F/SF

Blish is usually good, but I feel like I need to to watch "The Mark Of Gideon" again, cause that episode makes no sense in short story form...

Always fun, although this reread wasn't as hilarious to me as it had been on last reading, some 20 years or so before. ( )

Almost finished my 2020 re-watch/re-read. For some reason, books 5 and 6 are mostly third season episodes. At 20-25 pages per story, they are dialog and minimal description. More evidence of nobody in the editing chain watching the show - pushing open doors, a reference to landing the Enterprise, checking a watch, and that's just in "Mark of Gideon"! "The Cloud Minders", which I remembered almost nothing about when I watched it, turned out to be most relevant to 2020 - solving the conflict between the miners and the cloud dwellers revolves around wearing masks for protection from an unseeable threat. ( )

So, if Blish is like chocolate and Star Trek is like relatively cheap but still tasy chocolate (see my review of [b:Star Trek 4|76750|Star Trek 4|James Blish|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184738283s/76750.jpg|2330757]) then four volumes of Blish Star Trek adaptations in quick succession is like binge eating your favourite chocolate bars until you feel nauseated...I'm taking a break from this series for a while...

There's another issue: Blish, in one of his prefaces ([b:Star Trek 3|76749|Star Trek 3|James Blish|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184738234s/76749.jpg|2893168] I think), mentions that he is choosing which scripts to adapt based on the number of requests he receives for given episodes. Now, assuming that the general mass of Star Trek fans who were also readers willing to write to the author had some discernment, then the best episodes will appear early in the series and the quality will therefore go down in the later books. This is evident across the books 3-6 that I've read. Should one conclude that being a Star Trek fan, being a reader or being willing to write fan mail implies discerning character? Or any combination or permutation? Studies should be conducted! ( )