151: Star Trek TOS Season 1, “Dagger of the Mind"

https://youtu.be/-FDO3mS-HUk

Matt and Sean talk about rehabilitation, ethics, and classic monster movie tactics in Star Trek: The Original Series. And yes … there’s even Captain Kirk’s questionable behavior at the holiday party (seriously). How does this one hold up?

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Creators & Guests

Host

Matt Ferrell

Host of Undecided with Matt Ferrell, Still TBD, and Trek in Time podcasts

Host

Sean Ferrell 🐨

Co-host of Still TBD and Trek in Time Podcasts

What is Trek In Time?

Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.

 Hey everybody, in this episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about rehabilitation, ethics, and booga booga booga monster movie tactics. That's right, we're talking about Star Trek Season 1, Dagger of the Mind. This is number 9 in broadcast order, but number 11 in shooting order. Welcome everybody to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological order.

We're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast, which means we're looking at 1966. A year Matt and I do not remember at all because we were not yet alive. Who are we? Well, I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi. I write some stuff for kids, including my most recently released The Sinister Secrets of the Fabulous Nothings, book two of the Sinister Secrets series, which is a lot of sibilance and kind of hard to say.

It's available bookstores everywhere. I hope you'll be interested in checking it out. And with me as always is my brother, Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell. Which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And Matt, how are you this weekend?

I'm doing good. I have my copy of your book, Sean, and I'm planning on doing some reading of it on my upcoming trip to Vancouver.

I'm going to be going to Vancouver for, um, Everything Electric Show, uh, which is run by Fully Charged Live. I'm going to be moderating some panels. I'm going to be on a panel. So if you're in the Vancouver area, go to the Everything Electric Show. In fact, I can put a link in the description if you want to check it out.

Um, I'll be there and I'm going to be reading your book on my long plane ride.

Well, I hope when you come back into the country, if they say, do you have anything to claim? You just say that my brother is a genius.

On now to our viewer comments. We always like to share your comments on our previous episodes. So Matt, what have you found in the mailbag for us this week? We have

some good ones from, uh, the last episode we took last week off. So we had a little break, but, uh, from what are little girls made of. We had one from Annoying Critic who wrote, I think the moral of this episode is that we lose something when we use technology.

As Matt puts it, there's something lost in translation. TNG's Data character arc is for Data to try to become human, and so the original series and Next Generation stories are kind of inconsistent with each other, which might be why they don't mention what are little girls made of in Next Generation. In Star Trek Picard, they upload Picard into a machine like, into a machine like they do here, but it works fine, and unfortunately, the moral is lost.

At some point, Sean, I cannot wait in 15, 000 years when we get to Picard. There's so much to talk about about that show. There is. There is a lot. Yeah. Yep. We also had a comment from PaleGhost69 who wrote, As soon as Korby said the consciousness could be transferred, I already knew the ending. It felt like the last half of it was rushed though.

Also, it looks like the YouTube gods deleted my comment where I copy pasted the Powerpuff Girls intro for my wrong answer to, What are little girls made of? And then Happy Flappy Farm responded, I have had that happen several times. Brilliant insight gone. Glad I'm not the only one. And the reason I want to put this one in here is, I see this kind of comment, on all my channels, which is like YouTube deleted my comment for some reason.

I don't know why YouTube decides to delete some comments and not others. And I know people don't believe me when I say this, but sometimes things will end up in a, uh, held for review. And I will not understand why they end up there. And then other times they're just outright deleted. Like I never see them.

They're not on the public page. They're not held for review. They just don't exist. And I see people commenting that all the time. I wish I understood what was going on. The YouTube gods do what they do and they do not explain. So I'm sorry about that. Uh, then we had a comment, uh, from NUMAtrekkie, aside from the whole android angle, what really is the difference between Dr.

Korby's machine and the humble transporter? Both create a duplicate of the person, at least the transporter has the basic courtesy to kill the original. And then Happy Flappy Farm wrote Mind Blown. I'm sure, Sean, you've seen that raging debate that transporters are basically just creating endless copies of you and basically destroying the original.

Yes, there is a book that came out years ago and I know there have been multiple versions of this kind of book since and a lot of this lives on the internet. The philosophy of Star Trek and one of the chapters of the philosophy of Star Trek was when you use the transporter, is it still you that arrives and it's that entire debate of if something is taken apart and then reassembled.

Hmm, is it, I just,

I

just love how

NUMAtrekkie puts it, NUMAtrekkie puts it the basic courtesy to kill the original so you don't end up with a thousand of yourself floating around out there. Unless you're Riker, you know, that episode we'll get to at some point. Yeah, we'll get to that episode in 11 years.

And the last comment is from Happy Flappy Farm. Sean, one word, dehumidifier. I love mine here in the humid south. In reference to Sean sweating his butt off last episode, um, I don't understand the justification for Kirk to beam down the security guys. It seems like a flippant decision. Of course, from a TV standpoint, the show needed a couple of extras to die to keep their established norm.

