Star Trek: The Original Series 1-01: The Man Trap

Episode:

1

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Writer:

George Clayton Johnson

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Director:

Marc Daniels

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Air Date:

08-Sep-1966

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It's Star Trek Day today, September 8th, so to celebrate I've decided to rewatch The Man Trap, the very first ever episode of Star Trek! Well... maybe. It's arguably not even the first with 'Man' in the title.

The Man Trap was the sixth episode of The Original Series to be filmed and it's at least the fourth chronologically (after The Cage, Where No Man Has Gone Before and The Corbomite Maneuver). But it's undisputedly the first Trek story to air on televisions and it aired exactly 55 years ago today, so that's why I'm writing about it. Well okay it aired two days earlier in Canada, but no one counts that for some reason.

There were a few reasons why this episode was chosen to get moved to the front of the line, such as: it has the characters down on a strange new world instead of being bottled up on the ship, it doesn't include any "space hookers", it's got a straightforward story, the visual effects could be completed on time, and it has a scary space monster. Uh, spoilers, sorry. Basically they wanted to put their best foot forward to maximise their chances that viewers would come back for a second story.

It was directed by Marc Daniels, who was credited on 14 episodes over three seasons, leaving him tied with Joseph Pevney as the series' most prolific director. On the other hand this was writer George Clayton Johnson's only Trek story. He wrote a bunch of Twilight Zone though and co-wrote the novel Logan's Run, so he wasn't the worst choice for the job! In fact the Star Trek producers made a habit of trying to get acclaimed science fiction authors to write for the series... and then heavily rewriting them afterwards to make their stories feel like Trek. The writers weren't always impressed.

Okay, I'm going to go through the whole episode one scene at a time, writing a recap under my screencaps and sharing my thoughts along the way. This means that there'll be SPOILERS for this episode and every single other Trek episode that aired before it. All zero of them.

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I wonder if any viewers were disappointed to discover that the United Space Ship Enterprise doesn't really have a rocket booster stashed in its back end... unlike the USS Protostar in Star Trek: Prodigy.

Twilight Zone beat Star Trek to television by seven years, so Trek aired a bit late to be the first respectable science fiction series on US television. But it could make the claim of being the first prime time adult science fiction color television series, and that might even be true! Man, this series is in so much colour. Every episode is like an advert for colour TVs, with the uniforms and lighting designed to show off what they could do. Not that it was doing anything unique, as you had Adam West's Batman series starting the same year.

But how many people actually watched The Man Trap on its first airing in the US? The internet is cruel with its numbers here, but with a Nielsen rating of around 24 and a total number of US households with TVs at around 54 million, that'd give it viewing figures of 13,000,000 households... right? Either way, it got good numbers for the time. When this episode came on, 46.7% of the TVs being watched in America at that moment were tuned in to it, and if it could've held onto those numbers during the rest of its run the series might have gone a lot longer than three seasons.

Though if you count the franchise as a whole, Star Trek's actually in season 38 right now, plus it's had a few movies along the way, so it's doing alright.

Alright, this is it: the very first glimpse people ever got of the USS Enterprise on TV! Except not really, as it would've probably appeared in a trailer first. Also this isn't even the shot from the original episode. It's a CGI recreation made in 2007 for the Remastered edition. I think it's held up pretty well though, considering that it was supposed to match footage shot in the 60s and they had to hold back on the lens flares and other pretty artefacts you get in modern VFX shots.

I think the design of the ship has also held up pretty well. A lot people have argued that using this version of the Enterprise for Strange New Worlds could've never been an option because of how laughably dated it looks, but to me that's like saying the Millennium Falcon looks dated, or that Star Destroyers look dated. It looks like it's of an era for sure, but it's not a flying saucer or a rocket ship with a sparkler sticking out of its ass. Sure the pylons are extremely thin, but that's not a 60s thing, that's to make it look like it's built out of ultra-strong future materials beyond our knowledge! And the smooth hull is a deliberate choice as well, because why would you want pipes and gadgets on the outside, where it's a pain to go and fix them?

Okay, here's what the original shot looked like back in 1966:

It looks like someone cut out a photo from an old newspaper. That's (probably) not a problem with the original model filming however, it's a problem with generation loss from the low-tech compositing process they used back in the 60s. The team working on the Star Trek: The Next Generation remaster were able to scan the original elements and composite them digitally so that series looks fantastic now, but it wasn't an option here.

That's a real shame I reckon, as I really wish I could've seen how good the re-composited shots would've looked. The best I can do is get a semi-recent photo of the original model taken in the Smithsonian and stick it onto a generic space background:

The Remastered version's CGI model looks legit fantastic, I have to give them full marks for accuracy, plus they've added some extra hull plating detail... but it still doesn't look quite as good as a proper physical model in my opinion. I mean that's true of CGI in general; it's always trying to look real, so something that's started off real has a massive unfair advantage over it.

Especially when it's 11 feet long like the Enterprise model is. That's 3 feet longer than the movie model! It's almost twice as long as the Enterprise D model used in Next Gen!

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NEXT SPACESHIP

Anyway thanks for dropping by and reading Ray Hardgrit's Spaceship Adventures!

Next week I'll be talking about another great spaceship, but until then feel free to leave a comment!

Okay, the first voice we hear in the series is Captain James Kirk's and that definitely hasn't been recreated in a computer by a team of experts for this edition. It's 100% William Shatner.

"Captain's log, stardate 1513.1. Our position, orbiting M-113. On board the Enterprise, Mr Spock, temporarily in command. On the planet, the ruins of an ancient and long dead civilisation."

I don't know if Trek was inspired by any series in particular to have its episodes narrated as official reports like this, but I do know that the idea of telling the tale as if it's already happened came from Gulliver's Travels. The idea being that it makes the story feel more believable.

