Star Trek: 9 Times Mr. Spock Got A Power-Up
6. Spock’s Hypnotic Personality
Four months before the series premiered, a May 2, 1966 memo from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry included this about Mr. Spock:
Hypnotism is an everyday tool on Spock’s home planet, deriving from the intellectual intensity of the culture there. It forms a part of their economic, social, and sex life. He has this capacity -- and when we play it, we stay accurate, never get into hypnotism-fantasy. But he uses this ability rarely since this is one of the many compromises Spock has had to make in the past in order to rise to his present position and live with humans.
This was planned to be shown in “Dagger of the Mind”, but dropped in favor of the mind meld and forgotten.
Or was it? In the second season’s “The Omega Glory”, while Kirk and Captain Tracy are fighting to the death, Spock locks eyes with the Yang woman Sirah and she looks as if in trance. When McCoy asks what’s he’s doing, Spock says, “I’m making a suggestion.” He wordlessly gets her to activate one of their confiscated communicators, bringing the Sulu cavalry to the rescue. “Suggestion” evokes “post-hypnotic suggestion”, and it sure looks like some sort of hypnosis.
The shooting script is a somewhat unclear on this matter, for when it describes Sirah bringing a communicator near Spock, he gets the (unused) doozy of a line, “Do as my mind instructs you, woman,” which sort of suggests a mind probe/link/fusion/meld/whatever, but this isn’t really what we see in the episode, and that’s what matters. So a hypnosis power-up it is.