One of our favorite Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, "The Galileo Seven," premiered on January 5, 1967. In the episode, the Galileo shuttlecraft crash-landing on Taurus II with Spock, Scotty, McCoy, and others on board. On the planet, the group must fight for their lives when they make the acquaintance of Neanderthal-esque creatures, and Spock must decide if a logical approach to saving the day is the right approach.

Check out some facts, figures, quotes, and anecdotes about "The Galileo Seven" below.

The story begins at Stardate 2821.5.

The Galileo is seen for the first time on TOS, after being referenced in "The Conscience of the King."

Rand — and Grace Lee Whitney — were written out of the show effective this episode, and so revised pages updating the first draft of the script gave Rand's lines to Yeoman Mears.

Phyllis Douglas only played Mears the one time in "The Galileo Seven," but she did return to TOS to portray Sevrin's Girl #2 in "The Way to Eden." Douglas died in 2010 at the age of 73.



Two Galileos were built, according to The Star Trek Concordance, namely a miniature and a full-scale exterior mock-up.

One of the two writers credited on "The Galileo Seven" was S. Bar-David. That, according to Memory Alpha, was Shimon Wincelberg's non de plume, and it means "Shimon, Son of David" in Hebrew. He also wrote "Dagger of the Mind," as well as episodes of Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and other shows. He passed away in 2004 at the age of 80.

Don Marshall played Lt. Boma, the astrophysicist who clashes with superior officer Spock. The late actor — he passed away in October 2016 — told StarTrek.com in a 2012 interview that it meant the world to him that the color of Lt. Boma’s skin made no difference in the scheme of the episode. "That was beautiful," Marshall said. "That was Gene Roddenberry, and I’d worked for him once before. I did an episode of The Lieutenant for him. That’s the way the guy was. He didn’t see color. He saw the situation and he had a vision, more so than most people. You could really see that with Star Trek. People learned from Star Trek. This guy created something special. A lot of people went into engineering because of Star Trek. I’ve been told that by many, many engineers. People became astronauts and went into the space program because of the show. You look back and you think, 'What a visionary Gene was,' or ‘What a beautiful person he was.' I wish everybody was that way, but of course we don’t have that."

"The Galileo Seven" was the one and only episode directed by Robert Gist, who passed away in May 1998 at age of 73.



And, decades before Spock insisted that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...," he spoke these words in "The Galileo Seven": "It is more rational to sacrifice one life than six, doctor."

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