During its initial three-year run (1966-1969) on NBC-TV, one of the defining characteristics of Star Trek (aka Star Trek: The Original Series) was its unabashed optimism about humanity’s future and its relationship to the rest of the cosmos. Here was a science fiction series which proclaimed that by the 23rd century, humankind would all but end war, racism, violence, personal conflict, sexism (well, sort of), and more of our most grievous failings, so that it could soar into the stars as part of a galactic consortium (the United Federation of Planets) of like-minded races and civilizations.
In later years, as the influence of creator Gene Roddenberry began to wane, succeeding spinoffs like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and more recent shows like Star Trek: Discovery began to introduce not just a less rosy view of humanity’s future but also of its two core foundations: Starfleet and the Federation itself. Roddenberry’s mantra that humans would evolve beyond personal disputes was deemed challenging to writing good drama. One entire season of Deep Space Nine put the Federation on a wartime footing, while the other shows explored far darker material as well.
The Original Series has been held up in the decades since it was first broadcast as a paragon of Star Trek’s founding attitudes, even if the intervening years have shown them to be naïve at times or not as progressive as they might have seemed back in the 1960s. Yet TOS did its share of delving into the darkness too. Here are a dozen episodes of the series that ended on far grimmer notes than Star Trek was originally known for—and in many cases, the episodes and the show were better for it.
“The Man Trap” (S1, E1)
The first Star Trek episode to be broadcast on NBC (on September 8, 1966), The Man Trap—written by science fiction author George Clayton Johnson (Logan’s Run)—seems on the surface to be a rather standard monster story.
The Enterprise arrives at planet M-113, where the ship is scheduled to drop off supplies for Dr. Robert Crater and his wife Nancy, who are conducting archaeological research there. The landing party is attacked by a creature that can change shape and needs salt to survive, impersonating the long-dead Nancy and members of the crew to get itself aboard the Enterprise and drain its victims—including Dr. Crater—of the salt in their bodies.
At the episode’s climax, a disbelieving Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) kills the creature—which has again taken the form of Nancy, with whom McCoy once had a relationship—before it can harm Captain Kirk (William Shatner). Despite nearly being killed, Kirk expresses regret that they were forced to exterminate the last member of an ancient species. Yet the fact remains that they do kill the creature, instead of even trying to communicate with it. Although Star Trek held the idea of contacting and respecting new life forms in near-reverence, basic survival outweighed science this time out.
“Charlie X” (S1, E2)
A classic early Trek episode, “Charlie X” opens with the Enterprise taking a new passenger on board: Charles Evans (Robert Walker Jr.), a 17-year-old boy who somehow survived for 14 years on the seemingly uninhabited planet Thasus after his parents’ ship crashed.
What Kirk and the crew eventually discover is that there are in fact Thasians, highly advanced beings who gave Charlie incredible psionic powers to survive on their world—but Charlie is too immature to control them and wreaks havoc aboard the ship. Since Charlie is too dangerous to enter civilization, he must return to Thasus, where he will live a lonely life among the incorporeal Thasians.
Although Kirk tries to convince the Thasians that Charlie could be taught to rein his powers in, it’s no use: despite Charlie’s own frantic pleas that he wants to remain with his own kind (“I can’t even touch them!”), he vanishes from the Enterprise bridge. The existential horror of his fate weighs on Kirk and the crew despite what Charlie has put them through, and the tragedy stems from this young boy being given virtually unlimited power and no human guidance to help him develop as a healthy human being.
“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (S1, E7)
Captain Kirk and Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett) beam down to the frozen planet Exo-III to meet with Dr. Roger Korby (Michael Strong), a brilliant exobiologist—and Chapel’s fiancé—who was thought to be dead. Korby discloses that he has discovered technology, left behind by a long-extinct race, which can create lifelike androids. He has already replaced his assistant with one and manufactured another in the shape of a beautiful woman (Sherry Jackson), with the help of an older android (Ted Cassidy) who once served the planet’s original inhabitants.
Korby creates an android replica of Kirk and sends it to the Enterprise, part of his campaign to seed the galaxy with his own civilization of android replacements. The plan is ultimately foiled, and it’s revealed that Korby himself is an android, his consciousness transferred to the robot just before he died of frostbite. By the end of the episode, all the androids, including Korby, are destroyed, with a rueful Kirk telling Spock, “Dr. Korby…was never here.”
