Star Trek – The Empath

★★★1/2 December 6, 1968 Season 3 Episode 12

If you want to see where we are…and you missed a few…HERE is a list of the episodes in my index located at the top of my blog. 

This show was written by Gene Roddenberry, Joyce Muskat, and Arthur H. Singer

the Enterprise comes upon a superior alien race that selects the landing party of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a pair of unnamed crewmen as guinea pigs in a psychological experiment. The aliens look like second cousins to the Talosians and we know what intellects they had. You also know what happens to unnamed crewmen in any Star Trek episode.

This crowd is almost as good or bad depending on your point of view. The three regulars are put into a room together with a deaf-mute named Gem played by Kathryn Hays. She cannot speak, but her facial expressions tell much because Hays is a total empath with healing powers.

As all the series regulars are tortured, Gem heals them. But like that other healer from the big screen, John Coffey in The Green Mile it takes a lot out of Gem every time she heals. It’s soon clear she’s the object of the alien experiment.

This is an interesting and emotional episode dealing with the idea of self-sacrifice. Having Gem mute makes her more mysterious as she can’t tell people about herself… the members of the Enterprise must determine for themselves what she is and decide whether she is a fellow prisoner or working with those holding them captive. Kathryn Hays does a great job in the role… expressing Gem’s emotions entirely through facial expressions. 

From IMDB:

This was DeForest Kelley’s favourite episode.

In the sequence of Gem absorbing the boils, Kathryn Hays was strapped to a board and kept absolutely still while make-up was applied. Stop-motion photography filmed the progression. The few moments of the scene took eight hours to film.

This episode contains another one of McCoy’s famous, “I’m a doctor, not a…” quotes. In this episode, it is “coal miner”.

The Empath was written by Joyce Muskat, one of only four fans who were able to sell scripts to the original series, the others being David Gerrold, Judy Burns, and Jean Lisette Aroeste.

After McCoy is tortured, his tattered uniform shirt is an older velour shirt, rather than the new polyester double knits that were used in the 3rd season.

The helical staircase in the station was also used in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (1968).

The orange-red flickers that accompany the Vian transporter effect are frames of the same effect created to represent the Medusan ambassador Kollos.

Though identified as Thann and Lal in the closing credits, the two Vians are never called by their proper names on-screen.

The third season of Star Trek was famously only greenlighted after viewer pressure made the NBC network change their mind after they originally planned to cancel the series after the second season. One of the conditions that NBC insisted on when they finally commissioned a third season was for the production company to implement cuts to the production budget by 25%, and this resulted in production design shortcuts (such as reusing footage, props and sets from previous episodes) as well as a purported drop in the quality of some of the scripts. The budget cuts are particularly noticeable in this episode, one of the last of the third season. With the production budget for the entire series already thinly stretched and close to running out as the production schedule for season three drew to a close, the producers were forced to creatively save money by implementing minimal set design in the laboratory scenes where much of this story takes place (hence why these scenes were filmed against a black backdrop) and re-use the slightly redressed alien desert planet surface set previously seen in The City on the Edge of Forever (1967) among others.

In Turnabout Intruder (1969), Kirk (in Janice Lester’s body) mentions the events of The Empath to try to convince Spock of the mind switch.

The research station shown at the beginning is the same set used in The Naked Time (1966). While it’s not unusual to re-use sets, this also confirms that Starfleet used the same design of research station on various planets.

In the United Kingdom, the BBC skipped this episode in all runs of the series through to the early 1990s. Three other episodes were also skipped, Whom Gods Destroy (1969), Plato’s Stepchildren (1968), and Miri (1966). The reason given was because they dealt with the unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease.

In the final scene, Scotty refers to the story of ‘the pearl of great price’. This refers to a parable told by Jesus in Matthew 13:45-46.

This is the only episode whose first-act credits open on a completely black background.

This was one of the few episodes to quote the Bible.

The Empath bears many striking similarities to Nightmare (1963), where Earth men are subjected to various tortures and torments by bizarre aliens on a mostly barren set with just a few props and backdrops. Both “The Empath” and “Nightmare” were directed by John Erman.

The footage of the Minaran sun is re-used from Operation — Annihilate! (1967).

The preview of the episode shows Gem’s healing of wounds done by jump-cuts, rather than as fades.

Sound effects of the Vians’ laboratory were previously used in Norman’s lab in I, Mudd (1967).

The tripodal device in the center of the Vian laboratory appeared first in Spock’s Brain (1968) as the framework connected to the black box (by “light rays”) that housed Spock’s brain. It is inverted here from its earlier position.

Uhura and Chekov do not appear in this episode.

The couch seen in the underground lab is a gigantic version of the agonizers seen in Mirror, Mirror (1967) and Day of the Dove (1968). It was first seen as the Eymorg’s table in Spock’s Brain (1968).

This takes place in 2268.

Leonard Nimoy and Kathryn Hays were also cast together in Night Gallery’s “She’ll Be Coming For You” (S3:E10, 1972).

Summary

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy suddenly find themselves in an underground laboratory where they meet an attractive young woman who is not only mute but also an empath who can absorb someone else’s pain. When their captors make themselves known, they refuse to explain why the three men have been taken prisoner or why they and the young woman, whom McCoy has named Gem, are there. Inexplicably, they set about torturing them for no apparent reason. Fortunately, Gem’s empathic powers allow her to take away their pain, but only at great sacrifice to herself. When their captors tell Kirk that he must choose which of his men to die, their selflessness comes to the fore, leaving Dr. McCoy to volunteer himself. They all soon learn that the object of the experiment is Gem herself.

CAST

William Shatner … Captain James Tiberius ‘Jim’ Kirk
Leonard Nimoy … Mister Spock
DeForest Kelley … Dr. McCoy
Kathryn Hays … Gem
Alan Bergmann … Lal
James Doohan … Scott
George Takei … Sulu
Davis Roberts … Dr. Ozaba
Jason Wingreen … Dr. Linke
Willard Sage … Thann
Bill Blackburn … Lieutenant Hadley (uncredited)
Dick Geary … Security Guard (uncredited)
Roger Holloway … Lt. Lemli (uncredited)