Star Trek’s first season had plenty of odd detours outside of traditional science fiction aesthetics, with none quite so odd as that of “Shore Leave.” As argued in that piece, “Shore Leave” is a lovely artifact of a different era of television, when season orders were twenty-plus episodes and sometimes, you just needed to fill 50 minutes with an idea. Any idea.
Modern television production is fundamentally different. Episodes like “Shore Leave” do not happen when you have full series orders of 10 episodes with major motion picture budgets. The room for experimentation is gone. There is story to tell, plot to convey, money to spend. Mere experimentation is not the only loss though. There is no longer “seasonality” within a season of television. With 24 episodes and a set airdate schedule - as opposed to sudden drops on streaming services - production could plan episodes around events outside of the story they told. The most obvious examples are the holiday episodes that populate seasons of old dramas - even something like House M.D. has multiple Christmas episodes - which are now confined almost exclusively to network sitcoms where the structural conditions that allow seasonality still exist. But streaming economics are anathema to any acknowledgment of the wider world outside the content. The content is on-demand and must be equally desirable at all points in which it could be demanded. Anything that might date or distract needs to be excised. In much of modern television, even the “episode” - the foundational unit of the medium - is just an arbitrary division of plot or time designed for maximal engagement rather than telling a discrete story.
Kirk and Spock are confronted by Sylvia and Korob. Antoinette Bower played Sylvia, just one stop along an extensive television career that included Columbo, Perry Mason, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, and The Twilight Zone. Theo Marcuse played Korob, in one of his final roles before an untimely death in a Los Angeles car accident at age 47.
“Catspaw” is thus a relic. It is Star Trek’s Halloween episode, having aired on October 27, 1967. In prime spooky season, the Enterprise just so happens to land on a planet of witches.
The episode opens in media res, with the Enterprise having lost contact with a landing party of Scotty, Sulu, and a redshirt named Jackson. They were sent down to Pyris VII to investigate its desolate land. A seemingly possessed Jackson is rescued, but his lifeless body warns the crew to leave or face death. The possessor, it seems, does not understand that facing death is the crew’s average Tuesday engagement. Once on the planet, the crew are confronted by Macbeth-esque witches three, who again warn them to leave or face death. Again, same issue.
Ultimately, the three end up inside a castle, classically medieval with the requisite skeletons, black cats, torches, and cavernous stone hallways. They find the original landing party under the seemingly magical control of two beings: Sylvia and Korob. Sylvia takes a sexual interest in Kirk and Korob takes a political interest in the new arrivals. The two come from a race that cannot experience “sensation” but can control all matter with highly advanced technology, proving out Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote. Sylvia seeks to use Kirk to experience all human “sensation” - here is where you would wink - while Korob realizes she has abandoned their initial mission to explore the galaxy. Korob helps the crew escape, kill Sylvia, and destroy their god-like technology. Happy Halloween.
The true forms of Sylvia and Korob. The Blu-ray transfer has not been kind to these poor little puppets, whose strings are entirely visible in the higher resolution, although it seems they were visible upon the original airing too.
Cards on the table, this is not a great episode of Star Trek. The plot lacks any real tension, thematic content is completely lacking outside of the nonsensical motif of “sensation,” and the crew ends up not having much to do. That it shares a writer with the novel “Psycho” is perhaps more complimentary to Alfred Hitchcock than anything else.1 But what it does have, and what elevates it above the worst and most forgettable episodes, are the wacky aesthetics that come with its premise. At least for the first half of the episode, it’s fun to see Kirk, Spock, and McCoy navigate a set that would fit right into an episode of Scooby-Doo. They’re warned off by ghostly witches drenched in fog, they’re chased around castle halls by a giant - in forced perspective at least - black house cat. The plot comes down to who holds what is essentially a magic wand and there are scattered skeletons galore. While the set is not too far off from the interiors of “Errand of Mercy” - it would be no surprise to learn they are the exact same space - the mood is different than anything Star Trek has done before. “The Devil in the Dark” is arguably a horror story but it is certainly not a supernatural horror story. The clash between the brightly colored, ultra-modern Star Fleet uniforms and the traditional medieval surroundings is compelling. The straightforward - some might say clumsy - attempt to marry a classic Halloween setting with the interstellar adventures of the Enterprise ends up successful precisely because of its disregard of tonality and genre. It’s a big universe out there. Why not?
Would that there were more than this though. By the end of its plot, which mostly involves Kirk, Spock, and McCoy being shuffled between different rooms by their captors, it is significantly less engaging than when it begins. Aesthetics only takes one so far, and that length appears to be about thirty minutes. Independent of any context then, “Catspaw” is a mildly entertaining oddity that ranks solely for its novelty. But there is something charming in its context, in knowing that Star Trek’s cast and crew looked at the calendar and realized that they had an episode due to air the Friday before Halloween. Every show deserves its own Treehouse of Horror.
Stray Thoughts
Despite allusions to pay at other points, there’s an odd statement from Kirk that money is no incentive for the crew because the Enterprise can synthesize gems. Has the Enterprise and the Federation solved scarcity? Why would there still be paychecks? The episode is blissfully, and correctly, unconcerned with these questions.
Plenty of great jokes in this episode despite the low stakes. Kirk correcting himself after calling McCoy “Bones” while the two are imprisoned next to a skeleton was a particular highlight.
Photo Credits
Big Cat: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Catspaw_(episode)
Kirk and Spock with guest stars: https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/halloween-star-trek-catspaw/
Puppets: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Catspaw_(episode)
That writer, Robert Bloch, also wrote Season 1’s “What Are Little Girls Made Of?". I was not the biggest fan of the episode either, which I noted was one of the season’s worst offerings. I have not read Psycho and can’t speak to him as a novelist, but I’m not impressed with him as a screenwriter!