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Vulcans never bluff.

More than forty years after it debuted on NBC television, the original Star Trek still commands a deep and abiding loyalty from millions of fans. Having spawned a successful series of feature films and at least one too many TV spin-offs, the colorful, exciting, and vividly drawn adventures of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and the crew of the good ship Enterprise have remained in demand and in print while many of their contemporaries have been forgotten. The series now moves into its third iteration in the DVD format, leaving behind a brief flirtation with HD-DVD. For this release, the episodes have not just been gussied up for the digital format, but have been completely remastered with all-new special effects. Whatever your stance on this digital upgrade, it’s hard to argue with the fact that Star Trek has never looked this good.

Star Trek: The Original Series Season Two – Remastered Edition marks a bit of a crossroad for the series in the new Hi-Def era. Originally intended as a DVD/HD-DVD hybrid release (on two-sided discs) like the S1 set, these were revised at the eleventh hour to one-sided DVD-only discs, what with HD-DVD having lost the format war, discs and players already clogging landfills across the country. Will Trek eventually be released on Blu-Ray? It seems likely, but for now, these spiffy-shiny DVDs will do the trick.

Season Two of Star Trek sees the series much as it was during the first year, with one addition (Walter Koenig as the feisty Russian navigator, Chekov) and one subtraction (Grace Lee Whitney, out as Yeoman Rand). The production team remained more or less in place, with creator Gene Roddenberry being the primary creative force, while uber-producer Gene Coon (the real hero of classic Trek) and script editor Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana kept an eye on the scripts. The regular cast continued to perform admirably, having truly settled into their characters.

Story-wise, Season Two is quite good for the most part, though it lacks a bit of the freshman energy of the first season. The creative team had clearly become efficient at putting together an exciting hour of television each week, and many of the S2 episodes are considered all-time classics.

However, this is also the season where Star Trek starts to get a bit repetitious. There are two episodes this season about a mindless alien menace wiping out entire solar systems – as well as the initial starship it encounters – before the Enterprise arrives (“The Doomsday Machine,” “The Immunity Syndrome”), and there are no less than three episodes about Federation personnel changing the course of a planet’s evolution by their corrupting influence (“A Piece of the Action,” “Patterns of Force,” and “Bread and Circuses”). In both “Return to Tomorrow” and “By Any Other Name”  – originally broadcast only two weeks apart – aliens hijack human bodies and become so distracted by the carnal pleasures suddenly available to them that they all but abandon their original intentions; there’s even an identical scene in both episodes in which the female lead indicates the transition by literally letting down her hair. “Who Mourns for Adonais” is a virtual remake of the first season episode “The Squire of Gothos,” and is also one of two episodes this year in which a godlike alien refers to humans as “my children.” The virtually interchangeable “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both feature rustic hill people, and Kirk falling prey to local customs.

Still, there are plenty of classic episodes here, and most of them hold up quite well. “Amok Time,” while a bit slow-paced by modern standards, is still impressively eerie and alien-seeming (one must assume it was quite unlike anything else on the air in 1967); “Journey to Babel” is a taut espionage thriller, with the added interest of the Spock/Sarek relationship. “A Piece of the Action” is a dandy little caper, if not particularly believable, and “The Deadly Years” features an outstanding performance by William Shatner. I have long cited Robert Bloch’s “Wolf in the Fold” (the Trek version of his classic story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”) as an all-time favorite, but re-watching it here I was struck by how much of the story takes place in the conference room, with everybody sitting around yapping. The episode still has some chilling moments, but is rather more inert than I had recalled. On the other hand, “Return to Tomorrow” was never a particular favorite of mine in the old days, but re-watching it here for the first time in at least a decade, I found it to be a superb execution of its basic central concept, with Leonard Nimoy being delightfully smarmy as the alien-possessed villain, and a youthful Diana Muldaur impressive (and utterly gorgeous) in her dual role. There’s an unfortunate bit of overacting from Shatner, to be sure, but “Return” is generally a real winner, and a bit of an overlooked gem.

My favorite episode of the season, however, has to be “The Doomsday Machine,” finally given the epic look and feel it deserves with the augmented special effects – but more on those in a bit. Even so, the episode is given weight and substance by the tightly paced script, and the superb performance of William Windom.

There are certainly some stinkers here as well, some of them notorious. “A Private Little War” is a heavy-handed Vietnam allegory with a boring visual look, a very bad Mugato costume, and some distinct story problems (the Klingon officer that had been providing weapons simply vanishes about halfway through, and his corruption of the natives is never really dealt with); “The Gamesters of Triskelion” is a gaudy, kitschy nightmare, with blank-eyed soon-to-be-porn star Angelique Pettyjohn sporting a tin-foil halter top and the biggest, poofiest hair in Trek history (and that’s saying something); “The Apple” is obvious and silly, as well as being one of the most overt “What Prime Directive?” episodes for Kirk. And, of course, there’s Roddenberry’s own infamous “The Omega Glory,” a dire hodgepodge of some of the worst elements of Trek: the starship commander that goes whacko – they really need to screen these guys more carefully – the warring primitives, immortality, and an alien civilization with ridiculously specific parallels to Earth.

Overall, Season Two of Star Trek has the feel of a show that has fallen into a comfortable groove. Although occasionally innovative, more often than not it lacks the raw energy of the first season, and it is here that it begins to fall into the kind of cliches that decades of comedians have delighted in poking fun at. It’s not bad, just more routine than memory had led me to believe.

