20
Monsters and Madmen
As Star Trek’s premiere approached, creator-producer Gene Roddenberry and his staff met with NBC executives to select the episode that would air first. Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be taken seriously as science fiction and had gone to extraordinary lengths to shore up the series’ sci-fi credentials, building bridges to the SF fan community and commissioning stories from prominent authors. However, with a handful of thought-provoking entries to choose from (including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “The Naked Time,” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”), the network chose the most simplistic story available—“The Man Trap,” with the shape-shifting Salt Vampire of planet M-113 running amok on the Enterprise.
Although written by respected SF author George Clayton Johnson (a Twilight Zone alum best known for cowriting the novel Logan’s Run), “The Man Trap” was the kind of hoary space opera that might have turned up on Lost in Space. This was not the first impression Roddenberry wanted to make. In his book Star Trek Memories, William Shatner describes the episode as “a dreadful show, one of our worst ever.”
Shatner’s judgment is too harsh, however. “The Man Trap” may not be top-tier Trek, but it’s a lively and engrossing adventure with some memorable character moments for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and especially Dr. McCoy, and it features one of the program’s most memorable monsters. This installment may not have reflected Roddenberry’s higher ambitions, but the first job of any television program is to entertain. Whatever else it may be, “The Man Trap” is never dull.
Besides, in retrospect, this installment seems like a perfectly appropriate introduction to Star Trek. Over the next three seasons, the series frequently strayed from the path of “pure SF” to present numerous episodes that could be categorized as action-adventure or horror stories that happen to take place in a science fiction setting. Many of these tales featured monsters capable of wiping out entire civilizations and madmen bent on galactic domination, with only the stalwart crew of the Enterprise to save the Federation from these fiendish terrors. It was the stuff of pulp fiction, not Hugo Awards, but sci-fi pulps had been one of Roddenberry’s earliest inspirations. And some of these episodes rank among the series’ most colorful, exciting, and best-loved installments.
Monsters
As they explored strange new worlds, the Enterprise often encountered fearsome, hostile creatures. Of all these many menaces, however, none were more memorable—or more intimidating—than the Horta from “The Devil in the Dark.” Because it’s ultimately revealed to be a sympathetic, misunderstood being, viewers may hesitate to label it a “monster,” but that’s the word used to describe the creature for the first two-thirds of the episode. The brilliance of Gene Coon’s teleplay lies in the way it establishes a classic sci-fi monster scenario and then turns expectations on their head with the revelation of the Horta’s true nature and motivations in the script’s final act.
Early on, “The Devil in the Dark” plays like something along the lines of Howard Hawks’s 1951 classic The Thing (based on John W. Campbell’s often-filmed novella “Who Goes There?”), with a clutch of people in a remote and environmentally precarious setting being picked off one by one by some barely glimpsed terror. In the precredit teaser, a lone sentry is killed by the monster, his screams of agony echoing through the dark, lonely tunnels of mining colony Janus VI. Director Joseph Pevney’s handling of this scene comes straight out of the classic horror handbook, with a tracking shot closing in on the terrified victim from the creature’s point of view. We soon learn that “that butchering monster,” as administrator Vanderberg calls the Horta, has murdered fifty miners already and seems bent on killing them all, leaving victims’ bodies “burned to a crisp.” The creature seems to be immune to phasers and can move through solid rock at amazing speeds, he reports. The danger seems so great that Kirk, at first, is adamant that the monster be destroyed. “The creature will be killed on sight and that’s the end of it,” he insists. Once the Horta comes fully into view, it proves no less remarkable—a quivering mass of molten rock, unlike any other creature seen elsewhere on Star Trek. The episode’s well-turned twist works so well because it follows thirty minutes of tightly wound suspense. This combination of elements makes “Devil in the Dark” one of the series’ most gripping and intellectually provocative installments.
This exquisite episode had humble origins. According to Bob Justman and Herb Solow’s book Inside Star Trek, makeup effects freelancer Janos Prohaska appeared at Desilu one day to demonstrate a monster suit he had designed—the Horta. Producer Coon was floored by the suit and promptly wrote “The Devil in the Dark” to feature it, penning the teleplay start to finish in four days. Prohaska performed in the episode as the Horta. Earlier, he had portrayed a very similar beast (the “microbe creature”) in The Outer Limits episode “The Probe.”
Other memorable Star Trek monsters included:
• The Mugato, a primate that looks like a horn-headed albino gorilla. The creature attacks Captain Kirk in “A Private Little War.”
• The Gorn, the lizardlike alien who battles Kirk in “Arena.”
• The Space Amoeba, a giant single-celled organism that consumes the Enterprise in “The Immunity Syndrome.”
