The Naked Time - Plot

Plot

On stardate 1704.2, the starship USS Enterprise, under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, beams a landing team down to a research station on the planet Psi 2000, a world in the midst of breaking up. The team finds all six of the scientists manning the station have died for no readily apparent reason. The circumstances of their deaths are not apparent; however, the life support systems had been found shut down and all control systems frozen solid.

One of the Enterprise crewmen, Joe Tormolen, removes his gloves and is contaminated by a strange red liquid. When Tormolen and Mr. Spock return to the ship they are given a clean bill of health by Dr. McCoy. Tormolen notices a strange itch and begins to act irrationally. He threatens Lt. Sulu with a knife, then attempts to turn it on himself. Tormolen is stopped and escorted to the sickbay where he later dies, apparently from the superficial wounds he caused himself during the incident. Dr. McCoy is left bewildered, especially since Tormolen's wounds were not that serious—Tormolen seems to have simply lost the will to live.

Soon Tormolen's bizarre affliction begins to affect other crew members and quickly spreads through the ship. They each begin to display both comical and horrific exaggerations of character. McCoy finds nothing like it in Starfleet records.

As the affliction spreads, Sulu abandons his post on the bridge and runs around the ship shirtless, brandishing a sword, and challenging everyone to a duel. Ship's navigator Lt. Kevin Riley wanders down to Engineering where he takes over control of the ship, then declares himself the new Captain of the Enterprise. He requests "double portions of ice cream" for everyone, then begins flipping random switches, fouling up ship systems and warbling "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" repeatedly over the PA system. The Enterprise starts to drift out of control and slowly falls out of orbit, pulled down by the erratic gravity of Psi 2000.

Nurse Chapel confesses her deepest desires for Spock, though Spock rejects her. Spock himself shows troubled emotions and begins weeping uncontrollably because he can't tell his mother he loves her. He tells Captain Kirk that he feels ashamed when he feels friendship toward him. Captain Kirk is also affected, first becoming overly romantic toward the ship, then exhibiting paranoia, breaking down for fear that he is losing his ability to command.

McCoy manages to avoid the affliction and finds that somehow on Psi 2000, water has changed to a complex chain of molecules and once in the bloodstream, it affects people similarly to alcohol, depressing the centers of judgment and self-control.

Riley is stopped and control of Engineering is regained. However, Riley has turned the engines off and the Chief Engineer Scotty tells Kirk that he is going to need more time to restart them than they have left. When Kirk challenges this, Scotty says, "Captain, I can't change the laws of physics!"

To avoid crashing into the planet, Captain Kirk orders that they are now forced to attempt a full-power restart, mixing the matter and antimatter in a cold state. To prevent the starship's warp engines from exploding, they will need to balance them into a "controlled implosion," but this has never been done before. Spock explains the physics behind this: that there is an intermix formula based on the theoretical relationship between time and antimatter, but this theory has never been tested out in an actual starship.

Although the restart is successful, it does send the Enterprise into a space-time warp, which results in the Enterprise and her crew being sent back about 71 hours in time. While they are recovering on the starship's bridge, Spock says that they have three days to live over again, to which Captain Kirk replies hopefully, "Not those last three days." Spock also points out that since the formula worked, they can go back in time to any planet, any era. Kirk then replies, "We may risk it someday."