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They killed Hengist!

You should know me better than that. There are plenty of production memos where they discuss discarding guest-of-the-week characters in favor of the regulars.

But they still also did episodes where guest stars played central dramatic roles. Again, the only part I object to is the overstatement that it "had to" be a regular, as if there were no alternative. If you know me at all, you should know I don't believe in binary thinking. Just because there are arguments in favor of using a regular doesn't mean it "has to" be done in every single case.
 
Hengist had been compromised and was no longer the human Hengist who'd migrated to Argelius to serve as an official. He was killed because it was the only way to destroy the Redjac entity, and deservedly so. Whomever Hengist was at one point in his life or career he clearly was no longer that person, and his death was an acceptable loss for the Enterprise crew and the populations of both Argelius and future worlds that might have been victimized by the entity.
 
Some of the more backwards aspects might be that in the future, ugly aspects of humans are discussed in less accusatory manner?

I am stretching here..a pre-Avenue Q take?


My theory is that Hengist was *never* an innocent…Evil Ed to Dandridge in FRIGHT NIGHT…only much worse.

One of Borges’ last stories perhaps describes this concept best:


Redjak’s memory…EXORCIST style

“Come into me”

Not everyone in Megas Tu is nice.

The shape of fear

Perhaps fear itself is a Boltzmann brain--ending where it started...seen in THE THAW?

The injection that acted like super valium...that might be a thing:

The addled don't feel fear.

The young do.

Perfect for spooky stories where kids see things adults cannot. Hard metaphysics.

McCoy's shot kills Freddy Krueger too then :)
 
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There are 111 years between the last previous recorded mass killings of women on Alpha Eridani II (2156) and the events of this episode, so it's possible that Redjac had been in Hengist's body for decades and that even on Rigel IV there'd been women slain but not part of the Enterprise's library computer records.
 
There are 111 years between the last previous recorded mass killings of women on Alpha Eridani II (2156) and the events of this episode, so it's possible that Redjac had been in Hengist's body for decades and that even on Rigel IV there'd been women slain but not part of the Enterprise's library computer records.

It could be that the entity got better at covering his murders and spread his victims out over a greater area, so as to not draw suspicion on himself.
 
There are 111 years between the last previous recorded mass killings of women on Alpha Eridani II (2156) and the events of this episode, so it's possible that Redjac had been in Hengist's body for decades and that even on Rigel IV there'd been women slain but not part of the Enterprise's library computer records.

After Alpha Eridani II, the computer said "There are additional examples." It explicitly was not the last recorded instance.


Maybe Hengist was otherwise an immortal. So the transporter literally had to disassemble him to kill him. Redjac/Hengist is fascinated with killing because he can't die.

You forget: Hengist was already dead at the time, a corpse animated by Redjac. Using the transporter was not about Hengist, it was about Redjac. Since Redjac was an incorporeal entity that could jump between bodies at will, the only way to deal with it was to beam it into space on maximum dispersion, so that "ts consciousness may continue for some time, consisting of billions of separate bits of energy, floating forever in space, powerless," but "it will die finally." (Or so Kirk assumed, though there have been two different comic book stories presuming that Redjac was able to reconstitute itself after all, in the TOS movie era according to DC or in the TNG era according to Wildstorm.)
 
The "additional examples" left unspoken could be attributed to other killers, unless they too were in the same direct line between Argelius and Earth.

Well, of course the computer was only listing similar instances with unidentified killers, but the pattern was enough to allow Kirk and Spock to deduce the existence and nature of the Redjac entity. The obvious implication of the script was that the additional examples would also have been the entity's work. There would have been no reason to include it in the script if that hadn't been the writers' intent.


Even James Blish refers to Spock as a Vulcanite in his first two episode anthologies or so. Could've been residual phrasing from the show's bible, perhaps.

No, that was surely Blish's own coinage. In the early volumes, he took considerable liberties and added his own ideas to the stories; indeed, he even wrote them as if they took place in the same universe as his Cities in Flight series. It was only in later volumes that he confined himself to straight adaptations of the scripts.

The first-season series bible only says that Spock's mother is human and his father is a native of the planet Vulcan, without offering a demonym. The first season referred to people from Vulcan as
"Vulcan" nearly twice as often as it used "Vulcanian," with "This Side of Paradise" and "Errand of Mercy" using both interchangeably. It was standardized as "Vulcan" from season 2 onward.

Blish was also the first writer to make it clear that ST's Vulcan was an extrasolar planet, not the conjectural planet Vulcan that was once believed to be closer to the Sun than Mercury was. People today have largely forgotten about that Vulcan, but at the time of TOS, it was still well enough remembered (at least among the science fiction audience) that Blish presumably felt the clarification was needed. (Given that Spock was originally suggested to be "probably half-Martian," I strongly suspect that Roddenberry initially intended Spock to be from the cis-Mercurian Vulcan, but his science advisors convinced him to make it an exoplanet instead. "Amok Time" was the first episode to make it reasonably clear that Vulcan is not in the same system as Earth.)
 
Vulcans coming from a far off star system meant we were allowed to pretend Star Trek's future would be like ours for just a little longer. I suppose Vulcans could still be sort of from the Sol system if their planet came through a wormhole from somewhere else and parked itself here permanently some time in the future.
 
I wonder if Redjac is the only one of its kind.
Kirk uses the mellitus of Alpha Majoris I as a comparison, and there are apparently more than one of those in existence, so I'd say within the fictional Trek universe there's more than one entity like Redjac, but there being only one that lives from at least 1888 until 2267 and is then disposed of because it's a mass of pure evil and destructive emotions is a far more rewarding concept.
 
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