The Enterprise comes upon two adjacent inhabited solar systems that have had their planets reduced to rubble.\u00a0 Heading into the next solar system they receive a garbled distress signal from the Federation Star Ship Constellation.\u00a0 When they reach the solar system, they find that all the planets except for the inner two have been destroyed.<\/p>\n
As they navigate through the debris field, they discover the badly damaged Constellation drifting in space.\u00a0 Sensors determine that parts of the ship are still habitable but the warp drive and transporters are destroyed and the bridge has been depressurized.\u00a0 Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and some red shirts beam aboard and discover that the crew is missing.\u00a0 While investigating the auxiliary control room they discover the ship\u2019s commander Commodore Decker (played by well known character actor William Windom) slumped over the control console in heavy shock.\u00a0 McCoy revives him with a medication and Decker relates to them that some device of mammoth proportions, \u201cmiles long,\u201d was destroying the fourth planet of the system when they arrived and so the Constellation attacked it with all it\u2019s phaser weaponry but with the machine\u2019s hull made of \u201cpure neutronium\u201d it had not effect.\u00a0 The Planet Killer counterattacked with a beam of \u201cpure antiprotons\u201d and disabled the Constellation.\u00a0 To save his crew Decker beamed them down to the third planet and stayed with the ship.\u00a0 After the Constellation could no longer move the device ignored it and went back to destroying the planets.\u00a0 Decker\u2019s crew called him and begged him to help them as the machine destroyed the planet, they were on but he had no way to save them and this is what led to his breakdown.\u00a0 Kirk speculates that the device is a Doomsday Machine unleashed in some long-forgotten war that destroyed both sides, leaving the machine to travel on indefinitely destroying everything in its path and using the debris from the planets it destroys as fuel.<\/p>\n
Kirk sends McCoy and Decker back to the Enterprise and stays along with Scotty and the engineering team to reactivate the Constellation.\u00a0 Scotty is tasked with getting the impulse engines working and the rest of the team attempts to get the main view screen of the auxiliary control room functional.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile back at the Enterprise Spock is towing the Constellation along and intends to head away from the subspace interference associated with the Planet Killer and warn Starfleet that the device is headed for the most populous area of the galaxy.\u00a0 Communication with the Constellation is cut off by interference and when Commodore Decker reaches the bridge, he relieves Spock of command and orders the Enterprise to attack the Planet Killer.\u00a0 And of course, this goes very badly.\u00a0 In the course of delivering a series of totally ineffective phaser blasts to the hull of the device the Enterprise is caught by a tractor beam and is slowly pulled toward the maw of the Planet Killer.<\/p>\n
At this point Kirk gets visual sensors back on line in time to see the Enterprise heading for annihilation.\u00a0 Scotty provides Kirk with impulse power and some phaser capability.\u00a0 Kirk attacks the Planet Killer and this gives the Enterprise the chance to escape.\u00a0 Kirk contacts Spock and orders him to relieve Decker.\u00a0 Decker escapes from an escort and steals a shuttle craft and despite pleading by Kirk flies it directly into the maw of the device.\u00a0 The explosion of the shuttle craft\u2019s small engine damages the Planet Killer by a small but definite amount.\u00a0 Kirk theorizes that exploding the impulse engines of the Constellation inside the device might destroy the Doomsday Machine.<\/p>\n
Scotty rigs a 30 second delay to provide Kirk with time to escape the Constellation before detonation.\u00a0 As the Constellation comes within a few hundred miles of the device Kirk pushes the timer and calls to be beamed out.\u00a0 But the transporter was damaged during the battle with the Planet Killer and we get the comical scene of Kirk getting closer and closer to destruction and anxiously reminding Spock he needs to be saved.\u00a0 Spock provides monotonous reminders to Scotty of the imminent demise of Kirk while the engineer works feverishly to repair the transporter\u2019s something or other.\u00a0 And of course, Kirk makes it out with nothing to spare and his atoms scrambling in the air as the transporter manages to collect him together out of the hellish nuclear inferno set off inside the Doomsday Machine by the Constellation\u2019s self destruction.\u00a0 We get some prattle between Kirk and Spock about the Constellation\u2019s detonation which is like a hydrogen bomb, the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s doomsday device, being used to destroy a different doomsday device.<\/p>\n This is a great episode.\u00a0 The writer, Norman Spinrad, although not an author I preferred was a competent science fiction writer so he has crafted an interesting science fiction story.\u00a0 The Decker character is given a good part as the Captain Ahab trying to get his White Whale.\u00a0 Kirk gets to add a little humor to the situation of his transporter malfunction problem and he actually does this admirably.\u00a0 He even gets to tell Scotty he earned his pay.\u00a0 There really isn\u2019t too much Shatner acting to mock but this episode doesn\u2019t need it.\u00a0 I\u2019ll call it a 10 \/\/ 0. \u00a0\u00a0This is as good as it gets for Star Trek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Enterprise comes upon two adjacent inhabited solar systems that have had their planets reduced to rubble.\u00a0 Heading into the next solar system they receive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,4,244,2149,240],"tags":[2150,2536,38,1355,44,309,265,1691,293,2535,154,1692,837],"class_list":["post-11131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-tv-reviews","category-star-trek","category-tv-reviews","tag-gene-roddenberry","tag-norman-spinrad","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-sci-fi","tag-sci-fi-tv-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-sff-tv-show-reviews","tag-star-trek","tag-the-doomsday-machine","tag-tv-review","tag-tv-reviews","tag-william-shatner"],"yoast_head":"\n