Star Trek 739: The Brain Shockers

739. The Brain Shockers

PUBLICATION: Star Trek #11, Gold Key Comics, August 1971

CREATORS: Len Wein (writer), Alberto Giolitti (artist)

STARDATE: 11:26.1 - Follows the last issue. [Edit: Evidence from ST #12 indicates this may actually occur sometime around or after The Enterprise Incident instead.]

PLOT: The crew investigates a planet where a number of ships have disappeared, but when the Enterprise is attacked, it breaks open bottles filled with powerful Vulcan emotions (headed for a Vulcan shrine). They slip into the crew unnoticed until they manifest on the planet surface (fear, laughter, anger, etc.). The planet's master is Malok, an immortal who lures ships there and has their crews face monsters and dangers to feed on their strong emotions. Spock snaps out of his Vulcan fear in a pretty cool sequence...
...and rewires Malok's emotion-draining machine to absorb the Vulcan emotions. These overwhelm him... forever!

CONTINUITY: Early Vulcan history is discussed. Given the business on Enterprise with Surak's katra stored in stone, it's not so hard to believe early Vulcan logicians tried to remove emotions technologically, but had to stop when a part of the soul came out with them.

DIVERGENCES: The usual.

PANEL OF THE DAY - Kirk, micro-manager
REVIEW: What's funny is, the blurb on the cover says:
Which made me read VULCAN FURRIES, especially when the inside cover has this:
But of course, it's FURIES, one R, relating to the Vulcan emotions that must be bottled up again. Cute metaphor. The story has some fairly good moments like the above Spock one-pager, but there's also a lot of running around as various monsters attack. Good resolution, if obvious, and I'd like a little more chemistry between Kirk and the guest ladies, but I guess that wasn't really a concern at this point.