Plot
On stardate 2715.1, the USS Enterprise, commanded by Captain James T. Kirk, makes a supply run to the planet Tantalus V, a rehabilitation colony for the criminally insane. After transporting supplies, they receive cargo from Tantalus for delivery elsewhere. Unbeknownst to the staff, the box contains an escaped inmate. Upon contacting the Tantalus administration, Kirk, First Officer Spock, and Chief Medical Officer Dr. McCoy discover that the stowaway is Dr. Simon van Gelder, former assistant to Dr. Tristan Adams, the Director of the Tantalus facility.
Appearing very distressed, van Gelder subdues the transporter technician and makes his way to the bridge. With a phaser in hand, he demands asylum but is quickly subdued by Mr. Spock with a Vulcan Neck Pinch. Dr. McCoy suspects something is wrong and wants to keep van Gelder for examination. He urges Captain Kirk to investigate, and Kirk transports to the colony with Dr. Helen Noel, a beautiful ship psychiatrist he met at a shipboard Christmas party.
Upon arrival, Dr. Adams introduces them to a blank, emotionless woman named Lethe and gives Kirk and Noel a tour of the colony. Adams is affable and accommodating, but his staff seem blank and detached. Adams shows Kirk and Noel the device that caused Dr. van Gelder's injury, an experimental beam called a neural neutralizer. Adams explains that van Gelder felt compelled to test the device on himself before using it on inmates. He was blasted by the beam at full power and driven insane. Dr. Adams claims the machine is perfectly harmless at low intensities and is only used to stabilize and calm deranged inmates. Dr. Noel is satisfied with this explanation, but Kirk remains suspicious.
Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, Van Gelder issues increasingly frantic warnings that the landing party is in extreme danger. His warnings contain cryptic references to the neural neutralizer, but whenever he tries to elaborate, he is racked with pain and unable to continue.
Spock mind-melds with Dr. van Gelder to obtain a clearer picture of his story. The meld reveals that Dr. Adams is himself insane and is using the neural neutralizer on both the inmates and the facility staff, treating them as guinea pigs in his studies of the mind as he learns to break their will and control them. After receiving this information, Spock assembles a security team, but the colony's force field blocks transport and communication.
In the mean time, Kirk examines the neutralizer without Dr. Adams and decides to test it, on himself, with Dr. Noel at the controls. The test begins and Dr. Noel playfully suggests that their Christmas party encounter went further than it did. Suddenly, Adams appears, grabs the controls and increases the intensity of the neutralizer. He brainwashes Kirk to believe he has been madly in love with Dr. Noel for years, and Kirk and Noel are subsequently taken prisoner and confined to their quarters.
Dr. Noel escapes into a ventilation duct. She reaches the facility's control room and interrupts Kirk's neutralizer session by shutting down all power in the complex. Kirk regains his wits and subdues Adams, leaving him unconscious on the floor of the treatment room. A guard discovers Noel's sabotage and restores power before turning his attentions towards Noel. He expects an easy fight against a woman but after a hand to hand struggle she defeats him by sending him hurtling into the electrical equipment with an athletic kick, whereupon he is electrocuted. After killing the guard, she again turns off the power, takes his phaser and returns to the ventilation duct. With the force field down, Spock, McCoy and a security team beam to the planet. Spock restores power to the colony after disabling the force field, unwittingly reactivating the neural neutralizer in the process.
When the neural neutralizer restarts, Dr. Adams is still lying on the floor of the vacant treatment room; the neutralizer empties Adams's mind and kills him. Van Gelder, having recovered his sanity, takes charge of the colony and destroys the neural neutralizer.
Read more about this topic: Dagger Of The Mind
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)