Star Trek episode "Obsession"

"Obsession"

Season 2, episode 13.

A vampire space-cloud!

This episode is kind of like a role-reversal of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Kirk is obsessed with hunting down this strange cloud from his past that decimated the crew of his first deep space assignment, the USS Farragut. He will even withhold important medicines from a colony in order to hunt it down.

Neat episode about guilt and recriminations.

It opens with no less than three red-shirted crewmen, just waiting to die on the planet's surface. Two die immediately by the strange cloud that sucks red corpuscles from bodies, and another, Rizzo, will die later in sickbay. (One interesting note is that McCoy uses cordrazine, that intense drug that makes him crazy in the classic episode "City on the Edge of Forever.")

One Deus ex machina is that the new security officer is Ensign Garrivick, the son of the Captain of the Farragut, prompting Kirk even more guilt on this specific mission.

They go down to the planet again, with four more obvious cannon fodder red-shirted crewmen. One more dies and one more placed in critical condition (his status is never updated).

Later, when they chase the cloud through space, one more crewman dies and another is put into critical condition (again, no status update).

So, if those critical conditions stabilized, I place the deathcount of red-shirted crewmen in this episode at 5. Good episode though.