#bleeeeeeeh

@camelosuspeito about Obsession - S2EP13 Star Trek TOS

I didn't reply earlier because, to be honest, I didn't really know what to answer.

I feel like Obsession is fine on its own. It's a perfectly decent episode that taps into Kirk's morality—and, more importantly, his ability to command. It examines how Jim, The Captain, from whom perfection is not only required but also expected, deals with Jim, The Human who makes mistakes and stretches the Starfleet uniform until all of himself fits in it. My problem is not with this EP in particular, but rather the sequence of episodes that leads to it: Friday's Child –> The Deadly Years –> Obsession.

If episodes like The City on the Edge of Forever and Amok Time are what Star Trek TOS offers at its best, Friday's Child is what it offers at its absolute, bottom-of-the-pit worst. Genuinely one of the foulest pieces of television I have ever seen. Not even character assassination; DC Fontana nuked Bones until there was nothing left.

On the other hand, the Deadly Years is not remarkable, but I think it's interesting enough. And it essentially asks the same questions Obsession asked right after it. What makes a captain good? What line has to be crossed for a good officer to become a bad one? Etc.

James T. Kirk sometimes (probably more often than he'd like to admit to himself) acts against his principles when a big enough stressor is at play. All three episodes do that in their own way. The problem was never that Kirk contradicted himself in Friday's Child, for example, but that nothing in the runtime of the episode justified it.

I don't think that's the case at all with The Deadly Years or Obsession.

I saw someone in the tags of a The Deadly Years-related post mention that the reason it doesn't work for them is that it is "surrounded by other episodes that also don't show Kirk at his best." Ignoring the atrocity that is Friday's Child, this raises a very good point.

I think the correlation between these three episodes (Friday's Child to Obsession/The Deadly Years) is a perfect example of how you can (and often should) write your characters "out of themselves", but it's still a matter of how you do it, just like anything else in art.

Friday's Child breaks that barrier of how a character acts and how it perceives itself constantly, with absolutely no regard for what it is portraying (I could go on a tangent about McCoy's character obliteration here, but I choose my own sanity and to limit my tangents to themselves).

That's a massive difference from how The Deadly Years works. Its central narrative is, "How can these characters handle not meeting the standards they hold themselves to?" while Obsession goes to a more Kirk-focused plot about, well, obsession.

I do think that Obsession Deus Ex Machina-ing itself is its own worst enemy. Kirk objectively made a very poor decision to continue chasing the cloud in Argus 10 to the detriment of Theta 7's citizens. Jim got lucky the fucking monster was about to reproduce and send thousands of others just like it (and just as deadly) through space. Ignoring that feels counterproductive to the point the episode itself was trying to make. It just screams poor story time management.

Here is the post I made about The Deadly Years prior to watching Obsession, if you're curious! –> https://www.tumblr.com/thomas-jefferson-miku-binder/764315715746627584/kirk-theres-just-one-thing-i-want-spock-the