Star Trek S2 E14 "Wolf in the Fold" / YMMV

Angst? What Angst?: While Jaris shows anger at his wife's murder, it's no stronger than what he feels at the murder of two strangers.
Captain Obvious Reveal: Administer Hengist's blatant attempts to avoid anything that might exonerate Scotty make it pretty easy to guess who the real murderer is. Though his being a demon/ghost of Jack the Ripper is somewhat less predictable.
Complete Monster: Redjac, introduced here, is a non-corporeal being that fed on fear and terror, but enjoyed causing fear just as much as the actual consumption of it. Redjac had the ability to take a humanoid host, and used these hosts for centuries to commit mass murders, most notably as Jack the Ripper. It targeted women because their deaths tended to generate more fear, and was responsible for dozens of deaths across multiple planets, and almost certainly countless more, as it claims to have existed since the dawn of time. In the episode, Redjac murders three women and frames Scotty for all of them. When it's discovered, it takes control of the Enterprise's computers and attempts to kill everyone on-board, cackling all the while. While it appears to have been defeated, it reappeared in both the DC and WildStorm comics.
Hilarious in Hindsight: John Fielder, who is best known as Piglet's voice actor in many of Disney's Winnie the Pooh works, plays Hengist, one of humans Redjac possesses. With this in mind, it's kind of amusing that decades later, a group of filmmakers would create Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, where Pooh and Piglet are murderers.
Ho Yay: Spock displays no interest in whatever the women at the cafe do that Kirk talks about, and for his part, Kirk gets pouty at the possibility of going to see pretty ladies alone.
Special Effect Failure: During a couple of action scenes John Fiedler is replaced by a stuntman who is obviously larger, and wearing an extremely obvious bald cap.
Values Dissonance:
- Redjac feeds on fear, and Spock says that it's targeted women because they're more easily terrified.
- Scotty supposedly becoming a raging misogynist after a woman accidentally injured him, and the only cure is getting him laid. In this line's defense, it's obvious Bones is just talking out of his ass to justify setting Scotty up.
- Some modern reviewers detract the cafe scene, Kara's dance, Jaris' home and the Argelian outfits (particularly what Jaris, Tark and Morla are wearing) as Orientalism, a heavily disputed term but indicating they see the Middle Eastern-style ambience as code for licentiousness and a "backwards" culture (still having the death penalty).^note Gene Roddenberry did not help matters any:
Let’s establish that the nature of this place keeps women eternally young, beautiful, and remarkably busty. Perhaps hormones work better here. At any rate, let’s cast and clothe in that direction with a vengeance. This place is remarkably peaceful because the women screw a lot. Isn’t that logical? Or, if we can’t be logical, let’s at least be provocative.
- And Gene Coon dutifully wrote into the script:
Most of the men, except for our people, have at least one beautiful, exotic woman with them - and the women are all lush, scantily clad, and most, most friendly. We should get the impression that this would be a perfectly splendid place for a man - especially a space man who had been out there somewhere for a long time - to visit.
- Diane Carey turns this around in her Fortunes of War novel Battlestations, in which she states that the devotion of Argelians to hedonism above all else has turned their culture stagnant, so that Argelius can only stay afloat economically by offering shore-leave services to passing starships. And that if you're not there specifically to get laid, it's the singularly most boring place in the galaxy.

YMMV / Star Trek S2 E14 "Wolf in the Fold"

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