The 10 Best Episodes Of Star Trek: The Original Series

The Devil In The Dark

The Enterprise travels to a distant colony world where an unknown creature is killing off the human miners that’ve settled there. As the murdering alien continues to pick off its victims, our heroes have to work out what it is and how it can be stopped. Or is the situation actually more layered than it seems?

“The Devil in the Dark” is another strong episode that has more going on under the surface than it first appears. On one level, it’s a fun, sci-fi horror show but it’s also, as Trek often is, a moral play, culminating in the episode’s best scene – when Spock attempts a mind-meld with the creature and discovers its true motivations.

As for the thematic core of this episode, Leonard Nimoy summed it up beautifully when he named “The Devil in the Dark” as his favorite Star Trek episode of all time:

“‘Devil in the Dark’ I thought was a wonderful episode about the fear of the unknown, how we fear and even hate something that we don’t know anything about. Learn who your enemy is and maybe that is no longer your enemy.”