Kaddish (S05E17)Airdate: 21 February 1997Written by: Linda McGibney Directed by: Jean de SegonzacRunning Time: 46 minutes The fifth-season episode Kaddish stands as a testament to Homicide: Life on the Street’s unflinching commitment to exploring the fractured identities that define life in a modern American city. Baltimore, in all its gritty complexity, is a character in itself—one that demands its inhabitants confront the uncomfortable truths of race, ethnicity, and faith. The series has long used its ensemble cast to dissect these themes, from Giardello’s reconciliation of his Sicilian and African American heritage to Pembleton’s fraught relationship with Catholicism. By Season 5, the show turns its lens on its only Jewish regular character, Detective John Munch, forcing him—and viewers—into a reckoning with his cultural roots.

Trouble with Tribbles (S02E13)Airdate: December 29th 1967Written by: David Gerrold Directed by: Joseph PevneyRunning Time: 50 minutes The enduring debate among Star Treks enthusiasts over which episode of The Original Series (TOS) stands as the definitive pinnacle of the franchise often devolves into impassioned, almost tribal, arguments. Yet when it comes to identifying the most universally beloved instalment, consensus is remarkably swift: Season 2 episode The Trouble with Tribbles occupies that throne with an almost gravitational pull. While its reputation as a lighthearted, family-friendly romp might superficially position it as an outlier in a series that frequently grapples with existential and ethical dilemmas, the episode’s enduring popularity reveals something deeper about the show’s foundational ethos. It demonstrates Gene Roddenberry’s universe’s capacity to accommodate whimsy without sacrificing its core principles of exploration, logic, and humanism. Here, comedy becomes not a dilution of the series’ ambition but a testament to its versatility—a reminder that even in the vastness of space, absurdity can coexist with profundity.

The 1968 Soviet television adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris—a two-part, black-and-white production directed by Lydia Ishimbaeva and Boris Nirenburg—arrives as a peculiar artifact of Cold War-era science fiction, one that inadvertently distills the phrase “less is more” into a mantra of pragmatic compromise. In an era where cinematic grandeur was the preserve of state-backed epics or Western blockbusters, this early interpretation of Lem’s philosophical novel emerges not as a triumph of artistic minimalism but as a testament to the constraints of its medium. Unlike Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, which would later elevate Solaris into the realm of metaphysical poetry through its meditative visuals and haunting score, or Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 psychological reimagining, Ishimbaeva and Nirenburg’s version operates within the stark confines of Soviet television production. Here, the absence of spectacle is not a deliberate aesthetic choice but a necessity imposed by limited budgets, rudimentary technology, and the logistical challenges of staging a cosmic mystery in a studio designed for soap operas. Yet, within these restrictions lies a curious sincerity—a determination to grapple with Lem’s existential questions about guilt, memory, and the unknowable nature of alien intelligence, even as the production’s technical shortcomings threaten to undermine its ambition.

Robert Bloch (S02E07)Airdate: December 22nd 1967Written by: Robert Bloch Directed by: Joseph PevneyRunning Time: 50 minutes Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) has, since its 1966 debut, cultivated a fervent, multigenerational fanbase, its enduring appeal rooted in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a utopian future defined by rationality, inclusivity, and interstellar cooperation. Yet, for all its progressive credentials, the franchise has not escaped criticism. Among its detractors, radical feminists have long scrutinized the original series, arguing that its portrayal of women—particularly in episodes like Season 2’s Wolf in the Fold—exposes a regressive undercurrent beneath Roddenberry’s enlightened veneer. While TOS is lauded for breaking barriers in diversity, its handling of gender often feels anachronistically crude, with female characters frequently reduced to sexualized victims or peripheral figures. For modern “woke” audiences steeped in discourses of equity and representation, episodes like Wolf in the Fold—with their reliance on exploitative tropes and patriarchal assumptions—risk alienating viewers, prompting calls for the series to be “cancelled” or memory-holed to obscurity. Yet, to dismiss the episode outright would be to overlook its genre-bending ambition, technical craftsmanship, and the uneasy tension between its problematic elements and its thematic resonance.

Russia’s history, a tapestry woven with threads of upheaval, conflict, and revolution, has long provided fertile ground for filmmakers seeking to dramatise its tumultuous past. From the Time of Troubles to the Bolshevik seizure of power, the nation’s narrative is punctuated by episodes that, when refracted through the lens of cinema, often reveal as much about the era of their depiction as the events themselves. Yuli Karasik’s 1968 docudrama The Sixth of July, adapted from Vladimir Shatrov’s play of the same name, occupies a peculiar niche in this tradition. Neither a propagandistic triumph nor a wholly subversive critique, the film stands as a paradoxical artefact of Soviet cinema: a work commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution yet one that inadvertently interrogates the contradictions of Soviet historiography. While it lacks the cinematic audacity of contemporaries such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), its stark portrayal of the 1918 Left SR Uprising offers a window into the ideological tensions of the late 1960s, both within the USSR and beyond.

Obsession (S02E18)Airdate: December 15th 1967Written by: Art Wallace Directed by: Ralph SenenskyRunning Time: 50 minutes The enduring strength of Star Trek as a franchise lies in its capacity to revisit core thematic ideas through divergent narrative lenses, a flexibility that allowed it to thrive even in its formative years. Nowhere is this more evident than in Season 2 of The Original Series, which produced two episodes explicitly channeling Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick within weeks of one another: The Doomsday Machine and Obsession. Both episodes, though separated by mere weeks in their original broadcast, demonstrate how the show’s writers could adapt a singular literary archetype—the obsessive pursuit of an unstoppable force—into distinct stories with unique tonal and philosophical emphases. While The Doomsday Machine leaned into Cold War-era anxieties about nuclear annihilation, Obsession delves into the psychological scars of guilt, redemption, and the tension between emotion and rationality. This dual exploration underscores Star Trek’s early ingenuity in repurposing classical narratives to interrogate contemporary human dilemmas.