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Star Trek TAS - Season 1 - Episode 01

Star Trek TAS - 1x01 - Beyond the Farthest Star

Originally Aired: 1973-9-8

Synopsis:
The Enterprise is dragged off course by Questar M-17, an imploded negative star mass, and meets a strange shapeless being. [Blu-ray] [DVD]

My Rating - 4

Fan Rating Average - 4.82

Rate episode?

Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 12 2 2 4 12 4 5 9 9 3 4

Problems
- The orange alien mysteriously disappeared from his post in one shot during the opening scenes, replaced by a redshirt.
- Spock mentions the temperature aboard the alien ship is absolute zero, which is impossible. Absolute zero is a theoretical value on the temperature scale, not an attainable one.
- Another use of the dreaded slingshot effect...
- Life support belts are a technology which we'll never see again after TAS. We can rationalize this like the slingshot effect. Perhaps they too ended up being deemed too risky for anyone to use after a series of accidents or something. And of course once again our TAS cast got absurdly lucky to have such good luck with them.

Factoids
- Chekov was not present at all during TAS.

Remarkable Scenes
- The sight of that massive organic starship.
- The deployment of the automatic bridge defense system. Cool device!
- Kirk and Spock getting their asses kicked by the automatic bridge defense system when the alien took over the Enterprise. Haha!

My Review
TAS begins its short run nicely, exploiting its cartoon production style by showing us grandiose sets they could have never used in live action. Indeed, this is TAS' single greatest advantage. Remarkable character: Lieutenant Arex. (The orange alien.) Just like the sets, Arex was a crewmember they couldn't have done in live action due to technology and budget constraints.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From CAlexander on 2011-04-05 at 2:19pm:
    Not bad for an old cartoon. Has a fun sense of exploration as they say "Gee whiz!" at everything on the alien ship. But once the alien took over the Enterprise, I was more or less confused the whole time.

    - I like how the life support belts give the animated show more freedom to actually let the crew explore places which do not have a breathable atmosphere.
  • From James T Quark on 2014-08-24 at 9:35pm:
    Poor Chekhov. I can just imagine the phone call.
    "So I hear that we are doing another Star Trek, this time animated! GREAT! I'm so excited! When do we start?"
    "Sorry, Mr. Koenig, they are proceeding without Pavel Chekov."
    "What? Why? I don't understand!?"
    "You've been replaced, Mr. Koenig. By an orange alien."

    Hehe I'm not sure what the details are as to why he didn't do the series but perhaps, in animation, they didn't need a Davey Jones type for the teenage girls. 😃
  • From Alex on 2019-12-23 at 2:58am:
    The biggest, grossest error for me is when they realise the age of the derelict ship, and Kirk wonders about "a civilization that advanced 300 million years ago... before life even emerged on Earth".

    This is SO wrong. 300 mil years ago plant life already firmly established itself on land, and amphibians and arthropods already thrived (including ancient cockroaches).

    By 1973 it was definitely already known that life is older than some 300 mil years. Currently it is theorised that life may have existed as early as 4.3-4.5 billions of years ago.
    ___
    Otherwise it was very pleasing to see those detailed drawn sets that would unfortunately be very very hard to do in live action production. And the episode overall was decent.

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