Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 1 Episode 3
Original airdate: 22 September 1966

“It’s like a man who’s been blind all his life suddenly being given sight. Sometimes I feel there’s nothing I couldn’t do, in time. Some people think that makes me a monster, don’t they Jim?”

Right. If I was Captain Kirk, I’d find it very hard to trust anyone by this point. First it was a shape-shifting alien on the ship. Then it was a young lad with mind powers. This time it’s a crewmember with… well, with mind powers again.

After finding the damaged flight recorder of the Valiant – a ship missing for 200 years – the Enterprise finds itself passing through the same strange purple barrier the Valiant did before its destruction. This’ll go well.

As well as taking out the ship’s systems and warp drive, the barrier also gives electric shocks to the ship’s psychiatrist Elizabeth and helmsman Gary.

Gary gets the brunt of it, and it turns his eyes a weird silvery colour. Probably done with some massively unsafe contact lenses made with tinfoil.

It soon becomes clear that the shock has given Gary some special powers, namely telepathy and telekinesis. Worried he’ll take over the entire ship, Kirk plans to maroon Gary on a nearby planet, but the all-powerful Gary tells Kirk: “Fuck that noise”. Or words to that effect.

The whole thing ends with a big scrap on the planet as Kirk and Gary beat the piss out of each other with gusto / bad choreography (delete as applicable).

Oddly, it ends with Kirk burying Gary in an open grave and dropping a big boulder over it, something you’d imagine he’d be able to move with his mind. But ah well.

After doing a bit of research I’ve discovered that this was the main pilot episode for the show (after another one called The Cage failed to be greenlit). Apparently NBC wasn’t sold on the sci-fi stuff but was well into the fighting scene. Fair enough.

One thing’s for sure though: if the next episode features someone else wandering around the Enterprise and threatening to kill everyone again I’m going to become suspicious that the whole bloody ship is cursed.

Other thoughts

• Near the end Gary creates an open grave for Kirk with a gravestone on it that says ‘James R Kirk’, but I seem to remember hearing that his middle name was Tiberius. I bet it’s one of those things that Trekkies try to explain with hokey logic, rather than it just being a cheap prop nobody gave a shit about at the time.
• This is the first episode that properly goes into Spock’s inability to feel emotion. They obviously forgot about him grinning like a goon as he played the harp in the previous episode.
• Sally Kellerman’s in this episode! A few years later she played Hot Lips in M.A.S.H. and was nominated for an Academy Award. Sadly, she was a nobody at this point in her career so she pegs it before the end of the episode.

Up next – Star Trek episode 4: The Naked Time