Written by Robert Bloch, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” is a grim morality play about losing our own humanity to technology, which cannot (at least for now) duplicate human emotion, judgment, and reason. Literally the entire guest cast is dead by the end of the episode as the androids end up wiping each other out. This is supposed to be an improvement?
“The Conscience of the King” (S1, E13)
Kirk is made aware by a childhood friend that a man named Anton Karidian (Arnold Moss), leader of a traveling theater troupe, may be Kodos the Executioner, the one-time governor of a space colony who ordered the deaths of half the colony’s 8,000 inhabitants due to a food shortage. Kirk, his friend, and Enterprise crewman Riley (Bruce Hyde) are the last survivors of a group of nine colonists who saw Kodos’ face—the others have been murdered, and Karidian’s troupe was in the vicinity for each death.
When Kirk’s friend is killed and attempts are made on both his and Riley’s lives, Kirk confronts Karidian directly, but the man—although clearly tormented by his past—does not come clean. Karidian, who is indeed Kodos, finds out that his daughter Lenore (Barbara Anderson)—who he thought he had shielded from his horrific history—is the one killing the last colonists who can identify her father.
In the finale, Lenore attempts to shoot Kirk with a phaser, but her father steps into the line of fire and is killed, driving her insane. Kirk, who came to care for Lenore, is left shaken by the entire incident. That’s hardly surprising; justice for a mass murderer is finally served, but far too late and at the cost of several more lives and a young woman’s morality and sanity.
“Balance of Terror” (S1, E14)
“Balance of Terror” chronicles a cat-and-mouse game between the Enterprise and a Romulan vessel that has destroyed several Federation outposts along the Neutral Zone bordering Romulan space. Wary of igniting a full-scale war, Kirk must outmaneuver the Romulan commander (Mark Lenard) and destroy his ship—which is equipped with a cloaking device rendering it invisible—before it can return home.
This one has it all: action, suspense, space battles, and even a lesson in bigotry, as navigator Stiles (Paul Comi) accuses Spock (Leonard Nimoy) of being a spy for the Vulcan-like Romulans. Although the Enterprise defeats the Romulan vessel, its commander expresses regret to Kirk in their only face-to-face communication, suggesting that in a different reality they could have been friends. He then blows up his own ship instead of being taken prisoner.
In a final, tragic scene, Kirk must comfort an ensign who was supposed to get married earlier in the episode—and whose fiancé, a weapons specialist, was killed in the battle. This was the first time that Star Trek addressed the cost, trauma, and needless waste of war, but certainly not the last—although it remains just as powerful and haunting now as it did decades ago.
“The Alternative Factor” (S1, E27)
“The Alternative Factor” is infamous for being one of the worst episodes of Star Trek’s otherwise stellar first season. After a strange phenomenon causes the entire galaxy to briefly “wink” out of existence, the Enterprise picks up a frantic man named Lazarus (Robert Brown), who says he is pursuing a murderous creature that wiped out his people and is responsible for the cosmic “wink-out.”
It turns out that the creature is also Lazarus—just Lazarus from a different universe that’s composed of anti-matter. He’s also the sane one: he explains to Kirk that should he and the Lazarus from our universe, who is composed of matter, ever confront each other in one of the two universes, both realms will be destroyed. His solution—with Kirk’s help—is to shove himself and “our” Lazarus into a sort of magnetic vault between the two universes, where they’ll remain for all time.
All this confusingly plays out with the two Lazaruses constantly switching places amidst a breakdown in logic that even Spock can’t save. Yet that final image—of being locked in a room with your mortal enemy for all eternity—is admittedly a haunting one, and ends an otherwise poor outing on a somber note.
“The City on the Edge of Forever” (S1, E28)
After Dr. McCoy accidentally gets an overdose of a drug that can drive the user insane, he beams down to a planet and vanishes into an ancient time portal left behind by a long-extinct civilization. His actions change the entire course of history, wiping out the Federation, Starfleet, and the last 300 years of human advancement, while leaving Kirk, Spock, and a landing party stranded on the dead planet’s surface.
