Like Miri, I didn’t particularly care for Dagger of the Mind...but I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t exactly bored, but it was a boring episode. 

The episode opens with a rookie on the transporter - Mr. Berkely - who doesn’t even bother hailing the Tantalus Colony before attempting to transport cargo down. Kirk even calls him out on it, recommending he review protocol on transport with penal colonies. 

Where is Scotty, and why is he leaving the worst guys in charge of the transporter room? First Wilson, now Berkely. Next thing you know, he’s going to have Lt. Riley man the damned thing.

The man is a danger to himself and others and should never be allowed to touch a control panel ever again. 

(Then again, he might be able to beam Kathleen home and stop singing about getting her there.)

But enough about the most incompetent crewmen in Starfleet (until Harry Kim), let’s talk about this episode. 

The plot revolves around Kirk and a beautiful woman named Dr. Helen Noel investigating Tantalus Penal Colony after catching a stowaway named Simon Van Gelder, who claims to be a former assistant of Dr. Adams (the man who apparently brings the Federation prison system from something like our own to the rehabilitative system glimpsed in Voyager. Dr. Adams appropriated some sort of brain eraser tech that Van Gelder developed, after Van Gelder attempted to destroy it because it’s sinister and overpowered, as we see when Kirk (ballsily) investigates it with Dr. Noel and Dr. Adams takes over...

It’s a bog-standard mystery plot that isn’t very compelling and doesn’t reveal much about the characters. There’s a few nice little lines from Spock, like

“You earth people glorify organized violence for 40 centuries but you imprison those who employ it privately.”

Bones has a bone to pick with that, and Spock uses logic to explain it away; now, there wasn’t much in the way of world-building back in the 60s, so the whole Vulcan nuclear war isn’t established at this point in the show, but logic did allow the Vulcan species to survive their devastating internal conflicts thanks to Surak. 

There’s also a bit about how we treat prisoners; Kirk is more than willing to dismiss Van Gelder and drop him back off at Tantalus and Van Gelder calls him out on it, and this resonates with McCoy because he’s more than willing to go over Kirk’s head to force him to find out why a man who was a Director of research at the colony became balls-out insane. Kirk doesn’t like it, but you can tell he respects McCoy’s willingness to jeopardize their friendship in the name of truth and justice. 

Kirk allows Bones to have his cake, but on one condition: he send an expert Penalogist (lol) down to the planet with him.

So naturally Bones sends a woman Kirk met (and possibly boned) at a Christmas Party: the appropriately named Helen Noel. 

And Jesus Christ on a slice of toast she is an attractive woman! I don’t know who was in charge of casting but between her, Andrea, Dr. Dehner, and Uhura they were doing their job right because goddamn. One thing that always struck me about the TNG era was that as the years went on, the alien women were more attractive than the human ones, but TOS does NOT have that going on. 

Mad scientist dick

Look at how goofy and dumb that assignment badge looks lol. 

Dr. Adams could have easily been a Roger Korby-type relentless asshole mad scientist, but he’s not - in fact, he’s quite genial and open about everything. Even when Kirk finds the neural neutralizer he’s pretty open about what it is and what it does, but eventually the man reveals his hand when he decides to erase Kirk’s brain. I don’t know why he thought that was a good idea, but it’s like when the killer in a Law and Order episode is caught so he tries to kill the detective. 

In the end it’s clear what happened: Dr. Van Gelder created the neural neutralizer as a rehabilitation tool, but after testing it on himself (ballsy) he determined it was NOT a good thing. Dr. Adams disagreed, turned it on Van Gelder to shut him up, and kept using it because he didn’t care about the cost, just the results. He was too arrogant and hopped up on his own hype, and ultimately it proved to be his undoing. 

I’ll just leave this here, the picture alone says all it needs to about the character of Lethe. 

This episode is notable in that it is the first use of a mind meld in Star Trek as Spock attempts it with Dr. Van Gelder. He doesn’t use the familiar “my mind to your mind...” speech to initiate it, but the spirit of the words are similar enough. Notably, he says that it has never been attempted with a human before, so now if I’m going to have to do some mental gymnastics I’m going to say that Archer’s meld with Syran/Surak’s katra was quietly kept secret by T’Pau (she was there, after all) and the stuff between Mike and Sarek was a family secret Spock was not privy too. 

I also think that perhaps Spock had never attempted to meld before, and as a half-Vulcan he was unsure of his ability to even do so. 

