A Private Little War

This Story: Season 2 Episode 19 (production code 2.16)
TOS Overall: Story 48, Episode 49
Trek Overall: Story 48, Episode 49
Airdate: 2 Feb 1968
Written by Gene Roddenberry & Jud Crucis (Don Ingalls)
Directed by Marc Daniels

Notes

• One of the two episodes that has the other Doctor on the Enterprise – Joseph M’Benga.  The other episode was Season 3’s “That Which Survives“.  The name Joseph didn’t get created until the character’s appearance decades later in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
• This episode was intended as a commentary on the Vietnam War, which was still an active thing at the time this episode was made.
• Jud Crucis was really a pseudonym for Don Ingalls, the original writer.  He did that when he got upset that Gene Roddenberry rewrote his story.
• There was a comic book published in 2007 called “The Order of Things” which tells this story from the Klingon point of view.
• One of the few episodes we get to see McCoy fire a phaser.
• Ned Romero plays the Klingon Krell here.  He would go on later to play Anthwara in the TNG episode “Journey’s End” as well as Chakotay’s Grandfather in the Voyager episode “The Fight“.

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