• The Giant Anthropoids of planet of Taurus II (essentially, overgrown cavemen), which menace the away team led by Spock in “The Galileo Seven.”
• The Neural Parasites, which resemble giant, flying raviolis, from “Operation—Annihilate.” Although goofy-looking (they were actually repurposed bags of fake vomit), these parasites wreak havoc on the Deneva colony and kill Captain Kirk’s brother, Sam.
• Sylvia, the cat-woman of planet Pyris VII in “Catspaw.” Sylvia (Antoinette Bower) and her warlock mate, Korob (Theo Marcuse), hold a landing party captive with their “magical” powers.
• The Tribbles from “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Maybe it’s a stretch to call anything this cute and cuddly a “monster,” but their impact on Starbase K-7 was certainly monstrous. Besides, the Klingons consider them little monsters.
• And, of course, the Salt Vampire from “The Man Trap.”
Malignant Life Forces
There were no monster suits needed for several of the creatures Captain Kirk and his crew tangled with. These were mere clouds of vapor or whirling balls of light, but they proved no less deadly than the flesh-and-blood (or rubber suit) beasties. Noncorporeal menaces became more prevalent during the show’s third season, when budget constraints made invisible monsters an economic necessity. Arguably the most fearsome of this ethereal lot was the entity known as Redjac, which terrorizes planet Argelius II in “Wolf in the Fold.”
Scotty, recuperating from a head wound, is accused of murdering two young women in brutal fashion, stabbing them repeatedly. The evidence all points to the Enterprise chief engineer, who suffered blackouts during both killings. If found guilty, Scotty will face the ancient Argelian penalty for murder: “death by slow torture.” To get to the bottom of the mystery, prefect Jaris (Charles Macauley) asks his wife Sybo (Pilar Seurat), an empathic “sensate,” to perform an ancient ritual (essentially, a séance). During the ceremony, she detects the presence of “an ancient evil.” “Monstrous, terrible evil,” she says, “a hunger that never dies.” Then Sybo, too, is killed. Once again, Mr. Scott is the prime suspect. But eventually the killer is revealed to be a noncorporeal, virtually immortal life force (a “highly cohesive electromagnetic field,” according to the Enterprise computer) named Redjac that feeds on fear. The entity projects a hypnotic screen that induces memory blackouts and occupies the body of a human host in order to kill. Over the centuries, Redjac has surfaced many times in many places, always committing a string of ghastly murders before vanishing again. One of its previous stops was gaslight-era England, where it was known as Jack the Ripper.
“Wolf in the Fold” is an old-fashioned horror-mystery yarn dressed up as science fiction. As in “The Devil in the Dark,” Pevney’s direction evokes the classic horror style, especially when his camera prowls the dark, foggy streets of Argelius II. He also drapes the séance sequence in shadowy ambiance. While “Wolf in the Fold” isn’t terribly satisfying as a mystery (there are too few suspects to make its solution very hard to figure out), it includes a deliciously perverse twist: “Piglet” turns out to be Jack the Ripper! Redjac inhabits the body of Argelian administrator Hengist, played by John Fiedler, best known as the voice of Piglet in Walt Disney’s classic Winnie the Pooh cartoons. The episode’s closing moments are priceless, with the incapacitated Hengist/Redjac railing, in Fiedler’s Piglet voice, “Die, die, die, everybody die! Kill, kill, kill you all!”
In this publicity still for “The Man Trap,” Kirk rubs shoulders with the Salt Vampire, the first of many Star Trek monsters.
This installment was written by Robert Bloch, who also penned “Catspaw” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” but remains most famous for his novel Psycho. “Wolf in the Fold” contains echoes of Bloch’s acclaimed short story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” In this tale, the Ripper is depicted as a globe-trotting, ageless sorcerer who preserves his eternal youth through periodic ritualistic murders. Both the episode and the story are bloody good yarns.
Other malevolent life forces:
• The Vampire Cloud from “Obsession” drained all the red corpuscles from the bodies of its victims, leaving a trail of pale, bloodless corpses. Eleven years earlier, the creature killed half the crew of the USS Farragut, including Kirk’s mentor, Captain Garrovik.
• The Hate Creature (officially known as the “Beta XXVII-A Entity”) from “Day of the Dove” was composed of “pure energy,” according to Spock. It looked like a floating, spinning pinwheel of colors. It possessed fantastic powers, which it employed to trap humans and Klingons together on the Enterprise and force them to wage an endless, pointless war against one another, so the entity could feast on their growing hatred.
• The Zetarians were also energy beings, which looked like multicolored flashes of light. But they once had corporeal form, and in “The Lights of Zetar,” they take possession of an Enterprise crew member, Lieutenant Mira Romaine (Jan Shutan), in an attempt to regain flesh-and-blood existence.