Kirk and Spock jump through the portal to find McCoy and reset history. They end up in 1930s Depression-era New York, where Kirk meets and falls in love with a young woman named Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). It turns out, however, that McCoy saving Edith from death in a car accident is the incident which changes all of history; for the future to proceed normally, Kirk must let Edith die.
“The City on the Edge of Forever,” written by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison, is still widely considered the best episode of the original series and one of the finest Trek segments ever. It places Kirk in an impossible situation: Edith must perish, or else Kirk will be responsible for sending history down an unimaginably catastrophic path. It’s as tragic an ending as anything seen on TV at that time, and leaves Kirk devastated. It also poses the sobering question: what would you do?
“A Private Little War” (S2, E19)
The Enterprise visits a supposedly peaceful, agrarian planet named Neural, where Kirk—who has been to the planet before—is shocked to see a group of villagers attack a clan called the Hill People with firearms, which this planet should not be able to develop yet. After Spock is shot and wounded, Kirk and McCoy discover that the Klingons have secretly been supplying the guns to the villagers.
The conflict eventually escalates to the point where the peace-loving leader (Michael Witney) of the Hill People—whose wife (Nancy Kovack) is brutally murdered by the villagers—finally asks Kirk for guns as well. A weary captain, convinced that both sides must be armed equally, agrees, telling Scotty (James Doohan) in the end to manufacture a hundred guns, or as he describes them, “a hundred…serpents, for the Garden of Eden.”
“A Private Little War” was written expressly as an allegory for the Vietnam War, with the Klingons and Federation standing in for the Soviet Union and U.S. supplying arms to both sides of the conflict. Gene Roddenberry revised the original script to tone down the references, but the allegory still remains, along with the implication that Kirk’s actions—while meant with good intentions—are only going to prolong and expand the bloodshed.
“The Paradise Syndrome” (S3, E3)
While surveying a world that lies in the path of an asteroid, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy discover that the planet is home to humans who resemble pre-industrial Native Americans. Near their village is a mysterious obelisk that may have been left behind by the higher intelligence that transplanted the humans to the planet ages ago. Kirk accidentally opens the obelisk and falls inside, emerging with his memory erased as he’s treated by the tribe as a deity.
As the Enterprise’s mission to deflect the asteroid fails, damaging the warp drive so that it takes months to travel back to the planet, Kirk builds a new life with the tribe, falling in love with a woman named Miramanee (Sabrina Scharf) and getting her pregnant. But when Kirk is unable to deflect the asteroid himself (since he is a “god”), the villagers stone him and Miramanee, killing her.
Frankly, “The Paradise Syndrome” has dated badly in terms of its representation of Native Americans (even on another planet). It does end on a somewhat positive note, as Kirk, his memory restored, and Spock finally reopen the obelisk and deflect the asteroid. But Kirk—free, at least for a while, of his responsibilities to the Enterprise—truly embraces his brief new existence as “Kirok” and falls deeply in love with Miramanee. Her death (and that of their unborn child) is not only tragic but needless.
“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (S3, E15)
The Enterprise picks up two aliens from the little-known, distant planet Cheron: Lokai (Lou Antonio), who claims he is a political refugee seeking asylum, and Bele (Frank Gorshin), an authority figure who has been pursuing Lokai for 50,000 Earth years and is determined to bring him back to Cheron to face punishment for his alleged crimes.
Both humanoids are all black on one side of their bodies and all white on the other, except that Bele and his people are black on the right, while Lokai and his people are white on the right. This seemingly trivial difference has led Bele’s people to allegedly subjugate Lokai’s race for ages, with the two beings seemingly incapable of reasonably settling their differences.
When the Enterprise arrives at Cheron, it turns out that Bele and Lokai’s races have completely annihilated each other. Yet these two last survivors still cannot give up their hate, with Bele pursuing Lokai to the planet’s surface. Kirk leaves them there, exhausted and dispirited by their inability to stop hating each other. Yes, it’s heavy-handed, but the climax of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and its message about the destructive nature of racism and intolerance, is among the show’s most downbeat.
“Requiem for Methuselah” (S3, E19)
While scouting a supposedly uninhabited planet for a rare element needed to combat an outbreak of Rigelian fever, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are confronted by an elderly man named Flint (James Daly), who tells them they must leave or be destroyed. Flint eventually changes his attitude and invites them to his home while his robot servant locates and processes the element. Once there, they meet his “ward,” Rayna (Louise Sorel), with whom Kirk quickly develops a mutually intense attraction.