It definitely works for the series. For one thing it establishes right from the start that they're serious professionals doing serious business. They also have Navy ranks and structure, to make things more accessible to viewers at the time.

And these are the first Star Trek characters audiences ever got to meet: an alien with pointed ears and a bowl cut in the captain's chair, a black female officer at the main console, and some other guy who clearly needs more buttons to press on the right. Right away the series is making a statement, and that statement is: "We're so strapped for cash that we're using recycled footage in our very first shot."

This scene was actually filmed for The Naked Time (the episodes were aired out of order), which explains why no one's at the front console is wearing gold and Uhura's at navigation. In fact at the end of this two second clip Uhura leans down to do something with the controls in the middle of the consoles and then three episodes later you get the rest of the scene, starting with her leaning up again.

The episode cuts to a close up of Spock as Kirk's narration continues; the footage borrowed from What Are Little Girls Made Of? this time.

Then we get to see people transporting onto an obvious set with a coloured background for the first time! I guess they didn't have the transporting technique mastered just yet though as there's a double exposure when it fades between the two shots.

"Ship's surgeon McCoy and myself are now beaming down to the planet's surface. Our mission: routine medical examination of archaeologist Robert Crater and his wife Nancy. Routine, but for the fact that Nancy Crater is that one woman in Dr McCoy's past."

Is that really the kind of thing you should be putting in your official ship's log Kirk? Also I've noticed two things about the log: first, he didn't mention Darnell was beaming with them. Second, it's in the present tense, talking about things they're doing now, not things that happened in the past.

Why is Darnell tagging along for a routine medical examination anyway? Why is Kirk for that matter? And why are they armed?

The music is going for 'eerie', but Kirk immediately starts joking around, suggesting that McCoy bring his ex some flowers. I'm sure she'd be really impressed with a bit of grass picked up outside her front door.

This seems like a good time to talk about the uniforms. Everyone already knows that Kirk's 'gold' tunic was actually made of an avocado green nylon fabric that appeared yellow on film... but that wasn't actually the case until season 3. For the first two seasons Shatner was apparently wearing sparkly gold velour and that worked out pretty well, until they found out that it shrunk every time it was washed (with union rules saying the costumes had to be washed every day).

So they switched to a different fabric for the third season, dyed with a shade of green that matched the gold velour when seen on screen. But not in this photo apparently. (Info and image from Star Trek Prop Authority)

Here's another fun fact: Wikipedia defines a 'mantrap' as being a "mechanical physical security device for catching poachers and trespassers," so there's a chance someone's going to get some metal spikes in their ankle soon.

Man, these aliens really knew how to light their ancient buildings. The bold red tint makes it a lot more interesting to look at than typical ruins.

Star Trek might seem like a cheap show these days, but a lot of thought went into every aspect of the show's look. Even DeForest Kelley's hairstyle had to be carefully designed to create the right impression. The actor was known for playing villains at the time and the execs weren't sold on him playing one of the heroes, so he got an expensive haircut inspired by John F. Kennedy and that did the trick.

The three of them don't have to wait long before Nancy walks in, looking just as she did when McCoy knew her 12 years ago. Which would've been roughly 2254; a couple of years before Discovery season 1 and four years before he looked like Karl Urban in Star Trek 2009.

But Kirk sees her as a slightly older woman with grey in her hair!

Both versions were played by the same actress, who was 38 at the time if you're curious. But the third version that Darnell sees was played by someone completely different. Kirk catches him staring and Darnell explains that Nancy looks just like a woman he left behind on Wrigley's Pleasure Planet. 'Wrigley's' as in the same company that makes chewing gum? They've got a whole planet now?

We're left to wonder what kind of women you'd meet on a 'pleasure planet', but McCoy clearly isn't keen on hearing about it, telling Darnell to use a "little less mouth". Kirk follows it up by suggesting that he steps outside. Poor Darnell.

Whatever Nancy really looks like, she definitely seems to know McCoy, referring to him by the nickname she gave him: "Plum". Not as catchy as Bones... though I suppose we haven't heard him called that yet.

Nancy goes out to find her husband, with Darnell seeing her as Pleasure Planet Nancy again. The music switches to sexy saxophone mode and she throws her hood at him. Darnell takes it as the hint it's clearly intended to be and goes off to get a bit of alone time with a married woman he's only just met.

And that's how Star Trek's very first teaser ends!

OPENING TITLES

Hey it's the old CGI model used for the first batch of Remastered episodes. You can tell because the spinning light show on the front of the warp engines looks a bit rubbish compared to how it appears in the rest of the episode. The team switched to a less detailed model after the first eight episodes so they could render scenes faster and have more time to fine tune the look, and it definitely paid off.

The opening titles begin with an iconic fanfare and another narration by Kirk, this time explaining the premise of the show. I feel like most people are familiar with it by now, especially if you've seen this episode that I'm spoiling right now, but I feel like typing it all out anyway.

"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. It's five year mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations. To boldly go where no man has gone before."

Well you say that Kirk, but your first episode is about going to an old dead world to seek out an archaeologist and give him a check-up. Some people have a problem with the 'to boldly go where no man...' bit as well, either because it's a split infinitive or because of how it only includes one gender. Which is a problem with the title The Man Trap as well now that I think about it.

Personally I always assumed that 'man' meant 'human', as that's the only way the line makes sense to me.

Nice to see that the classic Star Trek logo was there right from episode one. It took a few years off between 1979 and 2009 but now it's been firmly re-established as the main Trek logo for Kurtzman-era series like Discovery, Prodigy and Lower Decks. The typeface was invented for the series by the way, and was eventually released with the name 'Horizon'.

