Trivia / Star Trek S1 E25 "The Devil in the Dark"

• Creator Breakdown: William Shatner's father died during filming, but he insisted on going through with production, and felt closer to the cast and crew for helping him through the difficult time.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • This was William Shatner's favourite episode, thinking it was "exciting, thought-provoking and intelligent, it contained all of the ingredients that made up our very best Star Treks." He also cited it for the emotion of how the cast helped him through the difficult loss of his father.
  • Leonard Nimoy named this as one of his five favourite episodes, calling it an "interesting episode," stating "I thought [it] was a wonderful episode about the fear of the unknown, how we fear and even hate something that we don't know anything about, learn who your enemy is, and it's not, maybe then it's not no longer your enemy."
  • Gene Roddenberry named it as one of his ten favourite episodes.
  • Grace Lee Whitney named this as one of her favourite episodes.
• Throw It In!: The whole episode. Acrobat/stunt actor Janos Prohaska was promised an episode if he could come up with a convincing alien. He demonstrated the Horta outfit in producer Gene Coon's office and Gene immediately signed off on using it. He then knocked out the script in just four days. He later played the Gumato (mispronounced as "Mugato" by DeForest Kelley) in A Private Little War.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The costume was a heavily updated and modified version of the one Prohasaka created for "The Probe" , the final episode of The Outer Limits (1963).
  • The prop used to depict the damaged reactor for the colony was previously used as the damaged Enterprise transporter circuit found in engineering that Kirk's double phasered in "The Enemy Within".

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