It has always struck me that ‘This Side of Paradise’ is the most characteristically “Kennedy-esque” episode ever put on TV. As your bewildered reactions show, it is totally a product of its time and that time has been forgotten. This was first season stuff, the time was NOT the counter cultural late 60’s/early 70s, It was still the’ post -Sputnik reaction’ early space race. Everything then was about breaking out of our supposed recent national decent into the somnolent purposeless self-satisfied consumer’s paradise of the 50’s, obsessed with comfort, entertainment, material possessions and one’s individual goals. Instead we were now to wake up excited, recover our vigor and enthusiasm, get back to the pioneer spirit, take up the old American mission– correct our failings at home, live up to our ideals, remake the world as we had dreamed we would while fightingt WW II (BTW; Star Trek itself is a grandchild of of Heinlein’s ‘Space Cadet’, which was a reflection of The1947 UN Baruch Plan to control atomic energy…very idealistic, but very institutional)– post Sputnik we were told we needed to prove to ourselves and the outside world that freedom can still contend for and shape the future of earth & space beyond–the final frontier.

Read Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ speech. It is a rallying cry to meet a great crisis, part identity crisis, part threat to our very existence, he issues a challenge to sacrifice and work hard, half Gettysburg address, half manifest destiny. Or even more so, Kennedy’s August 1960 contribution in LIFE magazine to the on-going “Quest for National Purpose” debate: “We must climb to the hilltop.”
“…Nestled between the mountains and the sea, shielded from the storms and stresses of the outside world, that little valley offered its inhabitants a placid and sheltered life….Too many Americans in the 1950s, I believe, have been living too much of the time in such a valley. We have felt contented and complacent and comfortable. Now it is time once again to climb to the hilltop, to be reinvigorated and reinspired by those faraway peaks, the principles that are vital to our national greatness, that underlie our national purpose, that foster our “American dream.”

You see in that paragraph JFK practically wrote the script for the Star Trek Paradise episode! He sent us to the moon for goodness sake!! What do you think Kennedy-esque meant?! “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask where to get drugs and tune out?”

Did you imagine

Here it is again for the cage when the talosians were reading the ships computers they saw earth history from the 60’s POV. Why not show a quick glimpse of 9/11, The Iraqi War, slavery, adding more weight to the keeper’s words about humans being too violent and dangerous a species. OVERALL with a few “you could’ve done better moments” like ship size conveyed in Where No Man…I give this project a 75% rating.

What revisionists fail to realize is that there is a large part of the move/tv fan culture is wholly in favor of restored original content; Criterion led the way and saw much success during the laserdisc era, thanks to wonderful release of original material with as many extras as possible.

Thanks to historic acts of idiocy from (among others) Ted Turner (colorizing Black and White films), George Lucas (Star Wars Trilogy: The Special Editions) and recently Francis Coppola (The Outsiders), original visions were “good enough” long after Lucas & Coppola moved on to other projects–until technological innovation acts as a new toy for a desperate child. It appears certain “artists” and corporations have no sense of respecting history, unless it bleeds another dollar out, and as a result, generations of fans–in this case Star Trek–the original series fans may not come like dopey-eyed legions to retailers, spending hundreds on the questionable Remastered release, while the original version-the one which captured the love and respect of millions over the course of 40+ years–remains something to be forgotten.

Good job, CBS….and thanks for following everything-old-is-worthless Lucas.

As for “This Side of Paradise,” we’re agreed (of course) that it’s a wonderful episode, but you’re wrong on just about every other count, starting with the strained comparison to Invasion of the Body Snatchers–given that the Cold War parable about our familiars becoming soulless automatons bears no relation at all to the events in the Trek episode, as the effect of the spores was to make the infected more compassionate and caring, not less. And the theme of the episode was hardly a repudiation of “tuning in and dropping out,” since the spores offered peace and good health, not transcendence, and Elias Sandoval was hardly anything resembling a Timothy Leary figure. (Omicron Ceti III was a well-ordered, functioning place, not a drugged-out commune with stoners lying about and dirty dishes piling up in the sink.) What the show questioned, as clearly stated at the conclusion on the Enterprise bridge, was the religious and social utopian notion of paradise as an appropriate condition for human beings, and what makes its exploration of that theme so honest and enduring was Spock’s final reflection on his experience–brilliantly acted by Nimoy–which so poignantly spoke of the price of paradise lost.