- The Enterprise finds an ancient abandoned starship with a malevolent entity aboard, eager to take over the Starfleet ship.
- Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner): The commanding officer of the USS Enterprise Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy): The ship's half-human/half-Vulcan science officer and first/executive officer Lieutenant Commander Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley): The ship's chief medical officer Lieutenant Commander Montgomery "Scotty" Scott (James Doohan): The Enterprise's chief engineer and second officer Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols): The ship's communications officer Lieutenant Sulu (George Takei): The ship's helmsman Ensign Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig): A Russian-born navigator introduced in the second season premiere episode Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett): The ship's head nurse.
The Enterprise finds an ancient abandoned star-ship (beyond the farthest reaches of their galaxy), emitting radio signals. The Enterprise investigates was navigating the galaxy, when Suddenly the ship is pulled by a hyper gravity phenomenon coming from a nearby planetary body, which pulls them towards the course of the radio signals. The body has negative spectral readings on it. It has mass, but everything else is negative. But still the Enterprise continues to accelerate towards it. At the last second, Kirk uses flank thrust to attain orbital velocity around the planetary body.
Once steady, Enterprise notices a star-ship emerge from the far side of the planetary body. this was the source of the radio signals, but the ship is dead, with no power source, and temp of absolute zero. The star-ship is huge. The allow of the ship is unknown and it has been in orbit for 300 M yrs. Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scott board the star-ship. They discover it to be made from a metal that was spun like spider webs and is extremely durable. Additionally the ship has many pods, each of which has been burst open and looks like the crew themselves destroyed the ship. The ship stopped transmitting when the landing party boarded it. Further investigation reveals that the star-ship was built to absorb and store energy. Energy could be of any type, light, sound, motion, magnetic, nuclear etc. Inside the control room, they find a recorded message which warns fellow star-ships that they destroyed themselves as they didn't want to transmit this malevolent life form from the planetary body to the rest of the Universe and chose to destroy themselves.
Thats when the door to the control room is burst open and the entire room bursts into explosions. Scott is able to beam back the landing party just prior to them getting blown up. But something else beams aboard with them and starts taking over the Enterprise immediately. The entity destroys the ancient alien star-ship using the Enterprise's phasers and shuts down life support systems to many parts of the ship. Spock surmises it is an energy based life form, capable of using the ship's computer as its brain and other systems as its parts of body. The entity is looking to control the Enterprise and it can reproduce through mitosis. It will control every computer it encounters and through it every star-ship and planet in the galaxy.
Kirk tricks the entity into releasing control to the auxiliary panels. Spock initiates a free fall into the planet. The entity tries to save itself by exiting the Enterprise and inhabiting the dead planetary body. Then Kirk initiates the warp drives for a slingshot maneuver to save itself.
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What is the broadcast (satellite or terrestrial TV) release date of Beyond the Farthest Star (1973) in Australia?
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