DAGGER OF THE MIND | S.1.E.9
Star Trek - The Original Series
Original air date: November 3, 1966
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2715.1
SYNOPSIS
Kirk and psychiatrist Helen Noel are trapped on a maximum security penal colony that experiments with mind control and Spock must use the Vulcan mind-meld to find a way to save them.
CANON CONTEXT
This episode introduces the Vulcan mind meld that we know so well today.
The title was taken from William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Macbeth is planning to murder the King of Scotland, and sees a dagger that he attempts to grasp, but it's only a hallucination.
Is this a dagger which I see before me
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
RECAP
The power of suggestion is examined loosely in this episode. The Enterprise is visiting a penal colony that serves as a prison for criminals to rehabilitate them in very humane ways. Dr. Adams is world renowned for the systems he put in place to care for prisoners and reform them across penal colonies in the galaxy. In short, he’s respected by Captain Kirk and most of the psychiatric professionals. Bones, on the other hand, has some burning questions.
While at the penal colony the Enterprise transports some vital materials to the planet and in return Dr. Adams sends on board a large box of classified documents on his research. However, what ends up on board is a crazed stowaway, Dr. Simon van Gelder. Once the assistant to Dr. Adams, now he is considered mentally deranged and dangerous and he’s running amok on board the Enterprise.
Dr. Gelder seems to be talking gibberish but he manages to ask for asylum on the ship, refusing to return to the penal colony. Orders in starfleet dictate that Captain Kirk must conduct an investigation of these allegations before he can return Dr. Gelder to the planet. He takes along with him, none other than, an attractive woman whose credentials are that of psychiatrist. Apparently she and Captain Kirk had a rather interesting interlude at their last Christmas party and it put me in mind to Captain Peacock and the blow tickler incident at a similar party from Are You Being Served?
At first Dr. Helen Noel is annoying. She seems to be fawning over the captain sexually and Dr. Adams with admiration and respect. But by the middle she realizes just how dangerous the good doctor is with his "neural neutralizer.” This machine was used on Dr. Gelder but there are differing accounts on how and why.
Dr. Adams claims that Dr. Gelder used it on himself without any sort of supervision. While Dr. Gelder, through a Vulcan mind meld with Spock, explains that Dr. Adams used it on him to erase his memory so that he wouldn’t warn others of this very dangerous machine. Yes, this is the first time we see the mind meld in action and while it’s very different from how we know it to work today (such as the finger placement on the face and saying the words “your mind to my mind, your thoughts to my thoughts”) it still comes with similar effects.
Wishing to uncover more about the neural neutralizer without Dr. Gelder present, Captain Kirk takes Helen Noel with him to test it out. The results seem harmless at first, with Helen Noel suggesting the captain is very hungry. But we quickly realize how this machine could be used for bad and not good. Suggesting pain and suffering if you don’t listen to, trust, and obey Dr. Adams.
But Captain Kirk is much too smart and strong to fall for this kind of mind control and he fights it with all his might, giving Helen Noel time to find the control room on the planet so the forcefield preventing transportation and communication with the Enterprise.
Dr. Helen manages to shut down their control room and Spock immediately beams down onto the planet to rescue Kirk and Noel. In all the mayhem, no one realizes that Dr. Adams is left alone in the neural neutralizing room all alone.
By the time he’s found it’s too late, he’s dead. Without someone there to fill his mind that was slowly being emptied by the machine it killed him.
Some really scary stuff in this one, I must say.
DID THEY REALLY SAY THAT?
Captain Kirk: Can you imagine a mind emptied by that thing, without even a tormentor for company?