Flint, who hails from Earth, eventually reveals that he is more than 6,000 years old, and has spent eons under different names—including historical figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Brahms, Alexander the Great, and others. Lonely, he has built himself an android companion—Rayna—with whom he wants to share the rest of his life. He uses Kirk to bring out Rayna’s emotions, but Rayna, unable to choose between the two men and overwhelmed by her new feelings, self-destructs.
Although Kirk only spent a few hours with Rayna, he is apparently stricken with grief over her demise. When he falls asleep in his quarters, Spock actually mind-melds with him to make Kirk forget her. It’s certainly a somber moment: Kirk is so saddened by the entire affair that Spock feels the need to secretly erase his captain’s memories of it.
“All Our Yesterdays” (S3, E23)
Most of the main cast got a chance to fall in love in Season Three and this, the original series’ penultimate episode, was Spock’s turn in the barrel. When he, McCoy, and Kirk are accidentally thrown back in time on a planet whose sun is about to go nova, Kirk ends up in the planet’s version of the 17th century while Bones and Spock are flung into its Ice Age. There, they meet a woman named Zarabeth (Mariette Hartley), who was sent there from the future as punishment by a tyrannical leader.
Since Spock and McCoy were thrown 5,000 years into the past, Spock begins to revert back to the way Vulcans behaved before they embraced logic, expressing anger toward McCoy and falling in love with Zarabeth. But Zarabeth has lied to them, telling them they can’t return to the future when in reality she just wants them to stay because she is totally alone.
Kirk, Spock, and McCoy all get back in time to escape the supernova, and while Spock tells McCoy that he has reverted back to his normal self, McCoy has his doubts. Meanwhile, Zarabeth’s fate—dying alone, thousands of years in the past—hangs heavily over them as the Enterprise warps out of danger.
What are some of your favorite examples of darker endings on Star Trek: The Original Series?
It’s nice to see “The Alternative Factor” on this list. I know it’s widely considered an inferior episode, but I’ve always found its premise fascinating (and terrifying) enough to make up for its deficiencies.
I find the introduction to this piece misleading, since it perpetuates the common mistake of assuming that Roddenberry’s perfect humanity and “no conflict” rule from his tenure on The Next Generation applied to TOS as well. That is easily disproven by the many flawed, contentious humans in TOS, such as the criminal Harry Mudd, the bigoted Lt. Styles, the vengeful Ben Finney, the deluded John Gill, the malevolent Ron Tracey, etc. TOS posited that humanity would have outgrown racism and war, yes, but at the time Roddenberry was still a TV writer who prioritized drama and therefore embraced flawed characters and morally gray situations. It wasn’t until much later that he started to believe his own hype as this great visionary philosopher to the point that he started to prioritize utopian messaging over entertainment.
Indeed, the first-season TOS writers’ bible says that, while the version of Earth’s future the show depicts was meant to be generally optimistic in terms of overcoming war and achieving unity, writers should avoid making the characters too perfect, but should give them a “believable mixture of strength, weaknesses, and foibles,” because portraying the characters too idealistically would alienate the audience. I think the Gene Roddenberry of 1966 would’ve taken serious issue with the priorities of the Gene Roddenberry of 1987. The bible also points out that depictions of that idealized Earth should be avoided, that the focus should be on alien worlds and human colonies on the frontier where things are still more rough-and-tumble. He wanted drama, danger, and conflict, so the utopian Earth was strictly in the background.
I couldn’t agree more. TOS had the right balance. There WAS conflict – along with incredible hope. That’s why it’s still my favorite in the franchise. With all going on in our world today, I have been returning to Trek again and again for hope. Hate has no home in TOS.
Good choices. Didn’t see the point of criticizing the 1960’s portrayal of Native Americans though. That was a beautiful episode.
What I like about this one, cliched portrayals aside, is that Kirk actually had time to fall deeply in love with an average girl, and to be happy, even if that happiness was brief. The writers should have let her live and bear his son, which would have been a great lead in to a sequel
I wonder what Mr Chakotay would make of Miramanee’s world? (Heck, it’s interesting to wonder what the planet itself looks like after a century or more, whether we include well-known Federation types or not: what might a First Nations civilisation that never suffered a post-Columbus interchange look like circa AD 2024?).
