Memento Mori

The Enterprise arrives at Finibus III with an atmospheric processor upgrade, only to find the colony attacked and many colonists missing. Survivors are taken aboard, and La'an, the only survivor of a Gorn attack in her childhood, recognises the signs. Gorn ships strike, leaving the Enterprise badly damaged, with shields, sensors and weapons crippled. Pike hides the ship in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf, where neither side can see clearly, and with sickbay struggling, M'Benga and Chapel resort to 21st-century medicine. The crew destroy one Gorn vessel, but more arrive. Spock mind melds with La'an to recover buried memories of how the Gorn communicate, then uses their light signals to trick one ship into firing on another. As the brown dwarf is drawn towards a black hole, Pike swings the Enterprise around it and ejects the unstable processor, whose explosion convinces the last Gorn ship that its prey is destroyed. Lives have been lost, but the Enterprise survives.