Season 1 Episode 10 ('Dagger of the Mind')

Most notable feature of this episode: The Vulcan Mind Meld! This ep must've been where that all began. I failed to note the episode in which Spock first used the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, so I'm glad I remembered to mention this one. It's totally a milestone, right up there with the first ep to feature Bones, and the first ep to feature Scotty.

Scotty was not running the transporter, in this one. That made me kind of sad. I like his bad-toupee-and-bad-accent character very much.

The Enterprise is doing a mail-run to a penal colony for the criminally insane, and a 'prisoner' ends up escaping from the prison-planet to the Enterprise. The prisoner turns out to be former-administration on the penal colony, but even before anyone knows that, Bones can feel it in his gut that something ain't right. Kirk n' a femme fatale (who rises above her psychologist-socialist-devil-woman roots by the end of the episode) drop down to investigate, just to shut Bones up.

Can I just say that, so far, this show is about as pro-intellectual as the Tea Party? By which I mean that this show is way anti-intellectual. Smart guys are always bad. Even nominally smart guys, like doctors, are only right when they're getting 'hunches' or whatever, as the whole Bones-insists-something-is-wrong thing makes blatantly clear. Presumably that will change, but if anyone's thinking that this whole anti-intellectual streak in the Tea Party is something that is new to America, early Star Trek episodes will certainly rob them of that misconception.

Good episode, though. I think the series is starting to really find itself, despite the fact that it's still about as secular humanist as Mohammed.

Random stats: 1 Seagrams cherry-whiskey thing, because it was a dollar, 3 big-shots of Boru Irish vodka because the 750ml bottle was on sale (man! It's SO MUCH BETTER than Aristocrat... I know that's faint praise, but it's still true; this shit's decent), 2 defining Vulcanisms exhibited on the show so far, 4 episodes about mental shit (it seems like that number should be higher, but I just ran through the last 9 posts, and that's really it), and 10 episodes that hate Communists in one way or another.