The Tholian Web
- FIRST SHOWN (US)
- 15 November 1968
- ON
- NBC
- STARDATE
- 5693.2
- DIRECTED BY
- Herb Wallerstein
- PRODUCTION NO.
- 64
WRITTEN BYWritten by Judy Burns and Chet Richards
The starship Defiant drifts in strange space with its crew dead. When it fades from existence with Kirk aboard, Spock must take command as the Tholians close in.
Red alert: the full plot, ending included. Haven't watched yet?REVEAL SYNOPSIS
Searching for the missing starship Defiant, the Enterprise finds it drifting in an unstable region of space, its crew dead after turning on one another. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov board, but the Defiant is slipping into another universe. The transporter can only retrieve three of them, and the ship vanishes with Kirk still aboard. Spock calculates when it may reappear, but the Tholians arrive, order the Enterprise out of their space and begin spinning an energy web to trap it. The strange space starts to drive the crew to violent madness. Believing Kirk dead, Spock and McCoy clash until they watch his recorded last orders, which urge them to work together. Then crew members glimpse a ghostly Kirk in his environment suit. McCoy finds an antidote, and as the web closes the Enterprise uses the rift to pull Kirk aboard just as his air runs out. Spock and McCoy then deny having heard his last orders.
- 01Ralph Senensky shot much of the episode before being replaced for running over schedule. Herb Wallerstein completed it and received sole credit.
- 02The Defiant's fate was finally revealed decades later in Star Trek: Enterprise's two-part “In a Mirror, Darkly”.
- 03A law professor later cited Kirk's recorded last orders as an early example of a video will.