Sorry, I'm struggling to find much to say about these titles as all that happens is that the Enterprise approaches a planet, goes into orbit, then swoops past the camera. It's not a very elaborate sequence.

Though the ship does swoop past the camera a couple more times, I guess to make sure you're looking at the screen when each of the names comes on. Well, both of the names, as only William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are credited. There's no mention of DeForest Kelley in the season 1 credits, despite this being a McCoy episode, and even Gene Roddenberry failed to get his name in the titles. It's a big change from the modern shows, where every writer gets a producer credit.

Oh here's some fascinating trivia for you: the Enterprise swooshes from right to left one time, making this one of the few moments in the entire series that you get to see the right hand side of the ship. The right side of physical model is unfinished and covered in cables for the lights, so the ship was never filmed from the right, and the Remastered effects shots tend to stick to that tradition.

ACT ONE

Act one begins with the proper establishing shot of the planet we missed out on first time around. The Remastering process also involved replacing matte paintings, so we get a nice panning shot of this sandy wasteland for me to stitch together.

Kirk continues his log voiceover to remind us of what's going on:

Captain's log, additional entry. Since our mission was routine, we had beamed down to the planet without suspicion. We were totally unaware that each member of the landing party was seeing a different woman; a different Nancy Crater."

Hey, he's switched to past tense this time.

Now Robert Crater's here but they're missing Nancy.

Robert is weirdly unhappy to see them here, and wants them to cancel their medical examination and go away. Also he wants them to drop off some salt, but after that he wants them gone.

Unfortunately he's trying this on the wrong person, as McCoy demonstrates that he can be just as cranky as him or anyone else and makes it clear that Robert doesn't have a choice in the matter. He might be living alone on some alien world, but he's a Federation researcher and regulations say he's going to get a damn check-up from a Starfleet doctor! Well okay, the writers hadn't come up with the United Federation of Planets yet at this point in the series, or Starfleet, but he soon comes to terms with the fact that he's getting the examination anyway and lets McCoy do his thing, who waves a sensor over him and checks the results on his tricorder like doctors will still be doing 100 years from now.

The three of them start to have a casual chat about how many grey hairs Robert's wife has, with Kirk saying that she's got some grey bones as well. Oh wait, he was saying she has grey, Bones! It's the first use of McCoy's current nickname! We got an origin story for his nickname in Star Trek 2009, but that conversation was exclusive to the Kelvin universe so there's nothing to say his nickname doesn't come from the word 'sawbones' in this timeline (slang for a surgeon).

The two of them start arguing over whether she looks 25 or not and it's a shame that Darnell isn't here as he could've argued that she's also a blonde.

Just then they hear screaming and find Darnell lying dead! Turns out it was Nancy screaming, not Darnell, as he's got a bit of fruit in his mouth.

This gives McCoy a chance to introduce his famous catchphrase, but he only says the "Dead, Jim," part this time around. So Darnell has the honour of being the very first person to ever die on Star Trek. McCoy notes the red mottling on his skin but doesn't immediately volunteer a suggestion of what could've caused it or what caused his death.

Kirk's been all charm and smiles up to this point but he's switched to 'one of my crewmembers has died and I want to know why' mode now. Robert suggests that Darnell picked up an untested plant on an alien world and shoved it right into his mouth, which seems pretty in-character to be fair, and Nancy says that's exactly what she saw. It's all very suspicious, I mean he wasn't even wearing a red shirt! Fortunately they have the fruit so they can bring it up to the ship and scan it... but Kirk just tosses it away instead.

Now Kirk has a chance to say one of his famous catchphrases, but when he opens his communicator (after failing to flip it open the first time) what he actually says to Scotty is "Three beaming up." In fact he never says "Beam me up Scotty," in the entire series, not even in the Kelvin movies, so I won't be listening out for that.

Hey it's Mr Spock and Uhura, I remember them from the teaser 10 minutes ago.

Gene Roddenberry was determined to get both of these characters into his show but he only had to fight for one of them... and it wasn't the black woman in a position of authority. NBC wanted more diversity and its Manager of Film Program Operations was a black man (Stanley Robertson), so there were no problems there. NBC Sales Department wasn't keen on getting a religious backlash against Spock's 'Satanic' appearance though, and went as far as airbrushing photos in a sales brochure to take the points off his ears. In the end the production team they told NBC they'd keep Spock off screen as much as possible in the first few episodes... and then didn't. No one was complaining after they saw how popular he was.

Uhura tries to start a conversation, telling Spock that if she hears the word 'frequency' one more time she might cry. He looks a bit confused, saying that it would be illogical for a communications officer to resent that word. This wasn't originally meant to be Spock's introduction in the series, it was the sixth episode filmed, but man they ended up with the perfect line to get his personality across. And we get a hint of Uhura's personality as well, as she suggests he could tell her that she's an attractive young lady. Lots of character in this scene and absolutely no plot.

But then she takes great offence at Spock's lack of reaction when there's a call from the transporter room reporting one death. He didn't even ask which of them died! Or what killed them! Information he'd definitely need to know in the possible case that Kirk's dead and he's the captain now.

The second Enterprise set we get to see is sickbay the dispensary, and it's clear some time has passed as Spock calls to report the results of his research on the plant Darnell ate. It's similar to the nightshade family (which includes plants like tomatoes and potatoes), and contains an alkaloid poison. There's no trace of alkaloids in his system though so they can rule that out.

Kirk tries to argue that he literally had the plant in his mouth, but McCoy assures him that he couldn't have swallowed any. He doesn't have any idea what killed him though, as except for the circles on his skin he can't detect anything wrong with him.

McCoy's mind drifts back to Nancy and he changes the subject, talking about how she really did look 10 years younger to him, but Kirk shuts him down. He wants him to focus on figuring out what killed his crewman! The one that's in this very room with them as they're talking! The look on McCoy's face says "Well, I deserved that".

