written by S Bar-David (Shimon Wincelberg)
REVISED FINAL DRAFT, dated August 5, 1966
with further revised pages dated August 6 and August 8, 1966
report & analysis by David Eversole

Pretty much shot as written, with a couple lines and a couple scenes dropped.

In his first speech of admiration for Doctor Adams' penology methods, Kirk also has a line that was thankfully cut as it reads as very cloying. He says Adams' prisons "at last make me proud to be a human being."

After Kirk tells Bones he is behind the times, the scene continues in the script with:

McCOY
Ah, sweet progress. What happens to
a man when it finally becomes more
comfortable to be in jail than out?

KIRK
I wish you'd make up your mind. One
minute a bleeding humanitarian, the
next a cynic...

Kirk mentions that at the Christmas party he had assumed Helen Noel was a passenger they were carrying (but in the flashback, even though it is false, Kirk mentally has her dressed in a uniform...).

In the script, Kirk takes up the toast and delivers the final bit "...or our hearts so empty that we cannot fill and warm them all. Amen, Doctor." So, despite the legend of Shatner stealing lines, here he gives one away.

In the script, Spock grips Van Gelder at the base of the neck, around the shoulder area, then caresses nerve points on his torso and then goes into the meld. Nowhere in the script does it state that Spock touches Van Gelder's head or face. Still, it would look silly to initiate a mind meld by grabbing someone's belly, doncha think?

When Adams has Kirk under the neural neutralizer he instructs Kirk to walk to the door and hand out the phaser. Kirk does so. Adams then has Kirk call Spock and make a false report that all is well. Kirk does so, then hands the communicator to Adams after trying to recall Spock and failing.

Act Four then begins with Spock and McCoy comparing a "Voice-O-Graph" of Kirk's call to on-file graphs of the captain's voice. Though they match they do note that Kirk's voice was stressed and conclude he was coerced into calling. Then we cut to Helen waking Kirk up, etc.

The rest of the script is pretty much what aired. Few dropped lines here and there, but nothig major. Kirk phaser-stuns Adams in the script, whereas in the aired episode, he knocks him to the floor.

When they find Adams dead, in the script, after Helen says she understands what happened, we have:

McCOY
I can't say I do, Jim. A man has to die
of something.

KIRK
He did, Doctor. Of loneliness.

In the final scene Kirk notes:

KIRK
Doctor Adams and I did agree on one
thing. Vengeance is wrong.
I'm sorry for him.

I think some of these lines of Kirk's were dropped as they made the captain seem too "liberal," and in 1966, a TV action star had to be a bit more conservative. I could see Picard declaring that at last he was proud to be human because of advances in gentler, kinder penology, but not Kirk.

S BAR-DAVID (which stands for Shimon, Son of David) was a pseudonym used by writer Shimon Wincelberg (1924-2004): a writer, playwright and television scenarist who used many aspects of his Orthodox Jewish beliefs in his work. He wrote short stories for Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker and Punch. During his forty-nine years (1947 to 1996) in the film industry, he wrote for Mannix, Police Woman, Planet of the Apes (the television series), Logan's Run, The Paper Chase, Trapper John, M. D. and Law and Order. For Star Trek, he wrote "Dagger of the Mind" (under his pseudonym) and "The Galileo Seven" as Shimon Wincelberg. For the aborted Star Trek: Phase II he wrote "Lord Bobby's Obsession."

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