Operation – Annihilate!

Did You Know?

• Galaxie 500 wrote a song about the episode titled Spook, secretly using the title Spock, for their 1990 album This Is Our Music.
• Rock band Powerman 5000 sampled Aurelan's line 'They came... Things...! HORRIBLE things!' for their song Public Menace, Freak, Human Fly.
• Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a B+ rating.

Plot

The USS Enterprise follows a path of mass insanity that has collapsed civilizations on several planets. They arrive at Deneva, a Federation colony where Captain Kirk's brother Sam, his wife Aurelan, and son Peter are stationed. After a ship flies into the local sun with its pilot raving about being free, Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, and a security detail beam down to the main city. They find the town quiet, then are attacked by men with clubs; the landing party stuns them, but McCoy discovers their brains are still violently stimulated.

The party finds Sam dead, Aurelan irrational, and Peter comatose. Back on the Enterprise, Aurelan briefly wakes to warn Kirk of horrible things spreading from planet to planet, using bodies to build ships, then dies. Kirk and Spock return to the surface and find single-celled creatures nearly immune to phaser fire. One attaches to Spock's back, injecting tissue into his spinal column.

Spock later escapes sickbay deliriously trying to take control of the ship, but is sedated. After regaining control, Spock returns to the colony to retrieve a specimen. He and Kirk determine the creatures are a hive mind, but tests fail to find a way to destroy them.

Production

The script, originally titled Operation: Destroy, was written by Steven W. Carabatsos. In the teleplay, Aurelan was a Denevan woman in love with Kartan, who flew the ship into the sun; her father was also a major character, and neither was infected by the parasites. The original ending had the Enterprise destroy the aliens' central brain on their home world, not use light. Author James Blish used this draft for his print adaptation.

This was Herschel Daugherty's first Star Trek episode; he later directed The Savage Curtain. Child actor Craig Hundley made his first Star Trek appearance as Peter Kirk, later appearing in And the Children Shall Lead. Location shooting occurred at the TRW campus in Redondo Beach, California, and at Schoenberg Hall at UCLA. The neural parasites were created by prop designer Wah Chang from bags of fake vomit.

A filmed scene showing Peter Kirk in a command tunic sitting in the captain's chair, with Kirk agreeing to let him return to Deneva, was edited out due to time constraints, leaving Hundley with no lines and the episode without an explanation of Peter's fate.