Star Trek: The Original Series - Season Three (DVD, 2004, 7-Disc Collector's Edition)

Star Trek Season III: After being rescued from cancellation following the second season, NBC reluctantly agreed to give the Star Trek another shot. Stuck in a bad time slot and with a dwindling budget, the cast and crew did what they could to keep the show alive. Unfortunately, this season pays the price, and there are more than a couple stinkers in this bunch. However, there are still plenty of solid episodes to be found in this third and final season of our beloved Star Trek. "Spectre of the Gun", "The Enterprise Incident", "The Tholian Web" (one of my personal favorites) and "The Savage Curtain" (with Abe Lincoln and Gengis Khan no less!) are all top notch episodes. But then there are bombs like "Plato's Stepchildren" (annoying kids) and "The Way to Eden" (annoying hippies) that really make your stomach turn. Still, lackluster Trek is better than no Trek at all, and there is plenty of good entertainment here to go around. No collection is complete without the final season of voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

By the third season of the original Star Trek series, the budget had been slashed by $20,000 per episode and the show's best producers and writers (including Gene Roddenberry) had departed. The results are apparant as the quality of the episodes is, on average, very very low (almost as bad as some early season one episodes).

The second half of the season is an almost uninterrupted parade of nearly unwatchable episodes. "Plato's Stepchildren", an episode which features Captain Kirk acting like a horse, appropriately herelds this decline. The only decent episodes after this point are "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", dealing with racism, and "The Cloud Minders", dealing with terrorism. The rest is made up of truly awful episodes like "Wink of an Eye", "The Lights of Zetar", and "The Way to Eden". Throughout, Spock is forced to act completely out of character to accomidate the absurd plots. Overall, the second half of the third season is such a huge disappointment because it comes from the same show which produced such innovative and exciting episdoes in previous seasons.

On the other hand, the first half of the season is generally pretty good, with the exception of episodes like "The Empath" and "The Paradise Syndrome". In fact, episodes like "The Enterprise Incident" and especially "The Tholian Web" are far better than anything from the show's second season. "The Enterprise Incident" does a fantastic job developing the Romulans (better than "Balance of Terror") and Spock, while both it and "The Tholain Web" contain great suprises involving Captain Kirk. In addition, the special effects from season three are far, far better than any in previous seasons (a situation which is especially evident in "The Tholian Web").

The problem is that such high quality episodes are so, so rare and that the averge episode is so, so bad. Season three contains about four excellent epsidoes that are on par with or better than the best episodes of season two. But the typical episode is of so much lower quality than an average season one or season two episode that season three on the whole becomes nearly without value.