Name: Star Trek: The New Voyages – Story 7 “The Winged
Dreamers”
Author: Jennifer Guttridge, with an introduction
by DeForest Kelley
Publication Date: 3/1976
Publisher: Bantam Books
Page Number: 37
Historian’s Note: Sometime after The Second Season of
the Animated Series
Cast of Characters: Captain James T. Kirk Commander
Spock Dr. Leonard H. McCoy
AKA “Bones” Lieutenant
Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”
Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu Lieutenant Nyota Uhura Lieutenant Langely Lieutenant Kyle Nurse Christine Chapel Ensign Pavel Chekov Crewman Caros Durban unnamed security guards
Starships and/or Starbases: USS Enterprise NCC-1701,
unnamed shuttlecraft
Planets: unnamed planet
My Spoiler filled summary and review: The Enterprise is exploring a strange new world. It is a M-Class planet, right in its star’s goldilocks zone. Yet, no intelligent life has developed on the planet. As they walk along the planet’s surface this little fact has the trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy confused. In a short while Kirk and McCoy head back to the ship via the transporter, Spock stays behind to supervise things on the surface.
 |
| Just exploring the planet! |
At this point members of the crew start to hallucinate. Their dreams seem to be manifesting in reality. Forty of them suddenly stop reporting in and go missing. When Captain Kirk becomes aware of this on the Enterprise, he orders all crew members currently on the planet to get back to the ship and cancels all shore parties. Things go from bad to worse. A crewman dies and McCoy can’t tell what it was that killed him. Mr. Spock finds the missing members of the crew, but they flat out refuse to return to the ship and they don’t think Spock should be allowed to go back either.
 |
| Dreams becoming real |
Kirk and McCoy try to transport back down to the surface but massive power failures have caused the ship’s transporters to go offline. This forces the two officers to use the shuttlecraft, which doesn’t bother McCoy because he hates the transporter anyway. When they get to the planet and they find Spock unconscious but McCoy is able to revive him. At this point both the Captain and the Doctor start to hallucinate. Only Spock seems to be immune, but they don’t know how long that will last for. So, it is decided that the best they could do would be to get on the shuttlecraft, get off this planet, and get back on to the ship. This works although Kirk almost ruins everything trying to take the helm controls away from Spock when he hallucinates that the Enterprise is on fire.
 |
| On fire! Maybe not! |
They
manage to get on the ship but find the power of illusions hasn’t been stopped.
At one point Kirk is given the illusion that they have already won and all the
missing have been returned before Spock brings him to reality. They determine that there is a native species
that is a collective consciousness and that they were simply caught in the
middle of it. At first, they thought
this may have been an aquatic species but they determine it was actually this
planet’s version of butterflies. They
negotiate with the butterfly collective.
This insures peace and the return of the missing crew. The adventure is over.
Additional
thoughts: This was an interesting little story. If the episodes “Shore Leave” and "This Side of Paradise” had a baby this story is it what probably look like. Like the former, the crew on shore leave are on an
apparently empty planet and all of a sudden their dreams start coming to
life. Like the later, the crew gets
addicted to the planet and munity in order to stay.
Now I was a little taken back at the beginning when Kirk and Spock were confused about no intelligent life on the planet. Now I remember the old saying that if the life of the Earth put onto a 24-hour clock then all of human history would be in the final two minutes to midnight. So how do Kirk and Spock don’t know they have shown up on this planet three minutes to midnight?
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| Fun times! But this time its butterflies! |
Of
course we learn that there is life here just not the kind we would expect to
run into. This could have been one of
those great Star Trek moments like “The Devil in the Dark.” Where we come to know and respect life
radically different from our own and be able to see similarities as well as
differences. However, the whole thing is
ruined by Spock and McCoy speculating what life form on the planet would be
best to evolve in order to get or the smart butterflies.
I
thought it was very ironic that shortly Captain Kirk is given the illusion that
he has already unexpectedly won and his crew returns, a paragraph later he
really does unexpectedly win and has his crew return. It was almost as if the writer got board with
her own story and just wanted to end it now. It was not a clean stop
however.
Should it be canon: Yes, I don’t see any problem
with this story becoming part the official voyages of the USS Enterprise. The story has flaws but so don’t many
episodes.
Cover Art: What I said in the review of the first story:
“The cover is beautiful. You have the Enterprise flying in all its glory in the bottom center of the image. Behind it looks like a space station built on an asteroid. Flying above in the opposite direction is an unknown starship whose design I don’t recognize.”
Final Grade: Final Grade 3 of 5
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