Yeah, except giving them two months to deflect the asteroid makes it deeply implausible that they failed. Just have a shuttle push it gently sideways on a continuous basis and it would’ve been nudged just enough to miss the planet when the day arrived. (And the love story in “Requiem for Methuselah” would’ve been more convincing if they’d simply changed the four-hour deadline to a four-day deadline.)
Sixties TV discouraged strong continuity, because there was no home video and no guarantee you’d get to see every episode of a show, if you were out that evening or if a storm knocked down your rooftop TV antenna, say. Thus, it made sense to prioritize making each episode complete in itself with no dependence on what came before. So setting up sequels was rarely done, and love stories and attachments for lead characters had to be undone by the end of the hour. Also, the attitude was the reverse of today — the classiest shows were the pure anthologies, and serialization was seen as the stuff of cheesy soap operas and old-time movie serials for kids. So even shows with continuing casts aspired to be as anthology-like as possible, because it was more reputable.
Just because an episode is good doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to acknowledge its flaws. The only honest way to evaluate something is to acknowledge both its positives and its negatives. And the ’60s portrayal of Native Americans deserves criticism.
I think that the most poignant moment in TOS is the final line of “This Side of Paradise” (S1, E24), where Spock is asked his opinion on escaping the plant spore-induced euphoria: “I have little to say about it, Captain, except that for the first time in my life, I was happy.”
All our Yesterdays is in my top five. I really wish the series had ended on this high note instead of the lousy Turnabout Intruder
AC Crispin wrote two sequel novels, which are even better than the episode: Yesterday’s Son and Time for Yesterday.
Thanks for the info about these novels! Appreciate it very much.
I really like city on the edge of forever. And paradise syndrome to the best Star Trek ever made in any Star Trek show better than the next generation better than Voyager better than Deep Space 9 better than enterprise.
“its message about the destructive nature of racism and intolerance”
While it is a striking ending, the episode treats the racists and the people pushing back against racism as equally culpable. I don’t think it’s aged well.
I never had that impression of the episode. the message that I always got was that it was two relatively equal groups, on similar footing, but who hated each other because of a superficial difference in appearance. I seem to recall that both groups claimed to be the one being oppressed, but neither actually seemed to be. perhaps I’m not remembering the episode well.
No, one group are definitely slaves. Then after they achieved freedom, they were eventually penned up in ghettos.
No, they were not on equal footing. Their dialogue makes it unambiguous that Bele’s people enslaved Lokai’s people:
Their politics are very clearly based on 1960s American racial politics — a formerly enslaved population granted nominal freedom but still marginalized, fighting for equality but being denied it by their former masters. Which is what makes the episode’s both-sidesism so grotesque and hypocritical.
Agreed. “Last Battlefield” fumbles the whole message by saying that victimization and fighting back against victimization are equally bad and indistinguishable.
Not to mention that, for all that it seems to have gained a reputation these days as an exemplar of TOS’s social messaging, it was never considered all that good an episode back in the day, but was seen as a laughably broad, unsubtle attempt at the kind of message the previous seasons did more intelligently.
Actually, the point of the episode is that “fighting back against victimization” could be worse than the initial victimization.
In Rwanda in the 1990s, for example, Hutu resentment over being lorded over by the Tutsi resulted in the massacre of as many as a million Tutsi.
There are more recent examples, too.
In the context of 1960s America, however — or even 2020s America — that was a hell of a screwed-up and inappropriate message.
It very much fits Desmond Tutu’s comment that when the elephant sets its foot on the mouse’s tail, neutrality sides with the elephant.
I was struck by one moment when Kirk snarks that while Lokai’s people may have died fighting for freedom, he’s still alive, as if that’s proof he’s a race hustler.
I think one problem with the episode is that it mashed together American race relations and the us vs. them mentality of the Cold War in such a way that it detracts from both issues. I don’t recall racism being the main issue between the US and the USSR, nor there being a chance of nuclear armageddon unleashed in the South over Jim Crow laws. Put them together and it’s a whole lot of… huh?
please cite. I love Harlan Ellison & think this is easily a top 10 TOS episode, perhaps top 5, but I’m curious how “widely” this is considered “the best”. personally, I’d rank it after Balance of Terror at a minimum. the 5 you name after it in this article all have an argument to be ranked above it. if you’d said “darkest ending” I think you were more on track. “best” would need to account for non-dark endings like Arena, Space Seed, Changeling, and others.
to step off the soapbox, I think one that might make a nice addition to your list is A Piece of the Action – the last exchange between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy about possibly leaving a communicator behind is a lovely dark twist.
