[6.8/10] “Wolf in the Fold” is a tale of two halves, and the thing that keeps the episode from ranking any higher than the barest level of “good” is that the two have very little to do with one another, and there’s an awkward transition between the two for good measure.
The first half of the episode is a Clue-style parlor mystery. Scotty is found with a bloody dagger and a dead belly dancer with him, and he’s put on trial by the local authorities on Argellius II, a planet where the only law is “love.” What ensues is a pretty engaging little puzzle, where all the forensic and circumstantial evidence points to Scotty having done the deed, but plenty of other characters with suspicions and motives are introduced to muddy the waters and make the audience wonder who’s really to blame.
The second half of the episode is a weird ghost story involving, of all things, the spirit of Jack the Ripper who can apparently take human bodies as hosts and represents an ancient evil that’s been plaguing the galaxy for centuries. That’s a little silly, though as the show bends over backwards to try to explain, not that outlandish compared to some of the things the crew of the enterprise has already encountered. And what follows is a pretty convincingly creepy struggle with the malevolent spirit.
The big problem is that the two parts of the story don’t really connect in a satisfying or suitable way. The first part legitimately had me guessing as to who the murderer was. I didn’t suspect it was Scotty himself (that seems a little too straightforward both for a murder-mystery and for Star Trek), but Dr. McCoy notes that Scotty’s suffering from the after effects of a concussion, which creates just enough uncertainty about his mental state to make it plausible that he could have done this.
But the episode introduces plenty of other potential murderers. The jealous husband is a cliché, but his focus early in the episode suggested there was more to him than met the eye. The disapproving father is a candidate as well for similar reasons. Inspector Hengist has a “protests too much” quality about him and is resistant to Starfleet’s involvement in the investigation. And Prefect Jaris, the head of Argelius II, could be playing some long political game the audience is not privy to.
(For the record, my quickly-debunked guess was that Jaris’s wife Sybo was using her psychic powers to induce Scotty to commit the murders while she remained blameless. Seemed Trek-y enough.)
That gives us some contrived but entertaining “lights flicker off -- someone gets murdered” sequences and a courtroom scene involving some fancy lie-detector test that answers some questions and raises more. While part of it sag, “Wolf in the Fold” tees up its central mystery rather nicely, to where the viewer is excited to try to figure out whodunnit and learn the answer.
Then, we learn it’s the functional equivalent of Jack the Ripper’s ghost.
That ends up being a really weak solution to the mystery. While I would have been totally satisfied in the murderer turning out to be Hengist would have been an entirely satisfactory resolution to the mystery, the motive that he’s just an ancient evil being who’s been killing women for centuries to “feed” on them doesn’t feel like injecting a little science fiction into the whodunnit genre; it feels like a cop out that keeps the show from having to actually come up with an interesting motive for the killer beyond “he’s just an evil ghost thing.”
What’s worse is that the episode spends what feels like an endless amount of time with Kirk and Spock trying to justify/explain that. I can appreciate that their sleuthing leads them to figure out that the woman-killers of legend create a direct path from Earth to Argelius II through Rigel IV, pointing them to Hengist, and that being the equivalent of the chief of police gives him lots of opportunity, but the notion that the Ripper spirit needs to “feed” on fear and that somehow a pleasure planet is the best way to do that is weird.
On top of that, the pair spend so much time trying to science up the notion of a fear ghost in a way that just feels unnecessary, like the show knows this is a specious answer to the question that doesn’t fit especially well into the story or Star Trek in general and so is trying really hard to show how it could kind of sort of comport with other things the crew of the Enterprise has encountered.
It’s a shame because, while it’s an awkward fit and an awkward transition, the following scenes where the Ripper ghost terrorizes the ship and the crew are unexpectedly effective. Doing a haunted house story on the Enterprise makes for an odd but intriguing setup. Again, it seems like the plot to a whole different episode, but Spock having to fight the ship’s computer itself, imbued with the spirit of the Ripper, and distracting it with pi calculations is a clever bit.
To add to that, once unleashed the Ripper is legitimately creepy. The voice modulation effects as it pipes itself in through the P.A. are unnerving. And its taunts -- that everyone on the ship will die and there’s nothing Kirk can do about it -- make for an appropriately spooky atmosphere. Even the final bits, where the ghosts is possessing anyone and everyone it can get its hands on to try to fight Kirk and Spock makes for some chilling stuff at the margins.
Of course, Kirk finds an unlikely solution (knocking out the creature when it’s possessing Hengist and then scattering its atoms into space), and there’s some of the good ol’ Original Series tonal whiplash ending, where Kirk chuckles and declares that after four people have died, including a member of starfleet, and the rest of his crew are high as a kite, he needs some space hookers. It’s just another testament to the disjointed feeling of this episode.
Again, it’s a shame, because independently, both halves of the stories are pretty good. The murder mystery portion in particular was very promising, and while it goes off the rails a bit, the haunting of The Enterprise works fairly well too. The two stories just have little-to-no business being in the same episode, and “Wolf in the Fold” suffers considerably for it.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2017-05-29T21:52:55Z
[6.8/10] “Wolf in the Fold” is a tale of two halves, and the thing that keeps the episode from ranking any higher than the barest level of “good” is that the two have very little to do with one another, and there’s an awkward transition between the two for good measure.
