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Nomad is an antagonist from Star Trek: The Original Series. It was originally designed by humanity as an advanced probe, but it was damaged and set adrift. Later, after an encounter with a mysterious alien probe on a similar mission, Nomad was rebuilt as a powerful but irrational spacefaring entity. Nomad's faulty reasoning made it a serious danger to organic life until Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise managed to use its own logic against it.
Nomad was designed by named Jackson Roykirk and launched from Earth in 2002 as the planet's first interstellar vessel to seek out extraterrestrial life. It was a prototype and the only one of its program built.
During its mission, Nomad was damaged by interstellar debris and lost contact with Earth. It later encountered an alien probe called Tan Ru in deep space. The two units merged, resulting in a powerful new construct with faulty programming. Nomad reinterpreted its mission to seek out and destroy anything that was perceived as imperfect, a condition that apparently applied to any organic living being.
In 2267, Nomad was eventually discovered by the USS Enterprise, shortly after it wiped out 4 billion inhabitants of the Malurian system. Originally deeming the Enterprise to be as imperfect as the Malurians, it opened fire on the vessel, nearly destroying it. It halted its attack when Captain James Kirk hailed the probe and introduced himself; Nomad had mistaken Captain Kirk for Roykirk.
Upon coming aboard the Enterprise, Nomad found the crew to be imperfect and wiped out the memory of Lieutenant Uhura as well as killing Montgomery Scott. Fortunately for Scotty, Nomad was able to "repair" him on the orders of Kirk. After investigating the probe, the crew learns what happened to Nomad: how it was damaged somewhere in deep space, then encountered an alien probe of unknown origin but great power, with which it merged. The alien probe's mission was to sterilize soil samples (presumably for research purposes), but the goals of the two probes were corrupted during their merger until the mission of the new single entity became to seek and sterilize life.
Using the ship's star charts, Nomad was able to fix coordinates on Earth and planned to return. Kirk was concerned that if Nomad returned to Earth and found it to be populated with imperfect lifeforms, it would sterilize the planet. Reasoning that Nomad could not be defeated with force, Captain Kirk devised a plan to stop it using its own logic. He reveals to Nomad that he is not Roykirk, its creator, that Nomad has erred in not discovering this error, and in not correcting this error immediately by terminating itself, thus convincing Nomad that it is a source of imperfection. He then told Nomad to "execute its purpose" (to destroy what was imperfect), and since it was imperfect, Nomad attempted to destroy itself, though Kirk was able to beam it out into space before it did so.
Characteristics[]
Despite its small size, barely larger than an average man, Nomad is immensely powerful, capable of generating tremendous bolts of energy that quickly drained the defensive force fields of the Enterprise. Repeated fire is enough to completely sterilize a planet's surface. Its own shields were sufficient to absorb the attacks of the Enterprise's weapons. It has more precise beam weapons with a narrower area of effect, which are able to disintegrate small objects that it encounters on the ship. Its information system could read data from the Enterprise computers far faster than their maximum rate of transmission, resulting in damage to the ship's computer. It can erase a human being's memories. Nomad can modify the engines of the Enterprise to make its more efficient, and it can even "repair" a crewman who died after contacting Nomad's energy shield, effectively restoring him from death. However, whatever its original computing abilities, its brain had become corrupted during its long time in space and during its merger with the alien entity that granted it its power.
Trivia[]
In a prequel series that takes place centuries before the original series, spaceship crewman Travis Mayweather had a model of the Nomad probe in his quarters.
The episode was the basis for the Star Trek Motion Picture.