Dagger of the Mind
- FIRST SHOWN (US)
- 3 November 1966
- ON
- NBC
- STARDATE
- 2715.1
- DIRECTED BY
- Vincent McEveety
- PRODUCTION NO.
- 11
WRITTEN BYWritten by S. Bar-David
S. Bar-David is a pseudonym of Shimon Wincelberg, who asked for the name change after objecting to Gene Roddenberry's rewrites.
A violent escapee from a model penal colony stows away aboard the Enterprise, and Kirk beams down with a ship's psychiatrist to see whether the colony is as enlightened as it appears.
Red alert: the full plot, ending included. Haven't watched yet?REVEAL SYNOPSIS
After a delivery to the penal colony on Tantalus V, a desperate man slips aboard the Enterprise hidden in a cargo container. He is Dr Simon van Gelder, assistant to the colony's celebrated director, Dr Tristan Adams. Adams claims van Gelder was hurt in an experiment, but the man's terror is real. Kirk beams down with psychiatrist Dr Helen Noel to inspect the colony, which seems humane and well run. Aboard ship, Spock uses a Vulcan mind meld to reach van Gelder's fractured mind and learns about the neural neutraliser, a device that can empty a person's thoughts and plant new ones. Testing the machine, Kirk falls into Adams's hands and is made to believe he loves Noel. Noel crawls through a ventilation duct to cut the colony's power, and Spock leads a security team down to switch off the force field. In the struggle Adams is left alone with the machine running, and it kills him.
- 01The first appearance of the Vulcan mind meld. Leonard Nimoy pushed for it in place of the script's original idea of alien hypnosis.
- 02The title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy, in which he asks whether the dagger before him is a dagger of the mind.
- 03Morgan Woodward called van Gelder the most physically and emotionally exhausting role of his career. He reportedly rested at home for four days after filming.