Top 15 Star Trek episodes to watch for Halloween Part 3 (#5-#1)
By Chad Porto
2. “Impulse” – Star Trek: Enterprise
We joke a lot about cyborg zombies in space on this site. Star Trek’s creation of the Borg has given them a great villain that really incites fear into people. So if we go with the idea that the Borg are the George Romero-Esque zombies of the Star Trek universe, then the Vulcans are the characters from The Crazies. Also a George Romero film.
Like with the difference between Romero’s “…Of the Dead” series and The Crazies is the general idea of how the zombie archetype behaves. The Borg are like the “…Of the Dead” franchise; slow, lumbering relentless. Yet, the Crazies weren’t so much about the creeping idea of death but more about the fragility of humanity. It featured people succumbing to their baser urgers, resulting in heeps of violence.
That’s the basic idea of “Impulse”, a group of Vulcans ends up getting stuck in space and due to an illness, lose their ability to quell their emotions and become anger-fueled monsters that tear everything and anything apart in front of them.
The episode is made even more stressful with the fact that several members of the Enterprise go in to try and investigate, leaving T’Pol exposed to the same illness that corrupted the other Vulcans.