Who Built The Doomsday Machine: Star Trek (TOS)

Well this has been a long standing mystery that has never been answered in canon. However, non-canon sources have given the doomsday machine some interesting stories and origins. We hope you enjoy our video, and we have posted the links regarding the Doomsday machine we mentioned in the video, if yo would like some further information. Have a great Day.

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[Sammyandbobsdad]

This is my favorite Star Trek episode, and one of the things I like is that the doomsday machine looks so alien, and almost organic.

[stardude]

I like the fact that we may never know what alien race created the Doomsday Machine and for what purpose, it is now agreed that it was created in an ancient war probably millions of years ago and that its creators are now extinct, the actual mystery of it and it’s origins has a a great mystique and that adds to its appeal today.
I think some mysteries should remain mysteries.

[keving.]

The budgetary restrictions resulted in an infinitely better depiction of the doomsday machine than what Spinrad envisioned. It only makes sense that a neutronium hull would be too dense to shape into a normal space ship. And it looked ten times more menacing too.

[LTPottenger]

The performance for Commadore Decker will live through the ages, the actor's voice is amazing.

[craigalbrechtson]

I feel that part of the appeal of that particular episode is the fact that the machine's origins are not revealed. Even though it's destroyed it remains a mystery. And people love a good mystery even if it's not solvable. That being said, I prefer to go with Captain Kirk's speculation that it was a weapon used in a war in some other Galaxy eons ago. It sounds a bit more exotic and mysterious that way.

[coolbear]

I got to meet James Doohan at a convention and I asked him what his favorite episode was and he said it was this one because of everything he got to do 👍👍

[dennisswaim]

This thing and the concept behind it was truly terrifying. Great episode, top ten of TOS.

[PCUSE]

Everyone seems to list "City at the edge of forever" as their favorite episode, and it is great but the tension and drama exhibited in THIS episode puts it head in my view. Windom, who was a character actor on TV for the most part puts in a bravura performance as Decker and all the regulars rise to the occasion as well. Captain Ahab meets Horatio Hornblower in space.

[brmnyc]

You can't discuss this episode without giving credit to the fantastic musical score. That music amped up the tension 100%.

[farkinarkin]

Doomsday Machine is number one in my list of TOS episodes... "Don't you think I know that!" LOL.

[PhillipM]

I have watched this episode so many times I could quote you every bit of dialogue word for word. I like the new SFX. This episode aired back in October of 1967 one day before I was born

[SierraThunder]

William Windom justly deserved an Emmy for his performance of Commodore Matt Decker. The anguish that he managed to call up from somewhere deep inside of his soul was one of the most dynamic portrayals of a man mentally & emotionally broken by the loss of his entire crew, plus his inability to save them.

Edit: I really wish that the writers had found a better way to deal with the issue of Decker's self-torment, (although I understand just how much it must of shattered him), to have to literally listen to all of his crew be slaughtered & being thoroughly helpless to do ANYTHING to rectify a cataclysmic error in judgement.
Which in turn, finally caused him to sacrifice himself by running that pitiable little shuttlecraft into the machine in both a vain attempt to destroy the machine & in his own mind & soul, he might hopefully atone for the deaths of his entire command.

He would have made for a FANTASTIC recurring character to write scripts for, and IMHO, the addition of the character of Commodore Decker just might have saved Star Trek from cancellation a year & a half later.


RIP to one of my all-time favorite character actors, William Windom

[jamesknauer]

The episode was a mini-opera. Each character including the device had a musical motif in a brilliant score.

[martinmowbray]

One of the best episodes of all Star Trek. Not just the original series.

[mikeandrews]

“Gentleman, I suggest you beam me aboard”

The most stressed Captain Kirk has ever been.

[benrussell-gough]

IMO, the giant novel 'Vendetta' is my headcanon for the origin of the Doomsday Machine, less than 2, 000 years before its climactic engagement with the Enterprise and Constellation.

However, in my ideas for ST: Legacy, I have drafted an ideat that addresses the same idea: Whilst surveying a newly-opened sector, the Enterprise-G is suddenly struck by a uranium sabot travelling close to the speed of light. When the shocked crew track it back and use uranium decay dating, they determine that this was an anti-ship weapon fired from a gravitational railgun possibly tens of millions of years ago and millions of light-years away that, having missed its target, had continued to travel in between galaxies before finally running into the Enterprise. The ship comes close to being destroyed by a weapon fired by a long-extinct civilisation in a *different galaxy*. A chilling reminder of the size, age and and intrinsic unpredictability of the universe.

[sethmaki]

There's something fundamentally important that the writers of the show and many of the fans forget to take into account and it always makes me laugh because the fact of it is so plain that it just slaps me in the face: the machine is said to have been constructed of neutronium, a hypothetical material consisting of the degenerate material of a neutron star. The material is so dense that a star only about the size of New York City has a mass dozens of times of that of the sun. If the machine were as big as depicted, that much mass concentrated into an object that large would form an absolutely enormous gravitational effect due to the warping of spacetime that much mass would create. The machine wouldn't even need a primary weapon, its could disrupt planetary orbits from parsecs away with merely its presence.

[sureshmukhi]

This was one of the first Star Trek episode I watched as a kid in the 1970s. When Kirk tells Decker "there is no third planet!" I thought he was referring to Earth!

[DADZRITES]

According to a Star Trek book, "Vendetta", the Doomsday Machine was built by a civilization to destroy The Borg, who had battled with the ancient builders of this machine. The Doomsday Machine was programmed to destroy the Borg homeworld or any Borg outposts.

[normangiven]

A windsock filled with foam. Sometimes great things come from small budgets. A great episode!