Hello, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Trek Politics. I'm Mary Trump, here with my friend and co-host, Bob Suska.

So Bob, tonight, we're going to talk about a Star Trek episode that I don't completely get, but you probably do.

All righty, spoilers ahead, Mary. This is the Tholian Web from Midway through season three, written by Judy Burns and Chet Richards,

directed by Herb Wallerstein and Ralph Sinensky.

The enterprise is searching for the USS Defiant, which has gone missing in an unexplored region of space,

and they find it glowing green, even those sensors don't pick it up.

Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Chekhov, for some reason, beam aboard wearing glittery space suits.

The crew members they encounter are all dead.

The captain has been strangled.

Everyone aboard has evidently killed each other.

Chekhov begins to show symptoms of space madness, the same space madness that led to the deaths of the defiant crew, while Bones

notices that a crewman and a table are vanishing. Sulu and Scotty watch in horror as the

defiant begins to phase out of our dimension of space time,

and as always, when it rains, it pours. The transporters blow a gasket, leaving Kirk behind to fade out

into another dimension. Meantime, Chekhov's space madness worsens as the Tholians show up to start encapsulating the enterprise in a giant web,

while Spock declares Kirk lost forever, presumed dead.

Bones hypothesizes that the spatial distortions are affecting the minds of the crew,

causing the epidemic of space madness. Spock and Bones

butt heads over how best to resolve the crisis. Bones, of course, wants to flee the region

to protect the crew from the space madness, while Spock wants to stay and see if they can rescue

Captain Kirk. Spock holds a memorial service for Kirk inside the same room

from the wedding scene in Balance of Terror. In her quarters meantime, Urhura begins to feel the

...