This might seem an odd thing to review but I just binge watched it for the first time in a long time and it holds up. Overall, it was always kind of uneven, but the best episodes—and there are many of them—are well-remembered for a reason. The worse ones are perhaps a bit sentimental, or a bit too predictable, but never that bad. Also interesting is the long-forgotten fourth season, which never appeared in syndication because they expanded the episodes to an hour for that one. To me, the punchiness of the storytelling suffered, TTZ had always made great use of the half-hour format with concise stories that ticked along well. You can sense that the writers wanted to see what they could do given the little extra time, and mostly they make good use of it, but still, I felt a series of this nature kind of benefitted from the strictures of the shorter time slot.
Also interesting was that I had forgotten just how many people who went on to be famous later were in this series. Beyond the obvious, a fair bit of both the regular cast and guest-stars of Star Trek played roles: from George Takei as a Japanese-American dealing with post-WWII racism, to James Doohan in a bit part as a father in a small town, to Leonard Nimoy with a non-speaking role as party of a platoon of WWII soldiers, to familiar bit or single-episode players whose faces I recognized but names I didn’t know, like Antoinette Bower (Sylvia in ‘Catspaw’) or Stanley Adams (Cyrano Jones, ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’) or Susan Oliver ( from ‘The Menagerie’, who apparently specialized in playing the psychic sole attractive female inhabitant of the planet where the ship crashes.) Plus there were a host of others, from just about anyone who had a prominent role in a famous sitcom later in the 60s, plus many who I didn’t even know were acting that early: such as a very young Robert Redford, and an almost unrecognizable 27-year-old, clean-cut Dennis Hopper as a neo-nazi in one of the S4 hour-long episodes, among many, many other recognizable-at-second-glance faces. Also surprising, despite the series’s preoccupations with themes of the time (the space race, the military, the old west, the threat of nuclear obliteration) is how well the stories hold up. In particular, the Dennis Hopper one, in which he spends a lot of time making neo-Nazi speeches, struck me as entirely contemporary (unfortunately) in terms of the story and much of the dialogue. He said things on that episode in 1962 I still hear from certain ‘news’ outlets and other disreputable sources today.