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Podcast Enterprise: S2E14 Wolf in the Fold

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 this episode opens, you find Scott along with Kirk and Dr. McCoy on a planet called Argelius II. They’re here for some sort of medical show leave for Scott. Apparently he’s been involved in an accident and he has a concussion. And this accident was apparently caused by something, a female crew member aboard the Enterprise, something that she did cause this accident.And because of this concussion, Scott has been acting rather strange, apparently, and he has this absolute resentment towards women. Kirk and Dr. McCoy believe that bringing him down to Argelius II on medical shore leave will help him get over this resentment. For women, and because Argelia is to be something of a hedonistic society.It’s a very open planet, it’s a pleasure planet, and there are women there who can potentially entice Scott to help him get over his resentment. When the episode opens you find the three of them watching a belly dance, carried out by an Argelian woman.Because Scott is so enthralled by this Argelian woman. Kirk invites her to join them at the spot in this cafe. And she comes there. She talks to Scott.

They decide to go for a walk in the misty outside. Then they hear a scream. Something happens.And when Kirk and McCoy rush outside to see what’s going on, they find that the Argelian woman is dead. She’s stabbed multiple times, and there they find Scott leaning against the wall, half conscious with a knife in his hand. So it looks like he has apparently carried out this murder.In the next act you find that they’re introduced to a certain Mr. Hengist, a chief city administrator, something like a detective and a police officer combined. For some strange reason, the Argelians do not have law enforcement officers of their own.

So they have hired this alien from another planet called Rigel IV to come and handle all their law related matters.And Hengist is one of those characters from Rigel IV and he has to investigate this murder. He has decided Scott is guilty although he doesn’t say it out loud. Scotty is not being cooperative because he does not remember half of what happened. He seems to have blanked out. After that, they come into contact with the prefect of the Argelian world, which is Prefect Jaris and his wife called Sybo. What Jaris suggests is that they invoke some sort of a telepathic right involving his wife, and this is something that the Argelians have been doing for many centuries or maybe millennia. She has the ability to telepathically communicate with people and they decide to hold some sort of ritual, so that they can figure out who has been killing these women and this particular woman who was a dancer.It looks like Scott did it and Kirk has to agree to it because there’s no other way. Scott doesn’t remember anything.

All the evidence is pointing to him being the prime suspect. Hengist is completely annoying and he’s not helping matters. And what happens is that while they are holding this psychic telepathic ritual, the lights go off, everything goes dark, there’s a scream again, and then Sybo is murdered.And again, you find Scott holding her body . And it looks like he has killed her. And now the evidence is so strong against him that Kirk decides to take everyone back to the Enterprise and hold some sort of an inquest using the Enterprise’s computers. That is the only way they can prove whether Scott actually did this or didn’t do it.If you had left this to Hengist, Scott would have been subject to Argelian laws, which even Jaris says is pretty brutal. Back on the ship, they hold a trial and then they find that it wasn’t Scott who did it.

There is a strange entity called Redjac. And I missed a point here while they were holding the psychic telepathic ritual with Sybo, she did say something about Beratus, Kesla and Redjac. That is some sort of an evil entity that has been haunting this area. When they get back to the Enterprise they run a linguistic test to find out who Beratus, Kesla and Redjac are. They find that Redjac is another name for Jack the Ripper and Kirk pieces two and two together and finds out that the entity that has been killing all of these women is not Scotty. It feeds off fear and women in particular because according to Spock’s logic, women are more prone to extreme emotions.

Hengist, who has been aboard the Enterprise as part of the inquest, starts behaving in a very peculiar way. And then they find out that he has been possessed by this Redjac. Hengist has been dead for some time. This disembodied creature climbs into the ship’s controls.It wants to terrorize the entire crew so that it can feed off their fear. And to prevent that, Kirk has the entire crew sedated, which creates some humorous moments because they act as though they’re completely drunk.

And Redjac still aboard the Enterprise and haunting the computers. As he decides to come. There’s a certain trick that Spock suggests forces him out of the computer systems.He comes out possesses Jaris for a while, jumps out of Jaris’s body, possesses Hengist again, tries to stab and murder and create utmost terror on the Enterprise. But then Kirk and McCoy’s quick thinking with Kirk and McCoy’s quick thinking, they managed to sedate the already dead and reanimated Hengist so that he goes into some sort of catatonic state.And then they teleport him out into deep space and leave him floating there so that this entity called Redjac, he’s just drifting across deep space apparently, it’s also older than time. So they don’t know for sure if it would die out, but they’re hoping that it will.And that’s how this episode ends.

