Today in Star Trek history: TOS episode “Catspaw” airs

Witches, Boneses and giant cats abound in Star Trek: The Original Series’ Halloween offering, “Catspaw”

It’s that time of year when “ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night” come crawling out of the shadows. And 54 years ago, on October 27, 1967, the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Catspaw” premiered.

“Catspaw” was the first episode filmed for TOS season two, but it was, in fact, planned to be a Halloween episode (the only Trek episode in the franchise’s history to be produced specifically as a holiday show), so was aired seventh that season. In the episode, Scotty and Sulu are incommunicado on the planet Pyris VII. When Kirk receives a warning to stay away from the planet or suffer the effects of a curse, he predictably does the opposite, beaming down to the planet with Spock and McCoy in tow.

That’s when things get weird. Throughout the course of the episode, they encounter three witches (inspired by the hags in Shakespeare’s Macbeth), a wizard of sorts named Korob, Scotty and Sulu, who appear to be mindless automatons (with McCoy soon to join them) and Sylvia, a shape shifting woman with voodoo powers who transforms into a cat, eventually growing so large she can’t fit through the cellar door.

The crew on the Enterprise fares little better. With Engineer DeSalle in command, they experience extreme heat (thanks to Sylvia, who performs her voodoo by holding an Enterprise Christmas tree ornament over an open flame) and then find themselves encased in an invisible force field, unable to beam down or warp away. As if that weren’t bad enough, they have an encounter…with Ensign Chekov’s hair!

Yes, this was the first episode filmed with Walter Koenig in the cast as Ensign Pavel Chekov. The addition of a Russian character who wasn’t trying to kill our heroes, or at least steal their secrets, was groundbreaking for television in the 1960s. But in order to appeal to a younger crowd, it was decided that Chekov should take a page from the musical group, The Monkees. That meant he had to sport a shaggy mop top, but Koenig hadn’t had time to grow his hair out between being cast and taking his seat on the Bridge. So, for his first few filmed episodes, he wore a wig. Or did it wear him?

“Catspaw” was written by famed author Robert Bloch, using elements from his 1957 short story “Broomstick Ride” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. According to Bloch, “I wanted to do something that would involve changes in appearances. So, I decided that instead of having the usual Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation, I’ll have a female who was capable of chameleon-like adaptations.”

Still, “Catspaw” is a Halloween episode and that aspect is played to the hilt, with skeletons chained to dungeon walls, a thick fog around a gloomy castle and Kirk and McCoy trying to teach Spock about Trick or Treat. The episode is a little silly at times and the super-sized cat scurrying down the castle corridors can be taken for nothing more than a regular-sized cat scurrying through a miniature set, but despite these tiny nitpicks, it’s a fun episode with a couple of genuinely spooky moments.

If you want to learn more about the making of “Catspaw” and all the other TOS season two episodes, check out Marc Cushman’s excellent book These Are the Voyages: TOS Season Two.