All 5 Gerald Fried Star Trek scores ranked
By Mike Poteet
“Friday’s Child” (Season 2, Episode 11)
“Friday’s Child” is another sub-par Star Trek episode, despite coming from the keyboard of D.C. Fontana. But Fried’s score makes up quite a bit for the slow action and padded plotline.
Jeff Bond, the foremost expert on the music of Star Trek, praised Fried’s score for “Friday’s Child” in a 2007 review of the remastered episode:
"The opening and closing credit cues, with a thrilling trumpet figure playing against the familiar Alexander Courage Enterprise fanfare, [are] some of the most rousing music in the series (all the Enterprise shots in the episode get thrilling, brassy music cues); the tribal, pounding march that plays over the first tracking shot of the Capellan village perfectly establishes the warlike character of these people, and I love the sheer balls of moments like the cut back to the Enterprise bridge … [where] Fried’s music [is] laying down a furiously heavy downbeat just to show Chekov’s sensors losing track of the Klingon ship."
Bond also notes that Gerald Fried gave the franchise its first uniquely “Klingon theme,” more than a decade before Jerry Goldsmith gave it one in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.