Day of the Dove entity

[Melakon]

After the Klingons are aboard, most of the Enterprise's crew is trapped on other decks, and Spock runs a sensor check.

Spock: There appear to be more life-energy units on board than can be accounted for by the presence of the Enterprise crew plus the Klingons. A considerable discrepancy.

He soon narrows it down.

Spock: No additional Klingons detected, Captain. It is an alien life force, a single entity. I cannot ascertain its location.

Apparently the Entity can confuse sensors initially into thinking it's more than one life-form. At times, it seems like the Entity must be able to maintain itself in multiple locations at once, since it's commandeered the ship, rapidly seems to shift through decks, compensates for temporary advantages by either side, and keeps most of the crew trapped off camera.

But the real puzzler is why did the Entity balance the Enterprise's fighting forces to the Klingons' available 40 people? If it can prevent permanent death and injury to both sides, why doesn't the Entity conserve its energy? It could release 40 Enterprise crewmembers at a time or even 1 at a time, allow them to die, then bring in a new batch, while healing only the Klingons.

It's never suggested this might have been its intention. Though it might mean the entire main cast would die.

 

[Marsden]

Maybe limiting to 80 pawns is conserving energy, keeping track of over 400 might be too much concentration.

 

[T'Girl]

Like an opera, too many characters and you lose track of the story.




:

 

[kirkfan]

I have a feeling that the entity wasn't doing that juts to feed itself. It kept itself entertained too.

 

[Vger23]

I've always felt like this story deserves a follow-up of some kind. I wonder, for example, if other similar beings feed off different emotions?

 

[Timo]

Well, in "Wolf in the Fold", the computer did know of the Drella that feeds on love.

For all we know, restoring dead people to life was also nourishing, rather than consuming, for the entity. It specifically needed to create hatred where there was little or none, suggesting this was the part where it paid in order to get profits, and the profits came from the actual fights - the deaths or perhaps the rebirths.

Apparently the Entity can confuse sensors initially into thinking it's more than one life-form.

I'd say the dialogue indicates the entity is one whopping big lifeform instead. But still just one. That is, Spock was measuring the total life-energy aboard, not counting individual lives, and the count was high because the entity was very energetic.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

This entity looked very powerful to me but it seemed to depend on constant feeding, it would weaken quickly if not fed.

 

[Melakon]

It had killed 400 Klingons before we saw it on the planet, so maybe it had built up its energy reserves and didn't need to kill anyone on the Enterprise yet. It might have been toying with both crews for a while, like a cat with a mouse before the kill.

 

[BoredShipCapt'n]

I've sometimes wondered if Alan Dean Foster was inspired by this episode when he invented "meegees."

 

[Timo]

It had killed 400 Klingons before we saw it on the planet

Kirk and the heroes claim that an entire colony 100 people strong was lost. The episode casts heavy doubt on the colony ever having existed, though. None of the heroes suggest they would have been familiar with the colony before the events, nobody mentions the name of the place, and all evidence goes against it having been there. Clearly, too, the heroes are under the influence of the entity from the get-go, as Kirk is so eager to order "total response" against the Klingons even though there is no plausible evidence of their malice yet...

For all we know, the Klingon battle cruiser exploding never happened, either. The illusions created by the entity are mere personal delusions, not elaborate visual spectacles of ships exploding - but the evidence for the loss of the Klingon ship is not an elaborate visual spectacle, either. It's just hearsay.

Does this mean that when we really saw the ship explode, it was no illusion, and Kirk (unwittingly, and not merely under evil influence) destroyed a ship with 400 people aboard?

OTOH, later on, the entity does create "visual illusions": phasers becoming swords, at least. And all the deaths aboard Kirk's ship prove to be illusory. Perhaps those of the Klingon ship were that, too, and the entity's deranged brother had his way with the still very much alive Klingons in the meantime?

Much about the events remains ambiguous. Were 400 people really locked up belowdecks, begging for help - or merely kept happy with illusions of their own while the heroes fantasized about their phasers being unable to cut through walls they in fact could have melted like butter? So much is indicated to be reversible that it seems likely that none of it ever actually happened...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Marsden]

It had killed 400 Klingons before we saw it on the planet, so maybe it had built up its energy reserves and didn't need to kill anyone on the Enterprise yet. It might have been toying with both crews for a while, like a cat with a mouse before the kill.

