“The Slaver Weapon”
Written by Larry Niven
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Season 1, Episode 14
Production episode: 22011
Original air date: December 15, 1973
Star date: 4187.3
Mission summary
Spock, Uhura, and Sulu, commanding the shuttlecraft Copernicus, are delivering precious cargo to Federation Starbase 25: a Slaver stasis box recovered from the planet Kzin. The long lost Slaver Empire scattered these time capsules across the galaxy, which either contain perfectly preserved artifacts from the billion-year-old civilization or booby traps; apparently the Empire fell due to its unhealthy addiction to the game show Let’s Make a Deal.
One stasis box provided a flying belt which led to the development of artificial gravity fields on starships, thus they’re potentially very valuable, dangerous, and incredibly rare–the only way to detect a stasis box is with another stasis box or dumb luck. As it happens, Spock’s box unexpectedly points the way to another one on planet Beta Lyrae. Spock is skeptical that a stasis box could go undiscovered there for so long, but they can’t pass it by without investigating.
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