Title: The Tholian Web
Airdate: 11/15/1968
Plot Summary
In The Tholian Web, the Enterprise finds its sister ship, the Defiant, adrift and in some sort of interphase space. Everyone on-board is dead and the landing party sent to investigate find themselves in danger of phasing out with the ship. Spock, Bones, and Scotty are beamed back, but Kirk is lost. Spock takes command and calculates when he might be able to retrieve Kirk from this space, but it’s not their space. It’s the Tholians, and they want them out.
On top of it all, the crew begins to succumb to the same mental hysteria that affected the Defiant’s crew. That crew ended up killing each other. Will the Enterprise crew do the same before Kirk can be rescued? Or will the Tholians web them in, trapping them in this space to be doomed?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is fairly absent this episode, having to float about in space… or non-space… for most of the runtime. We do get his recording to Spock and Bones which immediately has them both sheepishly realizing they were being buttheads. Except they weren’t really that much, and it’s all unnecessary.
Logical
Spock takes control of the ship when Kirk is lost and pretty much does everything he can to get Kirk back. This is in keeping with Spock’s unwavering loyalty to his Captains, getting himself court martialed for Captain Pike and putting himself in harm’s way whenever Kirk is in danger. This would continue through the movies as well.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy comes through with the cure, which looks like a screwdriver. Or Tang. He also plays the “I knew Spock always wanted the center chair and would do whatever to get it!” card which is really becoming tiresome at this point. Spock has really never desired command and time and time again has put himself in severe career jeopardy, not to mention endangering his own life to do what’s necessary to save Kirk. It’s gotten to the point that McCoy is looking more and more an asshole.
Maybe I’ll give him a little slack on this one with the space crazies making them all binky bonkers.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu hits the gas so hard that the Enterprise just disappears.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov gets to give some of his trademark screams as he spends most of the episode in a psychotic rage.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is the first to see ghost Kirk, and immediately they think she’s gone crazy. I’ve seen other articles calling this out as sexist but that’s bullshit. Everyone was going insane one by one, and while she didn’t exhibit the same symptoms, she wasn’t exactly coming across as calm and rational about it either. Once there was corroboration, they immediately let her go. This was completely logical decision making by McCoy for his part.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty is the second one to see Kirk, thereby confirming Uhura was not insane. He also gets to continue being a raging alcoholic by immediately asking McCoy if he can mix the medicine with Scotch.
Canon Maker
The Tholians! They and the web seem to be so associated with Trek that you’d think we’d have seen them more but we wouldn’t for nearly 40 years with some episodes of Enterprise and even then, it was in the mirror universe.
Speaking of which, the Enterprise episodes In A Mirror Darkly part I and II chronicles just what happened to the Defiant and revisits the Tholians.
This would not be the most notable ship named Defiant, as we’ll find out in Deep Space Nine.
Canon Breaker
I have no idea how Sulu was able to just simply disappear. I’m not clear if they just got out of the web or went through the weird space rift? It’s not very well explained.
Vulcans do not lie. Which is bullshit as Spock lied his ass off at the end regarding watching Kirk’s video orders.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
The crew of the Defiant all kill each other. Given they are all Starfleet and many had redshirts, I’m counting this one. Enterprise crew did ok though.
Technobabble
Recording your video will is apparently standard procedure. It’s also the first time it was ever depicted as a thing. This makes sense if you think about it. TV as a medium was barely around for 20 years at this point, and it was still really rare and expensive to record yourself.
You had to use film and a tape recorder and try to match it up. Videotape for the masses was still a good 10 years away yet 20 years before video cameras became common. So you got to give credit to the writers for something that seems kind of mundane and easily overlooked nowadays but damn near impossible to do in 1969 unless you were extremely wealthy.
We get interesting-looking space suits, which look a thousand times better than what we saw in The Naked Time.
I Know That Guy:
Not a ton of guests in this one, at least not more than a scene or two. Notably, Barbara Babcock returns to do the voice of Loskene. Sean Morgan plays Lt. O’Neil and Paul Baxley the Defiant captain in recordings.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I’m going to get a lot of flack for this but I don’t think The Tholian Web is all that. I feel like it’s more well-remembered for what it put into lore than as an actual story. We’ve already had a “crew goes nuts” story way back when the show started with The Naked Time but you could also look only a few episodes back with Day Of The Dove.
Then you got the Tholian web itself which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Ok, you cage them up, then what? The whole point is you don’t want them in your space so you make sure they stay trapped there?
Not to mention how long it takes to create the web, if the Enterprise didn’t have to stay because of trying to get Kirk back, why would anyone wait around for the web to get finished? That thing would be the most useless weapon ever in normal circumstances. It took hours to make the stupid thing. Pretty sure the Klingons would just smoke those fools and be done with it.
Not that there aren’t some things to like. The space suits are cool looking and a nice addition, if a little cheesy these days. They certainly would echo the look of the astronauts of the 60s but seem a lot more sleek. Of course, now they look hokey, but I don’t care, I still dig them.
Kirk’s recording is spot on and worth the entire episode. It really embodies the whole trinity idea of Kirk, Spock and McCoy as Superego, ego, and id. McCoy is the emotional one, Spock the rational, and Kirk the one to use them both to come to good decisions. Those two need him as much as he needs them. The three are archetypes for a reason.
The reason The Tholian Web rises above what I view as a bit of a weak plot is the character development. It’s great and really gets us to know Spock and McCoy and by proxy, Kirk himself. We get more character development out of his recording than anyone on the entire Discovery series. So I got to give it props for that.
But the Tholians themselves? I like their look as an alien, but the whole web idea is stupid. I’m sorry but it is, it would never work except in that very specific situation where their prey had to stay where it was. Any other time, the ship would just move 100 km to the left and they’d have to start all over.
If you like character-building moments -and I do- then you’ll love this episode. If you demand some logical sense in your plot, you might not as much. I’m a little torn. While I love the look of the Tholians, who, much like the Melkotians, are truly alien-looking; the web is still just dumb to me.
I love the moments between Spock and McCoy. Where I did berate him on always accusing Spock of wanting his command, putting that aside, the back and forth between him and Spock and the subsequent mending of fences was great. I’m going to bump it up a bit since all in all, I do enjoy this episode, warts and all.