Why did the phaser damage the android Brown? Was it set to kill? We think the merry go round scene is too long. It was over two minutes long. I didn't realize it was that long. A person would have been very sick spinning at the rate, at that rate of speed. Good review. We're looking forward to the next one.

I remember while watching the Merry Go Round scene that no matter how fast that was going, I think William Shatner probably would have gotten off of that thing with a like, oh boy, like this is, that's a lot of spinning unless they just spun him like once or twice and then just kept looping the video, which is entirely likely, but yeah, pretty, pretty wild stuff.

And yeah, I completely, there is some inconsistency. You have Dr. Brown getting damaged by the phaser, but then you have, uh, Ruck getting destroyed, vaporized entirely. So at a certain point. It would have been nice for a little bit more of a, like, I've got this phaser set to the highest setting, or I've got this phaser set to stun.

It would have, a little bit of clarity in that regard would have been helpful. On now to our Wikipedia description, that noise in the background is the read alert, which means it's time for Matt to try and tackle the conundrum of a description that we are going to use for this episode, Matt, take it away.

Get ready for me to stumble. In the Star Trek episode Dagger of the Mind, the USS Enterprise visits a rehabilitation facility for the criminally insane on Tantalus V. The facility's director, Dr. Tristan Adams, a doctor whose reputation as a humanitarian is unquestioned, uses a neural neutralizer to destroy the human mind, gaining total control over inmates and staff.

Dr. Helen Noel, a ship's psychiatrist, accompanies Captain Kirk on a tour of the colony. Kirk becomes suspicious and decides to secretly test the neutralizer on himself, because that makes so much sense. Yes. Having exposed the power of the device, they are captured by Dr. Adams, and aboard the Enterprise, Spock and McCoy come to the conclusion that a supposedly mentally ill escapee from the facility

is actually correct in his warnings that Kirk and Noel are in danger and rush to help them escape the facility. I don't know why my brain completely just reset itself on that sentence.

It's perfectly okay. It's not very well written. It's a lot of commas and I am embarrassed to admit that I wrote most of the last half of that.

Anyway, this episode directed by Vincent McVitie and written by Espar David, which is not actually the writer's name. This was a pen name of the actual writer. We'll talk about the writer in a few minutes. This episode dropped on November 3rd, 1966. And we have, as always, the main cast, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, James Doohan does not appear in this episode.

Nichelle Nichols as Uhura is available. George Takei is not around. Majel Barrett is not in this episode, but Grace Lee Whitney is. And we have extras, which include James Gregory as Dr. Tristan Adams, Morgan Woodward as Dr. Simon Van Gelder, Marianna Hill as Dr. Helen Noel, Larry Anthony is the transportation.

In the, in the credits, he's originally listed as Transportation Man, which I just love. Like you can sing that to William Shatner's Tambourine Man. So it works perfectly. Susanne Wasson as Lethe, John Arndt as Fields, credited as just a crewman, Eli Behar, Ed McCready, Lou Elias, Eddie Paskey, and Frank Da Vinci also appear in this episode.

Of the extras, I wanted to talk about two of them in particular. I wanted to talk about James Gregory as Dr. Tristan Adams. James Gregory is a, that guy. He started his professional life as a stockbroker and then switched to becoming an actor and was making appearances on Broadway. He first, uh, he first made his film.

debut in 1948. And he was known as a, that guy who was often cops, often brash, often a boss. He was just that kind of like, you don't question the boss when the boss is in the room sort of guy. And for me, he was inspector Luger from the Barney Miller show. That was like, for me, that was who he was the most.

And. The other actor I wanted to talk about was Morgan Woodward, who played Dr. Simon Van Gelder. Morgan Woodward is known for his roles in this episode of Star Trek. He was also in the movie Cool Hand Luke, in which he played a sunglass wearing security guard at the prison where, uh, the, uh, Paul Newman as the main protagonist of that movie is incarcerated.

So it is, he also appeared in Dallas and played a kind of brash business man who would go up against the Ewing family. And I wanted to point him out in this because he's a actor who had several parts throughout his career that like stood up as like. Impressive movie, Cool Hand Luke, this episode of Star Trek, regular appearances in Dallas, but he's not super well known, but I think in this episode, I think we're gonna have some interesting conversations around his choices, his personification of this character, especially when you compare it to the acting presence

in most of the scenes where he is on camera, Leonard Nimoy as Spock is right there. And I think it creates a really interesting dynamic between the two of them as far as what they were doing on camera. So what was the world like at the time of the original broadcast? November 3rd, 1966. The number one song is the song 96 Tears.

By The Question Mark and The Mysterians, which it is hard to say the name of this band because The Question Mark is literally a question mark. This is one step away from being like Prince when he became the artist formerly known as, where he was using just a symbol. 96 Tears is their biggest hit, and Matt, why don't you take us through a few bars of it?

