Synopsis: Chief Engineer Scott is put on trial for murdering three women on Argelius II.
“Wolf in the Fold” can be seen as an examination of whether evil exists.
In this episode, evil turns out to be something alien, something that can take over an individual and drive him or her to do evil things, such as Jack the Ripper did, stabbing women in nineteenth century London. But while the conscious ego wants to see evil as something foreign to itself, something that can be ejected, like the Enterprise transporting it into deep space, never to be heard of again, evil is really not like that. It is something that lies within all of us. Our own ability to do evil is something that needs to be faced. Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott in going unconscious whenever he is confronted by it, seems to have had an all too human response. In “Wolf in the Fold” these fainting episodes are explained by a previous head injury that he is recovering from. But for the one murder in which Scott does not black out he feels a presence something cold “it was like a stinking draft of a slaughterhouse – but not really there.” Scott felt the evil.
Sybo, the third victim, was a seer and acknowledged and was describing the evil presence at the time of her stabbing. She called it “a hunger that will never die.” The collective unconscious is something that will never die, and its drives can be interpreted as a hunger.
Unlike in “Wolf in the Fold,” evil in real life cannot be transported into deep space where “its consciousness may continue for some time, consisting of billions of separate bits of energy floating forever in space, powerless.” It is something we all need to recognize is part of our psyche, and just as Captain James T. Kirk was forced to explore the evil, the shadow element, in himself in the episode “The Enemy Within.” But it is not all bad news, we “can connect to the hidden shadow in our nature,” that is “waiting to be discovered and provide insight” (Lopez-Pedraza, 2000, p. 87). And just as Kirk discovered in the season one episode, this insight from the shadow, our “evil” aspects, can be a source of strength.
Reference:
Lopez-Pedraza, R. (2000). Dionysus in exile: On the repression of the body and emotion. Chiron Publications.
Original post created 20 February 2021
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