Star Trek The Original Series - The Complete Second Season (1966)

Star Trek Original Series Season 2

Received item quickly as usual for items bought from Amazon. This item completes the set of three(1st season-yellow,3rd season-red). At just under $60 shipped to my door, this is easily half the price of buying the same thing in one of the big retailers. I love this item as I do the other two seasons. Excellent quality that will last forever. October 15, 2008

Star Trek Season Two

This is a must have for loyal Trek fans. The second season is hard to find in stores. Also, they have changed the packaging, so, if you want this nicely packaged set, buy soon as quantities are already getting low. The additional featurettes and insights are enlightening. No Star Trek Collection is complete without The Original Series Season Two. September 30, 2008

The Best It Has To Offer

The Second Season of Star Trek: The Original Series picks up right where the first season left off in terms of mind-bending plotlines and rousing action/adventure. Without the feeling-out period that all TV shows need in order to find their correct footing, this Second Season provided the most compelling drama of the entire show. Highlights include:

Amok Time: When Spock begins acting strange, Kirk brings him back to the Vulcan home world and discovers a special ritual that may have deadly consequences.

Mirror, Mirror: During an intense electrical storm, certain members of the Enterprise crew are transported to an alternate dimension, where the Enterprise is ruled by an iron fist.

Wolf In The Fold: When Chief Engineer Scotty is accused of muder on an alien planet, the Enterprise crew uncover the real killer (a chilling episode).

The Trouble With Tribbles: A hilarious script that lightens the mood of an otherwise tense show.

The Ultimate Computer: The ultimate maverick, Kirk, matches wits with the ultimate computer that technology can build.

To conclude, for viewers of the first season, the Second Season of Star Trek: TOS will not disappoint you. June 8, 2008

The best Star Trek season (of this or any other ST series)

Season 2 saw the full maturation of the Star Trek franchise. Gone are the awkward feeling-out episodes and the plain bad/boring episodes of the first season (e.g. "Charlie X", although "The Changeling" is pretty bad). Also gone is the awkward broadcast schedule, where uniforms and cast members appeared to change because the shows were broadcast in an apparently random order relative to their filming dates. In full flower is the Star Trek Triumvirate of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy - Spock representing cold logic (the ego?), McCoy emotional humanity (id?), and Kirk balancing the two with action (superego?). The addition of Chekov as the last "main character" of the Original Series crew is also welcome.

With the rise of stories revolving around the Triumvirate, there is an inevitable diminution of secondary character interactions. That's not to say that Scotty, Uhura, et al. are not given ample screen time in some episodes (e.g. Scotty's murder trial in "Wolf in the Fold"), but we don't have many interactions between them - e.g. Sulu and Rand discussing fencing, or Uhura singing in the officer's mess. That's a minor quibble, of course, as the season is rich in fantastic and varies episodes. There are some outright comedies ("I, Mudd" doesn't work, but "Trouble with Tribbles" and "A Piece of the Action" both routinely appear at the tops of lists of favourite episode votes).

Other reviews have listed the episodes for the season, but I will give a partial list of highlights, divided by classic Trek themes:

1. Comedy episodes:
- The Trouble with Tribbles: insatiable purring furballs infest the Enterprise while docked at a space station is disputed space. The Klingons pay a visit and further chaos ensues.
- A Piece of the Action: cultural contamination by a survey ship 100 years easrlier creates a culture based on 1930's Chicago mobs. Kirk and Spock attempt to redirect the course of the planetary evolution. Contains the a memorable line uttered by Mr. Spock in a mob accent: "I'd advise yez to keep dialing" (the phone). In a recent straw poll in the local newspaper, this episode was voted "best Trek episode" of all time.

2. Prime Directive episodes
- The aforementioned A Piece of the Action
- Patterns of Force - an historian recreates Nazi Germany on a planet at war with a neighbour

3. Alien Culture
- Amok Time and Journey to Babel - the former dealing with Vulcan mating rituals, the latter with the Father-Son relationship between Sarek and Spock.
- Friday's Child - the Klingons and Federation fight over mining rights on a pre-technological world

4. Transporter/holodeck/technology malfunction
- Mirror, Mirror - a transporter accident sends Kirk, Uhura, McCoy, and Scotty into an alternate universe where their counterparts are genocidal empire-builders.

5. Threat to all life in the galaxy/universe
- Doomsday Machine - The USS Constellation's crew are killed by a giant superweapon, and Kirk and the Constellation's captain must figure out how to destroy it.
- Obsession - a gaseous entity that eats red blood cells (thus killing its victim) is encountered. We learn that Kirk's first landing party command was destroyed by this same creature.

The final great episode of Season 2 doesn't easily fit into a standard Trek category, and that is "Wolf in the Fold", where Scotty is charged with the multiple murders of women on a shore-leave planet. It was written by Theodore Sturgeon, who also penned "Psycho".

There are extras on this disc, and they are quite good. I would have liked to have seen more text commentaries by the Okudas, and would really like to have heard some audio commentaries by the actors (both Nimoy and Shatner gave good commentaries on the ST films they directed). There are interviews with Nimoy discussing his photography career, Nichelle Nicholls on the origins of Uhura's name, and writer D.C. Fontana on the writing process, for just a few examples. Now that the price of these series have come down to more affordable levels (they were originally $100 each!), they are worth the money to see the stories uninterrupted by ads and uncut for syndication. June 5, 2008

Out of Order

Although it is real nice having the set in one package, it is a shame that they did not have the foresight to think we might want to watch them in the order they were numbered, i.e. episode 2 before 3, 3 before 4, 4 before 5, etc. They are on the disks in air date order, which is not the correct order, if you want to watch in actual order, you must juggle between disks. Wait to purchase until the idiots at Paramount get it right. Maybe this is why sales were not so good and went from $129 - $199 per season to less than $40.00 per season. April 8, 2008

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