ACT TWO

Alright we're back in the other room on the Enterprise, which means we're finally getting to see Captain Kirk on the bridge of his ship, enjoying a cup of coffee. Uhura gets a call asking why they've been delayed delivering their urgent supplies, and Kirk tells her to tell them that they can go a few more days without their chilli peppers. So the Starship Enterprise is currently performing medical examinations and transporting peppers. Not exploring strange new worlds. Oh, here's a completely irrelevant fact for you: chilli peppers also belong to the nightshade family.

Then McCoy calls up to the bridge and pulls the very first 'You'd better come and take a look at this' in Star Trek, telling a superior officer to come meet them without telling them why. To be fair he actually says "I'd rather not put it on the speaker," and there's no way Kirk's going to put Uhura's Bluetooth headset on.

And we're back in room #2. I know this wasn't written to be the pilot episode, but it seems kind of strange how it's not showing off the ship at all. It's showing off the cool bio signs monitor above the bed though.

It turns out that the cause of Darnell's death was detected in their scans, it was just too weird for them to check for it: he's been drained of all his salt. McCoy also admits mistaking the red rings on his face for skin mottling. Fortunately Kirk's not counting them, and he also apologises for snapping at McCoy earlier. Which is nice (though McCoy was asking for it).

I was really hoping that Kirk would make the connection here between the body drained of salt, and the only two people on the planet both making a request for salt.

Kirk beams a second landing party to the planet and this time he really means business. He even transports a sample of the plant up for analysis this time, and has McCoy taste some of Robert's last remaining salt tablets to confirm that they really are salt. I... don't know why he did that.

Incidentally, at the time this was made this was made salt supplements were considered to be important to keep people healthy in hot and arid locations, but these days replenishing electrolytes is considered more crucial. Though science could always change its mind on that again in 250 years.

Robert points out that they're trespassers on his planet. Wait, he owns the whole planet? But Kirk tells him that he doesn't like mysteries as they give him a belly ache, so he wants this solved. Then he informs him that he's beaming the two of them up to the ship for their safety, he beats him in a staring contest and he manages to flip open his communicator on the first try this time.

Kirk is definitely taking control of the situation now. At least until Robert runs off while his back is turned.

Seems like Nancy's been busy outside, killing two crewmen this time. Robert tries to lure her to him with a handful of salt, but has to make a run for it again when Kirk and McCoy catch up.

They find the body of Sturgeon, a blueshirt probably named after sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon who'd later write the episodes Shore Leave and Amok Time. The other guy's a goldshirt called Green, probably named after... I dunno, the colour green? So if you're keeping score that's 2 blueshirts and 1 goldshirt dead so far, and absolutely zero redshirts.

Kirk and McCoy still need to find Green so Kirk does the sensible thing and whips out his communicator. No actually he just yells his name. To be fair Green would've been able to hear him if he wasn't dead.

The camera cuts to Green's corpse, then pans up to show Nancy transforming into him! It just fades between them, it's not exactly a morph, but it's still a nice shot.

Though hang on, she changes her clothes as well? In that case how was she able to throw her hood over to Darnell earlier? Also we see both Greens in the same shot briefly and they're both wearing phasers, so how does that work? I mean can he shoot people with it or is it just a projection?

Nancy/Green meets up with Kirk and McCoy and we get a lot shots of him staring at them as they work out what to do next. McCoy wants to roam around the desert shouting 'Nancy!' but Kirk tells him to stop thinking with his glands and use his head like Spock does. The three of them are going to beam up to the ship and use its sensors to find Nancy! Sure they could do that and stay on the planet, but something's killing them off so it's probably wiser not to.

Then we get to see another part of the Enterprise! It's the transporter room, with the lighting turned to 'moody'. We even get to see the transporter operator slide the three sliders up to activate the beaming process, so that was happening from the very beginning.

Kirk orders Spock to begin scanning the planet for Robert and Nancy, then tells the transporter operator that there's a body down there to beam up. So he'll be scanning the planet as well I guess. Actually I think the transporter operator is only looking at the coordinates Kirk beamed up from, as he beams up Sturgeon's corpse and completely misses Green's body.
 

They walk out through the (implied) door and we get to see the Enterprise's wide curvy corridors with the cross-beams running over their heads to hide the fact that there's no ceiling. Oh plus there's a ladder! I was so happy when they added a ladder to Discovery's corridor set in season two as they're great. A nice simple way to imply there's another deck above this one.

This turns out be a much cleverer shot than I expected, as the camera turns to keep Kirk in frame as he walks around and then follows him into a turbolift!

In fact it walks into the turbolift with him, keeping him in the shot the whole time. I can't imagine this was easy to do with the cameras they were using in the 60s. I mean I'm surprised they got it through the doorway at all.

Kirk holds onto the handle and says "bridge", demonstrating how you use the turbolift. Then strips of light start going by the panel behind him to show the lift's movement, all in the same take. Honestly at this point I was half expecting him to walk out onto the bridge in the same shot somehow.

Meanwhile Nancy/Green is roaming some other hallways and runs into Yeoman Janice Rand, who is only just being introduced now. Personally the first thing I'd be staring at is that insanely elaborate hair, but Nancy/Green is more interested in the futuristic salt shaker on that tray she's carrying around.

Hey I think this might be the episode which gave McCoy a bunch of extra medical tools in sickbay, after they bought a selection of weird looking salt shakers and discovered they were unrecognisable as salt shakers but pretty good props nonetheless.

Nancy/Green makes a move to grab the salt, but Rand slaps his hand and heads into the turbolift. This isn't his meal! But he darts into the lift with her.

