The Doomsday Machine

This Story: Season 2 Episode 6 (production code 2.6)
TOS Overall: Story 35, Episode 36
Trek Overall: Story 35, Episode 36
Airdate: 20 Oct 1967
Written by Norman Spinrad
Directed by Marc Daniels

Notes

• My single favorite episode of the original Star Trek series.
• A future novel (Vendetta) postulated the theory that the Doomsday Machine was created to combat the Borg.
• This is the first episode with the auxiliary control room, although we see it in the Constellation first.
• This is the first episode where someone (Kirk) walks around the bridge and goes in front of the view screen.
• Scotty being thrown around engineering is reused footage from “Tomorrow is Yesterday“.
• The first episode with Kirk’s green “wrap around” uniform.
• One of the few episodes of the series to get a complete score (by Sol Kaplan).
• The events of this episode are briefly seen again in the “Star Trek Short Treks” episode “Ephraim & Dot“.
• While it was never explicitly stated on screen in either story, Commodore Decker of this episode is the father of “Will Decker”, the brief captain of the Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture“.
• William Windom returned to play Decker again nearly 40 years later in the Star Trek: New Voyages fan film, “In Harm’s Way“.  Windom is nearly unrecognizable as Decker here.
• There was a fan production called “Doomsday” which shows the events before this episode when Decker still had his crew on the Constellation.  Keep in mind it’s a fan production and is just 15 mins long, but check it out on Youtube here.

Links

[ Wikipedia | Memory Alpha | Amazon US Blu-Ray | Amazon US Blu-Ray ]

I wanted to do something special for this episode, so I recorded myself watching it – created my own audio commentary.  It’s in a fourth tweet on Twitter, but I also put it on Youtube and have embedded it below.