Podcast Enterprise: S2E13 The Obsession

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

When Obsession opens you find Kirk, Spock, an ensign called Rizzo, Leslie, and a security guard. They are down on planet Argus X carrying out a survey for Tritanium, a substance harder than diamond. They are surveying the planet for this material.

They actually find this material and while they’re doing this, Kirk notices that there is some sort of a smell in the air. It’s a sickly sweet. It smells a bit like honey. And Kirk freezes because he recognizes the smell. He knows the smell and he has smelt it somewhere in the past, somewhere on the other side of the galaxy. So he sends the red shirts to examine this scent and find out where it is coming from and he also tells him that if he if they find a sort of gaseous cloud to fire at it because that is the source of the smell. The red shirts including Rizzo find this cloud they find but before they could fire at this gaseous cloud, it attacks them.

It kills them and it drains all the red corpuscles of their body.So they’re basically white colored. Rizzo is alive, just barely. He’s taken back to the ship. McCoy Gives him a lot of blood transfusions to keep him alive. Kirk wants Rizzo awakened so that he can question him. Kirk has some sort of an obsession because of this creature, and this is because of something that happened in his past.And when Rizzo is awakened, he describes the creature and then promptly dies. Kirk also has a problem because he has to rendezvous with the USS Yorktown, taking some vaccines and deliver them to a faraway planet, and those vaccines are perishable.

If they don’t get them to this planet on time, it’s going to be a real disaster.But Kirk is too preoccupied with this cloud to do any of that. He’s delaying. He wants to remain in orbit around the planet Augusta X so that he can find out more about this creature, but scans show nothing as time goes on. Kirk gets more obsessed with it. Finally, this creature leaves the planet’s orbit, goes into space. Kirk wants to follow it. He goes on warp eight until the engines are about to explode.

He slows down and the creature also slows down, turns back and Kirk orders for this creature to be fired at using the photon torpedoes, but they go right through the creature and it begins to advance on the ship. Now, the problem here is that there is a certain character, Ensign Garowick, that Kirk has been constantly and continuously berating throughout this episode. Ensign Garowick is made to feel guilty for a certain event. He’s so upset that in his room he throws a plate onto a certain ventilation system control and the control jams, the creature finds a opening through that ventilation control.It enters the ship and Kirk has a problem because the creature can kill 200 people at a time. He knows this because the last time he encountered this creature was 11 years ago when he was aboard the USS Farragut as a young officer.

It was the same creature at the other end of the galaxy that attacked the USS Farragut, attacked everybody else aboard the ship except Kirk, who survived, and killed them.That was about 200 people it killed at one go. This is why Kirk has an obsession with this creature. This thing is inside the USS Enterprise and Kirk orders that the radioactive waste be flushed into the ventilation system. They have only about two hours left of breathable air and finally, they managed to get this thing out and it’s moving towards a certain place, Tycho IV, which is where it originates and that is also where the USS Farragut was attacked.

Kirk orders the ship to go there and find this creature and use an antimatter blast to attack it because this creature is apparently made of some unknown material called Dikeronium so they go there and unleash an antimatter blast. Kirk pulls off a feat of heroism. They destroy the creature and come back to the Enterprise, and finally, Kirk has some measure of peace of mind.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

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Acknowledgements

1. Intro music: Music from anchor.fm
2. Shotcut for editing the podcast
3. References: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/