Oh, “City on the Edge” has been consistently regarded as the best TOS episode for more than half a century. Just for a few examples:
Variety (where it’s voted 5th-best episode franchise-wide but best TOS episode)
Empire
Entertainment Weekly (not a ranked list, but states that many consider “City” the best)
Game Rant
And countless others I’ve seen over the decades. It’s such a ubiquitous opinion that I’m surprised you’ve never heard it.
“A Piece of the Action – the last exchange between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy about possibly leaving a communicator behind is a lovely dark twist.”
I’ve never seen that punch line interpreted as “dark” before.
“Where No Man has Gone Before”. Even decent people you’ve known and loved will go completely insane with power when given the chance, that’s pretty damn grim.
Hello all- New subscriber, love this site. On this article, pretty much all of my fave OG Trek episodes were covered, but. There’s always that in matters of taste, yes? But I was quite surprised to see “The Doomsday Machine” omitted. Entire solar systems destroyed, billions if not trillions of lives lost, a starship mostly destroyed and her Captain, Kirk’s old friend Commodore Decker driven insane with grief… cuz his desperate but reasonable effort to save his crew and go down with his ship went completely sideways, this is the very definition of dark. Decker commits suicide, and after Kirk/Spock/Scotty manage to destroy the fiendish forbidden ice cream cone, they wonder if any more are left wandering the galaxy. Even the sketchy science never spoils this episode for me, but the CGI remaster makes me crabby, cuz the look and proportions of the forbidden ice cream cone were changed for the worse. By sketchy science, I mean that early on, Spock determined that the hull of the device was pure neutronium. If so, it wouldn’t need a huge blastifying ray to destroy planets. An object that size (“miles long”) made of neutronium, the densest material we have discovered, would have such a huge/steep gravity well that as it approached a system, all the planets etc, and the star itself would be sucked in like so much dust into a Kirby. In essence it would be the equivalent of a self directed/guided mobile black hole. Begs the question: could the Constellation or Enterprise even pull away from the device, once in the gravity well? Scotty says “Yes”, but I wonder. The article was about dark OG Trek episodes. I cannot think of any other where a member of Starfleet commits suicide. And Decker’s weeping explanation of his missing crew: “Don’t you think I know that? I could hear them, calling, begging, but I couldn’t do anything.” Yeah, for what it’s worth, for me that’s the darkest episode. Takers?
Gravity doesn’t “suck.” It goes as the inverse square of the distance, so it doesn’t get steep until you get really close. Substitute a one-Solar-mass black hole in place of the Sun, and its gravitational pull at Earth’s distance would be exactly the same. The public perception of black holes as magic vacuum cleaners that actively reach out and pull things in over arbitrary distances is utterly preposterous and unscientific.
Besides, even neutronium is immensely less dense than a black hole. A typical neutron star is about 1.4 Solar masses and 10 kilometers in radius. The Planet Killer’s size was uncertain, but visual comparison suggests a size of about 3 km, while the FASA RPG said it was about 10 kilometers. Simplifying it to a cone, that would give it a volume of about 0.27 cubic kilometers for the smaller estimate, 7.5 km^3 for the larger. But since it’s hollow, let’s assume the volume of solid material would be about 20% of its total volume, or .054 to 1.5 km^3. That would correspond to a sphere between 0.23 and 0.71 km in radius, which, assuming neutron star density, would be between 0.03 and 0.1 Solar masses, or roughly 30 to 100 times the mass of Jupiter.
So yes, it would be massive enough to have a disruptive effect on planetary orbits if it passed through the system, but it wouldn’t “suck” like a vacuum cleaner any more than Jupiter sucks up asteroids as it goes past them. A close passage might perturb a habitable planet’s orbit to the point that its climate would become uninhabitable, or cause earthquakes and tsunamis, but it wouldn’t physically rip the planet apart short of a direct collision, I think.