Meanwhile Spock's discovered that there's only one person on the planet right now. Well, only one source of body heat anyway. He's completely missed Green.

I think we were meant to assume that Rand was bringing Kirk his lunch, but it turns out that it was Sulu's food she was carrying around! That means at 23 minutes into the episode we get introduced to another regular character and another part of the Enterprise. This is the Life Sciences Department: Botany Section, you can tell by all the plants and the futuristic spray bottles. Though this was actually a cunning redress of sickbay I think. I mean the dispensary.

Rand goes off to play with a hand puppet disguised as an alien flower, and gets into an argument about whether it's a girl plant called Gertrude or a guy plant called Beauregard. Sulu wonders why they have to call inanimate objects 'she', as in 'she's a fast ship', which is a bit of a weird thing to say when they're talking about the most animate plant I've seen since Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. A fact that Rand actually points out. She's scared that it'll reach out and grab her someday, but completely misses the chance to drop the title and call it a 'Venus Man Trap'.

Speaking of animate creatures I've been ascribing gender to, Nancy/Green figures out how to get the automatic door to open and enters in search of easy salt.
 

Nancy/Green's acting far more creepy than Nancy did, never saying a word to either of them, but before he can steal Sulu's salt and ruin dinner he's distracted by [PLANT SCREAMING]. Either Beauregard can sense the threat or it's noticed Sulu's eating celery, either way it's freaking out.

So Nancy/Green makes a hasty exit, leaving Sulu to calm down the hand puppet. Rand wonders if the guy's going space happy and I'm starting to wonder too. It's like the creature only knew how to play the role of Nancy and doesn't know what it's doing anymore. Nancy had the intelligence to lure a victim away and make a murder look like a poisoning, but Nancy/Green can't even figure out that if he just asked Sulu for a bit of his food he would have an excuse to take the salt shaker.

The episode's just about Nancy/Green roaming around the ship now I guess, biting his finger every now and then to show that he's hungry. Except now he's spotted Uhura and changed into Nancy/This Guy.

Nancy/This Guy is a lot more talkative than Nancy/Green, telling Uhura that she was just thinking of someone like him. Then he speaks to her in Swahili, apparently saying "How are you, friend? I think of you, beautiful lady. You should never know loneliness." Which is cool, as it's implying that Swahili is her mother tongue, the language she thinks in (which is confirmed in a later episode).

The creature backs Uhura against a wall and then raises his hands incredibly slowly, as Kirk keeps repeating "Lieutenant Uhura to the bridge," over the intercom with no reply. Don't worry, Kirk will get his revenge on her in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Oh, spoilers, Uhura survives this episode, because the creature hesitates for like 15 seconds and gives Rand and Sulu a chance to inadvertently interrupt.

Uhura joins them in the turbolift, obviously concerned about what just happened, but not enough to actually say anything, and Nancy/This Guy is left biting his finger again. He's really hungry, desperate for salt, even though he's drained three whole people in the last day or so. That's like 750 grams of salt!

Meanwhile McCoy can't sleep, so he calls the bridge to see if they've located Nancy yet (they have not). Turns out that Kirk's eating as well, as he's apparently decided to have his lunch up there. Or whatever meal it is. It's hard to tell the time when people are on different shifts and McCoy's trying to go to bed. Kirk suggests McCoy take one of the sleeping pills he offers to patients and it just so happens he has a bottle full of them right next to him.

Then our brief reprieve from watching the creature creep around in hallways is over, as it goes after a guy in what looks like a hazmat suit.

Back on the bridge, Kirk is still munching on food cubes when Spock tells him that they've been searching for ages and it seems like there really is just one person down there on the planet. Which raises the question of why they haven't just beamed them up. Instead the two of them will be beaming down.

The creature comes across McCoy's room by pure chance and we get a great example of how not to do a morph. The background changes and they started the fade when the first actor was blinking!

I'm surprised they didn't keep the camera locked in place and have Nancy's actress standing on a box to get the height to match. Sure the creature is changing height so it wouldn't have been a perfect solution, but it would've been better than that.

It's funny how the first half of the episode made the ship seem like it had two rooms and now it feels like we're visiting a new set every other scene. Incidentally I think this might be the only time we get to see McCoy's quarters, ever.

Nancy's still biting her finger, but she's a lot more talkative than she was in her other forms, and she actually explains to McCoy why she's here. She doesn't relate to the others like she does with him, as he's got really strong memories of her. I guess poor Green was basically forgotten even when he was alive.

McCoy is still living in the reality where Nancy being married is his main concern, but she assures him that she likes his feelings better! Then she tells him that he needs to rest and even gets him the water for his sleeping pill.

Meanwhile, Sulu and Rand coincidentally run into that hazmat guy lying dead on the floor with a face covered in circles, so now they know it's on the ship with them. The creature just couldn't help but give itself away.

ACT THREE

Uh, McCoy, why have you left the pill bottle open and pills lying everywhere? Also those are some weird bookends. Not the kind of thing I'd want watching over me as I slept on my huge sparkly pillow. In my uniform.

We get more of Kirk's captain's log narration here, revealing that it's now stardate 1513.8. That's .7 more than it was at the start of the episode, so if the decimal counter is measuring 10ths of a day, it's been 17 hours. No wonder McCoy's sleepy.

Nancy gets McCoy to sleep for some reason, then almost licks the sweat off his brow before being interrupted by Uhura calling for McCoy to head to the bridge. Wasn't she there during the conversation where Kirk told him to take a sleeping pill? She knows the dude's not coming.
      

Except he is, as the camera pans from the sleeping McCoy to another McCoy standing by the door. I have to give them a lot of credit for this shot, even if it's not hard to spot the cut if you know to look out for it. There's some surprisingly clever direction in this episode. And a really slow pace.

