Wolf in the Fold by: Robert Bloch and directed by: Joseph Pevney

 

“Wolf in the Fold” is written by Robert Bloch and is directed by Joseph Pevney.  It was filmed under production code 36, was the 14^th episode of Star Trek Season 2, the 43^rd episode of Star Trek, and was broadcast on December 22, 1967.

 

I did not know I needed an episode of Star Trek where it was revealed that Jack the Ripper was a Lovecraftian alien entity that feeds off fear and can only be destroyed by the entire crew of the Enterprise being given large doses of drugs to stave off fear, but that’s exactly what “Wolf in the Fold” gives its audience.  It’s an utterly insane episode of Star Trek and one that builds to that insanity by starting as a fairly standard murder mystery where Scotty is the main suspect, and potentially the one physically responsible for two murders.  Robert Bloch provided this script for the series and you can certainly see his influence on it as the plot structure essentially follows a classic slasher film structure, especially an exploitation slasher from the mid-1960s where the victims are exclusively female and the deaths are quite violent.  This does make “Wolf in the Fold” one of those episodes of Star Trek that hasn’t aged well, the violence against women is never examined as to what it does to the other female characters, instead the thrust being if Scotty will be prosecuted for the murders.  The female characters written in the episode are also explicitly there for pleasure and the male gaze, the planet Argelius II being a peaceful, pleasure planet guided by hedonism.  While that could certainly be an interesting idea for a society, but it’s one of those ideas that’s limited by the underlying sexism of the time meaning Bloch was always going to write an episode with this premise where the female characters are portrayed as lesser and objects of male violence, the entity even is explicitly stated to be preying on women because they are weaker.

 

The investigative sequence of the episode is actually quite odd, it builds to the second murder, the murder of a crewmember that has brought a device that can just reproduce the events of the last 24 hours from somebody’s mind which is honestly a weird bit of worldbuilding to include that if I had to guess the rest of Star Trek will ignore.  It does lead to an interesting scene where the wife of the planet’s highest official holds essentially a séance using empathic contact to discover the murderer, and eventually the creature.  John Fiedler, more well known as Jurror #2 in Sidney Lumet’s version of 12 Angry Men and the original voice of Piglet, plays Administrator Hengist here and his performance is delightfulu.  Fiedler has actual range as an actor, despite it being clear that his Piglet voice is just his own voice, something that means when he is revealed to be the entity, it speaks with the voice of Piglet, but evil.  As soon as the episode makes it back to the Enterprise, many of the sexist aspects of the episode are dropped for it to turn into a haunted house story, the entity ends up possessing the ship itself, stoking fear and danger leading to Kirk ordering the entire crew be given a drug induced happiness.  This makes the climax utterly insane on one hand, but the actors, especially DeForest Kelley and George Takei, play it so well that it works.  Shatner and Nimoy provide the straight men, though Kirk as a character is generally over the top, while Spock’s emotionlessness helps sell the danger while the camp is brought up to eleven.  It’s the ridiculousness of the finale that makes the episode work so well.

 

Overall, “Wolf in the Fold” once again hints at the cosmic horror of the Star Trek universe while still understanding the limitations of a television budget.  Robert Bloch as a writer knows how to write an effective horror or thriller story, even if this is an episode tied down by some extremely sexist tropes and just a generally sexist episode in subtler ways for the portrayal of its female characters.  The insanity is something the viewer should let themselves get sucked into because that’s what really makes it work, plus Joseph Pevney proves he is one of Star Trek’s most dynamic directors in the episode.  7/10.