Very good. As usual, your ability to imitate the lead singers of these groups is really always impressive. At the movies, people were lining up, this is the second time we've referenced this film, Hawaii, the 1966 epic drama directed by George Roy Hill, based on the James Michener novel from 1959.

This is about the establishment of effectively the first colony on Hawaii. And this movie was at this point, November 3rd was in its. It's second week in theaters, but it's first week at number one. And we've been looking at the shows that Star Trek would have been competing against. On television, Star Trek, we know in its first season, averaged about a 12 in the Nielsen ratings.

This episode in particular was somewhere in the mid nines as far as a rating, which is pretty stable for the show up to this point. And we've looked at some of the other programs that it competed against. Also on the air at the time were shows like Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, The Jackie Gleason Show.

These were programs that were hitting almost 30 in the Nielsen's. So it gives you a sense of the scope of the audience that we're talking about. We've talked about, up to this point, a bunch of programs with recognizable names. The Lucy Show, Jackie Gleason, Green Acres, Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies. And this week, it's no different.

We're talking about Gomer Pyle. USMC. This is the spinoff show from the Andy Griffith Show, which had introduced the character of Gomer Pyle to American audiences. This is an American sitcom that aired on CBS from September 25th, 1964 to May 2nd, 1969, spinning off from the Andy Griffith Show, the pilot episode was aired as the season finale of the fourth season of the

parent series. So that was an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where you mysteriously followed Gomer Pyle into his desire to enlist in the Marine Corps. The show ran for a total of 150 half hour episodes, spanning five seasons in black and white for the first season, and then color for the remaining four.

And in the news. We see, amongst all the news stories here, I keep going back to this one thread when we talk about news in 1966. All the stuff coming out of President Johnson's administration about how well things are going in Vietnam. So here we are, Johnson had just returned home from a tour in Asia, in which he came back confident that Asia was a vibrant, vibrant place, that the war was going well, and that things were going to turn around there very, very soon.

It would, of course, turn into a slog that would continue for years, leading eventually to a withdrawal under Nixon, with no victory in sight. On now to our discussion about this most recent episode that we're going to be talking about. One of the things that pops out immediately, Dagger of the Mind, a reference to William Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macbeth in planning to kill the King of Scotland, the lines include, is this a dagger, which I see before me, the handle toward my hand.

Come, let me clutch thee. So we are looking at the references, literary references in this episode, a title which is based on Macbeth and in the episode Shimon Winselberg, the author of this teleplay, included a reference to Hillel's Torah on One Leg, which is a Story about a person who goes to the rabbi, Hillel, and says, I want to be taught the Torah while standing on one leg.

And Hillel answers, that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the entire Torah, all the rest is commentary. This reference in the teleplay was pulled back on by Roddenberry, rewrote it, you'll remember from the episode, as the ancient skeptic. And so he basically removed a little bit of the Jewish nature of the anecdote from the telling of it.

And Winselberg was offended by this. And so he had his name changed in the broadcast in the credits to S. Bar-David. So he was making a bit of a protest about the changes that Roddenberry had made. This is an ongoing thing we are seeing within Star Trek very early on, people pushing back on Roddenberry's coming in at the 11th hour and changing some of their words.

And we've already talked previously about how, well, maybe he wasn't always wrong to do that. We've talked previously about an episode in which, uh, his revision actually made a lot of sense in the episode where the Romulan cat and mouse story was taking place. Other times, some of his changes, like making sure that William Shatner shaves the chest hair off because Captain Kirk is not a hairy man.

Well, what? Okay. We're going to leave that. We're going to leave that there without further commentary, but we're going to get into this episode. I wanted to start with the first, the first character who's not a regular crewman that we see in this episode is Van Gelder. And we are shown, we are, we know that we are visiting a penal colony where the criminally insane are incarcerated.

We are given very broad brushstrokes about prison life has changed. These are not what would have been considered archaic, torturous prisons. And their references to what that kind of torturous prison would have been like is clearly aimed at a 1966 audience as your prisons. This is, we do not do that to people anymore.

Everybody can be rehabilitated. So we know we are supposed to be in a place where the criminally insane are being held. And then something is beamed aboard the Enterprise and out of the box climbs Van Gelder, who immediately hides against a wall and gives a horse eye that Bruce Willis would have been proud of.

It is scene chewing performances coming out of this, this actor in the role of Van Gelder. We see him anytime he is looking at anybody, one eye is going to be bigger than the other. It's a little Bill the Cat from Bloom County, if you'll remember that character. Uh, and when he talks, he has to do two forms of communication.

One is hyperbolic anxious, screaming, and the other is halting something in his head, keeping him from speaking so that he is spitting and choking out details and clearly wrestling with an internal mechanism that is keeping him from being himself. The level of It's like theater acting. It's like stage acting.

