History Recap / StarTrekS1E4TheNakedTime

The ''Enterprise'' has arrived at the ice planet Psi 2000 to document its impending collapse. Spock and [[RedShirt a red shirt]] beam down in environmental suits to investigate why a laboratory on the planet shows no life signs: turns out, everybody froze to death because someone left the door open and nobody cared enough to correct that. While Spock is investigating the corpses, his companion [[TooDumbToLive unwisely]] removes his glove to scratch his nose, allowing a strange red fluid to drip onto his hand.

Chaos engulfs the ship as the disease spreads: crew members act carelessly, laughing maniacs run around the halls painting creepy messages in red paint, Sulu menaces passersby with a fencing sword, and Spock enters a crippling depression. Worst of all, Riley has locked himself in the engine room, hijacking the PA system to make bizarre announcements and advise women on hair and makeup styles, stranding the ship just as the planet is breaking up, threatening the ''Enterprise.'' Kirk and Scotty try to break into the engine room while [=McCoy=] cooks up an antidote. However, by the time Scotty gets the door open, it's revealed that the engines were stopped completely and that restarting them would take more time than they have. Desperate, Kirk orders Scotty to... [[{{Technobabble}} do something involving matter/antimatter annihilation]] to get the Enterprise out of the way. Scotty cries that it only has a [[MillionToOneChance 1-in-10,000 chance]] of not blowing them to smithereens (so, naturally, it will work perfectly), but he needs Spock's help. Kirk tries to [[GetAHoldOfYourSelfMan slap Spock out of his funk]], but Spock only recovers when Kirk empathizes with him under the disease's influence and reveals the heavy burden of being Captain of the ''Enterprise''--contrary to popular belief, ''you can never get laid'', at least not with crew members. [=McCoy=] cures the crew and the ship escapes, but with a strange side-effect: it travels about three days backwards in time, in the series' first instance of time travel.

** Tormolen's rant about how "we don't belong out here" and "we're polluting space" seems to suggest that the sort of long-range space travel they've been doing is relatively new, and still has its critics. Later episodes and series would show Starfleet having been around for over a century already, and warp drive having existed in some form since the late 21st Century.

The ''Enterprise'' has arrived at the ice planet Psi 2000 to document its impending collapse. Spock and [[RedShirt some other loser]] beam down in environmental suits to investigate why a laboratory on the planet shows no life signs: turns out, everybody froze to death because someone left the door open and nobody cared enough to correct that. While Spock is investigating the corpses, his companion [[TooDumbToLive unwisely]] removes his glove to scratch his nose, allowing a strange red fluid to drip onto his hand.

* DeathByDespair: A RedShirt tries to commit suicide, is stopped before he seriously hurt himself, then dies anyway because he can't summon the will to fight off the minor infection of the wound.
* DecontaminationChamber: The transporter room is shown to have the ability to decontaminate the outside of isolation suits with some sort(s) of radiation. Of course the sort of radiation that would do that would also, at the least, damage the skin of the people in the suits unless the suits blocked the rays...and unfortunately the idiot who beamed down with Spock had taken off a glove, been contaminated, and then put the glove back on--thereby making sure the rays would do nothing (not that they'd have done anything against an infection within someone's body anyway).

** No-one on the Bridge notices that the helmsman has wandered off until an alarm sounds because the Enterprise is falling towards the planet below.

* LossOfInhibitions: The crew begins experiencing strange feelings and behaviors after being the search team for a mysterious disaster. Dr. [=McCoy=] ultimately realizes the water on the planet had mutated, causing it to affect the brain like alcohol. While some effects more resemble delusions (e.g., Sulu calling Kirk "[[Literature/TheThreeMusketeers Richelieu]]"), a lot of them (Sulu leaving his station early to fence at the gym, Christine Chapel making an Anguished Declaration of Love to Spock, Spock crying and Kirk confessing how stressed he feels because of his position) fall under the lack of inhibitions that alcohol typically causes.

** Kirk vents about how his love for the Enterprise is AllTakeAndNoGive.

* MeaningfulEcho: Kirk angsts that he can't act on his feelings towards Yeoman Rand, asking only for a few days with a real woman to touch, a beach to walk on and [[TheChainsOfCommanding no braid on his shoulders.]] Later on the Bridge he's giving Rand a LongingLook and reaches out to touch her, only to pull his hand back.

* MillionToOneChance: Scotty gives the odds of successfully cold-starting the engines without blowing themselves up as 1 in 10,000--and that's ''with'' a supercomputer and weeks to calculate the formula. Fortunately, Spock is better than a supercomputer, if they can get him to stop crying long enough to focus.

* ObliviousGuiltSlinging: Chapel tells Spock that "the men from Vulcan treat their women strangely. At least, people say that, but you're part human too. I know you don't... you couldn't hurt me, would you?" Her words clearly affect Spock, not only because he's become infected but because they strike a chord--he's later shown crying over how he could never express affection for his human mother because he was ashamed of his human side and [[WellDoneSonGuy wanted to show he respected the Vulcan traditions of his father]].

* PlotHole: Dr. [=McCoy=], a front-line medical worker, never succumbs to the disease--pretty impressive considering that it manages to afflict much of his medical staff. Though, given that the stuff affects human physiology "just like alcohol", maybe he can just [[NeverGetsDrunk hold his liquor]] better than most of the crew.

* SchmuckBait: What exactly did Kirk expect to happen when he touched the end of Sulu's sword?. (There are no euphemisms in the previous sentence, but don't let that stop your imagination.) To be fair, foils used in sport fencing don't have sharp tips for safety.

* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodSandwich: Averted when Riley sculls his coffee on being called to the Bridge. Tormolen never starts his meal however, what with being [[KnifeStruggle stabbed with his own knife]].
* TooDumbToLive: Joe Tormolen, the RedShirt who accompanied Spock down to the planet. He takes his protective glove off, puts his hand down on the surface of a planet where six people have died with no explanation, and scratches his nose with the same hand. Before he stabbed himself, he claimed that humanity didn't belong in space. Given his horrific failure to follow basic hazmat procedures on a space station where everyone has died for no evident cause, perhaps it was only ''he'' that did not belong in space.

* WhamLine: Kirk and Scotty cut their way into the Engine Room and hand Riley over to Security. Just then Uhura calls to let them know the Enterprise has entered the upper atmosphere of the planet.

* DeadpanSnarker: Spock, of all people, gets in one when he tells two bridge crewmen to, "Take [[Literature/TheThreeMusketeers D'Artagnan]] here to Sickbay."

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.

* ArtisticLicenseSpace:
** Why would a planet break up due to its sun going dark? Also, the universe isn't old enough for white dwarves or any other star to go dark, either, if it is meant that the star turned into a black dwarf. However, a 'dark star' was an early name for a black hole, so it's possible that's what they're referring to, with the planet breaking up and then compressing as it falls into the black hole's gravity well.

[[caption-width-right:350:[[FanService Ohhh myyyy.]]]]

** When Spock tells Kirk that they've travelled back in time three days that they'll have to relive, Kirk has the same reaction.

* BottleEpisode: This episode is considered a bottle show, as it contains no villain and only regular characters, and takes place almost entirely aboard the ''Enterprise''.

** There is no ice-planet's reason in hell that the ''Enterprise'' needs to "spiral down" as the doomed planet shrinks. Are they connected by fishing line or something? Every line of technobabble expended on explaining this problem just digs the hole deeper (The ''gravity'' is changing? ''What''?). Ultimately, of course, the problem is a VoodooShark: It exists to give the crew [[RaceAgainstTheClock a clock to race against]], not to accurately portray orbital mechanics.