Title: Wolf In The Fold
Airdate: 12/22/1967
Plot Summary
Wolf In The Fold starts with Scotty on shore leave with Kirk and Bones at a racist strip bar. He takes a dancer with him and kills her, which he does not remember doing. The mystery deepens as more murders happen and could link back to Earth’s past.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk decides that the best way to get Scotty to deal with his resentment of women is to take him to a brothel. I’m really not sure what that was supposed to accomplish.
Logical
Spock works through the problem with the computer efficiently, getting to the conclusion that Scotty was possessed by a creepy alien. He also comes up with getting the computer to calculate pi to fill up its memory.
Spock is also a wet blanket to take to a brothel planet.
He’s Dead Jim
We do get a couple of “She’s dead, Jim” good and proper. I believe it was actually Bones’ idea to send Scotty to this planet which makes me question his medical credentials.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu gets real drugged and comments that Redjack sure is gloomy.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is absent from this episode.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is absent from this episode.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty really has bad luck with women on this show. He’s on this planet because an explosion injured him that was caused by a woman. He then murders a woman. Well ok, he was possessed by Redjack but still. He should just stay on the ship and read his tech manuals.
Canon Maker
Well, Jack the Ripper is now an alien. That’s Star Trek canon now. So there’s that.
There was a lot of asking the computer questions and figuring out where certain words come from or solving problems. This technique will be used a lot in The Next Generation.
This will be the first time that Starfleet officers are subject to the laws of the planet they are visiting. This will integrate nicely into the ideas of the Prime Directive that really gets fleshed out in The Next Generation era.
Canon Breaker
I’m not sure if there was any canon broken but surely there’s got to be something about using whorehouses as psychological therapy.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
One blueskirt gets stabbed to death. The other are natives of the planet.
Technobabble
More lie detector technology is introduced in Wolf In The Fold, you just have to put your palm on a lighted disk and the computer will know completely that you are lying or telling the truth.
I Know That Guy:
John Fielder plays Hengist in Wolf In The Fold. He’s played voices in some Disney movies, most notably as Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. He also was a juror in 12 Angry Men and did many recurring guest appearances on various tv shows such as The Bob Newhart Show.
Charles Macaulay plays Jaris. He frequently played a judge and then DA Markham on the Perry Mason TV film series.
Pilar Seurat plays his wife, Sybo. She was on a ton of ’60s TV primarily as Asian characters but was able to take on various nationalities. Her son is Dean Devlin who gave us Independence Day and then a whole pile of shit that continues to this day.
Tanya Lemani plays the gypsy dancer who gets killed and Charles Kierkop plays her fiancé, Morla. Dierkop played supporting roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, and Police Woman. Gen’Xers will also know him as the killer Santa in the original Silent Night, Deadly Night.
Judith McConnell appears as poor Yeoman Stabbytodeath Tankris. This was one of her first roles. She went on to have a long role in the soap Santa Barbera and various other soaps. She even played in The Purge: Anarchy just 10 years ago and is still working as of 2019.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Oy I do not like Wolf In The Fold. For some reason, comic writers seemed to love the idea of Redjack and kept bringing him back. I personally hate it but that’s just me.
The idea that Scotty would have an accident caused by a woman (the details are sketchy) and therefore hate all women? And then the therapy is to take him down to a sex planet? Ok so he has a bunch of sex and now he thinks women belong in engine rooms even more? Or does he see them all where they belong, scantily clad sex playthings! (Based. Heh.)
Seriously. This is a whole pile of bullshit. It’s all a weird contrived setup to get Scotty into this mess so we can get into this whole Redjack thing. Oh, Redjack. Who turned out to be Jack The Ripper in the late 1800s London. You gotta be kiddin’ me.
Then there’s the unintentional hilarity of having John Fielder get possessed by Redjack. Having Piglet screaming “YOU WILL ALL DIE! DIE! DIE!” is just too funny to be taken seriously.
Oh by the way, we’ll have a weird séance and the lady who runs it will get killed during the ceremony.
Then when they finally figure out it’s an alien, it takes over the computers too? So to stop it, they have the computer compute to the last digit of pi. That was kinda hilarious as Redjack wails as he gets sucked up into math.
Finally, they have to give everyone happy drugs which makes the entire crew go silly to keep it from taking anyone over. This ends the episode on an inappropriate comedic note given three people have been brutally murdered.
Wolf In The Fold is a shitshow from beginning to end. Maybe some of you like it and it’s purely a subjective matter of taste but I really dislike this episode.
Except for murdering Piglet. That does make me laugh. Half star for the psychotic piglet.
