Hallowe’en is nearly upon us, and as I’m playing a Star Trek Adventures game at the moment I was reminded of Robert Bloch’s Catspaw, apparently the only time a Star Trek show ran a specific episode to suit its seasonal airtime, moving it out of its original schedule order to do so. You can see why - it’s full of witches, curses, fog, castles, plastic skeletons and a very unfriendly black cat.
“There is a curse on your ship! Leave this place... or you will all... die!”
(The season one and three episodes originally broadcast nearest Hallowe’en were Miri and Spectre Of The Gun, both of which were creepy in their own ways with the rapid ageing and the rotting diseases and the surrealist Westerns and the floating brains with glowing eyes, but that’s just original Star Trek for you.)
Catspaw provides a functional Sufficiently Advanced SF explanation for its tropes, with racial memory as the source of imagery, but it’s basically magic. It’s hardly the only episode like that, though.
“Dust, cobwebs - Hallowe’en is right.”
Hallowe’en episodes, like Christmas episodes, often bend the reality and raise the Weird Level of otherwise mundane shows, or drop some horror or fantasy into SF and other genres. All involved just have to agree not to make a big thing of it when things go back to normal next week.
Are you planning a Hallowe’en special this weekend? Or dropping a romance into a game in mid February, or...?
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