Like he's sending it to the back row. How did you feel about this performance? William Shatner is often mocked as an overactor and you and I have talked already in this podcast about, I am very comfortable with saying, like, in a 1966 context, William Shatner is a good actor. Like, he's good. And this is maybe a case of an actor who, as time moved forward, and the type of acting that was anticipated on television changed, and William Shatner did not move with that change in perspective.

That may be more appropriate. what happened with William Shatner than, oh, he's just a bad actor. But here you have somebody who feels very much in the same school of the 1966, you're acting to the back row. You just happen to be in front of a television camera. How did you feel about this performance?

It's, it's, it's

awful. It's, it's, I mean, you nailed it. It's one of those, there was a transition going on in film and television at this point, like late sixties, early seventies acting became subtle. Like, unspoken. Like, you look like a statue at times, but there's turmoil underneath, because the camera picks up those subtleties.

Uh, this guy clearly didn't get the memo, and was, you know, in the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hitting the back rows, as you put it. But, in his defense, Sean, By the end of the episode, you understand why he was doing what he was doing, why he was acting that way, why he may have been directed that way, because he was clearly programmed to have all that horrible pain anytime he's talking about what was actually going on.

So it's like, okay, he'd be in wracking agony. So of course he's going to be doing that. But the fact that there was no off switch, the fact that there was no, it was, he was at 11 constantly and never dialed down to a seven or a five and then back up to 11 because that never happened. It's awful. It's just absolutely abysmal, especially as I just, I'm going to contradict myself.

By the end of the episode, you understand how the programming works and how the doctor was always like, you know, you're gonna be wracking pain until you say, blah, blah, blah, blah. He should have at points been calm. He should have at points been, okay, okay. And then anytime somebody would ask him like, what's going down on the surface?

He'd be like, the pain would rack, you know, come up as he's trying to answer. It's like if they had done that, it would have made his performance more impactful, have more meaning. But the fact that it was just constantly 11, it was just, even for watching a 1960s television show and you have to keep yourself in the mindset, different time, different era, even putting myself into that mindset, this is just hard to watch.

Let me, before I respond to that, let me ask you a follow up question. Just big picture. Where does this episode fall for you? Like at the better end, at the weaker end, somewhere in the middle? Somewhere in the middle.

It's somewhere in the middle. Yeah. There are aspects of this episode I really liked. We'll get, we'll get into that, but there's stuff I liked.

There's stuff I didn't like, but it's, it's a middle.

For me, I find myself, there's something about this episode that kind of. And we'll get into it in a few minutes. Greases the rails enough that this performance of Van Gelder works for me because I feel like the whole thing kind of fits within a certain uh, zone of what they were going for.

And I'll get into what I think that zone was in a few minutes. For me, I feel like I love the depiction of Van Gelder with the horse eye, and the chewing of the scenery, and the growling everything, and I think part of what makes it work for me is there's one scene where he does beg not to be sedated yet again.

And he is getting close to doing what you're saying. I don't disagree that maybe dialing it back to a five would have been even better. He goes back to maybe an eight instead of at 11. Uh, yep. But he, he's breaking through in that moment. And I always interpreted this as the reason he is out of control from the word go is that the programming is supposed to keep him placidly at the facility and he's already gotten himself onto the ship.

He is already constantly breaking through the programming. So for me, I interpreted all of that as if they had met this guy somewhere on the Penal colony, he wouldn't have necessarily been behaving this way, but because he's already getting himself physically into a different place, his brain is just constantly ricocheting off of itself.

That is my fanboy canon. Like that is me creating an explanation as opposed to it being presented. I don't

disagree with your interpretation. That's a great interpretation. And I kind of, I accept it, but for me, it was, that's not. It shouldn't necessarily be clear from the get go why he's acting that way.

You do have to learn why he's that way. But the fact that it took you so long in the episode to understand why is he at 11 all the time, that's part of where my problem is. And so it's like, it's a little bit of the acting and it's a little bit of the, well, you didn't kind of reveal what's, why he is the way he is until later in the episode.

And then you have to retcon in your own head. Oh, that explains why he's been completely at 11 for the past half hour. Yeah. So, so for me, it's like that, that's the problem. It's, it's not necessarily that he was at 11. It's how much he was at 11 and how long it took to figure out why he was at 11. All that stuff.

I think what's, Interesting. And I didn't find anything in my notes that this is what they were going for. And I, it has, as I mentioned, uh, the name of the episode is a reference to a Macbeth, uh, scene. And you end up with reference to a uh, Jewish teaching anecdote that is a high cultural reference that is embedded in the episode.

And nothing I saw pointed to like, Oh, this was kind of like what they were going for. But in Dr. Adams and in Van Gelder, I saw a classic haunted castle story. I saw almost a hammer film. And if you know what hammer films are, British productions typically done very, very quickly, very cheaply, meant to be quick entertainment, mainly for kids.