Anyway, Nancy/McCoy presses the button to open the door, and... wait, what? Since when has anyone in Star Trek had to press a button to leave a room? (Star Trek: Enterprise doesn't count).

Meanwhile Kirk's continuing his Captain's log narration, mentioning that he suspects the creature has some kind of hypnotic or paralysing power, and that the answer lies with Professor Crater. Fortunately he's just found the guy, peering out from behind a rock!

They can't just beam Robert up, that wouldn't be dramatic enough, so Kirk tries to have a chat with him here, asking where his wife is. He's interrupted by a call from Sulu, telling him that Barnhart was found dead on deck 9. We'll never know what colour shirt he was under his hazmat suit. Meanwhile Spock wanders off and finds Green's body. Kirk's within shouting range, but Spock uses his head and calls him on his communicator instead, cutting in on his chat with Sulu. You can do group calls on these things!

With these two pieces of information they now know that the creature's on the ship and it can disguise itself as anyone.

Kirk orders general quarters, security condition 3, intruder alert, which means everyone has to walk, run or jog to battle stations.

It also means we get a rare glimpse of female officers wearing trousers, which were phased out almost immediately. The Original Series is famous for its miniskirt uniforms, and as far as I can tell the reason they exist and were so ubiquitous is because basically everyone wanted them. The studio wanted sexier costumes, the network wanted sexier costumes, Grace Lee Whitney and Nichelle Nichols wanted to show their legs off, and it's no mystery what Gene Roddenberry wanted. It was 1966, miniskirts were in fashion, so they ended up in the show.

Speaking of scenes from the pilots, they've sneakily recycled some footage from Where No Man Has Gone Before here. Though I guess it might not really count as recycling if it's a scene that never made it into the broadcast episode.

It's definitely a bit weird to me, seeing people wearing the Where No Man uniforms and the regular uniforms in the same episode, but we've seen so many uniform variants already that they wouldn't have seemed out of place at the time. Plus they were mixing uniforms like this for the whole of Next Gen season 3 and no one cared.

Things aren't entirely 100% safe down on the planet either, as Robert is opening fire on them with an old laser gun prop from the first pilot. I can't really comment on how great that beam effect looks, as it was improved for the Remastered edition, but I can mention that the Styrofoam bricks explode real good. Right next to actors as well.

Robert continues to insist that they don't want them there, they just want to be alone, and he'll kill for it! Kirk is sure he's just trying to frighten them and the two officers come up with a different approach. Well Spock points into the distance and then crawls away, so I have to assume they're both on the same page. The original draft apparently featured Scotty in Spock's place, but it's not a big surprise why the second actor credited in the titles is the one who ultimate got to go down and do stuff.

Meanwhile, on the Enterprise, McCoy's still asleep and Nancy/McCoy has reported to the bridge.

It's nice to see that the other characters (except Scotty) are still getting stuff to do in this episode, with Uhura manning the science station and Sulu manning communications... hang on. If you ever wanted proof that Uhura can operate any station on the bridge, here you go.

This is a slow episode, but I do like scenes like this, with an unusual angle of the bridge and an unusual set of characters working on a problem.

They've figured out that Green and the mysterious crewman that bothered Uhura were both the intruder, and Nancy/McCoy offers to help them track the creature down. Probably for the best, as this episode's dragging on and he might be able to speed things along. Plus they did drag him out of bed and told him to come up here for some reason.

Back on the planet, Kirk and Spock utilise some military tactics to get the drop on Robert. Kirk crawls one way, Spock the other, and then they use their communicators indicate they're ready. They never discuss their plan though, which is why it works. Not that there's much to it: Spock yells "Crater!" and Kirk shoots him when he turns around. Really they didn't even need to make him turn around, Kirk had a clear shot from cover.

A few of the stones wobble around unconvincingly but otherwise things go well here, with Robert stunned but not unconscious. Kirk asks him about his wife, and he answers in slow motion (due to the stun I guess), saying that she's the last of her kind. They have a chat about the buffalo and how they're all gone now too, which isn't actually the case in our present day. We came very close to wiping out the American buffalo, with only about a thousand remaining, but Wikipedia claims there's 150,000 of them at this point.

Anyway it turns out the creature murdered Nancy about a year or two ago. This is such a dramatic revelation that Kirk calls Sulu, orders him to step up to GQ 4, and says they're beaming up.

ACT FOUR

One thing I like about the new Remastered CGI is that you get to see the colour of the planet reflected off the hull, which they never tried to do with the original effects shots. It really helps make it look like they exist in the same scene.

The crew now have the task of finding a shapeshifter on a starship, which might take a while as the Enterprise is bloody huge. Okay maybe not compared to a Star Destroyer, or Battlestar Galactica, or anything from Babylon 5, but in 1966 this was a big ship.

The smallest number we've been given for the original Enterprise's length is 289 metres long, or 0.18 miles, but it seems like it'd need to be more like 400+ metres to fit all those tall sets in (which is closer to the length it's depicted as being in Discovery). Either way that means it's sitting on the size chart next to the aircraft carrier which had a crew of 4,600, so it's going to be pretty easy to lose things like salt monsters in there.

I'm not surprised that Star Trek won so many hardcore fans back in the day. If someone wasn't already drawn in by Kirk and Spock, or the weekly space adventures in color, or the miniskirts, the idea of the heroes living on a giant ship you could wander around inside and get lost in seems like it would've been unlike anything else on TV.

Act four begins with shots of security officers standing guard in red-tinted corridors, then briefly checks on Dr McCoy. Turns out he's still asleep. Which means the McCoy sitting in this meeting is an imposter! Oh, plus we've got another new set: the briefing room, with its nice purple walls. Well, they're purple at the moment anyway, probably thanks to the lighting.

