Illogical and almost nihilistic episode in which Captain Kirk is willing to delay transporting very badly needed medicine to a nearby planet (acknowledging that deaths may occur as a result) to pursue his own "white whale" like a futuristic Captain Ahab. Unlike Ahab, though, Kirk's obsession is a very deadly creature that has already claimed starship lives in the past and which is almost impossible to contain or capture as it is in the form of a deadly gaseous cloud.
The episode also contains a line, which I thought until recently that only I had found bizarre and even risible; to wit, Kirk says, "Scotty, try flushing the ventilation system with radioactive waste" in a bid to exorcise the creature from the Enterprise, into which it has entered due to Kirk's mishandling of the situation in the first place. Flushing the ventilation system with radioactive waste would presumably have an even more lethal impact on the human crew than it could ever have on a gaseous diffuse cloudlike creature. A stupid and infuriating episode.
The episode also contains a line, which I thought until recently that only I had found bizarre and even risible; to wit, Kirk says, "Scotty, try flushing the ventilation system with radioactive waste" in a bid to exorcise the creature from the Enterprise, into which it has entered due to Kirk's mishandling of the situation in the first place. Flushing the ventilation system with radioactive waste would presumably have an even more lethal impact on the human crew than it could ever have on a gaseous diffuse cloudlike creature. A stupid and infuriating episode.