Brief Thoughts On: "The Tholian Web"

I don't usually do individual episode reviews like this, but seeing how Halloween is almost upon is I thought I'd take some time to write about my favorite episode of the original Star Trek series–"The Tholian Web".

Brief synopsis: the Enterprise is searching for the missing starship Defiant, which they soon find shimmering in an eerie green glow in and uncharted area of space that appears to be "breaking up". Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov beam aboard in spacesuits, finding the ship's life support deactivated and the crew dead, apparently by their own hands. When the ship starts dematerializing, the landing party beams back to Enterprise, but Kirk is left behind and disappears with the ship, leaving Spock in command. The crew begins slowly going mad one by one, starting with Chekov and McCoy determines that the fluctuations in space/time are what drove the Defiant's crew to insanity and death, and will soon happen to the Enterprise's crew as well. While they struggle to retrieve Captain Kirk, the eponymous Tholians arrive. Fiercely territorial, they attack the ship and begin to ensnare it in an energy web. Eventually the Enterprise is able to rescue Kirk from the "spatial interphase" Defiant fell into and escape, while McCoy finds an antidote to counter the interphase-induced mania.

This one has always been a favorite of mine. Between the ghost-ship feel of Defiant, the crew's gradual descent into madness, and the mysterious, crystalline Tholians and their exotic web, it has a wonderfully spooky feel to it that I think justifies a Halloween-time watch. The story is particularly intriguing: it is the only episode in the whole series in which Captain Kirk is not in a central role. He is stranded aboard the Defiant for the majority of the episode, and is even presumed dead at one point. This leave Spock and McCoy in charge of the ship, and their usual banter is taken to the next stressful level before they're able to overcome their rivalry and work together to save the ship and their captain.

If I had one critique of this episode, it's that the Defiant storyline and the Tholian storyline could have easily been two different episodes. The interphase plot takes up the majority of the thing, with the Tholians essentially being an inconvenience, albeit an incredibly memorable one. But other than that I think it's a solid Trek episode.

On a final note, this episode received a sequel of sorts in the Star Trek: Enterprise two-parter episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", which revealed that the Defiant was transported to the 22nd Century of the savage "Mirror Universe", where rogue officers of the human-dominated Terran Empire used the ship to first suppress an alien rebellion and then turn on the Empire itself. I'm not the biggest fan of Enterprise, but I loved that episode, partially for the beautifully retro Defiant and just for the darkly fun Mirror Universe action.