They've done the smart thing and put out salt as bait to lure the creature out, but Salt Vampire McCoy suggests that they should just give it salt without tricks. It's an intelligent creature just doing what it has to in order to survive! Spock finds this compassionate response to be reckless.

Hey Kirk's got one of those new-fangled colour TVs in his briefing room! Three of them in fact, as it's a three-sided monitor. That way we can see his face and the screen at the same time, though I don't think he's seeing much from that particular angle. They wouldn't have been seeing anything at all on the set, as the image had to be composited in.

Robert reveals that the creature needs love as well as salt. He nearly killed it after it killed his wife, but he recognised its intelligence. Plus it's the last of its kind! Then Kirk comes out with this in response:

"You bleed too much, Crater. You're too pure and noble. Are you saving the last of its kind or has this become Crater's private heaven, here on this planet? This thing becomes wife, lover, best friend, wise man, fool, idol, slave. It isn't a bad life to have everyone in the universe at your beck and call, and you win all the arguments."

Then Kirk asks if Robert's learned to recognise the creature in any form it takes and we get a close up of Salt Vampire McCoy sitting next to him as he says 'yes'. But he won't help them find it. So Salt Vampire McCoy and Spock go off to give Robert a truth serum!

The Man Trap

The Naked Time

There's a short clip of the Enterprise in orbit to show the passage of time and then it cuts to Kirk running down a corridor as an alarm goes off. They managed to save a bit of money here as well by using another shot borrowed from The Naked Time. There's so much reused footage in this episode it's like a clip show for episodes that haven't aired yet! Except not really, and it's not the kind of thing you'd even notice.

Kirk arrives at sickbay the dispensary to find Spock on a bed, with bleeding green blood out of a red cut on his forehead. Apparently the director decided to give him green blood on the day, which makes sense as it's his alien blood that saved him here.

Spock tells him that McCoy was the creature and it left him alone because "my ancestors spawned in another ocean than yours did" and his blood salts are different. I guess the producers hadn't decided on him being half-human yet, but they had decided that he should occasionally be immune to things that would kill the others. Unfortunately Professor Crater did spawn in the same ocean as Kirk and he's currently lying dead on the floor.

Over in McCoy's quarters there's another bad 'morph' as Salt Vampire McCoy turns back into Nancy. She wakes the real McCoy and begs for his help, just as Kirk arrives at the door with his phaser drawn.... alone.

That was another nice camera move, with the way it started facing Kirk at the door, then moved back and turned around to frame the three of them like this.

Kirk's being kind of an idiot here, confronting a creature who can paralyse people without bringing any backup, but Nancy's not exactly a genius herself. The two Craters kept claiming that these shapeshifting salt vampires are intelligent, but Nancy always makes the dumbest choices for another fix of salt and she can barely resist going for the salt tablets he's holding.

Unfortunately McCoy's only just woken up and he's not at his most intelligent either, so he stands between the two of them and then wrestles the phaser out of Kirk's hand! This gives Nancy a chance to grab the tablets and paralyse Kirk! You'd think McCoy would start putting the pieces together here, but nope he just stands there and lets Nancy put her hands on Kirk's face.

Fortunately Spock runs in and wrestles the phaser from McCoy! Well, he tries to anyway. McCoy was too strong for Kirk and even Spock's inhuman Vulcan strength is no match for him.

So Spock switches to plan B: convince McCoy that the woman currently draining Kirk of his salt is a salt vampire. Actions sometimes speak louder than words, and Spock arrives at the logical conclusion that the best thing to do is to smack Nancy across the face repeatedly.

So Spock is the first to use the two-fisted Kirk attack! Over and over again. Seven times in total. A nerve pinch might have worked out better, but you never know with a shapeshifter.

Nancy gets bored of his feeble Vulcan punches and swats him away into a bookshelf, sending McCoy's books flying. Fortunately his point has been made: the woman that McCoy witnessed draining salt from Kirk's face is clearly not Nancy! It took almost two minutes but he's finally been talked around. McCoy still has Kirk's phaser so he's able take the creature down, ending the crisis and saving his captain! I mean, in theory. He doesn't seem in any rush to actually do it.

Spock's apparently too hurt to get up, so the creature's able to go back to the paralysed Kirk and pick up where it left off. It's not in any hurry either though, taking 15 seconds to get there, and hesitating a while to turn into her true salt vampire form first. After 10 seconds of staring at a salt vampire and 5 seconds of Kirk's screaming, McCoy finally pulls the trigger. Twice.

And we get a first person view of him firing the phaser! This starts the tradition of Trek doctors being a deadeye with a pistol.

It's a bit of a shame about the creature though. Partly because it was the last of its kind and was clearly a salt-addict, unable to control itself, and partly because they'd sold this new Star Trek show as being intelligent, respectable science fiction and in episode one they're fighting a space monster.

It's not the worst looking furry monster costume though really. In a different reality the salt vampire could've worked through its problems and become the show's Chewbacca. Why didn't you set it to stun McCoy? You didn't have to make them extinct!

The salt vampire's actual form was played by dancer Sandra Gimpel, who had previously played a Talosian in the first pilot. It's the last of its six different appearances, meaning that the character holds the record of being played by more actors than any other character in the Original Series.

No one's in the mood for joking around at the end of this episode as Kirk's lost a bunch of salt, Spock's been beaten up twice, and McCoy's just found out that his ex died a year or so ago. Kirk's says he's thinking about the buffalo, and then they just stand there in silence listening to the iconic bridge sounds for a while. Possibly realising that they could've just set the phaser to stun.

Kirk finally orders Sulu to leave orbit at Warp 1, establishing right at the start that the ship uses Warp speed and that it's totally okay to do it inside a solar system. Though they won't get very far at that speed; I thought there was a guy waiting on them to deliver some chilli peppers!


