Episode 10: Dagger of the Mind

Episode 10: Dagger of the Mind

Stardate: 2715.1

Quick Summary: While transporting a package from the penal colony Tantalus, an escaped prisoner sneaks onboard the Enterprise - only he's not a prisoner at all but the director of the colony, gone mad and seeking asylum. The real protagonist is his associate, Dr. Adams, who rehabilitates prisoners on the colony with a mysterious machine that makes their minds go blank and transforms them into brainwashed zombies. Kirk beams down to check it out along with Dr. Helen Noel, but is soon put under the machine himself, and only after being rescued by Noel and Spock does he get away and kill Dr. Adams in the process.

Review: It's pretty easy to spot early on that this is going in a Clockwork Orange direction, what with rehabilitating incorrigibles with the neural neutralizer, producing pain if subjects' minds veer off the suggested path; that is until you realize that this episode pre-dates Clockwork Orange (in movie form) by five full years, which makes you appreciate the imagery a bit more.

Anyway, watching these episodes in sequence is paying dividends. If a common theme among the first few episodes was that of a crazy person taking over the ship, the theme currently underway is that of a genius with noble intentions going astray and losing sight of the fact that the ends do not justify the means.

Here we get the first ever Vulcan mind-meld - noticably more similar to a creepy form of hypnosis than in its later incarnations. It may not be a coincidence that it's introduced here either because (and tell me if I'm reading too much into this) the way the mind-meld is portrayed like hypnosis creates an undeniable parallel to the hypnosis produced by the neural neutralizer. Are we to question why taking advantage of a suggestionable mind is Ok in certain circumstances but not in others? Also, the episode might be worth its salt just on the basis of the outstanding three-way interplay between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy - they're playfully adversarial, but it's so clear they loooooove each other. Truly delicious for the avid fan. And here are two things that I am incredulous about: 1) Why on Alpha Centauri would Kirk ever voluntarily sit in the neural neutralizer chair himself?! and 2) Give me more details about what happened at the "Science Lab Christmas Party" with Dr. Helen Noel!!!


Review: 3 stars