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!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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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!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S2E12 The Deadly Years

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 this episode opens, you have the USS Enterprise in orbit around Gamma Hydra IV, and you have Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, a Lieutenant Galway, who’s a new character for this episode and Hansen Chekov, they are beamed down to this planet and they’re there for a routine resupply mission.And on this planet, there is a, there is an experimental colony, which is headed by a certain Robert Johnson, who is supposedly 29 years old.

Now, when they beamed down on this planet, Kirk and the landing party find Absolutely nobody. The area is deserted. There are some buildings, but there’s nobody, so they decide to split up and examine what’s going on.Chekov enters one building, finds an extremely old dead man, and he loses his marbles a little bit. He calls out to his captain. He comes running out in absolute fright. And because he is so frightened, the rest of the landing party go into that building and they find this old man. And McCoy, after he does an examination of the dead body, reveals that this person died of natural causes of extreme old age.Now this is very puzzling for the landing party and for Kirk because none of the colonists on Gamma Hydra IV were above 30. So who is this old person? Now While they are deliberating this, an old man and an old woman come into the building and he reveals himself to be Robert Johnson and he says he’s 29 even though he’s extremely old and his wife, Elaine, he says she’s 27 and they’re not in good shape.So They’re taken back to the Enterprise.

Now, on board the Enterprise, Elaine dies of old age and Robert Johnson also dies of old age, because they are just so old and there is something that is causing accelerated aging in both of these characters. And apparently all the other colonists also died of this sort of accelerated old age.Kirk convenes a meeting in the briefing room to try and figure out what is going on. You are introduced to a new character called Janet Wallace, Dr. Janet Wallace, who is supposedly an old flame of Kirk’s. They try to, They try to figure out what exactly is going down on that planet. They hit a dead end, but as time goes on, they find that they themselves are subject to the aging.And each of the characters is affected by this aging process in a different way. So McCoy, he’s growing old very fast and he’s becoming very cranky. Spock is growing old and he’s feeling very cold and he’s not able to take the low temperatures on board the Enterprise. Kirk is becoming a little senile, and that is a big problem, because there is also a Commodore aboard the Enterprise, a Commodore Stocker.He wants to go to Starbase 10.

Now, because of this aging process, this aging problem, basically, and how it’s affecting the crew, Kirk cannot go to Starbase 10, despite Commodore Stocker’s protests. Everybody’s growing older and older. The most affected seems to be Lieutenant Galway, who’s aging much faster than everybody else, despite being 10 years younger than Kirk. They’re constantly trying to find out why this aging disease has afflicted them all. Nothing seems to be happening. Kirk gets more and more senile. He gets, He gives orders, he forgets he he has given those orders and he gives those orders again. And then just as they get and then They are also very close to the Romulan neutral zone, which means it’s very dangerous.

You cross the line and the Romulans will attack and Kirk is trying to keep it together.He’s not able to and finally Spock finds that there is some sort of radiation on Gamma Hydra for that is causing this aging process, but by now Commodore Stocker has had enough. He’s watching the Captain go senile from this aging disease. He’s watching the rest of the crew members get old. The landing party.I mean Only Chekov has not been affected and they don’t know why.

Commodore Stocker decides that he wants to take over the Enterprise because Kirk is so inefficient right now. And as he does so, he convenes a disciplinary hearing to remove Kirk from his position.Spock is also not in a condition to take over the Enterprise, so Commodore Stocker, who has absolutely no field experience, decides to commandeer the Enterprise. And that turns out to be an absolute disaster because he has no idea how to deal with the Romulans.

He directs the ship to go right into the neutral zone.They’re attacked by Romulans. And while this is happening, Kirk is panicking down in the sick bay because he’s old. He can’t do anything. He’s got arthritis due to old age. He’s senile. And at the same time, his mind is clear enough to realize that his ship is being attacked and there’s a green horn at the helm.And this is when they find out why Chekov wasn’t, wasn’t affected by the aging disease.

It’s because of adrenaline. Spock, despite his age, somehow manages to produce a serum. This serum is injected into Kirk so that he can recover and become young again. And it works with, Although the injection of that serum looks very painful, Kirk, however, manages to recover. He goes back to the bridge and relieves Commodore Stocker of his disastrous command and gets the Romulans to stop attacking with a very clever ruse involving a bluff and a carbomite device and a bomb blast, which doesn’t really exist.

