Day of the Dove

"Day of the Dove"

"Day of the Dove" is the seventh episode of the third season of Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast November 1, 1968 and repeated June 17, 1969. It was written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Marvin Chomsky.

Overview: An alien force drives the crew of the Enterprise into brutal conflict with the Klingons.

Plot

On stardate 5630.3, the starship USS Enterprise receives a distress call from a human colony on Beta XII-A. The colony is apparently under attack by an unknown vessel. On arrival, the Enterprise finds no sign of an enemy ship. Captain Kirk beams down with a landing party to investigate the planet but they find no evidence of a human settlement ever having been there.

Back in space, the Enterprise goes on alert as a Klingon vessel suddenly pulls into orbit with them. However, as the crew watch, a series of strange explosions occur on the Klingon ship that leave it dead in space. The surviving crew of the Klingon ship, led by Commander Kang, beams down to the planet where they quickly capture Kirk's landing party.

Kang denies attacking any human colony but asserts that his ship was fired upon unprovoked by the Enterprise, and he demands that Kirk surrender his ship. Suddenly Pavel Chekov accuses the Klingons of killing his brother, Piotr, however Kang takes this as an opportunity to blackmail Kirk, and thus tortures Chekov until Kirk gives in. Kirk pretends to agree and surrender quietly, however, he manages to trigger a security alert to Mr. Spock on the bridge just before beaming up. When Kirk's team, along with their captors, returns to the Enterprise, Kang and his crew are "held" in the transporter beam, rematerializing later and finding themselves surrounded by an armed security force. The Klingons surrender.

Undetected by the crew, a strange swirl of energy sneaks aboard the Enterprise. The entity interfaces with the ship's main computer, and suddenly the Enterprise jumps into warp at maximum speed on an uncontrolled heading to the edge of the galaxy. Fear and anxiety begin to rise as the ship races out of control. Emergency bulkheads begin to close throughout the ship isolating Kirk and some of his men with the Klingons.

At the same time, mysterious racks of bladed weapons appear throughout the ship and the crew's phasers disappear, replaced by swords and knives. The crew and the Klingons both now armed with the primitive weapons, a savage melee breaks out between them. Kirk manages to fight his way back to the bridge where Spock reports that he has detected an alien presence that seems to have taken over the ship. Spock begins to work on a way of getting rid of it.

Meanwhile, the Klingons have taken over engineering and begin to shut down life support to the rest of the ship. Oddly, their attempts are futile and life support is restored completely on its own. In fact, severely wounded crew who fought during the skirmish find their wounds have rapidly healed, almost as if to keep both sides of the battle on a matched footing (coincidentally, almost all of the Starfleet crew were trapped behind the emergency bulkheads - leaving only enough left to evenly match the Klingons in number). Kirk and Spock surmise that the alien intruder is playing some kind of twisted wargame, but its motives are unknown.

Kirk wants his crew to stop fighting, but they find themselves uncontrollably driven to violence through fearful paranoia. Kirk and Spock decide to try to reach Kang, in order to alert him to the situation, and to reason with him. Meanwhile, Mr. Chekov roams the ship seeking revenge for the murder of his brother Piotr - even though Sulu points out that Chekov is an only child. When Chekov finds the Klingon female Mara, who is Kang's wife and science officer, he threatens to rape and kill her. Mara is rescued by Kirk and Spock who manage to knock Chekov out.

Mara remains wary of Kirk's help. She tells him she has heard that Klingons that are captured are put into Federation concentration camps for later execution or experiments. Kirk tries to calm her down telling her there are no such camps, and that an alien force is behind what is going on. Mara still refuses to believe Kirk; however, the alien entity finally makes an appearance just outside sickbay. The being lingers for a moment and then vanishes through a bulkhead. Spock believes the entity may be feeding off everyone's negative emotions, especially fear and anger. He suggests it may have faked the colony distress call and set up this battle between the crew and Klingons so that it has a convenient source of nourishment.

Having seen the alien herself, Mara is finally convinced and leads Kirk to Kang, who remains holed up in engineering. Mara tries to explain the situation to her husband, but Kang doesn't believe it and demands a final duel to the death with Kirk. The two ship captains begin their swordfight and soon the entity appears to feed off their anger.

Despite the presence of the being, Kang continues fighting. Kirk, however, struggles to ask Kang if he would like to spend the next thousand lifetimes satisfying it. Mara asks her husband to lay down his arms. Kang now realizes the fight is pointless and agrees to a truce. To combat the alien entity, the Klingons and Enterprise crew begin to show goodwill and positive emotion toward each other. This finally drives the weakened alien from the ship.

40th Anniversary remastering

This episode was remastered in 2006 and aired January 5, 2008 as part of the remastered Original Series. It was preceded three weeks earlier by the remastered version of "A Taste of Armageddon" and followed a week later by the remastered version of "Who Mourns for Adonais?". Aside from remastered video and audio, and the all-CGI animation of the USS Enterprise that is standard among the revisions, specific changes to this episode also include:

• The planet Beta XII-A has been given a more realistic earth-like appearance.
• New scenes and more dramatic shots of the Klingon battle cruiser have been added, including replaced footage of the ship as it explodes above the planet.

Further references

The Beta XII-A entity depicted in this episode later appears in Greg Cox's novels about the Q Continuum, where it is called (*). The entity is eventually destroyed in "Tales of the Dominion War" when it sneaks aboard a freighter which is then pulled into a spatial anomaly - destroying the ship, and (*), for good.

Michael Ansara, John Colicos (Kor from "Errand of Mercy"), and William Campbell (Koloth from "The Trouble with Tribbles") would later reprise their Klingon roles on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

External links

• Template:StarTrek.com link
• Day of the Dove at IMDb
• Template:TV.com episode
• Day of the Dove at Memory Alpha
• Review of the remastered "Day of the Dove" at Trekmovie.com
• Day of the Dove script analysis