It’s Saturday, so: Trek. I’ve been re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek with the goal of taking a peek for ideas useful for those playing Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius.  

I’ve collated all the previous episode scenario seeds on a tab under Star Trek Adventures here on the blog, so if you want to look through the previous episodes, that’s where you can find them. Today? That brings me to an episode I frankly enjoyed so very much on this re-watch and it all comes down to one character: Dr. Helen Noel. Which episode?

Dagger of the Mind

Energize.

Okay, when I say my enjoyment of this episode comes down almost entirely to Dr. Helen Noel, I am not understating. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To start with, Enterprise is popping by a penal colony and everyone on the Bridge is waxing poetic about how Dr. Adams revolutionized penology and has turned what used to be prisons into something closer to “resorts” and that people who were once violent criminals get rehabilitated now and he’s the man.

(Obviously, Harry Mudd wasn’t assigned to this penal colony.)

They beam down some stuff, and beam up some stuff, but it turns out a wide-eyed and manic Dr. Simon van Gelder hides inside the crate of beamed up stuff, beats up this week’s random Star Trek Hunk, and goes on a tear begging for asylum and yelling and stuff and so the crew reach out to Dr. Adams and he’s all, “Yeah, so sad, he went insane,” and while Kirk is down for believing the Dr. Adams because he’s Dr. Adams, Bones just feels something off about all this—no factual data, just as a doctor he looks at his patient and thinks, I’m not down for the easy explanation.

And Captain Jerk once again rears his head, dismissing Bones (this is the second time he should have listened to Bones’s gut about something—remember when he dismissed Bones’s “something’s off” about how he swore he saw a younger version of his former flame in The Man Trap?), until Bones forces Kirk’s hand by officially noting a request in his log which Kirk has to answer and then Kirk has to beam down and Bones assigns Dr. Helen Noel as a psychiatrist and penologist to accompany him.

Okay. Okay we need to talk about Dr. Helen Noel because she is fucking awesome. First, she puts Kirk in his place with a few well-placed bon mots of “Oh, don’t you remember me from that party?” while doing some coy eye flicks and I already want her to have a whole spin-off series because she’s already not here for Kirk’s shit. Once they beam down, Kirk keeps cutting her off, and she snaps back about being the expert and points out her opinions are why she’s here and when Kirk says one of the pleasures of being the Captain is not having to listen, the villain of the story is on Kirk’s side so, again, go Helen.

Okay, so Dr. Adams is using a neural neutralizer to basically mind-wipe people and make them think whatever he wants (they can’t even think unless he tells them to think) and basically Kirk and Noel figure this out (at the same time as Spock and McCoy figure it out up on Enterprise thanks to Spock mind-melding with Dr. van Gelder—which he says he’s never done with a human before but let’s pretend he meant ’never done with a mentally damaged human before’ give we know he has, or at least Strange New Worlds has shown us that, which to be fair is a retcon).

So, Kirk gets Dr. Noel to use the neural neutralizer on him, they figure out Dr. Adams is full of it (and basically brainwashing prisoners as well as his staff like Dr. van Gelder) and amusingly Noel decides to get a wee bit of comeuppance by suggesting their party moment was more romantic than it was as a test of the full range of the suggestibility—but then Dr. Adams finds them, implants a “You’d do anything for Helen Noel, lie, cheat, kill, anything!” into Kirk and then locks them up.

Now. Here’s more why-I-love-Helen for you: she rejects this. Like, it’s clear she wanted to ride the Kirk train at that party, but she is not on board with him having compromised consent to his own feelings and she helps him snap out of it. Then he opens up a ventilation hatch and is all, “It’s too small for me, do you think you’d mind risking electrocuting yourself to take down the planetary shield so we can get help from Enterprise?” and she’s all “Die Hard it is!” and is crawling through those air vents immediately, saying she’ll figure it the fuck out because they are getting out of this place.

Yipee ki-yay, mother-trekker!

Her fabulousness doesn’t stop there, though. When she gets out of the hatch, she manages to drop the shield, but one of Adams’s men attacks her, and she’s knocked to the ground and lies there all moaning and barely conscious and he goes in for the kill and—SHE WAS FAKING IT AND GO-GO BOOTS KICKS HIM IN THE GODDAMN CHEST.

Anyway, Spock arrives to save the day (as if Helen needed it) and Dr. Adams falls victim to his own machine, and we close out on Kirk absolutely not apologizing to Bones or admitting Bones was right and instead talking about how it’s possible to die of loneliness and listen, buddy, you had your shot at Dr. Helen Noel and you missed it. Live with it.

(Also, she deserves better than you.)

Okay! So let’s reluctantly put aside the awesome Dr. Helen Noel (I would love for her to show up on Strange New Worlds though, please-and-thank-you) and look at this episode for story seeds. The obvious options are in the existence of penal colonies themselves (which we know, thanks to Star Trek Voyager, are still kicking around in the 2370s), and the neural neutralizer technology (which, at the end of the episode, a restored Dr. van Gelder assures us has been disassembled).