Lots of things of the people wandering in the woods because they, their wagon broke down and they find a castle during a rainstorm and it turns out that the, the person who lives in the castle is, uh, a vampire or an evil scientist or what have you and there's hauntings and it was, you know, Productions that would reuse a lot of the same actors, reuse a lot of the same sets, very quickly written, meant to just be like fluffy horror gothic tales.

And in watching this one, I can't help but think that that was A main part of the skeleton of this episode, they go to this place where they know that there's this doctor. The doctor is isolated in this location with these people that are not supposed to be well. They are supposed to be dangerous. When one of these people escapes, it turns out he is effectively a Frankenstein's monster created by that doctor.

And when they go and investigate deeper, they find the doctor. And here's for me, you mentioned like this episode falls somewhere in the middle. This episode falls somewhere in the middle for me as well, with elements of it that I remember from my childhood with nostalgia that put it right at the top.

Kirk in the chair is a, Is a, an amazing image and is part of what I hold in my head from when I was 10 about Star Trek. The depiction of the people who are in support of Dr. Adams being like zombies is another element of this that I remember very clearly. It's creepy, it's spooky, and you see Van Gelder, who if he's kind of a Frankenstein's monster, he's appearing aboard the ship and like Frankenstein's monster, Frankenstein's monster is viewed immediately by the local villagers as a danger.

So here comes this guy, he's misunderstood from the word go, and he's got to be trapped, he's got to be killed. That's happening here with Van Gelder. Van Gelder shows up and immediately he's, he's a menace. He's wild eyed and running through the corridors, and he gets to the bridge, and he's going to do what he has to to get the captain to keep, to give him asylum.

So as, even though he is talking in a way that sounds sophisticated, nobody's taking him except at face value. He is a maniac running through the ship. And there's no greater motive for why Frankenstein has built this monster than Frankenstein wanted to build the monster. He is pushing morality to the side to see if he can do a thing.

And they talk about Dr. Adams in this, as this brilliant humanitarian. And yet when it comes to reasons why he is doing what he is doing, The episode does nothing to give us insight as to why he has clearly mind wiped members of his staff. He is using former patients as staff in, they present Lethe as this woman who comes forward and he's like, yeah, she used to be a patient and now she's a doctor and a very good one.

And there's no record scratch moment for anybody in the room. Nobody's just like, wait, what? She, it, How does that work? Like this depiction of the, the flat affect on the people who are working in this place, the moral questions about have you truly rehabilitated, really rehabilitated somebody if you remove who they were entirely?

And you leave in place a new construct. Is that ethical? And it is depicted here without any kind of debate. And to me, that's what pushes it completely into basically B movie status. To me, this is a well done horror movie. It is, they show up. They're supposed to get a thing. Oh, there's a monster on the loose.

Wait a minute. Is he a monster? What's going on down on that planet? They go down. They find a bunch of creepy stuff. They manage to save the day and escape despite the fact there's even in the, we have to go find the power source. That's like she goes down into a dungeon. It is all depicted in very hammer film horror imagery to me that I'm surprised that I couldn't find in my research anything that said, yeah, they wanted to do effectively like a horror story.

It reminded me of some of the early episodes of Enterprise where you and I would talk about how surprising it is that Enterprise was leaning so often into a horror motif. And here in this one, I found myself thinking the exact same thing. This felt a little Outer Limits. It felt a little Twilight Zone ish.

Especially with the turn against the Doctor. How he mind wipes himself to the point of death. And the depiction of It's psychological horror at the end when Kirk is reflecting on his experiences. It's, to me, it's all that, it's all that kind of horror vibe.

There's been several episodes like that now, which are Outer Limits, Twilight Zone.

Yeah. And I had the same exact thought around Enterprise, which was, I remember we were watching that, like, wow, they're going into horror a lot. It's like, how weird for Star Trek. They're going to horror a lot. It's like, wait, The original series actually seems to have been doing that too, so maybe it was kind of more in line with what the original series was and less what Next Generation and Deep Space Nine did.

Yeah. They went into the horror aspect less, not that they didn't, they did, but it just seemed to be less than what we're seeing now. Um, I agree with you that this does seem like a B movie horror film. And they did, in a very bad way, try to have the debate. Of, is it moral to like, remove who you are for the sake of rehabilitating you?

The only person that was doing that was our boy Kirk. He was the only one that was like, giving side eye to all these people of like, this doesn't seem right, this doesn't seem right. Yeah. And yet, The psychologist is completely fine with it. I didn't understand that. She's just like, this guy's awesome.

Look at what they're doing here. This is totally acceptable. This is totally, that's totally fine. And Kirk's the only one going, huh at people, I didn't, I didn't get that at all. You would think that she would be the one doing the side eye. She would be the one going to Kirk. Something's not right here. You know, that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Which, at the same time, not to jump around too much, but like, I was also impressed with what they did with her. Like, at the same time, I was like, disappointed in how they treated her and what they did with her. And at the same time, there's other things. Like, they gave her the action of the episode.