• Sargon was one of three ancient, formerly corporeal beings whose life essences had been preserved in noncorporeal form. In “Return to Tomorrow,” Sargon and his friends asked to “borrow” the bodies of Kirk, Spock, and Dr. Ann Mulhall (Diana Muldaur) in order to construct android bodies for themselves. The trouble began when one member of the trio decided he would prefer to keep his human form.
• The Gorgan, perhaps better known as “the Friendly Angel,” from “And the Children Shall Lead” was an ancient alien menace who duped the children of explorers on planet Triacus into murdering their parents. Next it tried to use the children to take control of the Enterprise. The translucent, ghostly Gorgan was portrayed by renowned defense attorney Melvin Belli, who was not an actor (and it showed).
Technological Terrors
Aside from flesh-and-blood and “pure energy” menaces, the Enterprise also crossed paths with numerous mechanical monstrosities—malevolent supercomputers, as well as runaway robots and killer space probes. But the most chilling of these technological terrors was the Planet Killer from “The Doomsday Machine.” The Planet Killer was a colossal, automated engine of destruction, capable of chewing up entire solar systems, one world at a time. Commodore Matt Decker (William Windom) described it as a “devil right out of Hell.”
Responding to a distress signal, the Enterprise discovers Decker’s ship, the Constellation, badly damaged in a futile battle with the Planet Killer, which was in the middle of consuming a nearby world. Captain Kirk, Scotty, Dr. McCoy, and a damage control team beam aboard the Constellation and find Decker keeled over a desk in auxiliary control room in a state of shock. McCoy takes him to the Enterprise for treatment while Kirk remains aboard the Constellation. Then the Planet Killer reappears, and Decker assumes command of the Enterprise, leading the ship into a near-suicidal attack on the monster, a robotic weapon of “immense size and power,” according to Spock, that chops planets into rubble with a “pure anti-proton beam” and then sustains itself by feeding on the rubble. Kirk theorizes that the Planet Killer was a “doomsday machine” launched in a long-forgotten war and still roaming the galaxy, wreaking destruction. It was a weapon that was intended primarily as a bluff and never intended to be used, “like the old H-bombs were supposed to be.”
Norman Spinrad’s teleplay was inspired by Moby Dick and plays much like a nautical adventure tale. But Commodore Decker’s Planet Killer bears little visual similarity to Captain Ahab’s white whale. It looks more like a giant, demonic horn o’ plenty. (In actuality, according to Paula Block and Terry Erdman’s book Star Trek: The Original Series 365, it was a wind sock dipped in concrete.) Director Marc Daniels’s unusual camera setups (several ultra-low angle and gliding tracking shots) subtly enhance the drama, and cinematographer Jerry Finnerman employs an uncharacteristically dark lighting scheme, lending the adventure a hard edge. Daniels also elicits excellent performances from the cast, especially Windom, who left an indelible impression as the battered, guilt-ridden, revenge-crazed Commodore Decker. The finishing touch is composer Sol Kaplan’s stirring musical score, which many fans and critics consider the best ever written for Star Trek. It all adds up to one of the series’ most suspenseful and spellbinding episodes.
Other man-made monsters:
• NOMAD, the demented space probe from “The Changeling,” destroyed imperfect organic life forms (in other words, every living thing it met) before crossing paths with Captain Kirk.
• The M-5 experimental supercomputer from “The Ultimate Computer” took temporary command of the Enterprise and then refused to relinquish it, killing crewmen who attempt to deinstall it. Computer scientist Richard Daystrom’s (William Marshall) bizarre relationship with the computer evoked connotations of Frankenstein, while the M-5’s behavior foreshadowed the murderous HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
• Landru was a telepathic supercomputer who held the population of planet Beta III under a reign of holy terror in “The Return of the Archons.” Worshipped as a god, Landru’s will was enforced by the monklike “Lawgivers.”
• Vaal, another supercomputer worshipped as a god, ruled the docile denizens of planet Gamma Trianguli IV in “The Apple.”
• The Providers, disembodied brains kept alive in a computer-like matrix, ruled the citizens of planet Triskelion in “The Gamesters of Triskelion.” The Providers also forced slaves to compete in gladiatorial contests for their amusement (and wagering).
• Ruk, the giant, murderous android enforcer employed by mad scientist Dr. Roger Corby in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” was portrayed by Ted “Lurch” Cassidy.
Madmen
From Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and beyond, mad scientists and megalomaniacs bent on conquest have been a staple of horror and adventure yarns. Inevitably, Star Trek had its share of such villains, as well, the greatest of which was undoubtedly the superhuman Khan Noonien Singh from “Space Seed,” one of the most important figures in the history of the franchise.
