Wolf in the Fold should have been a serious episode of Trek. It certainly tries pretty hard by setting up Scotty as a murderer of women. But then it turns out the murderer is actually an invisible alien who is actually Jack the Ripper. Yeah, you read that correctly. It includes a, "he's dead Jim!" for full effect and even includes a seance. Also more sexism. The episode doesn't exactly fall apart, but Kirk and Spock throwing out random theories about invisible murderous clouds that just happen to be exactly correct is a bit of a stretch.
This one begins with Kirk, McCoy and Scotty hanging out at a belly dancing club of some sort on planet Argelius II. It turns out Scotty was badly injured by a mistake made by a female crew member an this is apparently their plan to get him to not hate women. It seems to be working and he leaves the place with the beautiful dancer. Moments later we hear a scream and she is dead in front of him and he is holding the bloody knife. The three enterprise crew meet with the administrator of the planet, a Rigelian named Hengist who doesn't seem to have a lot of respect of Argelian culture. After questioning Scotty in the club they learn Scotty has no memory of the events and in fact received a concussion at the time of the murder. The actual head of the planet arrives unannounced and insists they return to his house so his wife Sebo can perform a empathic probe of all involved.
While Sebo is preparing Kirk is allowed to bring in a technician with a psychic tricorder (WTF???) to probe Scotty's memory. Instead as soon as they are alone the technician is murdered and Scotty is again found with her hold a knife, and again he has no memories. They move on the the seance lead by Sebo, and she immediately detects a deadly evil spirit is present with them, one that feeds of death and fear. But then the lights go out and Sebo is stabbed in the back and Scotty is found holding her. Things are looking pretty bad, but Kirk convinces the head of the planet that they should all go to the Enterprise so they can use the ships truth scanner and he agrees for some reason.
Back on the ship they all meet in the hearing room and Scotty is questioned and confirmed to not be the murderer. They also question the other suspect, the first girls ex-boyfriend, but he too is innocent. Without many other obvious alternative Kirk and Spock start wildly speculating and asking the computer to theorize and they decide that it must be Jack the Ripper who of course all the aliens have heard of. They then somehow conclude that the alien was last on Rigel so it is obviously Hengist who then proves his innocence by try to fight them all. He fails but the energy cloud thing that is occupying him flees into the ships computer.
Once in the computer it starts ineffectively trying to scare/kill every one on the ship. Spock manages to drive out out of the computer with the old, "calculate the last digit of pi," trick. It then returns to Hengist's body which quickly submits to a Vulcan neck pinch. Not caring if the cloud thing is actually Hengist or is just using him they beam him into deep space on, "wide dispersal pattern," no wonder McCoy doesn't trust the transporters.
Post episode commentary: This one tries to be tense by having a lot of twists, but having one of them be that Jack the Ripper was an alien cloud monster was a twist too far for me. This episode does at least manage to not be boring and that is always a good thing.
5 out of 10
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