Sent her down the chute, trying to find her way through, trying to, you know, break down the power supply and having to play cat and mouse and do all that stuff. I was like, holy cow, they made a Yeah. They gave that part to a woman. You would expect that would be Kirk's thing to do in this episode, but Kirk was kind of incapacitated and kind of like not completely action man in this one. And I was very impressed that they did that. But at the same time, it's like, what they giveth, they taketh away. And here she is just like eye candy in other scenes and then just going along with the flow of like, everything here is great.

And it's like, come on, you're a professional. You should have your own take and assessment as to what you're seeing and saying it honestly to the captain. I thought that was a little

weird. Yeah, I have nothing to back this up, but. Later in the series, there were complaints from other actors on the show, regulars on the show, that Shatner would argue and get scripts changed a little bit so that Kirk would say things that their characters were originally supposed to say so that he could be the smart one in the room.

So there would be things where Scotty was supposed to say something about an engineering detail and Kirk instead would say it so that Kirk could look like he knew so much or Spock or whomever. And It rubbed the other actors the wrong way. Like, why does he get to say all these lines so that he can look like the smart one in the room when it's supposed to be our job?

That's supposed to be doing that. And this one, without having anything to say, like, that's what happened here, it sort of feels like it at times. It almost feels like you, you had Kirk aboard ship being like, Dr. Adams, his reputation is stellar. He's known as a humanitarian and everything that he does is about rehabilitating people.

These prisons aren't like they used to be. They're just helping people now. They're almost like resorts and the people come out better and more productive than they ever were in their lives. And then he goes down and immediately is just like, what the heck is all this? Why are you doing that? It's like, it's a little bit like what happened in transporting down that changed his mind.

And it does feel like she should be a little bit more, like you said, like, well, this is kind of an analog card approach, like for her to be like, well, you're doing quite a bit, but is the original person even here anymore? It would have been better for him, I think for the character of Kirk to have been pulled back from a kind of

unknown respect into a, Oh, I maybe need to be a little more critical here. And then if she had been the one to say like, we need to figure out how that machine works, because I have a lot of ethical questions. And if he had then said, I volunteer, you, I'm giving you an order, use it on me in controlled ways so that we can detest whether it does anything of value.

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that.

Yeah. Kirk. Kirk. They go in and they, they bust their way in and sneak their way into the machine and he is just immediately like, I'll get in the machine. And it's like, you all, you seem to think this is dangerous. Why the hell are you putting yourself in the machine as the guinea pig?

That made no sense to me. And she's blindly like turning the levels up. And like the whole. You know, like, give me something else to do. And she starts talking about the holiday party. It was like, Oh God, this is, this is cringy. This is cringy, what's happening right now.

I love everything about that machine, except for the fantasy that she puts out there.

Yes. Because it is, it is, it is creepy. Um, there are so many things she could have said otherwise, like she could have, when you hear the word asparagus, your ears will itch. And then turned off the machine and said, I'm going to name some carrots. I want you to respond to them however you feel you need to.

And then said like a few vegetables instead of asparagus. And then watch Kirk say. Yeah, no response. Um, like that would have been like more in the realms of the show than I didn't even like when he walks into the transporter room and sees it's her and then turns to Spock and says, tell McCoy that she better be the best assistant I've ever had.

Like, like the sexism at play. And again, this is a show that is trying to be progressive and for its time it was, but it makes it rough when you have. The captain clearly having overstepped the boundaries that should be in place, and her clearly inviting more, and even using machine to try and plant a seed of more, like, I didn't believe that in that moment she would have done anything close to that.

And so it was like, and, but you're right at the end, she's the one going into danger. She's, he tells her like, don't touch anything that's going to kill you. I mean, he literally says like, I don't have time to explain, but there are things down there that'll kill you. Don't touch them. And she's like, okay, she goes in and I love that scene and she does great stuff and she fights off guys and it's terrific.

But, and she doesn't need Spock to save her. That's one of my favorite moments is that she gets away, gets a weapon, goes back to find Kirk. Spock shows up moments after she leaves. He doesn't show up and save her. He shows up and is looking around and very quickly, like two and two. Okay. I've turned off the power.

You can come down. That was terrific. Well, At the

same time, at the same time though, what I find interesting is the dichotomy of how they're treating her. It's like at one time it's sexist and then literally the next sentence, it's like, Oh, that's pretty funny. That's pretty good. Like in that same transporter room where he makes that awful statement about she's been rid of the best assistant I've ever had, flip to the next thing.

She makes reference to a holiday party and then he gets so uncomfortable. That was hysterical. To me, that was, that was, that was awesome. It was like, she was, there was a power dynamic. And she had the power in that moment. She was making the captain super uncomfortable. I thought that was very funny.