The Enterprise discovers a centuries-old “sleeper ship,” with dozens of inhabitants in suspended animation. The vessel turns out to be the USS Botany Bay, a penal ship carrying seventy-two genetically engineered supermen (and superwomen) from the long-ago Eugenics Wars. Their leader is the imperious, implacable Khan (Ricardo Montalban), whose physical and intellectual abilities are matched only by his personal charisma. Kirk, Scotty, and historian Lieutenant Marla McGivers (Madlyn Rhue) revive the sleepers before they realize who they are. Khan, a ruthless dictator who once ruled a quarter of the planet, seduces McGivers, revives his compatriots, then takes control of the Enterprise and prepares to launch a new campaign. “The battle begins again,” he boasts. “Only this time it is not a world we will win, it’s a universe.” Khan’s overconfidence creates an opportunity for Kirk to defeat the tyrant and his genetic supermen.
Marc Daniels directs with his characteristic skill and precision and keeps the tempo brisk. But the episode’s primary strengths are its tightly wound, psychologically complex teleplay by Gene Coon and Carey Wilber and the dynamic performances of Montalban and Shatner, who circle each other throughout the episode like two panthers trapped in the same cage. The script depicts the Starfleet officers’ conflicted feelings about the bold, larger-than-life Khan, who is in many ways an ideal leader. McGivers falls in love with him, betrays him to free Captain Kirk, but ultimately chooses to remain with Khan. Even Kirk, McCoy, and Scott are impressed with the would-be emperor of the universe—much to Spock’s consternation. “We can be against him and admire him all at the same time,” Kirk explains. All this works because Montalban’s performance is so stylish and alluring. As a dynamic leader of men, his Khan outdoes even Captain Kirk, which didn’t sit well with William Shatner. Although the rest of the cast and crew got on well with Montalban, Shatner despised working with him. Some of this leaks through in his performance, lending a sharp edge to Kirk’s determination to defeat his rival. This serves the story well.
Director Robert Gist kept the giant anthropoids in the shadows while filming “The Galileo Seven,” but one of the creatures can be seen clearly in this publicity still.
In the end, Khan is not so much defeated as bargained with, left with a planet of his own to tame, the harsh but habitable Ceti Alpha V. Fifteen years later, writer-director Nicholas Meyer used this open ending as the jumping-off point for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). With one of the most popular villains in Star Trek history (and one of the most accomplished guest stars to appear on the program) on board, Meyer crafted an action-packed, emotionally gripping film that became a blockbuster hit, and that many fans revere as the finest Star Trek feature film. The success of this movie cannot be understated. Following the disappointing critical and box-office reception for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the future of the entire franchise was hanging in the balance. If The Wrath of Khan had flopped, the entire franchise might have gone down with it. Instead Khan, Star Trek’s most notorious villain, became the franchise’s savior.
Other megalomaniacs and mad scientists:
• Dr. Tristan Adams, the administrator of the Tantalus Penal Colony, used his “neural neutralizer” to perform torturous experiments on inmates and even staff members in “Dagger of the Mind.” Adams was played by James Gregory, the former Manchurian Candidate and future General Ursus (from Beneath the Planet of the Apes).
• Dr. Roger Corby (Michael Strong) was an archeologist who discovered ancient technology that enabled him to build sophisticated (and potentially deadly) android servants in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” He was also the former fiancé of Nurse Christine Chapel.
• Kodos the Executioner, from “The Conscience of the King,” was a former governor of the Tarsus IV colony who, faced with a famine, ordered the deaths of 4,000 settlers so that 4,000 other settlers (of his choosing) could survive. Although presumed dead, Kodos was discovered to be hiding under the assumed identity of actor Anton Karidian. Veteran Arnold Moss portrayed Kodos/Karidian. Seventeen years earlier, he costarred with Ricardo Montalban in the film noir classic “Border Incident.”
• Captain Garth (Steve Ihnat), better known as Garth of Izar, was a decorated Starfleet officer whose exploits in battle were legendary. But he went mad and tried to establish himself as dictator of the galaxy, after the aliens of planet Antos IV taught him their technique for reshaping matter through mental energy. He was confined to an asylum on Elba II, where—in “Whom Gods Destroy”—he took Kirk and Spock hostage during an escape attempt.
• Colonel Phillip Green was a twenty-first-century tyrant and notorious war criminal who was recreated by the Excalbians in “The Savage Curtain.” Green (Phillip Pine) led a team of villains that also included Genghis Khan and Kahless the Unforgettable, founder of the Klingon Empire, in a good-versus-evil showdown against Kirk, Spock, Abraham Lincoln, and Surak of Vulcan. Green was also mentioned (and appeared in “historical” video) in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “In a Mirror Darkly, Part II.”