The Original Series, in alphabetical order, from memory – Blue Towel Productions

Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep.

And so recently, when I was trying to quiet my mind so I could drift off I found myself wondering if I could order ever episode of Star Trek (the original series) in alphabetical order, from memory. I am familiar with all of the original Star Trek episodes, but I don’t have any systematic way of bringing them to mind (ie I don’t know the order they came out in, etc) so I could only do this by trying to recall all the episodes that begin with an “A”, all the ones that begin with a “B” and so on (doing the traditional alphabetizing thing and ignoring it if “The” “A” or “An” appear at the beginning of the title.)

(By the way, I originally had this as part of my monthly round-up post here, before I decided to pull it out into its own thing).

Anyway, this became a preoccupation for a couple of weeks, not just when I was lying in bed. I purposely avoided actually looking at a list, and then finally a little bit ago, I was able to do it–I listed all 80 episodes of the original series (that counts the unaired pilot, The Cage, and both part of The Menagerie, which re-purposed most of the footage in The Cage) in alphabetical order, at least assuming that I have the names of the episodes correct (there is one I’m not sure about).

All of this was in my head. I never wrote them down, but I’m going to do so now. I’ve been waiting to finish this post to actually put it down, and since I actually figured it out mentally a couple of weeks ago (the last one to come to mind was The Squire of Gothos), I haven’t continued to go over it. So I’m not 100% that now I won’t struggle to remember something.

So yeah, I’m going to list them in “real time” here, as best as I remember them, and keep track of how long it takes me to do this. And then I will look up the list and see if I made any mistakes. (More and more as I go through life, I figure I must have some degree of neurodivergence. I think this is evidence).

So here we go: I’m turning on my timer…now.

1. All Our Yesterdays
2. The Alternative Factor
3. Amok Time
4. And the Children Shall Lead
5. The Apple
6. Arena
7. Assignment: Earth
8. Balance of Terror
9. Bread and Circuses
10. By Any Other Name
11. The Cage
12. Catspaw (took me a bit to recall this one)
13. The Changeling
14. Charlie X
15. City on the Edge of Forever
16. The Cloud Minders
17. Conscience of the King
18. The Corbomite Maneuver
19. Court-Martial
20. Dagger of the Mind
21. Day of the Dove
22. The Deadly Years
23. Devil in the Dark
24. The Doomsday Machine
25. Elaan of Troyius
26. The Empath
27. The Enemy Within
28. The Enterprise Incident
29. Errand of Mercy
30. For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
31. Friday’s Child
32. The Galileo 7
33. The Gamesters of Triskelion
34. I, Mudd
35. The Immunity Syndrome
36. Is There in Truth No Beauty?
37. Journey to Babel
38. Let This Be Your Last Battlefield
39. The Lights of Zetar
40. The Man Trap
41. The Mark of Gideon (I really struggled to remember this one)
42. The Menagerie
43. The Menagerie part II
44. Metamorphosis
45. Miri
46. Mirror, Mirror
47. Mudd’s Women
48. The Naked Time
49. Obsession
50. The Omega Glory
51. Operation: Annihilate!
52. The Paradise Syndrome
53. Patterns of Force (Another one I had a hard time remembering. I remember where on the list something should go, more or less, but so far there have been three that I had to really work to bring back to mind)
54. A Piece of the Action
55. Plato’s Stepchildren
56. A Private Little War
57. Requiem for Methuselah
58. Return of the Archons
59. Return to Tomorrow
60. The Savage Curtain
61. Shore Leave
62. Space Seed
63. Spectre of the Gun
64. Spock’s Brain
65. The Squire of Gothos
66. A Taste of Armageddon
67. This Side of Paradise
68. That Which Survives
69. The Tholian Web
70. Tomorrow is Yesterday (this is the one I’m not sure if I have the right title for. Maybe it’s actually “Yesterday is Tomorrow”? I don’t think so, but I’m not certain)
71. The Trouble with Tribbles
72. Turnabout Intruder
73. The Ultimate Computer
74. The Way to Eden
75. What are Little Girls Made Of? (I almost skipped this one and went right to the next! But I remembered before I hit “enter”)
76. Where No Man Has Gone Before
77. Who Mourns for Adonais? (I’m not sure if I’ve spelt that correctly)
78. Whom Gods Destroy
79. Wink of an Eye
80. Wolf in the Fold

Done! 17 minutes, 31 seconds. That definitely took me longer because I stopped reviewing it some time ago.

So now let’s look at a list and see if I made any mistakes (these refer to the episodes in their broadcast order, not alphabetical order)

• I spelled “maneuver” correctly, after not being sure. It’s not how it’s spelled in Australia (we say “manoeuvre”)
• Hmm, I had to check the actual episodes for this, but both parts of “The Menagerie” are credited just as that, “The Menagerie.” Both parts add “Part I” or “Part II” (as is appropriate) after the title, which is in quotation mark. So at least one of my answers here is not quite correct.
• I forgot the “The” at the start of “The Conscience of the King”
• “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is the correct title. Hooray!
•.”Court Martial” doesn’t have a hyphen in it.
• There’s a “The” at the start of “The Return of the Archons”
• The same for “The Devil in the Dark”.
• And “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Drat!
• According to the internet, “Operation–Annihilate!” has got a dash, not a colon
• I did get “Who Mourns for Adonais?” correct, in spite of my uncertainty.
• Technically, it seems I should have listed “The Enterprise Incident” as “The Enterprise Incident”
• In what I think is my biggest mistake so far, what I put down as “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” is actually called “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”.

Okay, so that’s nine episodes that I made some sort of mistake with. Two of them were due to punctuation errors and one because I didn’t put something in italics. Four of them I forgot the “The” at the start of the title, and I was a bit confused by how they formatted the title of “The Menagerie” for its two separate parts. And then I got one word completely wrong (writing “This” instead of “That”) for one title.

Still, I think that’s pretty good considering it was all a mental exercise, up until now.

Incidentally, there are no original Star Trek episodes whose titles begin with H, K, Q, V, X, Y or Z. I wonder how long each of those took to come along?

• “Yesteryear” is the second episode of the Animated series in the 1970s.
• “How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth” came toward the end of the Animated series.
• “Q Who?” came along in Next Generation’s second season
• “Violations” was a fifth season Next Generation episode
• “The Killing Game” was a two-parter in the fourth season of Star Trek Voyager.
• Star Trek Enterprise opened its third season with “The Xindi”.
• And it closed that same season with “Zero Hour”–Star Trek Enterprise brings it home!

Okay, enough of this. Time get some dinner.