Also, this guy shows up again! He was the dopey looking redshirt in Miri. He looks a little cleaner here, maybe he got a promotion after that (he’s wearing command gold, after all) and started cleaning up his life. 

And Uhura is on the bridge! Haven’t seen her since The Naked Time, I think. No Scotty, and Sulu hasn’t appeared since Mudd’s Women. You tend to notice these things, you know? 

One last thing I wanted to talk about before wrapping up is there was a reverse of the Hero/Damsel in that Kirk was the one in distress and it was up to Noel to shut off power to save him and allow Spock to beam down to shut down the colony’s shield (they call them force fields, I’m not sure they’re different things here.) 

AND THEN SHE STRAIGHT UP KILLS A GUY!

She plays hurt and then straight kicks a guy into the electric system, frying his ass. Not too bad, Dr. Noel, not too bad...

As they’re leaving the planet, Bones says “hard to believe a man can die of loneliness.” You see this look on Kirk’s face like “oh shit I’m lonely” but then he looks at Spock and Kirk’s face flashes into a smile as he realizes “nah I got a crew and a ship.” 

Rating: 2/5; Skip

This is not a great episode, but it's not bad. Like Miri, it's an episode. It's relevant because it's the first instance of a mind meld, but the mystery isn't compelling enough to invest in and it reveals relatively little about the characters. 

me irl

Miri

Miri is a bland episode. It’s not completely boring, but it’s also just not very interesting. 

The Enterprise discovers a planet that looks exactly like Earth, down to the dimensions and atmospheric composition. The series will go on to do this three more times, in what it calls “Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development.” 

Gene Roddenberry included the concept in his original pitch as a way to keep budgets down and also to maintain audience’s frame of reference with familiar settings, costumes, and technology.

To our jaded expectations here in 2017 it’s lazy, but I give 1966 a pass since this was the first real sci-fi/fantasy adventure show on a shoestring budget that fought tooth and nail with the network to stay alive. If later series had pulled it, it would have been a lazy plot device to reuse sets and costumes (Who Watches the Watchers old west Vulcans notwithstanding.)

Moving on.

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Yeoman Rand, and two redshirts beam down to the planet to locate the source of a mysterious “Earth-style” SOS signal. What they find is a rapid-aging disease and creepy children among the ruins of a civilization that ended in the 30s. 

And trike-boy, who the plot reveals lived for 300 years, hit puberty, and turned into a purple mutant whose age caught up with him. It’s a sad scene as this giant, mutated child mourns for his broken tricycle just before dying. 

Not before Kirk and Spock beat the crap out of him, though. 

They investigate, discover a little girl named Miri who develops a crush on Kirk, the away team contracts the disease, they have 170 hours to develop a cure in the ruins of a laboratory full of the last native research, Miri gets jealous of Rand as everyone gets pissy in their final hours, the creepy kids are creepy and steal the communicators, Miri betrays Kirk so Rand can get captured and Kirk can have some action in the final 15 minutes (because McCoy looking at samples in slides just isn’t very interesting.) In the end, the day is saved and they leave a medical team on the planet to rehabilitate these 300 year old kids and cure the disease. 

Bojack Horseman and Mr. Peanutbutter, c. 1966

There’s nothing interesting here, plain and simple; in fact, the questions raised by the episode are far, far more interesting. This planet developed similarly enough to Earth that the natives spoke English and wrote in recognizable roman characters. Did the cars run on fossil fuels? If so, did they have a civilization of Voth that fled the planet before an asteroid hit it? Was the solar system the exact same, or was it only the planet? Did the Preservers take native Americans from this planet as well?

So many questions. 

Jahn C. Reilly c. 1966

There’s not much to talk about. The child actress playing Miri is good enough to be remarked on, the guy playing Jahn looks just like John C. Reilly, the other kids are creepy...

Kirk is revealed as quite the charmer here. He’s kind and almost fatherly to Miri, patient and gentle without coming off as creepy. It’s times like these that Shatner the actor is really appreciable. 

Oh, there’s some stuff about Janice and Kirk’s relationship, but seeing how this may be one of her last appearances it’s pointless to care about it. Yeoman Rand exists to be leered at, victimized, and captured. My headcanon is that she transfers off the Enterprise and that’s why we never see her again, and her experiences embitter her to the point where she snaps at Tuvok in Flashback. 

I’ve run out of things to say, and I’m impressed I managed to say anything about this episode at all. 

Rating: 3/5; Skip

It’s not a bad episode, but it’s just not essential viewing. 

What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Circuits and wires, apparently. 

