As Kirk and McCoy make their way through an evening fog to another private club, they hear a scream, and find the dancer dead on the ground with Scotty standing against a nearby wall, clutching a bloody knife.
Jaris, the Prefect of the planet, appears and bids his wife, Sybo, employ the Argelian empathic contact to determine the truth.
While she prepares for the ritual, Lieutenant Karen Tracy, an Enterprise medical specialist, beams down with a psycho-tricorder, interviews Scott, and is murdered.
The participants hold hands as in a seance, and Sybo begins to speak of a "monstrous, terrible evil", "a hunger that never dies", which has been named "Kesla", "Beratis", "Redjac."
[1] A repeated point for denunciation is Spock's infamous remark that "women are more easily and more deeply terrified, generating more sheer horror than the male of the species.
"[2] Writing in 2010, Torie Atkinson objected to Kirk's demand for a "psycho-tricorder," which, McCoy says, "will give us a detailed account of everything that's happened to Mister Scott in the last twenty-four hours.
She also "liked the humor—there are a lot of good one-liners (particularly McCoy's line about having drugs that could tranquilize an active volcano)" as well as "the idea of a murder mystery in the Star Trek universe.
"[4] Reviewer Jeff Bond was mostly pleased with the episode: Robert Bloch's "Wolf in the Fold" is typical both of the horror writer's contributions to the series (he also wrote What Are Little Girls Made Of?
"[5]Bond adds, If you're planning on introducing your feminist girlfriend to Star Trek, "Wolf in the Fold" might not be the best starter episode — it's equivalent to a slasher film in the way women are presented almost exclusively as victims for a marauding monster ... That's compounded by the episode's jocular wrap-up in which the Enterprise's command crew of hound dogs are eager to put the brutal murders of a few female citizens and crewmembers behind them by getting back down to Argelius ...
It's offensive in retrospect but "Wolf in the Fold" to my mind makes up for a multitude of sins when it veers off into black comedy territory late in the episode ... Hengist is a superb foil ...
The offbeat idea of drugging the entire crew to keep the Redjack entity harmless really moves the story in an unexpected direction and conjures up what to my mind has always been the funniest line ever uttered on the original Star Trek: which comes when Kirk asks McCoy what the entity would do if it entered a tranquilized body, to which McCoy replies "Well, it might take up knitting, but nothing more harmful than that.