Everything else they were doing, like the whole implanting the romance and the best assistant ever. It was like they were both doing awesome stuff with her and horrendous stuff with her at the same time. It was like they, it was almost like there was two different writers. A complete misogynist was writing some scenes.

Somebody who is super progressive was writing the other stuff. Kind of weird.

Yeah. It's, it's a little weird the way it goes back and forth like that. Touching now on the introduction of yet another element of Star Trek that echoes throughout the ages, no matter what Star Trek you're watching, you're gonna see some of this.

You're gonna, you're gonna love it. And you're going to see it all the time. I'm talking, of course, about the mind meld. This is the first introduction. Can I just say how bad this mind meld was? When they introduced the neck pinch, it was born of like Nimoy. I actually, uh, stumbled recently upon a YouTube video of Leonard Nimoy talking about the invention of the,

neck pinch. And he was laughing about how it was like, it's like, I didn't want to do what looked like you'd seen it a million times in old Westerns of just walking behind and clocking them with the gun. So we came up with this thing and it worked and we used it again and again, and it was great. And here we have a similar thing introduced, which eventually becomes the classic fingers in certain positions, phrasing, it's not hypnosis, it's just my mind to your mind.

We know it now so well. And this one comes across as, it looks like hypnosis. It comes across as hypnosis. And creepy. Didn't, didn't

you feel like they were about to make out like five times in the scene? They were like lips an inch apart. Yes. And he's fondling his face and it looked Like they're about to make love.

It was really weird. It was bizarre how he kept going around the bed and like touching different aspects of his head. It was like, what are they doing here? One of the things

that happened here that I really loved though was as Van Gelder was talking about the experience of being in the chair, Spock's haunted yes agreements with those building to a way that demonstrated that Spock was getting lost

in the reality of this man's thinking. Uh, and I think that that scene, I don't know another way that they could have painted the emptiness, which goes back to the psychological horror of what I referenced earlier of like a hammer film. Van Gelder on his own saying, like, sitting in that chair, your mind becomes empty, like, that on its own doesn't hold the same level of horror of the confirmation from Spock.

And Spock's confirmation becomes, in certain ways, more horrific than Van Gelder's descriptions. Van Gelder is saying, your mind empty, longing for anything, you're longing for life, you're longing for death. And Spock's haunting yes, which becomes more urgent in death, is I think terrific. That moment of that mind meld for me is absolutely fantastic.

And I love the depiction of the two of them where they are now meeting in the middle and I can't help, but wonder what kind of conversations did they have while shooting about Spock's objective, Logical approach. He says to McCoy, I've never done this on a human. He's, he's kind of analytical and saying to the doctor, this will not affect you.

As if Dr. McCoy was worried that he was going to get lost in a mind meld. He was just like, this is not going to affect you. It's only going to affect him. This is not hypnosis. He's very analytical and all that stuff. Van Gelder, meanwhile, as we've already said, is horse eyes all over the place, growling and choking on his words.

And the two of them in the mind meld meet in the middle in a way that I found directorially perfect and performance perfect. I loved the construction of all of this, but you're right. There is weirdness in the fondling, the moving of the fingers, the closeness of the faces. I never felt like it was about to be a kiss, but it certainly was something very different from what we would come to expect.

So the moment I. The moment they said, ah, mind meld, that might be the solution here. I had no memory that the mind meld in this case looked like modern dance. It was, I envisioned it would be the, Oh, here come the fingers on the face and the, my mind to your mind. And we didn't get that. So it was a little, uh, it was a little strange.

It was a little jarring. Moving from that depiction. of the exploration of the emptiness in the chair to the use of the chair on Kirk and the moments where he's in the chair and goes slack as a result of the machine being turned up a little bit. Here again is a moment where I feel like we're seeing William Shatner actually do a really nice job with very subtle movements of the chair.

Transitioning into the, I am an empty vessel in this moment, Dr. Adams coming in and abusing that power, using that power to take control of the situation. And then we move deeper into the episode and the machine then is going to be used for like ultimate harm and control over Kirk. And we get the reference that, oh, Van Gelder at this moment was on the floor weeping.

Captain, you're an amazing subject. We get at this point is when, for me, the ethical dilemma of the show becomes most apparent in the form of, Adams has no reason to be doing all of this. He comes across as just mustache twirling evil, and it's really kind of empty from a, what is his end game? Yeah, his endgame is unclear, and his Trek, the Trekness of this is dropped away, and that's where for me it becomes full on B movie of he is the evil doctor doing this to see if he can, and then he himself is caught in his own trap, and at the end of the episode, the sequence right at the end, Kirk walks onto the bridge, and looks like a zombie.

Walks to the chair and sits down and we have a bit of a wrap up that to me is the perfect cherry on top of this Hammer Horror Film model that I keep going back to. Because Shatner in this moment I think does a really nice job. He is reflecting on the fact that he saw such loneliness, such isolation in that chair, that it was enough to make you long for death.

