Writer: Robert Bloch
Director: Joseph Pevney
Producer: Gene L. Coon
It's another horror themed episode from Trek's resident "psycho" (get it?) Robert Bloch. This time, he's using a theme he apparently returned to a lot in his short story work -- Jack the Ripper.
It's an episode that you can definitely see working as a little standalone story in a horror anthology, and it takes a bit of work to get it working within the Star Trek mileau. It also is a bit light for an entire hour of television, and occasionally feels padded.
The basic set up is this -- Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty are on shore leave on a hedonistic planet, designed to get Scotty's morale up after an accident in Engineering gave him a concussion. The accident was caused by a woman crewman and this has caused Scotty to develop an irrational hatred of women, and McCoy basically thinks getting Scotty laid by a space hooker on this planet will cure him. Let it be stated for the record that this is a nonsense garbage premise, necessary only to set up the peculiar nature of the plot.
Namely that Scotty keeps getting into situations where a woman he is with (space hooker, female officer, high priestess) is murdered, and he's clearly the one responsible (holding the weapon, in a locked room, blood all over his hands kind of stuff). However Scotty claims he can't remember any of the incidents -- he blacks out during the crime. McCoy supposes it might be the result of the head trauma, the blackouts and possibly the murders themselves.
The rest of the episode is the course of the investigation, which follows scientific and supernatural courses on both the planet and the Enterprise before revealing the twist -- turns out the murders are being committed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper, a noncorporeal entity who feeds on terror and possesses the bodies of men to murder young women in order to feed on their terror. Kirk comes to the startling realization that "as man moved out into the galaxy, that thing moved with him."
The entity possesses the ship's computer in order to poison everyone aboard with gas, but Spock distracts it with an order to calculate the final decimal place of pi, and the episode ends with McCoy shooting everyone so high with tranquilizers they can't feel fear at all, enabling Kirk to beam the thing into space and scatter its atoms so it can't reintegrate.
If this story sounds kinda nuts, it totally is. I've never quite been able to decide if the insane sci-fi twist of "Jack the Ripper is an alien entity that feeds on fear" is brilliant or stupid. And the idea that Scotty has to be given this weird head trauma backstory that doesn't make a lot of sense for it to work really weakens the thing.
The other thing that doesn't work is the ending. Once we realize what's going on, we should be terrified. It should be a horrible moment, and it is for a bit, but once the entity has control of the Enterprise, it just isn't scary enough. It's comical, even without McCoy getting the whole crew high. I also wish that, for an episode giving a starring role to Scotty, it revealed a bit more about him and gave him a bit more to do than just sheepishly insist that he "canna remember!"
I seem to remember I loved this episode when I was a kid. As an adult, it's just kinda there.
Rating: 2.5 out of 4
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