Catspaw

"Catspaw" is all sorts of First-Generation TOS badassery, and who could argue otherwise? It is penned by none other than Robert Bloch, who, when not penning episodes of classic "Thriller" with Boris Karloff, was also creating and documenting the dress-wearing doings of a certain California taxidermist with an old, Victorian manse and a mommy fixation—for that other Great Ghoul, Alfred Hitchcock.

It's straight up one of the greatest of all TOS outings, IMHO, and it's one of the few episodes of TOS that bridges the gap between fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. And does so successfully.

Let me explain. Let me tell it like it is, Doc. Open all hailing frequencies.

Enterprise is orbiting Pyris VII, an inhospitably "dead" hell world with lots of fog rolling across the studio floor. The Landing Party (I actually like the term "Away Team" better, but they didn't call it that back in Kirk's day), consisted of Sulu, Scott, and a Red Shirt named Jackson who beams back aboard upon request (curious that), and transports up a walking dead man, falling off the transporter pod and looking legitimately as if he's just been embalmed when an eerie, ghostly, clairaudient séance voice tells the Captain the Enterprise is "Cursed! Turn back!" Something along those lines.

So down go Kirk, Spock, McCoy as Landing Party El Numero Two-O, and everything is spooky and fog-drenched, and the Three Witches from Macbeth come floating in as disembodied heads with predictably ugly kissers to moan and groan something I never quite caught but which Spock, in typical arched-eyebrow aplomb, states cogently is "bad poetry." Okay.

The crew looks down, and like an image arising from one of Lovecraft's nightmares, see a matte-painted horror castle manse out of the Horror Castle Manse Halloween store, and end up with an audience with a bald, robe-wearing wizard with a goatee that eerily echoes Anton LaVey (who was coming to national attention during these years).

I'm getting slightly ahead of myself, though. First, they follow a black cat with a weird neck pendant collar to a collapsing D&D floor trap that leaves them chained to a dungeon wall with a de rigueur prop skeleton that was chained up on that studio wall just a little too long.

Scott and Sulu are zombies now, and they come for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy—the latter later becoming a zombie himself. Korob, the robed magician fellow, it turns out, is actually the male bitch for Sylvia, who wears the same pendant as the oversized black kitty and demonic familiar, and who torments the crew of the Enterprise by holding a little pendant of it over an open flame, causing it to heat up considerably on the bridge.

(This is, by the way, the first appearance of Ensign Chekov (Walter Koenig) in the series, and, I'll be damned, he has a groovy 1967 with-it beach bum Monkees hairdo that makes him look like an extra in a grade Z cave man meets nudie cutie flick. Or something.)

So Kirk and Spock overpower the zombie crewman and Kirk ends up predictably romanced by Sylvia, who shows her capacity to alter form so she looks like any number of desirable outer space sci-fi sex kittens. Kirk masterfully plays along, and then she has a flip-out, feeling that she's being "used." You know, a woman scorned. ...At the end, we have a giant demonic kitty shadow, and then...but I'm not going to exactly give away the ending here.

But it involves weird, fuzzy, sort-of bird puppets. And it clocks with the idea that aliens draw the Enterprise crew into these sorts of affairs through illusion and trickery, just so they can utilize them for a few kicks.

And having said that, I'm forced (but not by magic spell) to sign off the only way that I can:

Cat's all, folks! ...

Original Star Trek TV Series Trailer S02E07 Catspaw Preview Trailer

Author's website

Author's YouTube

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Trash Volume 1 (Ebook)

My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to low Trash Volume 1 (Print)

My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels. by C. Augustine (Ebook)

My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein--Four Novels. by C. Augustine (Print)

My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker