Star Trek: 25 Greatest Original Series Episodes
8. The Doomsday Machine
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The Enterprise finds one of its sister ships, the U.S.S. Constellation, dead in space, abandoned by its entire crew save her Commodore Matt Decker in a catatonic state. The ship's log reveals that the Constellation encountered a massive "doomsday" entity that crippled the ship and the crew, having abandoned ship and settled on a nearby planet, was obliterated after the device consumed said planet. The device, a "doomsday machine" of sorts, is believed to have been created to stop both sides of a distant war and the machine ventured into our galaxy after the conflict subsided, and uses the rubble from the planets it consumes as energy. After Decker sacrifices himself in a kamikaze mission into the center of the device via a shuttlecraft, the crew discovers that the internal explosion of the shuttlecraft managed to slow it down. Kirk and Scotty then move the Constellation directly into the path of the planet killer, hoping the much larger craft will result in the destruction or disabling of the device. Kirk becomes stranded aboard the doomed ship until the very last second when Scotty pulls him out and the planet killer is disabled, adrift in space just as the Constellation was.