Plus we don't know what was happening with those about 400 crew trapped. It seems like the writer completely forgot them but I could imagine quite a bit of hostility being generated by 400 trapped people. Especially with the entity's the ability to generate false memories and stimulate suppressed emotions in sophonts.

"Of all of the Jeffries Tubes in the ship, I got trapped with Ensign Skippy!"

 

[Greg Cox]

I've always felt like this story deserves a follow-up of some kind. I wonder, for example, if other similar beings feed off different emotions?

For what it's worth, I brought the "Day of the Dove" entity back in a story titled "Night of the Vulture" (see what I did there?), which can be found in the Tales of the Dominion War anthology.

 

[Melakon]

Does this mean that when we really saw the ship explode, it was no illusion, and Kirk (unwittingly, and not merely under evil influence) destroyed a ship with 400 people aboard?

OTOH, later on, the entity does create "visual illusions": phasers becoming swords, at least. And all the deaths aboard Kirk's ship prove to be illusory. Perhaps those of the Klingon ship were that, too, and the entity's deranged brother had his way with the still very much alive Klingons in the meantime?

I've never interpreted phasers and knick-knacks turning into swords and the Klingon ship being destroyed as mind controlled illusions, but as actual occurrences. If these had been illusions, Spock should have been able to determine it as easily as he did in "Spectre of the Gun" the week before

 

[Timo]

...But then the entity left. It would have had zero motivation to put anything back the way it was.

Does this mean the phasers remained swords, the bulkheads remained permanently sealed, and the dead now stayed dead?

Doesn't sound like it at all. Okay, for a rare once, we didn't get a "It's all right now, let's get back to work after a few jokes" conclusion to the story, and perhaps after our heroes and villains decided the laughter had done its job, they turned dead serious and gathered their dead, then flew the ship to a starbase where sufficient tools existed for freeing the 400. Then again, perhaps not.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Melakon]

Does this mean the phasers remained swords

I've watched the episode about 15 times in just the last 30 days, and don't remember the swords turning back into phasers.

 

[Greg Cox]

I watched it yesterday and didn't get the impression that the phasers-into-swords business was an illusion. Spock specifically mentions the alien's ability to apparently transmute matter into other forms.

And the last we see of any weapons is when Kang throws his sword away and we heart it clatter onto the deck right before he joins in laughing the entity away. We never see the swords turning back into phasers.

How exactly they fixed things afterwards, I have no idea.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

I watched it yesterday and didn't get the impression that the phasers-into-swords business was an illusion. Spock specifically mentions the alien's ability to apparently transmute matter into other forms.

And the last we see of any weapons is when Kang throws his sword away and we heart it clatter onto the deck right before he joins in laughing the entity away. We never see the swords turning back into phasers.

How exactly they fixed things afterwards, I have no idea.

I agree, it probably wasn't an illusion.

 

[Timo]

I've watched the episode about 15 times in just the last 30 days, and don't remember the swords turning back into phasers.

That's the thing: by the time the entity leaves, the camera has zoomed so close to our main hero and main villain that their hands and the weaponry they hold can no longer be seen. When we last glimpse a Klingon holding a sword, at the start of the zoom-in, the entity is still there.

Spock specifically mentions the alien's ability to apparently transmute matter into other forms.

And Chekov specifically mentions his brother, so there's a bit of ambiguity there.

It seems we catch none of our heroes at their finest hour: McCoy is a warmonger, Kirk orders mercilessly lethal action at the drop of a hat, and Spock speculates in a fashion that allows the enemy to proceed unhindered... If there's a part of the episode where the entity is not dulling them down or winding them up, it's probably only at the very last minutes of the show.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Melakon]

Scott can probably fabricate a few replacement phasers on board, at least until they can get to a starbase. For all we know, the phasers where the trapped crewmen are may be unaffected. Otherwise, guarding 40 Klingons with just your fists and good looks might be difficult.

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

Scott can probably fabricate a few replacement phasers on board, at least until they can get to a starbase. For all we know, the phasers where the trapped crewmen are may be unaffected. Otherwise, guarding 40 Klingons with just your fists and good looks might be difficult.

I am not even sure that good looks will help a lot.