Card of the Week: The Tower

The only constant in life is change.  But sometimes an unexpected and seemingly catastrophic change can occur suddenly, with little or no warning, like a proverbial bolt from the blue.

The Tower card implies such a shocking change, and the crisis that can follow.  It may arrive as something external like a storm or car accident, or by something internal like growing pressures from work or relationship stresses suddenly reaching a breaking point and triggering an explosive outburst.  Whatever the situation, it will likely have lasting consequences, and require some readjustments.

Inverted, this card still signifies an unexpected disruption, but of a lesser magnitude.  With care, it may be possible to evade or even accept the situation with minimal collateral damage.

In “The Doomsday Machine” the Enterprise follows a distress call to star system L-374, where it finds entire planets gone and the starship Constellation a derelict.  Its sole survivor, Commodore Matt Decker, tells of a space battle that wrecked his ship and forced his crew to survive by beaming down to a nearby planet, which was then destroyed by the alien machine.  The Planet Killer reappears and attacks the Enterprise.  Scott manages to get the Constellation moving, but the two ships are still no match for the machine’s dense hull.  Decker, morose over the loss of his crew, sacrifices himself by flying a shuttle into the machine’s main opening, causing it slight internal damage when the shuttle explodes.  Kirk aims the Constellation into the same opening and barely escapes in time as it detonates an antimatter explosion that finally stops the machine.