Look, a way to not have to animate them wearing bulky space suits!
Captain Kirk and his crew come across an ancient starship with an entity still inside it. Unfortunately, the entity is not feeling particularly friendly...
This episode provides examples of
- Agony Beam: The entity uses one to take control of the bridge crew, zapping Kirk and Spock to do so.
- Ain't Too Proud to Beg: The entity pleads with Kirk not to leave it stranded on the dead star. The Enterprise leaves it there anyway. Can't blame them, considering what it just put them through.
- Being Watched: While the Enterprise landing party is on board the alien ship, Dr. McCoy says being on the ship gives him the creeps and that he feels like something's watching them. He's right: there's an intangible alien being on the ship that's trying to return to the Enterprise with the team.
- Big Red Button: The auxiliary warp drive controls are activated with a red button. Kirk presses it to send the Enterprise on a desperate slingshot maneuver to escape the dead star's gravity and get rid of the alien intruder.
- Bookends: Kirk's log entries at the beginning and end of the episode are nearly identical, indicating the adventure the crew just endured was just another day on the Five-year Mission.
- Eldritch Abomination: The entity possesses starships, is impossibly old, and apparently wants to go to the center of the galaxy for no given reason (Spock figures it wants to spawn, but it doesn't confirm either which way).
- Eldritch Starship: The ship the Enterprise finds looks plain weird. Multiple beehive-like structures strung together, with no visible means of propulsion like any other ship. Natural, considering it was built and manned by a long-gone species. Long gone as in, they were cruising around space 300 million years ago.
- Energy Beings: The entity is made out of magnetic energy.
- Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Spock calls Bones and Scotty primitive for being nervous while on an ancient, mysterious ship. Kirk shoots back they have a right to be afraid, given the circumstances.
- Haunted Technology: The entity takes over the Enterprise bridge's intruder control system.
- Insult Backfire: Spock straight-up calls Bones and Scotty primitive for being nervous on a weird-looking ancient spaceship scuttled by its crew for unknown reasons. Kirk shoots back that they have a right to be twitchy when dealing with something like that.
- Precursors: The species who built the abandoned ship did so three hundred million years ago.
- Ragnarök Proofing: The abandoned ship has been left alone for three hundred million years and is still relatively intact and functional after a few seconds poking about. Until the entity in it wakes up and starts trashing the place.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The entity. The original crew of the derelict ship committed mass suicide to seal it in. The Enterprise team accidentally lets it out, causing all the chaos in the episode.
- Title Drop: At the end, Kirk states the Enterprise's current objective is "mapping beyond the furthest star".