Seed One: Rehabilitation Settlements

Given we’ve been told penal colonies—though Kirk and later Trek often refers to them as “rehabilitation”—still exist in the 2200s and 2300s, this opens up stories around such facilities, the people who work there, and people who are placed there for rehabilitation. Now, obviously this is a topic where some Session 0 discussions should be considered given the real-world realities around the carceral industry (and I use that word purposefully), but if we’re looking through the lens of Federation utopia, these places are what they should be: locations where people get a chance to learn new skills, get back on their feet, have their struggles, traumas, or other issues counselled with an eye to helping them return to society in a healthy way.

Prisoner Transfer—The crew’s ship picks up a distress signal from a vessel, the USS Sam Steele, which is cut off and incomplete. Upon arrival, they find the vessel badly damaged, with multiple areas open to vacuum, but the crew present and accounted for. The vessel was transferring prisoners to a rehab facility and struck what appears to be a leftover mine from a nearby conflict (perhaps the Earth-Romulan War, the Cardassian Wars, any of the Klingon-Federation skirmishes, or the Dominion War, depending on the era you’re setting the scenario in). The ship was at warp, though it was thrown out of warp after the impact, and unfortunately that means the bodies prisoners—many of whom were lost to vacuum—won’t be recoverable. Only (a) it soon becomes clear this is no accident, and back-tracking along the course of the vessel locates debris but no bodies—someone staged this, and trace transporter readings from inside the Sam Steele lead the crew to believe someone had this all planned: this is a prison break, or something like it, made to look like a mass lethal accident—who’s behind it? And where are the former prisoners? More importantly, someone on board the Sam Steele had to be working with whoever put this in motion or the timing would never have worked. Or, (b) the prisoners in question are former-Starfleet turned Maquis, or other former-Starfleet or Starfleet-adjacent officers who fell afoul of their own ill intent or broken regulations, like Cadet Nick Lacarno, Captain Ronald Tracey, Admiral Eric Pressman, or Captain Benjamin Maxwell. When the crew find signs that things aren’t as clear-cut as an accident, an Admiral involved in Starfleet Intelligence forcefully shuts down their investigation, and the case is considered closed (with none-too-subtle messaging to back off). Do the crew keep looking? What does Starfleet Intelligence want with disgraced officers? Were there people on the Sam Steele who were complicit in this “accident,” and do they know what’s going on?

What’s Past is Present—We’ve seen Starfleet give second chances multiple times: Ensign Sito Jaza, Ensign Ro Laren, Lieutenant Tom Paris, even Commander William Riker, so it goes without saying it’s possible that one of the player crew or Supporting Crew or Supervising Crew on the player’s vessel might have a checkered past, one the rest of the crew might not be aware of, especially if they served out their time in a rehabilitation facility and the files were sealed thereafter (which dialog from Dagger of the Mind makes sound fairly commonplace). Perhaps said individual worked as part of a team on a theft or some other group-action illegal activity (Maquis raids, a protest that turned violent, etc.) but it’s in the past. Or it us, until they receive a message from a former member of that group that two other involved individuals were found dead, and then that person is also discovered deceased. Is (a) someone wronged by the group taking revenge on those they feel got off too easily for what happened? Or (b) is someone else in the group who can’t let the past go still refusing to give up the cause and considers those who did move on with their lives to be traitors in need of punishing—perhaps even one of those already found “dead” who has instead faked that death with a clone or some other replication trick as a red herring?

Seed Two: The Neural Neutralizer

Now, Dr. Simon van Gelder gave every assurance the neural neutralizer that also allowed near-total brainwashing of humans was disassembled in the denouement of Dagger of the Mind, but the technology itself is explained as being built on something meant to replace ongoing chemical treatment, and Dr. Helen Noel notes it as pretty standard, experimented with on Earth, as a temporary treatment meant to relieve and calm a troubled mind.

Side-Effects May Vary—The crew is called to a rehabilitation colony where there the staff are worried there is some sort of outbreak occurring—people are dropping into comas, and contact tracing is having a hard time tracking down any patterns. The colony itself is one devoted to those with neurological conditions that can lead to impulse issues or struggle with emotional control, and it can’t afford to have the staff fall below necessary levels to keep the facility running, nor is this doing any good for the rehabilitation process of those at the facility. They do use a neutral neutralizer to aid in temporarily aiding individuals to balance their minds prior to ongoing therapy sessions, but it’s a tried and true technology with a minimal but useful effect. Ultimately, the crew have to track down the source of the strange outbreak, which could be (a) a virus mutated thanks to the waves emitted by the neural neutralizer, and become airborne—it can affect anyone exposed as they shift from wakefulness to sleep, and thereafter suppresses the neurological process needed to wake up; or (b) an accidental telepathic effect being broadcasted by a half-Napean, half-Klingon patient. The unique combination of her Klingon brak’lul (the “doubling up/back up” found in Klingon biology) and her Napean empathic heritage has unknowingly gifted her with a projective empathic ability. It turns out that when she’s using the Neural Neutralizer to help control her often extreme mood swings, a telepathic resonance is created, one she unknowingly releases later into others, causing them to fall into a comatose state.

And there we have it, another episode, another few ideas for your campaigns. Have any of your Star Trek Adventures player characters or campaigns involved the criminal element? I brought Nick Locarno into one of my campaigns, and the other campaign had a recurring antagonist who the crew were quite sure was guilty of crimes he managed to weasel his way out of.