And this episode ends with Commodore Stocker finally acknowledging that he’s well aware now of what a starship can do with the right man at the helm.

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!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Podcast Enterprise: S2E11 Friday's Child

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 this episode opens, you find the USS Enterprise approaching the planet Capella IV. They are going to this planet so that they can negotiate with the alien Capellans for their mineral Topaline which is basically something that is used for their life support for the life support systems this planet capella four has an abundance of it and The mineral has to be mined, but to get to that you have to negotiate with the Capellans first.

And now these are, these people are a very war like kind of violent race of huge humanoids and it’s very difficult to deal with them and to negotiate with them, but Captain Kirk wants to do it anyway. He approaches this planet, he beams down and he also has a lot of issues with the Klingons because they want the Topaline as well.

So when he beams down to this planet, he finds a Klingon already there. Now, The catch here is that, McCoy has already been to this planet and he knows some of the ways of the Capellans, which Kirk does not know. But before they could do anything once they beam down there, one of the red shirts is killed, and this is how the episode starts.

You have conflict almost immediately where one of the members of the Enterprise is killed. Now, after that, the Capellans, being who they are and being this martial and very difficult to deal with group of people, decide to confine Kirk and the landing crew, including Spock and McCoy to this tent. It’s a little hard for them to gauge what the Capulans want at this point.

They are waiting there when this woman brings in some food and Kirk almost accepts it, but he is not, but then McCoy persuades him not to because that will lead to further complications. They meet with the High Teer or the leader of the ten tribes of Capella, who listens, he’s an elderly person who listens to them, but they can’t really negotiate with him because of the Klingon, who seems to get along much better with the rival of the chief of the Capellan tribes.

And Kirk and, long story short, Kirk and the landing crew find themselves in all sorts of skirmishes. The current Teer of the Capellans is threatened to be overthrown by this younger and brash, more brash individual who calls himself Maab. He gets along quite well with the Klingon, apparently, which is bad for everyone concerned.

The Klingon named Kras is the Klingon representative on Capella 4. He gets along quite well with the rival. of the current rival to the current Teer of the Capellans, who is called Mab.

And he creates all sorts of trouble for the earth people because he understands apparently the ways of the Capellans much better than the earth people do. And the Capellans do not want silly things like medicine and education. They want war all the time, and so especially with the rival to the current Teer assuming charge after a bloody coup

Kras has a better chance at getting the mining rights and get securing the mining rights for the Klingons. Kirk, after much confusion and after a lot after the current Teer is murdered by the rival and the Capellans find themselves with a new leader, Kirk and the landing crew find themselves in a lot of trouble.

First off, the consort of the previous Teer. They find themselves with her and on the run towards a certain group of hills and they have to go there, find the cave. She’s pregnant. She’s about to give birth. She does not get along with McCoy who wants to help her. And at the same time back in orbit with Scotty in command, the Enterprise is lured away from orbit by a distress call from an S. S. Dierdre, but as Scotty discovers later, the S. S. Dierdre is not in that quadrant, and this was a fake distress call from the Klingons, apparently, and they try to waylay the Enterprise and create trouble up there in space, and Kirk and the landing crew down here, along with Spock and McCoy, they have to deal with this woman called Eleen, who is a Capellan.

A search party consisting of the Klingon, Kras, and the Capellan, Maab, as well as all of the other Capellans have been released to search for Kirk, destroy them, and just get rid of their presence from Capella.

Kirk and Spock manage to somehow outwit this hunting party that has come after them. Krass reveals his true colors and turns himself against the rest of the Capellans. They manage to convince the Capellans to accept this alien’s Is that the widow of the previous year, alien’s son as a new leader of the Capellans. It’s all quite complicated. And basically the Capellan, mob who has been nothing but a pain for the Earthman up to this point, decides to sacrifice, sacrifice himself so that the Klingon can be brought down. Ultimately, there’s a new baby leader for the Capellans.

A mining treaty is secured, and, Kirk and the crew are back in the Enterprise, and the Klingons efforts to kind of thwart their for the efforts of the toward the diplomatic efforts of the Enterprise and the federation is completely thwarted and they’re able to get the mining treaty and the mineral that they needed for the life support systems.

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!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Continue reading