Trek III

Do the thing with your fingers42. Obsession. Sometimes I think the show’s writers challenged themselves to steer William Shatner through as many different extreme emotional states as possible over the course of an episode.  The plot can be straightforward, you just let Shatner go and stand back.  Here, a landing party is victimized by a killer cloud-like creature Kirk has encountered before, early in his career.  In fact, Kirk blames himself for a failure to act in time to have stopped the creature from killing much of his fellow crew.  With another chance to face it and set things right, Kirk becomes obsessed with figuring out its weakness and destroying it once and for all.  This one is a Shatner showcase, no doubt, as the story is really about some of what drives Kirk and his occasional overflowing humanity.  Lots of emoting: guilt, anger, frustration.  The delicate command path that Kirk follows to feed his obsession while other pressures are put on him (setting a good example for a young officer; dealing with an approaching deadline to meet another ship) is mostly well-done.  (There is one plot hole: the Enterprise needs to rendezvous with another ship to pick up some perishable medical supplies, but then they don’t, and it ultimately doesn’t matter.  And it even takes a while to establish that there is any reason they can’t just come back for the creature after dealing with the other problem.  Anyway.)  Like “The Deadly Years” this episode gives the crew a forum to be concerned about Kirk’s fitness for command, only this time it’s much more delicate and believable.  Killer Spock line: (after he manages to retrieve Kirk and another officer from a dicey transporter situation, and Scotty exclaims, “Thank God!”) “Mr. Scott, there was no deity involved.  It was my cross-circuiting to B that recovered them.”  This was a strong episode with a lot going for it: good ideas and suspense. 4 out of 5.

Trek tropes (number of instances encountered in series so far in parentheses):

  • Anonymous redshirt killed (five times!) (2)
  • Shatner showcase (2)
  • Highly experimental plan with low probability of success somehow works anyway (3)

43. Wolf in the Fold. The Next Generation had a lot of solid mystery episodes, but TOS tends to focus on other things (like diplomacy, or fistfights).  Here though, we get a good one (and since it’s a mystery my discussing it will naturally be extra spoiler-y).  Kirk and McCoy take Scotty to some sort of cabaret planet to relax him after a recent accident.  We get some sort of backstory about how Scotty has no respect for women, so maybe if he sleeps with one anonymously that will help.  I guess?  I’m actually not sure, there’s a lot of double entendre and saying just enough to make a point without being too explicit for 1960s TV.  Anyway, Scotty leaves with a woman and shortly afterward is found with a bloody knife in his hands and his companion murdered.  Scotty doesn’t remember anything.  Local law enforcement corrals him, but while trying to wrangle the story out of him through mystical and technological means, two more girls are killed and Scotty again seems guilty.  But the facts don’t add up so they return to the Enterprise to subject Scotty to a futuristic lie detector, and his innocent story checks out.  Through some brilliant computer queries Spock and Kirk deduce what has happened, and the planetary administrator helps them out by acting way too weird and giving away the truth: that he is possessed by the evil spirit of Jack the Ripper!  Things get a little crazy at this point as the entity jumps from person to person to computer.  It’s genuinely scary, actually, as it inhabits the ship and tries to freak everyone out.  Knowing that it feeds on fear, Kirk, McCoy, and Spock have everyone on the ship take a mild tranquilizer to keep things mellow.  So we get a fair stretch of goofy ’60s style drug humor, too, until Kirk and Spock are able to get the thing back into the killer’s body and transport him out into deep space.  Spock’s killer line: no great lines but I like when he shoves the drugged-up transporter officer out of the way to get the killer beamed out. Overall it ends up being an interesting science-fictional turn on a traditional mystery, if you can forgive some sketchy computer magic (e.g., that future computers can make brilliant deductions AND be inhabited by killer entities).  2 out of 5.

Trek tropes (number of instances encountered in series so far in parentheses):

  • Recent Earth history will always be relevant (1)
  • In the future, computers are magic, but still make teletype sounds (1)
  • Only Kirk can truly make command decisions (2)

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