Sex Solves Everything

Scotty suffers from a concussion after an explosion caused by a female officer and naturally McCoy worries Scotty may become a misogynist. So naturally Kirk gets Scotty a prostitute and as Mr. Scott walks grinning into the night with the woman, Kirk says, "Mission accomplished." This is a real episode of Star Trek.

It's "Wolf in the Fold", a second season episode that opens with a belly dancer in a vaguely Arabian harem looking tavern where men lay around being fed grapes by women. Maybe they aren't prostitutes--it's never explicitly said. Actually, Scotty just says to Kirk, "Do you mean to tell me that all these women--that all this is--" To which Kirk replies, "Yes, yes. The Argelians think very highly of their pleasure." So maybe they're nymphomaniacs. Anyway, the string of logic from McCoy's diagnosis to prescription for Scotty is just sort of . . . amazing. I mean, even for the 60s. I must confess to giggling.

Another episode written by Robert Bloch, this was actually sort of a sequel to a story he wrote in 1943 called "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper", which I haven't read, though I have read the other sequel Bloch wrote for it, "Toys for Juliette", which appeared in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions collection, a first edition of which a friend let me borrow in high school. It's been a long time since I read it, but it was more effective than this Star Trek episode. Even so, if you can get past the questionable psychoanalysis followed by the rather baffling investigation into the murders--the prime suspect in three, Scotty is never restrained--there is a somewhat effective spookiness to the story of an eternal spirit of Jack the Ripper. Then this effectiveness is somewhat tranquilised a bit when to combat the entity's desire to terrify the Enterprise crew Kirk has McCoy tranquilise everyone. So the humour in the drugged up Enterprise crew lounging and giggling kind of overrides the Jack the Ripper taking possession of the Enterprise's computers.

This episode did make me smile, though I kind preferred smiling with the show rather than at it in the previous episode, "The Doomsday Machine", which was a nice ship battle episode reminiscent a bit of what makes The Wrath of Khan work so well.