Writer: John Meredyth Lucas
Director: Marc Daniels
Producer: Gene Coon
This will always be one of my favourite episodes of The Original Series, although it does feature a healthy amount of what could be considered campiness, and a subplot around Uhura I never liked.
In this episode, the Enterprise encounters a superadvanced space probe called Nomad which comes aboard ship. Nomad is on a mission to "sterilize" the galaxy of all "imperfect" life forms, and has been destroying whole solar system populations. However, it believes Captain Kirk to be his "creator" and thus has stopped aboard the Enterprise for a time.
The Nomad prop is one of the best in the series, in my opinion. Hovering above the deckplates, moving around the ship, blinking in time to its speech voiced by Outer Limits narrator Vic Perrin, it's very effective. The mystery of who and what Nomad is sustains a good portion of the episodes, as Kirk and Spock must learn how to control or stop Nomad before it continues its journey of sterilization to Earth. The mind-meld scene between Spock and the machine is particularly effective.
While aboard ship, Nomad kills Scotty and wipes Uhura's memory for the crimes of being irrational and imperfect. With its advanced medical knowledge it restores Scotty to life at Kirk's orders, but it can't restore Uhura's memories, and so she must be "re-educated".
The scenes involving this are good and even funny -- Uhura speaks Swahili natively and must be retrained in frustrating English -- but I've found it extremely upsetting ever since I was a child that something as major as your entire life being wiped away and then having to be re-educated as an adult is sort've brushed aside like it's a gag, and of course Uhura is too minor a character for the consequences of this to ever be explored in future episodes. I dunno, it never sit well with me.
It turns out that Nomad is an Earth probe launched in the early 21st century to seek out new life-forms that went missing, and in truth collided with an advanced alien probe whose goal was to "sterilize" planets in advance of colonization. Repairing each other, they became one "being", seeking to "sterilize imperfect life forms". It listens to Kirk because the human creator of Nomad was Jackson Roykirk. The episode's climax is perhaps the series best example of the trope of Kirk "talking" a computer to death. By explaining to Nomad its' error in mistaking him, he convinces the probe that it is imperfect and must sterilize itself.
"The Changeling" is an entertaining, sometimes thought-provoking, occasionally silly hour of television. It is, significantly, the first time Earth specifically is threatened on the show ("The Doomsday Machine" did by implication, but not directly). And it cannot go without saying that the basic plot of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was more or less ripped off from this episode.
But honestly, the bit of this episode that always tickles me the most is Nomad's Dalek-esque cries of "STER-I-LIZE! STER-I-LIZE!"
Rating: 3 out of 4
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