The Doomsday Machine by: Norman Spinrad and directed by: Marc Daniels

 

“The Doomsday Machine” is written by Norman Spinrad and is directed by Marc Daniels.  It was filmed under production code 35, was the 6^th episode of Star Trek Season 2, the 35^th episode of Star Trek, and was broadcast on October 20, 1967.

 

Star Trek as a series exploring the universe often has a tendency to make the stakes of an episode an entire planet or larger, but what’s fascinating about going through the series week by week for the first time is that “The Doomsday Machine” is the first episode to make these larger stakes feel real.  The fear of nuclear annihilation was prescient in a world five years out from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and writer Norman Spinrad had an unpublished novella, The Planet Eater, that was rejected by several publishers.  Spinrad pitched the novella’s idea to Gene Roddenberry who saw the potential for it to be made as a bottle episode, and “The Doomsday Machine” being a bottle episode assists in making the stakes real.  The horror of the episode comes from the fact that the Enterprise crew are against an entity bent on destruction.  Sure, it’s a robot, but it’s an intelligent robot that targets whatever energy and life it detects which is converted to energy propelling it to the next source of energy.  It’s out there and it’s still moving, there are planets in it's way.  While there is a model used for the creature, it’s an almost amorphous design and clearly not meant to be comprehended by the viewer or characters.  It had an open mouth that consumes and that’s it.  This leaves “The Doomsday Machine” to be an episode that plays out like a cosmic horror story, complete with a character losing their mind to the horrors beyond their comprehension.  There are infinite lives at stake and the small hints of destruction in the model shots showing asteroids and the reuse of the Enterprise sets to show the heavily damaged Constellation are incredibly effective at accomplishing this.

 

“The Doomsday Machine” is surprisingly one of the few episodes of the series that doesn’t place its focus on the main trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, instead placing the main thrust and drive of the story under Commadore Matt Decker, played by William Windom, the one surviving crewmember and commander of the Constellation, found alive in a fugue state in the damaged ship by Kirk and Scotty.  In the grand scheme of a cosmic horror story, Decker is the man who has touched the Old Ones and lost his mind due to it, though in this script it isn’t just seeing the destruction of multiple planets in this system, it’s also Decker’s logical decision to send his crew to the planet to avoid the creature’s destruction.  The creature then promptly destroyed the planet, and while this reveal in the episode is seen a mile off, the anguish in Windom’s performance sells it.  Decker is wracked with survivor’s guilt and is motivated by wanting to destroy the entity by any means necessary, though is blinded by that guilt and rage.  Spock and McCoy spend most of the episode accompanying him on the Enterprise, both attempting to circumvent everybody’s destruction as Decker’s plans would lead to more deaths.  Spock, in a very subdued performance from Leonard Nimoy, is also willing to sacrifice other planets if it means getting the information to Starfleet, reflecting real world events surrounding intelligence agencies during World War II.

 

Decker’s final self-sacrifice is perhaps the darkest moment of the episode, and one of the darker moments of any Star Trek episode thus far, it being a sacrifice of destroying himself and a shuttlecraft in an attempt to save the day and this destruction doing nothing.  Well, almost nothing, it does allow the episode to turn it’s focus back on Kirk and build the tension to the final destruction of the Constitution used to inactivate the creature, leaving it hanging in space, but once the futility is over the episode then loses it’s cosmic horror edge and becomes a more standard thriller story.  Kirk’s the one to set up the explosion and save the day, but it honestly feels like it was just written because Spinrad and the production team knew they had to end happily and couldn’t kill off Kirk.  There were ways to mitigate this small mark against the episode, perhaps by having a redshirt be the one to save the day and press the button while Kirk escapes, but it’s still a fairly effective ending to a great episode.  The direction by Marc Daniels is also incredibly tightly done, composing itself of several tight shots of the characters.  This could be because the episode only has a few sets and Daniels is trying to trick the audience into not realizing it, but the style adds this great sense of tension and madness to enhance the performances.  Plus it’s enhanced further by the score by Sol Kaplan, composed specifically to work in this episode and not become stock Star Trek music like other scores during this second season.

 

Overall, “The Doomsday Machine” somehow manages to be an incredibly effective cosmic horror story filmed on an almost shoestring budget.  The conclusion itself has a couple of less than stellar moments, but shifting focus away from Kirk, Spock, and McCoy is integral at making the episode work as well as it does.  It’s a tale of coming Armageddon and how itt’s impossible to stop it once certain boxes are opened.  9/10.