I enjoyed this episode, it was a fun romp with Kirk and Nurse Chapel fucking around with a mad scientist and his alien android in some technicolor styrofoam caves for an hour. 

This is a Kirk episode, but I appreciated that it was also a Nurse Chapel episode because I like Majel Barret. I love her as Lwaxana Troi, I find her voice as the computer soothing and pleasant, and as a representative of the franchise she’s much easier to take than Gene Roddenberry or Rick Berman (god forbid.) She’s not really as prominent in post-TOS media as the ‘core’ crew, even though so far she’s had as much screen time as Sulu or Uhura and frankly, more to do (as of this episode at least.) She doesn’t even get cast in the Kelvin reboots! 

Her wig has also markedly improved since The Naked Time. 

Moving on,the episode revolves around Chapel’s fiancee, who has apparently been incommunicado for twelve years on a desolate alien world (the sixth alien planet since The Cage and the sixth wasteland planet as well.) 

Kirk is a realist; he doesn’t think it’s likely that Korby is alive, but Chapel is hoping against hope that he is. Of course, I’m with Kirk; it’s been 12 years and he was on a desolate frozen rock! And then - plot twist! - he’s alive! He answers their hail!

Note the uncomfortable young man in the background

Once they beam down, it becomes obvious by the two redshirt deaths and the sneaky presence of the sinister alien Ruk (technically alien android) that things are not as they seem, and the mad scientist Dr. Korby does what mad scientists do best:

Create a doppelganger of Kirk. 

Haters gonna emulate

Much like the Talosians in The Cage, the natives of Exo-III retreated underground after a natural disaster, where they set up a bunch of machinery and worked on perfecting android servants, presumably in their own image.

A handsome race.

Korby is a dipshit with a plan that Dr. Soong would have slapped him for squandering his research and expertise on: Korby is going to infiltrate and take over the Federation with his androids and then do mind transfers to perfect humanity. 

SPOILER ALERT! I read that book, and it sucked. You don’t transfer consciousness, you make a copy of your brain and stick it in an android body. You remain alive in your body and a copy of you in an android body goes forward after they put your organic body down. It was pure fridge horror. Nothing proves this more than Kirk - entertaining though his verbal sparring with his robot doppelganger is, it is proof that the android is nothing more than a copy. Sorry Janet, your book is a failed thought experiment that Star Trek did much better.

The rest of the episode is incredibly predictable but remains engaging and entertaining with some TnA and good old action. 

Yep, this is the dildo rock episode.

So I’m just going to come out and say it: Andrea is fine. Like...dayyyyuuummm. 

She is a very attractive woman. To be honest, her get-up makes the Berman-era catsuits of 7 of 9 and T’Pol look positively modest. 

Now, the real question she brings up: did Dr. Korby make a sexbot? Even Nurse Chapel calls him out by referring to her as a ‘geisha.’ Hell, just look at Kirk and Ruk’s faces!

Kirk: did he make a sexbot?

Ruk: he made a sexbot.

The bad doctor then tries to handwave it with a flimsy excuse about there being no emotional bond, but a man knows a sexbot when he sees one; after all, I don’t have an emotional bond with my hand but I still...you know what, we’re moving on. 

Dr. Korby’s real discovery here is that spinning is a good trick. Kirk programs his doppelganger with some old-fashioned racism to tip off Spock, a fact that Spock brings up at the end of the episode. One does wonder though, did Spock consider that Kirk’s rapist side had split off again? Someone go make sure Yeoman Rand is okay!

So in the end, Kirk discovers that Korby mind-transferred over to a robot body in his final moments and Ruk is the last of a race of androids that murdered their creators because all androids are evil or broken except for Data, and Andrea kills herself and Dr. Korby so we can finish this episode quickly. 

By the way, 2 redshirt deaths for the first time since Joey committed suicide via butter knife in The Naked Time 2 episodes ago. 

Oh yeah, I forgot about the appealing food! It looks like fruit chunks in gravy (there’s some mango, some watermelon, some kiwi or something) or canned beef stew. Christine’s favorite! This is on the same level as round playing cards and 3D chess/checkers except the latter looks interesting and this looks like something I’d whip together in the toilet to fake sick out of work. 

One final note on Andrea: Andrea told Kirk she was not ‘programmed for him.’ If that’s not evidence that Korby built a sexbot, I don’t know what is. 

Rating: 4/5, Don’t Skip

This was an entertaining episode with plenty of visually interesting things going on and a good Nurse Chapel episode.