Not quite — the actual line is “He’s dead, Jim.”Richard Matheson1926–2013 · American screenwriter & novelist · credited writer of the episode of first use
Dr. McCoy’s line is “He’s dead, Jim” — third person, about someone else. Its first documented appearance is in Star Trek: The Original Series, “The Enemy Within” (season 1, episode 5, aired 6 October 1966), written by Richard Matheson, where McCoy pronounces a transporter-damaged animal dead. Wikiquote lists “You’re dead, Jim” under Misattributed: McCoy never said “You’re dead” to Kirk.
“He's dead, Jim.” Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Enemy Within" (1966), written by Richard Matheson. Commonly misquoted as "You're dead, Jim," which was never said.
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Evoking the world of Richard Matheson — American screenwriter & novelist · wrote Star Trek's "The Enemy Within" (1966). Theme: "You're dead, Jim". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The line as actually transcribed
Work
Star Trek: The Original Series — “The Enemy Within” (season 1, episode 5)
First aired
6 October 1966, NBC — the first documented use of the line
Written by
Richard Matheson (on-screen credit); Final Draft teleplay rewritten by Gene Roddenberry, 8 June 1966
Spoken by
Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) — a fictional character
SPOCK: Energise. Reverse. SPOCK: The shock of putting him back together seems to have been too much for him. MCCOY: He’s dead, Jim.Season 1, Episode 5 · 6 Oct 1966
The subject is not a crewman. Spock and Scott have just tried to reverse a transporter split on an alien animal; it rematerialises whole but dead. This is the earliest instance of the line documented in an episode transcript.
Wikiquote’s Star Trek: The Original Series page ↗ lists “You’re dead, Jim” in its Misattributed section, with the note that McCoy “never said ‘You’re dead’ to Kirk” and that the misquote is typically pinned to “Amok Time” and “The Tholian Web.” The same page sources the genuine “He’s dead, Jim” under “The Changeling” and “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”
We checked Wikiquote’s claim against the transcripts rather than taking it on trust. In “Amok Time” ↗ — the scene where Kirk appears to die — McCoy’s actual words are “Get your hands off of him, Spock! He’s finished. He’s dead.” No “Jim,” no “You’re.” The transcript of “The Tholian Web” ↗ contains no line of this form at all.
The line was never a fixed formula. Wikipedia’s Leonard McCoy article ↗ counts it loosely: “Twenty times on the original Star Trek series, McCoy declares someone or something deceased with the line, ‘He’s dead’, ‘He’s dead, Jim’, or something similar.” That elasticity is exactly what let a fifth, invented variant slip into public memory.
“The Enemy Within” first aired on NBC on 6 October 1966 — decades after the 1930 US public-domain cutoff — so the episode and its dialogue remain in copyright. Television writing is work-for-hire: the rights sit with the studio, not with Richard Matheson or his estate. Wikipedia records the series’ production companies as Desilu Productions, Paramount Television and Norway Productions ↗, and names CBS Media Ventures as the current rights holder for the Star Trek television franchises.
Context
Why the words drifted
Dr. McCoy’s job, week after week, was to kneel beside a body and confirm the obvious. The phrasing was never fixed — Wikipedia counts roughly twenty deaths pronounced across the original series as “He’s dead”, “He’s dead, Jim”, “or something similar”, and Wikiquote records “She’s…” and “It’s…” as standing variants. A catchphrase with four interchangeable subjects is a catchphrase with a hole in it, and memory filled the hole with a fifth: you.
The pull toward “You’re dead, Jim” is dramatic, not textual. The scenes fans remember hardest are the ones where Kirk is the body on the floor — strangled by Spock in “Amok Time”, lost in “The Tholian Web” — and second person is what a doctor addressing Jim would say. But that is the one grammatical slot the line never occupies. In “Amok Time” McCoy is not talking to Kirk at all; he is lying to Spock. The real line is always a report about a third party, which is why it works: McCoy is the man who tells you the news, never the man who tells you about yourself.
The first thing McCoy pronounced dead with those words was not a crewman. It was an animal on the transporter pad.
Two footnotes worth keeping
A pre-echo, ten years early. Long before Star Trek, DeForest Kelley played an uncredited medic in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). Classic Movie Hub records that “DeForest Kelley’s first line in this film ends with, ‘This man’s dead, captain.’” ↗ This is a coincidence of casting, not a source: it tells us what Kelley had said before, not where McCoy’s line came from. (Wikiquote’s trivia note renders the 1956 line as “He’s dead, Captain”; the wording above is the one we could source, and we have not seen the film to adjudicate.)
Kelley hated saying it. Wikipedia notes he joked the line would end up on his tombstone — and it opened at least one of his obituaries — but he disliked repeating it. On Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan he judged that the catchphrase would puncture the scene’s weight, so he and James Doohan swapped lines and Scotty said “He’s dead already” instead. The actor was, in the end, a better editor of the line than the fandom.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1926–2013 · American screenwriter & novelist · wrote Star Trek’s “The Enemy Within” (1966)
Richard Burton Matheson was an American novelist and screenwriter in horror, fantasy and science fiction — author of I Am Legend (filmed as The Last Man on Earth) and The Incredible Shrinking Man, and a frequent Twilight Zone writer. He wrote exactly one Star Trek episode, “The Enemy Within” (1966) — the first in which Dr. McCoy pronounces something dead with the four words that became the series’ most-quoted diagnosis. One honest caveat: the shooting script passed through three hands — Matheson’s 2nd Draft, a John D.F. Black polish, then Gene Roddenberry’s Final Draft rewrite of 8 June 1966 — so which typewriter produced those four words is not documented. The on-screen credit reads “Written by Richard Matheson.”
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
“The Enemy Within.” Star Trek: The Original Series, season 1, episode 5. Written by Richard Matheson, directed by Leo Penn. Desilu Productions / NBC, first aired 6 October 1966.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘You're dead, Jim’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/youre-dead-jim