76. A Wolf In the Fold

Subtlety, thy name is Star Trek

76. 'A Wolf in the Fold,' The Original Series, Season 2, Episode 14

I had almost no memory of 'A Wolf In The Fold' when I started watching it. This episode doesn't hit my list of my personal favorites from the Original series and it hasn't risen up though the ranks of pop culture consciousness in the way that, say, one with the Gorn or the Tholian Web have. So, I was able to come into this episode with relatively fresh eyes. And what we see here is the TOS taking a stab at psychological thriller with a scifi twist. Pun intended.

On an alien pleasure planet, Argelia, where Scotty is accused of murdering women. He's literally caught red-handed with a dead body in one hand and a bloody knife in the other. He has no memory of the crime, and professes his innocence. We have here a haunting coming from the mind of the man who wrote Psycho, Robert Bloch. If that is a pedigree for exploring psychological horror, I don't know what is.

As Scotty maintains his innocence despite ridiculous evidence to the contrary, the true murderer reveals itself to be an energy being that hops from host-to-host killing women and feeding off their fear to sustain itself. Scotty was just its latest vessel on the planet at it hacked it's way through the populous. It revealed itself to be an entity that has traveled from system to system, and took credit for countless murders, and had even visited earth in the past, and that's pretty much where this passable mystery to just third-act nonsense.

You see, I've been doing my best to review the Original Series for what it is, but that's not always easy. This episode had great potential. It had a great setup, flamboyant guest stars, an interesting (and edgy for the time) alien culture that mixed hedonism with mysticism. My issue here isn't with any of the usual low-hanging-fruit complaints about the series — the stylized acting, or the limitations of the budget, or the undercurrent of blatant sexism that permeates the 60s — but the inclusion of Jack the Ripper.

Seriously, every Argelian looked as if they stepped right out of a victorian-era magician's poster.

When the alien entity reveals itself as Jack the Ripper, it lost me. It's weirdly out of place, and seems only to exist to give the audience some kind of context for the entity. But it misses the mark. It's forced. And when the entity leaves its host and takes control of the Enterprise, it goes from weird to worse. A being that lives on terror and fear takes over one of the greatest military weapons ever built by human hands. But what should be terrifying comes across as silly. McCoy gets the crew so doped up to keep them from feeling fear and feeding the entity they sway and giggle at their stations. At that point, I'm just waiting it for 'A Wolf in the Fold' to end.

This is supposed to be about Scotty, but it's not. For an episode focused on the chief engineer, all we really learn about the character is that he can creepily leer at women, and doesn't really give a fig about local customs. We learn that Kirk is fiercely loyal to his crew. We learn that Spock has some weird opinions on the emotions of women. We learn that McCoy has a metric f-ton of drugs aboard the Enterprise, and is not afraid to use them.

"Hey, man, an alien murder thing has, like, control of the ship? Like, groovy, man." — Sulu

Now, I feel like I've just been bashing the Original Series in my last few reviews on this list* and I want to acknowledge that that's not really my intent. They just haven't connected with me.  I have great respect of the Original Series, its creators, its vision, its legacy, and the fictional world it created. The character dynamics of Kirk, Spock and McCoy are among the strongest, and smartest in the history of not just television, but all of storytelling.

But for this adventure, what's the message here? Trust each other? Kirk's always right? Scotty objectifies women? I'm not sure. For me, 'A Wolf in the Fold' lacks a strong central theme that elevates other classic episodes above the limitations of the show.

There are adventures of The Original Crew I love with all my heart. This just wasn't one of them.

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Next up, Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, faces her past in 'The Raven.'

*A reminder, that this isn't my list, but io9's Top 100 Episodes of Star Trek of All Time.