The Changeling

Under attack from an old satellite, when it's on board demonstrates great insight, but the hybrid is mad, a crazy nomad, and it puts up a hell of a fight.

A bucket from the past that has evolved into a super thinking machine jeopardises the Enterprise and potentially all those back on planet Earth.

Season 2, episode 3. The Enterprise has encountered a powerful energy that has wiped out an entire solar system and all inhabitants. It holds the Enterprise and attacks... Kirk opens up communication with it and it agrees to beam aboard the ship. Kirk, McCoy and Spock head to the transporter room to me it. It is a probe that calls itself Nomad. When it hears others call the name Kirk it believes that Kirk is it's creator Roy Kirk. Kirk and Spock work together to find out more about this probe called Nomad. Nomad's programming is to destroy all biological imperfections - meaning all human and humanoid lifeforms. Kirk and crew must find a way to put an end to the highly destructive Nomad, there is one piece of hope since the "perfect" Nomad believes the "imperfect" Kirk is his creator.

Good episode that shows what could happen if thinking robots thinks they are a perfect creation and their imperfect creators must be destroyed. Machine vs Man.

8.5/10

"The Changeling" (Sept. 29, 1967) Old TV Guide synopsis: 'Kirk encounters a sophisticated killer, a talking metallic cylinder programmed to destroy life forms that don't meet its mechanical standards of perfection.' An old earth probe called 'Nomad' (voiced by Vic Perrin) is damaged in deep space, merging with an alien probe to follow a new directive that results in the loss of billions of lives across the galaxy. The Enterprise narrowly avoids destruction by its response to Captain Kirk, mistaking him for its creator, Jackson Roykirk, and revealing itself to be no larger than one meter in diameter. Its inability to understand human traits finds Scotty killed and Uhura's memory erased just for singing to herself; while the former is easily restored to life by Nomad, Uhura must become reeducated in Sickbay until she can finally return to her post. A Vulcan mind meld spells out how Nomad accumulated such devastating power, its mission to destroy 'imperfect' life forms putting Kirk in the position of having it focus upon its own shortcomings before it reaches the planet Earth. This was the prototype for the 1979 TREK feature film, but far more compact and suspenseful in an hour long format.

Yeah, lots of plot holes and cheesy special effects but this is one of my favorites, and it's entirely due to Shatner's restrained (for once) performance. He actually seems to be acting and responding to the crew (mainly Spock) like a normal human being without any of his typical over- the-top hamming it up. Well, with the exception of the ending where, sadly, the writers reverted back to the cutesy crap. I can't really blame Shatner for that, either. When given decent dialog in the rest of show, The Shat did alright in this one, making it one of the most watchable episodes.

And a shout-out to user verbusen for noticing Lt. Leslie in his review. After rewatching these episodes many times, you start picking up the small things in the background, and Lt. Leslie at the helm next to Sulu, as well as wearing a gold tunic (as opposed to his typical red) is unusual. What isn't unusual, of course, is that Leslie has no lines. It's worth noting that the actor who played Leslie, Eddie Paskey, made a point of actually reading the scripts beforehand so he knew when an anonymous red-shirt was going to get offed, and made a point of making himself scarce during those red-shirt casting calls.

I know a writer takes his characters, their history, and then manufactures some kind of threat. It's sort of sitcom without the com. In this episode, a wandering probe that was to be used for benevolent purposes has collided with another device and its mission has changed. It is called "Nomad" because it travels from place to place. Unfortunately, it destroys anything with imperfections; that includes even modest things. In a ridiculous move, it finds Uhura to be imperfect and wipes her memory clean. She is put back in kindergarten. Does anyone see how stupid this is? Even if she is retrained, she has no experiences or data to do her job. Others are killed when they confront the thing. The only salvation is that the thing has mistaken Kirk for the creator of the device. It moves around the ship like an efficiency expert in the sixties (although the worst that could happen then was you got fired). As time goes along, the probe starts to put two and two together and Kirk's control of it begins to wane. Spock is able to figure out its skewed mission by doing the old mind meld. So what to do. The conclusion has to do with logic. Spock's kind of logic.