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