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SST410: “Full of woe” — that’s what the old nursery rhyme says about Friday’s child, and Eleen of Capella IV would have agreed. The pregnant widow of the slain Teer Akaar, she hates the child she carries, expects to die for it, and wants to see Captain Kirk dead for daring to touch her. D.C. Fontana’s “Friday’s Child” gives us one of TOS’s most distinctive guest characters, and Dom Bettinelli, Fr. Jason Tyler, and Jimmy Akin dig into everything the episode has to offer.

The Capellans are one of Trek’s most fully realized alien cultures of the era: tall, platinum-blonde warriors who disdain the sick and weak, treat combat as preferable to lovemaking, and even have a consistent phonological pattern — glottal stops before every second syllable — that gives their names and speech a genuine linguistic identity. Jimmy points out that Eleen even applies it to “Mac’Coy.” When McCoy tries to treat Eleen’s injuries, she slaps him hard — twice. He earns her respect the only way she understands: by slapping her back. It’s a bold move for 1960s television, and the panel credits Fontana for it.

The Klingons in this episode are equally revealing. Kras, the Klingon representative, is cunning, deceptive, and willing to secretly arm himself with a phaser in violation of the rules of engagement — behavior that looks nothing like the honorable Worf of TNG. The panel argues that the franchise effectively swapped the cultural identities of Klingons and Romulans somewhere between TOS and The Next Generation, and this episode is a clear illustration of what the original Klingons actually were.

The Prime Directive barely shows up by name, but its absence is notable. Kirk’s crew is already dispensing medicine and negotiating industrial mining contracts with a pre-warp warrior civilization, yet Kirk invokes “our highest law” at a convenient moment. The inconsistency isn’t lost on the panel.

On the ship, Scotty plays the episode’s command role with his usual decisive competence — including an implied game of space chicken with a Klingon warship that he wins — though the panel debates whether he should have returned to Capella sooner. The famous Chekov moment here: claiming the “fool me once” proverb was invented in Russia, then sharing a private grin with the camera, retroactively explaining every such claim he ever made.

Fontana originally plotted a darker ending: Eleen attempts to have the child killed to save herself, and ends up dying instead. Roddenberry overruled it, giving us the episode’s hopeful close — Eleen naming the baby Leonard James Akaar after the doctor and the captain, while Spock predicts at least a month of insufferable self-satisfaction from both. The child, Kirk declares, is destined for great things — and Memory Alpha confirms he eventually becomes an admiral in the TNG era.

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