One Original Star Trek Guest Actor Wasn't Fully On Board With The Naked Time Episode
In the "Star Trek" episode "The Naked Time" (September 29, 1966), the Enterprise arrives at the crumbling planet Psi 2000 to retrieve the scientists working at a research laboratory located there. The Enterprise crew members find everyone has already died, their bodies laid out in bizarre, unexpected ways, all of them frozen by a malfunctioning environmental control unit. The room is frozen and the away mission wears full-body protective gear. While alone, Lieutenant Joe Tormolen (Stewart Moss) has an itch and removes a protective glove. He becomes infected with ... something
After beaming back, Tormelon begins behaving strangely. He sweats a lot and seems to have itchy palms. He's also surly and combative as if he's had too much gin.
Sure enough, Tormelon — as Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) discovers — has contracted a bizarre virus that essentially forces his body to be drunk. Tormelon is an angry drunk, sadly, so he gets into fights and even comes to blows with a fellow officer in the mess hall. He also, without realizing it, has already spread the virus. It will eventually make its way through the whole ship. This is an issue, as no one is sober enough to steer the Enterprise away from the collapsing Psi 2000, which threatens to crush the ship.
Moss would return to "Star Trek" for the episode "By Any Other Name," playing an alien named Hanar. In 2015, StarTrek.com caught up with Moss to talk about his two appearances, and Moss revealed that he had some nerdy nitpicks about his character. It seems that even as early as the fourth episode of "Star Trek," actors were already "correcting" authors on their view of Starfleet officers. Moss objected to Tormelon's rash glove removal.
The Naked Time
When asked about what he remembered about shooting "The Naked Time," Moss had a complaint, and clearly one that has been bugging him for decades. Firstly, he described the scene he was in thus:
"My first scene was with Leonard Nimoy, down from the Enterprise on an alien planet. [...] [W]e're in a space station full of frozen bodies. Spock tells me not to touch anything and he leaves to look around. While I'm taking a reading on a wall, my nose starts itching, so I take my glove off and touch the same wall, inviting a space germ to drizzle down onto my hand, impregnating it with an alien disease that causes me and anyone who touches me — and then anyone who touches anyone who touched me — to lose all control of our emotional safeguards and, in short, go batty."
Moss clearly understood his role in the story and the workings of the alien disease. For those unfamiliar, "The Naked Time" is the episode in which Sulu (George Takei) leaps about the hallways of the Enterprise with no shirt, wielding a fencing rapier. Sulu did that because he was infected with drunkenness.
Moss also seemed to grasp exactly what Starfleet was and began to form a (surprisingly accurate) headcanon about it. This was long before nerdy Trekkies gathered at convention halls to nitpick details about individual episodes and gather together a working theogony of vital canonical "Star Trek" events. Marc Daniels directed "The Naked Time," and Moss recalls pulling him aside to question Tormelon's brazen idiocy.
Doesn't he have a PhD or something?
Starfleet officers, as Trekkies now know, have to attend Starfleet Academy for at least four years before they can be assigned to a vessel and achieve an official rank. Starfleet Academy is the hardest school imaginable, studying history, science, engineering, the arts, xenolinguistics, alien medicine, and lord knows what else. Although there wasn't an explicit mention of Starfleet Academy in "Star Trek," Moss seemed to intuit that starship workers would require some form of advanced education.
And if that was the case, why would Tormelon be so stupid as to take off his glove? Moss recalls the following exchange with his director:
"Approaching my director, Marc Daniels, I said, 'I don't want to make any waves, but my character is a Starfleet officer who has got to have at least a PhD in engineering. Is he so dumb as to take his glove off and put his hand on a wall when obviously there's something seriously wrong here? And no sooner does he put his glove back on than Spock comes back and says 'Be certain we expose ourselves to nothing.' 'Oh golly gee, Sir. Too late.'"
Daniels' response wasn't exactly edifying. Moss just had to roll with it:
"Marc chuckled, looked up from his script and said, 'You're absolutely right. But if you don't take off your glove and touch that wall, we don't have a show.' That made perfect sense to me."
Sometimes, as an actor, you simply have to be pragmatic. It's comforting to know, however, that Moss is on the side of nitpicking Trekkies everywhere. If you were ever bothered by Tormelon's behavior in "The Naked Time," know that the actor was too.