The first half of the episode is a Clue-style parlor mystery. Scotty is found with a bloody dagger and a dead belly dancer with him, and he’s put on trial by the local authorities on Argellius II, a planet where the only law is “love.” What ensues is a pretty engaging little puzzle, where all the forensic and circumstantial evidence points to Scotty having done the deed, but plenty of other characters with suspicions and motives are introduced to muddy the waters and make the audience wonder who’s really to blame.
The second half of the episode is a weird ghost story involving, of all things, the spirit of Jack the Ripper who can apparently take human bodies as hosts and represents an ancient evil that’s been plaguing the galaxy for centuries. That’s a little silly, though as the show bends over backwards to try to explain, not that outlandish compared to some of the things the crew of the enterprise has already encountered. And what follows is a pretty convincingly creepy struggle with the malevolent spirit.
The big problem is that the two parts of the story don’t really connect in a satisfying or suitable way. The first part legitimately had me guessing as to who the murderer was. I didn’t suspect it was Scotty himself (that seems a little too straightforward both for a murder-mystery and for Star Trek), but Dr. McCoy notes that Scotty’s suffering from the after effects of a concussion, which creates just enough uncertainty about his mental state to make it plausible that he could have done this.
But the episode introduces plenty of other potential murderers. The jealous husband is a cliché, but his focus early in the episode suggested there was more to him than met the eye. The disapproving father is a candidate as well for similar reasons. Inspector Hengist has a “protests too much” quality about him and is resistant to Starfleet’s involvement in the investigation. And Prefect Jaris, the head of Argelius II, could be playing some long political game the audience is not privy to.
(For the record, my quickly-debunked guess was that Jaris’s wife Sybo was using her psychic powers to induce Scotty to commit the murders while she remained blameless. Seemed Trek-y enough.)
That gives us some contrived but entertaining “lights flicker off -- someone gets murdered” sequences and a courtroom scene involving some fancy lie-detector test that answers some questions and raises more. While part of it sag, “Wolf in the Fold” tees up its central mystery rather nicely, to where the viewer is excited to try to figure out whodunnit and learn the answer.
Then, we learn it’s the functional equivalent of Jack the Ripper’s ghost.
That ends up being a really weak solution to the mystery. While I would have been totally satisfied in the murderer turning out to be Hengist would have been an entirely satisfactory resolution to the mystery, the motive that he’s just an ancient evil being who’s been killing women for centuries to “feed” on them doesn’t feel like injecting a little science fiction into the whodunnit genre; it feels like a cop out that keeps the show from having to actually come up with an interesting motive for the killer beyond “he’s just an evil ghost thing.”
What’s worse is that the episode spends what feels like an endless amount of time with Kirk and Spock trying to justify/explain that. I can appreciate that their sleuthing leads them to figure out that the woman-killers of legend create a direct path from Earth to Argelius II through Rigel IV, pointing them to Hengist, and that being the equivalent of the chief of police gives him lots of opportunity, but the notion that the Ripper spirit needs to “feed” on fear and that somehow a pleasure planet is the best way to do that is weird.
On top of that, the pair spend so much time trying to science up the notion of a fear ghost in a way that just feels unnecessary, like the show knows this is a specious answer to the question that doesn’t fit especially well into the story or Star Trek in general and so is trying really hard to show how it could kind of sort of comport with other things the crew of the Enterprise has encountered.
It’s a shame because, while it’s an awkward fit and an awkward transition, the following scenes where the Ripper ghost terrorizes the ship and the crew are unexpectedly effective. Doing a haunted house story on the Enterprise makes for an odd but intriguing setup. Again, it seems like the plot to a whole different episode, but Spock having to fight the ship’s computer itself, imbued with the spirit of the Ripper, and distracting it with pi calculations is a clever bit.
To add to that, once unleashed the Ripper is legitimately creepy. The voice modulation effects as it pipes itself in through the P.A. are unnerving. And its taunts -- that everyone on the ship will die and there’s nothing Kirk can do about it -- make for an appropriately spooky atmosphere. Even the final bits, where the ghosts is possessing anyone and everyone it can get its hands on to try to fight Kirk and Spock makes for some chilling stuff at the margins.
Of course, Kirk finds an unlikely solution (knocking out the creature when it’s possessing Hengist and then scattering its atoms into space), and there’s some of the good ol’ Original Series tonal whiplash ending, where Kirk chuckles and declares that after four people have died, including a member of starfleet, and the rest of his crew are high as a kite, he needs some space hookers. It’s just another testament to the disjointed feeling of this episode.
Again, it’s a shame, because independently, both halves of the stories are pretty good. The murder mystery portion in particular was very promising, and while it goes off the rails a bit, the haunting of The Enterprise works fairly well too. The two stories just have little-to-no business being in the same episode, and “Wolf in the Fold” suffers considerably for it.