THE PLOT
After a female crew member's error results in a head injury for Scotty, Dr. McCoy prescribes shore leave to the sexually-permissive Argelius II, where he believes the delights easily available to a man will cure the engineer's resentment toward women. It certainly seems to be working. As the episode opens, Scotty is enchanted by a beautiful dancer's act, and quite happy at the thought of going off alone with her for a "walk in the fog" (wink-wink-nudge-nudge). Kirk and McCoy head off to another club, in hopes of finding some companionship for themselves, when they hear a shrill scream. Running to the site, they find Scotty... a bloody knife in his hand... standing over the dancer's body.
Scotty cannot remember the actual stabbing. Though all the evidence points to him, Kirk refuses to accept that his friend and engineer could be a killer. Others left the club at the same time, including the dead girl's jealous fiance. But every new revelation just makes Scotty look all the guiltier, even to the engineer himself. As more young women are murdered, Kirk is left to fall back on an Argelian ceremony to try to bring the truth to light.
CHARACTERS
Capt. Kirk: We get a little of leering, "Lothario Kirk," as he happily ogles the dancer, then suggests to McCoy that it would be fun to go to this club he knows "where the women are so..." (amusing gesture). For most of the episode, though, Kirk is put in the position of acting as advocate for his crew member. He is careful to stay on the side of working with the local government, rather than overriding them, and it is clear that he wants to find the truth as badly as the Argelians do.
Spock: Barely even featured until the second half of the show. He does get some good material late in the episode, figuring out the nature of the killer. His reaction to Kirk's suggestion of accompanying him to the aforementioned club "where the women are so..." is also quietly hilarious, as is Kirk's deflated reaction to Spock's befuddled expression.
Scotty: A Scotty-centric episode, but not really in the sense of developing his character. The episode derives its concept largely by having something happen to him offscreen that makes him unlike the Scotty we know, simply in order to make it halfway feasible that he even might be the killer. This does, at least, give James Doohan a chance to do some rather good bewildered acting, as Scott is left more afraid of not knowing what could have happened during his blackouts than he is of the threatened punishment should he be found guilty.
ZAP THE REDSHIRT!
Virginia Aldridge is Lt. Karen Tracy, a medical officer beamed down to scan Scotty's memory. Because the best person to leave alone with a potential woman-killer who is definitely suffering from blackouts is going to be a pretty young woman. As soon as she's alone with Scotty, she ends up predictably dead. And even though the memory-scanning capability presumably still exists once she's dead, Kirk never even suggests a more secured second attempt, opting for a seance instead (leading to a third death - though this one not an Enterprise crew member, so it doesn't fall under this particular heading).
(And before someone gets pedantic - yes, I know that her uniform was blue.)
THOUGHTS
The third of Robert Bloch's three Trek scripts, and it falls somewhere in the middle for me. It's better than Catspaw - which fell far in my estimation of it on this viewing - but not as good as What Are Little Girls Made Of (which itself was a flawed script). Bloch is a competent writer, but I've come to the conclusion that he perhaps wasn't intrinsically suited to Star Trek. Still, he always turns out a reasonably well-structured story, and his episodes are all quite watchable.
More than perhaps any other episode, Wolf in the Fold has a very stagy feel to it, made up of long scenes in limited settings. The first act takes place entirely in a nightclub. The second act is entirely in a house, and mostly in just one room. The third act moves the action to the Enterprise - and again, mostly to just the conference room. If you were to modify this for the stage, by the way, it would be no great task to adjust the third act so that it was still set in the house. I'm not sure whether this was a deliberate attempt to capture the spirit of some of Vincent Price's Edgar Allen Poe movies, which were often similarly stagy, or whether it was simply a script that was tailored to be very budget-conscious.
The theatrical nature of the episode actually works more in its favor than against it. The theatricality brings with it a certain level of atmosphere. The seance scene is particularly effective, with the dimming of the lighting and the increasingly frantic cries of Sybo (well-played by Pilar Seurat), as she senses the evil in the room.
Still, this is decidedly a "B" episode, with several limitations that seem built into the script. The only thing making Scotty an even halfway plausible suspect is an incident that happened off screen, which we are told has made him behave in a way that's completely out of character. We never actually see him display any hint of resentment toward women, making this crammed-in backstory feel all the thinner. This is a casualty of the "each one-hour episode in total isolation" standard of 1960's television. A more modern show might build to this, by having the accident happen on-screen a few episodes earlier, and then actually showing in the next few episodes Scotty displaying some of this resentment, leading to McCoy prescribing shore leave. But with each episode being its own "movie," any backstory has to be crammed in, rather clumsily in this case.
Another problem is that, while the structure of the piece is that of a stage mystery with Gothic overtones, it's an extremely thin mystery. The villain is easy to spot, with no real attempt made to disguise his identity. I couldn't picture anyone who's even halfway familiar with the mystery genre failing to I. D. the killer. There's also an abrupt shift to comedy in the last ten minutes. Some of the comedy bits are entertaining, but it genuinely does jar with the overall tone of the piece.
Still, even if it's a flawed episode, it is an enjoyable one. I have no problem giving this one a recommendation, albeit with a rather dead-average rating of...
Rating: 6/10
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