The big deal with this new release, of course, is the re-mastering, which incorporates new CGI special effects. This decision had been highly controversial among Trekkers, but is more or less a practical one. The series’ original special effects, while generally serviceable, were limited by the technology of the time. The compositing process, used to produce most of the outer space shots, is esepcially troublesome. Depending on the number of elements used in any given shot, it would remove the image further and further from the original negative, introducing increased grain and image corruption. Hard-core Trekkers are more than familiar with various shots of the Enterprise in which the warp nacelles look as if they’ve been eaten away, and even the show’s best SFX shots were re-used so many times that, from a dramatic standpoint, they become almost useless. Mastering these stories for Hi-def/DVD means that these original special effects would look even worse given the stunning resolution of the format, and so the decision was taken to replace them with computer-generated images that could be mastered in the same stunning detail as the original live-action 35mm photography. This also allowed the CG artists to tailor the effects to each story, rather than relying on a small number of stock shots as the original production team did for budgetary reasons. This quickly became a Pandora’s box, however, and the fans have always been quite vocal about change.

Certainly the upgrades are not universally effective, and, despite the CG team’s original assertion that they were only going to recreate effects of the exact same duration as the original FX footage, as more episodes got revised, they began to monkey with the shows more and more. Several live-action shots in “Amok Time” have been replaced with digital matte paintings that attempt to give the planet Vulcan some scope, but they are simply jarring. The opening shot of “The Ultimate Computer” is stunningly bad, looking as fake and plastic-y as any snap-together model kit. The Big Green Hand at the beginning of “Who Mourns for Adonais” looks kinda goofy, but not really any worse than the original effect. One nice touch in “Mirror, Mirror,” the alt-universe Enterprise has been made to look like the very earliest promotional stills of the ship, with needle-like caps to the warp nacelles, and slotted vents at the back end of the cylinders. For the most part, the fly-bys of the Enterprise that have been re-created work just fine, although the CG artists do at times seem a bit fetishistic about the ship, concocting odd angles and getting super-close to the fuselage. It’s a bit strange, but not particularly distracting.

Still, overall, I think the new effects work well, and in some cases, it’s difficult to imagine going back to watching the old, primitive effects. Case in point: “The Doomsday Machine.” The story is so effects-heavy that it’s frankly amazing the original series even attempted it, and the results were sorely mixed. While the design and execution of the planet-killer was very effective, other bits – such as the use of a plastic model kit to show the Constellation flying down the planet killer’s maw, and a laughably out-of-scale shot of the shuttlecraft approaching the machine – tended to spoil things. The new version here is one of the most seamless of the bunch, and while not 100% perfect, is a quantum leap beyond the original version, making a great thriller even better.

Moving on to the Special Features, they are a mix of vignettes ported over from the original DVD release of this season in 2004, and a few new tidbits. Typical talking-heads-and-clips features include “To Boldly Go: Season Two,” “Designing the Final Frontier,” “Writer’s Notebook: D.C. Fontana,” “Star Trek’s Favorite Moments,” “Life Beyond Star Trek: Leonard Nimoy,” “Kirk, Spock, and Bones: Star Trek’s Great Trio,” and “Divine Diva: Nichelle Nichols.” The best of these is the Design feature, with Matt Jeffries, Bob Justman, and other technicians describing some of the (often amusing) methods they used to bring the sets in on budget. All of these are reasonably well put together, though it’s doubtful you’d ever watch any of them twice. Included also are the original trailers for each episode, and these have been left un-remastered, often giving a glimpse of the original special effects.

Disc 5 is given over completely to Tribbles-related material. There’s the delightful original episode, the sequel “More Tribbles, More Troubles” from Star Trek – The Animated Series, and the superb Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations,” in which Sisko and crew time travel back to space station K-7 to try and thwart an attempt on Kirk’s life. David Gerrold lends an effective audio commentary to the animated episode (but why not get him to comment on his classic original too? A missed opportunity there), and there are two reasonably well-done featurettes on the DS9 episode. Though it’s a bit of tribble-overkill taken all in one sitting, these are satisfying additions to the prior DVD edition.

The best extra here is Part 2 of “Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest: Rare Home Movies and Special Memories.” Blackburn was something of a “utility” player on the series, a stand-in and background artist , who actually got quite a bit of face-time (though hardly any lines) in this season, as bridge officer Lt. Hadley, who can often be seen at either helm or navigation when the regulars were away. He filled in with bit parts as various aliens, and even played the plasticized “blank” android in “Return to Tomorrow.” Blackburn filmed many 8mm movies during his three seasons on Trek, many bits of which are presented here, along with interview footage and his charming narration. With the long history of Trek, there’s very little footage that has remained unseen, but these home movies qualify, and it’s a delight to have them here.

The packaging is an improvement over the weird round-edged clamshell cases of the original DVD releases. The discs still come in a tacky taped-together digipack encased in a plastic shell that opens in halves, but at least these will sit on a shelf without tipping over. The oddest decision was to replace the episode guide booklet, putting the text instead on a series of semi-transparent plastic slabs that look like coasters. There is also no artwork silk-screened onto the discs, obviously a fallout of the last-minute abandonment of the dual-sided hybrid configuration. The disc menus are the same vaguely annoying ones from the original (non-remastered) DVD releases, and there are no English subtitles, though the set is close-captioned.

Star Trek: The Original Series Season Two – Remastered Edition, despite its controversial elements (and its very long title) is still a good bet for Trekkers and especially for casual fans. The replacement effects give the show a renewed gloss, and even though this season does tend to repeat itself at times, there are more than enough great episodes here to merit a purchase. A truly “definitive” edition would have the original versions and the remastered episodes (I wouldn’t be surprised if the Blu-Ray edition goes that route), but for now this is a pretty nifty double-dip, and well worth acquiring for any fan of the show. If you’re flexible enough to take in the new tricks applied to this old dog, you’ll find plenty to enjoy. Boldly go, and pick up this Trek.

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