CONCLUSION

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I'm the kind of huge Star Trek fan who's only seen each episode once, a decade or two ago, so my memories of The Man Trap were kind of fuzzy. I have the feeling I didn't used to like it much though, and I have a stronger feeling I wasn't looking forward to rewatching it. The episode wasn't actually so bad though! Well, not at first anyway.

The episode starts off a little bit like Forbidden Planet, with the crew checking on couple of people that insist to be left alone on their dead wasteland of a planet, but then turns into something more like Alien or The Thing with a killer prowling the ship... eventually. It takes 20 minutes before the creature makes it to the Enterprise and then there's an entire hour of it following people around trying to suck their salt. Well, okay it's more like 7 minutes, but it felt like it went on forever. It was never really terrible, but it felt to me as if they'd taken an Animated Series episode and dragged it out to last a full 50 minutes. I don't remember having a problem with the way Original Series episodes are usually paced, but this one really did start to lose me. There just isn't enough content here to justify its run time, and a lot of the content it does have is scenes of Uhura trying to get Spock to be interested in her, Kirk and McCoy arguing about how old Nancy looks, or people discussing how hot Yeoman Rand is. Also a lot of people eating or drinking I noticed. You could draw a connection there, as love and food are the two things that the salt vampire craves, but that's maybe a stretch.

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not that it's based around the 'any one of us could be the shapeshifting killer' trope, but there's absolutely zero paranoia. No one's freaking out or pointing phasers at each other, and there's no blood tests or anything like that. There's also no mystery of who the creature currently is, at least for the viewer, as we get to see every transformation. This actually works to make the salt vampire more sympathetic I reckon, as we get to walk a mile in their shoes. I mean seriously, they spend ages walking around the ship trying and failing to get their salt. It really raises the question of just how smart the vampire is. The creature itself claims to be intelligent when it's disguised as McCoy, but the way it struggles so much as Green makes me wonder if it's cheating using its telepathy, appearing smarter when people's memories are stronger. Like how you can chat with a parrot without them actually understanding you.

In fact it constantly sabotages itself in any disguise. A ship arrives that will restock them with a year's worth of salt, but the salt vampire immediately gets a murder investigation started by killing a crewmember. Then it gets itself on the ship with all the salt on it, and instead of looking for food it murders someone else, letting everyone know it's on board with them! Fortunately it has one ally, Professor Crater, who will never betray it... so it kills him.

To be fair Kirk and Spock weren't at their most enlightened and Starfleet in this story, so I'm not sure it could've gone up to them and said "Hey I'm a salt vampire, I killed Nancy because I desperately needed her salt to live, but if I can get a supply of salt tablets I'll be good," but it never tries to negotiate with them at any point. "It's my planet, you're all trespassers, and salt vampire laws say it's cool for me to eat you, so you've got no legal right to judge me," would've been a good line to try as well. It did say 'c'mon, it doesn't mean any harm, just give it some food and let it go' when disguised as McCoy, but that argument would've worked better if it didn't still have a few salt tablets left at home to eat. I don't doubt that it was hungry, but it went after food it didn't have to the first chance it got.

The impression I got is that the creature is a salt addict, murdering people for the quickest, easiest fix and not feeling a shred of guilt over it, even though the slightest bit of patience might have gotten it everything it wanted. It's basically a psychopath, without a shred of empathy or consideration for others, and zero ability to think ahead. Intelligence isn't a requirement for the crew to treat it with compassion though, so it was a bit of a shame there was more discussion about Nancy's grey hairs than about the most ethical way to deal with their problem. They go straight from 'how can we find this thing' to Kirk turning up at McCoy's quarters with a phaser, and there's no effort made to communicate with it or capture it. They've got all kinds of advanced technology like phasers with a stun setting, transporters, forcefields, and doors with locks on them, but the best Spock can come up with is smacking it around 7 times and yelling "shoot it, it's killing the captain!" And even that seems like a bit of a complicated concept for McCoy who really has to stand there and think about it. The big dilemma of the story is whether or not he can shoot something that looks like his ex, but obviously isn't, and he doesn't come off looking great. They never say anything about him being hypnotised but his behaviour's so strange that it's like something must be going on there.

Other than that the characters seemed pretty much themselves though, which I guess shouldn't be all that surprising for the fifth episode filmed (sixth for Nimoy). Plus they're in the proper uniforms and on the proper sets, so everything feels correct. Well, except for Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley not quite getting to monopolise all the screen time. It's not quite living up to the original 'Wagon Train to the stars' pitch, as it's more focused on the crew than the guest stars, but we get to hang out with Rand, Sulu and Uhura for a bit, which is cool. Though things didn't work out so well for the four crewmembers (and a civilian) who died. That's a disturbingly high number of casualties; at this rate they'll run out of crew in 110 episodes! No dead redshirts yet though.

Star Trek's famous for its morals and messages and I spotted a whole bunch in this story: 'don't sabotage your long-term goals for short-term gratification', 'don't walk off to screw another man's wife in the middle of a mission' and 'extinction makes people sad'. Other than that it was kind of shallow and empty, I thought. The episode got a lot of negative reviews when it came out, which isn't what you want from your first episode. A lot of the cast didn't like it either and I'm with them on this one. There are much worse episodes of the Original Series, but I have a feeling this is going to turn out to be my least favourite of the first batch of episodes.

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NEXT EPISODE

Star Trek: The Original Series will return at some point maybe, but next on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm jumping ahead 21 years and writing about the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation: Encounter at Farpoint!

Thanks for reading by the way. If you want to share your own opinions you're absolutely welcome to make use of the comment box below. Or even visit the Discord!