Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: And the Children Shall Lead tor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Stardate: 5029.5
Captain’s log. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to Triacus, a scientific outpost, responding to a distress call. They materialize to find a whole lot of dead bodies. There’s only one survivor: Professor Starnes, but he dies after a minute, and he doesn’t recognize Kirk before he croaks.
One of the corpses has a bottle of poison in her mouth, and Starnes’s last log entry on his tricorder indicates that they have to all kill themselves because of the enemy within. (Gee, that would make a great title…)
A bunch of kids run out and start playing, completely oblivious to the fact that their parents are all dead around them. A security team beams down and forms a burial detail. But the kids are still all completely unconcerned. McCoy feels this is their extreme reaction to the horror of their parents killing themselves, a kind of traumatic amnesia to not face the reality of their situation.