TOS S03E23, S03E24

In this installment:
(viewed April 11th-12th)

Star Trek: The Original Series, S03E23 - "All Our Yesterdays"
Star Trek: The Original Series, S03E24 - "Turnabout Intruder"

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"All Our Yesterdays"

• "Defend yourself!"
  
  (Kirk readies his sword)
  
  "Uh, dude...you have a phaser."
• What is it with McCoy telling people to leave him behind in the snow?  Seriously?
• HE'S A WITCH!
• "Hey guys, I have an idea.  Instead of using our obviously advanced technology to travel to distant worlds and colonize them, maintaining our currently standard of living, let's just build a dangerously finicky computer to send us to the past instead!"
• "I am the real Atoz, you've done away with my replicas."  Hooray, you burned through all of his mirror images!
• Spock's clear distaste at having to eat meat in this episode is the first reference that I recall of most Vulcans preferring to practicing vegetarianism of one form or another.

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"Turnabout Intruder"

• "Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women."
  
  I know the show as produced in the late 1960s, but Janice Lester's statement is surprising for an organization in the 23rd Century.  Obviously Starfleet reverses this policy by at least 2344, if not sooner.
• Dr. Lester (as Captain Kirk) orders a change in course that will delay the Enterprise's rendezvous with the starship Potemkin, another Constitution-class vessel (and one against which the Enterprise faced off in the episode "The Ultimate Computer").
• I think they have this room on the Enterprise just for courts martial.
• It's stated that violation of General Order 4 is the only offense for which the death penalty still applies in Starfleet, but way back in "The Menagerie" the same is said of General Order 7.
• I'm really sorry if anyone is getting tired of me pointing out the sexism rampant in TOS, which most of us accept as a product of the era in which it was produced...but this series finale may be the most sexist episode of the entire series.
  
  It's stated that Starfleet either implicitly discourages or explicitly forbids women from serving as captains of starships.  Our antagonist is a poor woman, scorned by Captain Kirk and denied her dream of being a starship captain like one of the boys, goes crazy (you know, like a typical woman) and plots her revenge.  The insult is piled on even further during Spock's court martial when Lester-as-Kirk implies that it's ridiculous to suggest that sweet, fragile little Dr. Lester would be physically capable of overcoming strong, virile Captain Kirk and imposing upon him a personality transfer.
  
  It's really pretty bad, even compared with some of the other examples of sexism in TOS.  We take the good with the bad though, and among all the cheesy 1960s schlock of this first iteration of Star Trek, there's a lot of great adventure, character-driven drama and genuine science fiction in there too.  The pervasive sexism must be viewed as an understandable-but-unfortunate blemish on this otherwise groundbreaking piece of sci-fi.

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...and that's the end of Star Trek: The Original Series, folks!  Expect a short video recap tomorrow, and the start of my journey through Star Trek: The Animated Series to begin shortly.