And that he effectively saw a place where death was preferable. Loneliness was too much. And he keeps going back into this look on his face that is just like something in him has broken. And then he looks across the bridge to Spock and Spock's expression is one of extreme concern for a Vulcan.

He is looking at his friend with, there's hurt in Spock's eyes. Kirk gives a little smile, gives a command, Spock smiles back, repeats the command in what is now becoming first season Trek. Uh, Spock likes to yell. Um, and then for the briefest of moments, and it's hard to see because the credits pop up over his face, Kirk

falls again into that melancholy expression. It's lost behind the text, but it's there. I watched it twice. I ended up watching this episode via Paramount and then while running some errands and being in the bedroom and folding laundry and doing stuff like that, turned on the TV and the exact same episode was on Pluto TV and I rewatched it again.

So I watched that ending twice within a 20 minute period. And the moment that the credits start to come up, he falls back into that melancholy and I couldn't help but link it to a future moment that we are, you and I are years from discussing, but in Star Trek five, when Kirk says, I've always known I will die alone, which for me is a,

like Star Trek 5 for me is not a great movie, but that for me is a great moment. I love that statement from Kirk. And in watching these credit moments, I couldn't help but think, holy cow, it feels like that seed is planted there. There is something about isolation and loneliness that has broken a piece of Kirk off and it's, That seed is planted now.

He knows he will die alone because he knows what that moment of death feels like.

I, I saw that too when I watched it and I really liked it because I thought, oh, this is interesting. Kirk is going to be haunted by this experience. It's clearly with him. It's part of him now. That's really fascinating. But of course, Matt being a future Matt, I know.

They never resonate with that ever again, where future shows, like Next Generation, there are four lights! Like that haunts Picard. Like there are things that happen to Picard that keep echoing in future episodes, and in fact, into future series, like the Picard series, like there's these echoes of these things that have happened to him, where in this era of storytelling, they, they put the bow on the episode and they move on like nothing happened.

And that's disappointing because the way they wrapped this episode up was he's haunted by this and it would have been great if they had done something with this in a later episode or in one of the movies. And when you bring up Star Trek 5, Sean, I pretend Star Trek 5 does not exist. I think it's not just a bad Star Trek movie.

I think it's one of the worst movies ever made. I've seen it once and was so angry I refused to ever watch it again. I'm looking forward to when we get to it because that's going to be the second time I will have watched that movie and it'll probably be the only time I will watch that movie. I hate Star Trek 5.

Hate it. It is not one of my favorites. I've seen it more than once. It has a couple of moments that for me are Trek ish enough that they live in my head. Um, but that reference to, I've always known I will die alone. Like that is one of those things. That's, that's one of those things that lives up here. So when I saw that expression, it really did connect for me.

And I thought it stood out as, I do not think the writers of Star Trek 5 went back and watched this episode and thought, Oh, we can connect it to that. I don't think that happened. I think it was a happy accident. And I think it was in this moment, like you're saying, a different era of television making would have made this moment echo in various ways for Kirk moving forward.

Other things do echo for Kirk moving forward. The womanizing, like this episode nicely portrays that when it comes to holiday parties, maybe he has a couple of drinks and decorum goes out the window a little bit and he becomes a little too friendly, fraternizing with some of his staff. Um, that's of course a main Kirk through line, but what if it had been something like this, the idea that Kirk has a kind of

phobia, maybe, about isolation and sensory deprivation that would be something that could have been used in interesting ways moving forward. So viewers, listeners, what do you think? What did you think about Dagger of the Mind? Let us know in the comments. We look forward to hearing from you. And when you jump into the comments, don't forget, you can share what you think the next episode is about,

wrong answers only. The episode is Miri. So let us know what you think that's going to be about. That'll be interesting one because Miri is not really a word. So good luck. Before we sign off, Matt, is there anything you'd like to remind our viewers and listeners about? What do you have coming up on your main channel?

Uh, we have an episode that dives into, it's a kind of weird one, do we have enough room for solar? Because a lot of people say, let's just put solar panels on the roofs and we generate enough electricity for future renewables. And the whole episode is kind of devoted to that of, do we need to cut down forests to build large solar panel farms?

Or could we just put solar panels on top of our roofs and that's good enough. We dive into that.

As for me, if you're interested in finding out more about my books, you can visit my website, seanferrell. com. You can also go directly wherever it is you buy your books. That includes the public library. And as I mentioned before, the Sinister Secrets series, books one and two are out now.

Book one is out in paperback as well as hardcover. Book two just came out in hardcover. So if you have a reader in your life who enjoys, top of my head, robots, smugglers, uh, Invasions that require fighting off machines that are stronger than you. If you're into those kinds of things, check out these books.

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It allows you to throw some coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts and then we get down to the business. of talking about actors throwing horse eyes at the camera. Thank you so much, everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.