although TOS never went to 23rd-century Earth (the closest we got was a distant, illusory view of the city of Mojave in the original pilot, "The Cage"), several episodes dealt with time travel into Earth's past, and there seemed to be all sorts of reasons to go to planets that were "much like your Earth." Trying to go for a sense of plausibility, the show codified this tendency by inventing terms like the Class M designation and Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development to explain it away.
Where Season One had started the trend by featuring an exact duplicate of Earth in "Miri," Season Two was all about themed planets: Hallowe'en World! Greek Mythology World! Roman World! Gangster World! Nazi World! Weird Quasi-Cold War World! Season Three would continue this pattern somewhat (with such winners as Native American World), but it was the second season which really embraced it.
This seems fitting for a season whose finale was appropriately titled "Assignment: Earth," another time travel episode that served as a backdoor pilot for a potential spinoff series set on Earth in the present day. It's interesting to speculate on what such a series might've been like (and John Byrne did just that in a recent comic book series), but the alternate Star Trek universe that would've resulted from that development in the franchise would probably be virtually unrecognisable to us.
Speaking of alternate universes, Season Two also featured "Mirror, Mirror" and its evil take on the characters we know and love, leading to decades of further development and speculation on the Mirror Universe (not to mention many an evil-goatee reference in popular culture). Onscreen, at least, Mirror Earth has never been properly visited, either.
The combination of an abundance of free time with a Labour Day weekend Star Trek marathon on Space to provide inspiration, however, pushed me to pick up the gauntlet again and finish off Season Two, where more creative decisions inspired by real-world production issues seemed prominent.
Although TOS never went to 23rd-century Earth (the closest we got was a distant, illusory view of the city of Mojave in the original pilot, "The Cage"), several episodes dealt with time travel into Earth's past, and there seemed to be all sorts of reasons to go to planets that were "much like your Earth." Trying to go for a sense of plausibility, the show codified this tendency by inventing terms like the Class M designation and Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development to explain it away.
Where Season One had started the trend by featuring an exact duplicate of Earth in "Miri," Season Two was all about themed planets: Hallowe'en World! Greek Mythology World! Roman World! Gangster World! Nazi World! Weird Quasi-Cold War World! Season Three would continue this pattern somewhat (with such winners as Native American World), but it was the second season which really embraced it.
This seems fitting for a season whose finale was appropriately titled "Assignment: Earth," another time travel episode that served as a backdoor pilot for a potential spinoff series set on Earth in the present day. It's interesting to speculate on what such a series might've been like (and John Byrne did just that in a recent comic book series), but the alternate Star Trek universe that would've resulted from that development in the franchise would probably be virtually unrecognisable to us.
Speaking of alternate universes, Season Two also featured "Mirror, Mirror" and its evil take on the characters we know and love, leading to decades of further development and speculation on the Mirror Universe (not to mention many an evil-goatee reference in popular culture). Onscreen, at least, Mirror Earth has never been properly visited, either.