However, all this is rendered moot by the fact that the “neutronium” that exists in the Trek universe is nothing like real neutronium. DS9 established that the Dominion fortress on Cardassia Prime had a door made of neutronium, which would be impossible were it the actual substance, since actual neutronium would be so dense that it would sink right through the planet’s crust and settle in its core, if not for the fact that any chunk of neutronium that small would instantly expand back to normal density because of degeneracy pressure. The same goes for the “neutronium” Iconian ziggurat in “To the Death,” and the “neutronium alloy” of the Dyson sphere in TNG: “Relics,” and the “neutronium-alloy fiber” in 32nd-century Federation starship hulls. It also stands to reason that the Planet Killer cannot be real neutronium, because if it were, it would be impossible for it to maintain a non-spherical shape against the pull of its own gravity.
I rationalized this in my TNG novel The Buried Age by proposing that Trek “neutronium” is actually a shorthand for “hyponeutronium,” an alloy of stable transuranic elements whose nuclei are predominantly neutrons. Actually Diane Duane coined “hyponeutronium” in her 1980s Trek novels, but didn’t define it except as a really dense substance that was nonetheless much less dense than actual neutronium. In any case, Trek “neutronium” or hyponeutronium is only moderately dense, a substance that people can get close to without feeling any significant gravitational pull, so if that’s the composition of the Planet Killer, it would have no significant gravitational effect on the systems it passed through.
BTW – my local library has your book, it’s out, but I reserved it, always curious about ST universe extension stories, find them much more believable than Star Wars stuff. Maybe it’s the science v supernatural thing? Anyway, have a great week!
Thanks for the clarification- I always assumed that it didn’t collapse into a sphere because it was a designed device of immense power that was able to manipulate gravity in some unexplained manner- remember, there was no visible means of propulsion, for example; this is a science fiction show not a physics lecture. The remastered CGI device is of greatly different proportions than that of the original film; the original was much longer and had a kink (for lack of a better term) at the narrow end. I am aware that gravity only sucks when one falls to the pavement (ow), was simply my visual which was less cumbersome to type on my accursed phone than “falling into the gravity well, one by one as it passed”). As a jr. high kid, I created a doomsday device from chicken wire, paper maché, aluminum foil lining with blinking mini Xmas lights inside for a Con in Indianapolis. I used a small 3.5 inch model of the Enterprise and it’s then given “real” dimensions, as well as recruiting my Trekkie helper to double check my TV screen measurements to get the proportions correct. Photos from then of the finished device showed it overhanging both ends of the Ford Country Squire station wagon transport by an alarming amount; I’m 64 now, and this was a seventh grade project, but I think the final length was just north of 24 feet with a mouth just under 3 feet. My Trekkie collaborative partner, who’s mom created a hundred or so Tribbles to sell, and provided the transportation, has passed, so I can’t double check. Mounted backwards (of course) my device proved remarkably aerodynamic, as we made it to the Con without issue. Won an award and was the only thing of that size on display so did garner some attention. The size proved problematic, as post Con no one would store it, so we took a bunch of pics and blew it up with fireworks, another victory for the Federation!- can’t decide if my auto correct is possessed by demons or it just hates me, but I spend a significant amount of time simply correcting the auto substitutions to everything I type
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As for black holes, I believe that they are classified as a phenomenon, not a material. Somewhere in my uni days I recall reading that if a one centimeter cube of real neutronium was possible, it would immediately wreck the planet, because it wouldn’t just travel to the center of the core. It would build significant velocity on it’s first descent, and yo-yo in decreasing arcs until finally centering, with some pretty severe deleterious effects during it’s travels. In school late ’80s/early ’90s modelling wasn’t as simple as now- I’d really like to see a 3D visual of that sort of disastrophe!
Anyway, I’m sorry that this episode didn’t make the cut for the darkest episodes. Stand on my previous note- what other episode has a member of Starfleet fall off the edge from grief and commit suicide? And perhaps the DS9 war with the Founders had an equal body count, but likely not, cuz the device had been wrecking systems for an unknown number of years (“eons”) after “winning” the war for which it was built. And I’m thinking the technology to create such a device could create the means to keep it in shape and propel it- it’s a sci-fi show, not Physics 301.
Again, thanks for the clarification, but you really kinda missed my point about the”dark episode” thing!