Stardate: 3478.2
Synopsis: On an exploratory mission, several crew members are killed by a mysterious gas cloud. Kirk recognizes it as the same cloud that decimated the crew of the USS Faragut 11 years earlier, of which he was a member. His guilt and intuition drive Kirk to obsessively chase it after it departs into space, and once back "home" to the site of where the Faragut had been destroyed, Kirk and Ensign Garavik, son of the Faragut's captain, bait the cloud into an anti-matter explosion, killing it, and leaving the Enterprise free to deliver medical supplies to another ship that's been waiting for them this whole time.
Review: Only this series can make so much of a gas cloud, and that's why we love it. It camouflages itself by changing its molecular structure; like turning "gold into lead" or "wood into ivory"; it is described as "something that can't possibly exist, but does". Yummmm.
If you read into the title of the episode, "Obsession", you would think the core of the story lies with Kirk's Moby Dick-like obsession with revenge against the cloud (perhaps laying the groundwork for Captain Picard's obsession with the Borg a bit later down the road, but I digress), and for a while that's how it plays out. But this episode grows stronger than that. The whole dynamic with Ensign Garavik assuming the guilt-laden role of the younger Kirk adds a layer of complexity, and indeed the central importance of the Faragut's demise 11 years earlier with its ill-fated Captain Garavik as well as a young Lieutenant Kirk ties everything together in what's really a psychological examination of our main players. Your brain keeps returning to this.
And that's not even the best part. Kirk becomes reflective, wondering aloud if his actions are based on intuition or just irrational. This themed conflict is nothing new to the series, but what's fresh here is that it's Kirk who is the centerpiece of the debate, in contrast to how it's usually Spock. And he proves to be a good vehicle for it.
This would definitely get a 4-star review if it weren't for the gas cloud being, well, a gas cloud.
Review: 3 stars
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