I have repeatedly stated that the original Star Trek series is looked at with rose tinted glasses. There are some really good episodes, ones well remembered and well loved. And then you get ones with Earth duplicates and energy beings that are written by Gene Roddenberry. But we’re not looking at one written by him, no we’re looking at a good one.

The Immunity Syndrome has the right kind of story to make a great Star Trek episode. A tense situation in space, all scenes inside the ship (or a shuttle pod). The 3 main characters of Spock, Kirk and McCoy all under the pressure of a threat that they and the ship must deal with, and not one with the excuse of “only ship in the region”.

The episode opens up with the Enterprise on its way to Starbase 6, when it receives a messed up message from the USS Intrepid which is a ship crewed entirely by Vulcans (and this was before later writers made the whole species a group of jackasses) and then Spock suddenly gets hit my some mental effect and tells them that the ship, is dead. This ominous statement is made more… Well ominous when upon heading to the system that the Intrepid was at, Chekhov’s readings say the whole system is dead.

What follows is the Enterprise discovering a strange zone of darkness, which seems to be draining all energy including that of living things. There is the meta issue in storytelling that occurs when you introduce something like this, in that how is anything, any civilization meant to develop when you have stuff like this floating about that can just casually wipe out a whole system. But I’ll leave that for now and instead focus on the story.

There is a real sense of tension as the stakes are set right away if the Enterprise and its crew should fail. They themselves are driven to breaking point as they are only kept up by McCoy giving stimulants. Friction between our leads as when the nature of what is causing the zone of darkness is revealed, Kirk must make a choice between McCoy and Spock – which to send out to gain vital information knowing that whoever is sent, will most likely perish. Now we as the viewers know that they will be fine, of course. But it’s a credit to the actors that they portray the idea, that they won’t.

While definitely what you would call a bottle show since they only need the sets of the Enterprise (and the shuttle interior which can be easily done by a small disguise of a ship interior) it’s a very strong outing that plays to the strengths of the 3 main leads. That does mean the other characters don’t have much to do, but they are there, except Sulu who’s actor was busy with other works at the time.

If you were to make a short list of original series’ episodes to watch, it would feel off if this wasn’t included. While there are other episodes with some large thing in space such as the Doomsday machine, there’s just something about this one that lets the 3 leads do great work that is not in those ones.

Rating: 🌌🌌🌌🌌