The Man Trap

What can I say about The Man Trap? As an episode of Star Trek in context of the entire series, it's a less well done note in one of the melodies that makes Star Trek what it is. It's not bad, it's not good, and it's not exactly necessary.

I'm surprised this was chosen as the first episode to air over the second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, because this was such a formulaic monster-of-the-week episode. Then again, it had a good old pew-pew laser fight, nice shots of the ship, a Spock-is-an-alien-lol moment, some crewman hijinks, a Rand appearance, a desert planet, some redshirt deaths...in short, all the ingredients are there for a solid TOS episode; it's just not a very interesting TOS episode.

These guys are the Beavis and Butt-Head of the Enterprise. 

The most interesting thing about this episode was the salt vampire. Dialogue alluded that it was part of the race that built the ruins Crater was investigating, but I wonder if they weren't what destroyed that civilization.

See, I know we humans require a minimum of sodium to survive (cats and dogs require significantly less from external sources, if any), and I would guess that these Salt Vampires (or M-113 Creature if you want to get technical) evolved on this planet where salt was readily available, likely in the form of salt water; the star got hotter or something happened to dry up the seas, but the creatures persisted (they probably weren't building rockets but the ruins are evidence of culture and society) on the residual salt pans and deposits left by the evaporated seas until the end, one sad, desperate creature driven by instinct.

Oh, except they're also psychic and can suck salt out of people's bodies...maybe sodium in this ecology like...carbs do in ours? I'm not a nutritionist, I just want to Watson up a history for this creature beyond "they did a vampire episode in space."

It is an effective vampire story, and from that angle I was able to enjoy it on its own merits. I spoke to some people and they put the creature itself in context; apparently this thing was scary as fuck back in 1966, and I suppose I can compare that to my own experience with The X-Files as a child - namely, a little monster named Flukey. 

The resemblance is somewhat uncanny

I felt like this episode may have been chosen as the first one because the characters were all there - Sulu, McCoy, Uhura, Kirk, Spock, Scotty, even Rand - all the characters one thinks of when they think about classical Star Trek. They're also more or less in their proper form; Uhura flirts aimlessly with Spock (who is visibly annoyed), McCoy is cantankerous, Kirk utters out a fortune cookie navel-gaze at the end, Rand is a secretary. Where No Man Has Gone Before had Spock smiling (and being a smart-ass, which is in character but he was a grinning jackass in that chess match), some old fart doctor, and no Uhura; Charlie X had Spock smiling as well, but I rather liked the coy smile he was giving Uhura as he strummed his lyre. 

I wonder what the Kelvin version of The Man Trap was like...

Finally, I can't help but wonder what a post-Devil in the Dark Kirk and Spock may have done with this creature; would they shoot it, or would they try to reason with it, offer it salt until they could get it to some sort of starbase or planet capable of supporting its needs? If they can make Pluto in less than 9 minutes, they can surely get mass quantities of salt for an alien. You know Picard would have had Worf and Data wrestle it to a replicator and start force-feeding it all the salt it could consume. 

Personal Rating: 2/5; skip.

It's not a terrible episode, but there's nothing here that other, later episodes don't do much better. I'd suggest finding the scene between Spock and Uhura on youtube, or watching only the scene simply because it's a good establishing moment for Spock. 

END. 

The Cage

"A person's strongest dreams are about what he can't do." 

I watched TOS for the first time earlier this year, and I loved it, yet I never bothered with The Cage because it's partly recycled in The Menagerie and to be frank, every time I tried I was bored to tears within the first ten or fifteen minutes.

Setting aside the aesthetic differences, the original pilot lays the foundation for a fairly standard episode of Star Trek. I'm not going to sit here and lay out the whole plot - that's what Memory Alpha is for. Instead, I'm going to talk about how it made me feel.

Having sat down for the entirety of the episode, I found that I did not care for The Cage - but there were things I did like and could even appreciate about the episode.

I liked Pike. Looking past the fact that he's uncertain of remaining in command (a very un-Trek attitude when contrasted against James "don't let them make you retire" Kirk and Jean-Luc "not planning on it" Picard), he's a pretty solid Starfleet officer. For the duration of his captivity by the  Talosians, Pike tries to use his wits and reason over violence to escape, only turning to the latter as a matter of last resort. That's standard Starfleet operating procedure if I know anything about it.

The man has a despairing loneliness about him and soulful eyes, but he lacks the swashbuckling charm of Jim Kirk, and I think Shatner's (and by extension Kirk's) charm is at least 60% of his performance and 5% of what makes TOS great. You won't get that from Pike.

The Talosians were assholes. They apparently nuked their planet, fled underground, then got into mental fantasies so intense and addictive they couldn't even maintain their facilities, then they go about luring aliens to their world in order to capture them and feed off their fantasies (and hopefully enslave, breed, and use to repair their infrastructure.)

They look like humans with oversized heads, but they don't know how to put Vina back together? She must have been a real lump of meat, but once they got her to a certain point, they should have realized "oh hey, she kind of looks like us but with hair!" and fixed her up.

I did read that in the original draft the Talosians were supposed to be crustaceans, and someone online posited that maybe they still were and the humanoid forms were also mental projections...in which case why did they not project straight humans? Whatever, it services the overall plot.

The point I'm trying to make is that the Talosians made their bed and now they have to lie in it - and I don't give a shit about that, but they picked the wrong species to try to enslave.

Dicks.

Other things I noted were the usual early installment weirdness things - like Spock ordering they engage hyperdrive, warp factor (7, presumably.) When they meet the (illusory) scientists, one officer excitedly talks about how the time barrier has been broken, which is some new development in the 18 years since the crash. There's some interesting, pre-streamline warp drive stuff here, like there's maybe some hard science going on with relativity and what not.

The show struck me as more 50s futurism than 60s; the bridge was very military looking, like if someone raised the ceiling on the NX-01 and replaced everything with office furniture from the 60s - I thought those tiny monitors were lamps. How the hell do they even read those things? The monitor is the size of an old Nokia flip phone!

It's interesting how Nimoy adopted Number One's logical demeanor and defined a race in the first season of TOS, but I didn't find her so logical as much as aloof and professional. She's not cold, she's working.

That kid by the elevator looked super uncomfortable the whole time.

Apparently Earth is all public parks surrounding major cities, according to the illusions. How quaint a future is that? Reminds me of some old article from a newspaper published in the early 1900s about how 100 years from then we'd pave over all the grass and drive non-essential animals to extinction...only Gene went the opposite way and people have pet horses and the Mojave Desert is completely terraformed. I guess that's fine, because most of the planets we visit in TOS are nice, dry American Southwest style deserts and studio back-lot wastelands.

Hot, dry; comfy. Can't beat the matte views. 

I bet kids would have loved seeing spooky aliens and ray guns on TV, cerebral or not - I've never seen Lost in Space, but I bet it's trash compared to the positively cerebral episode of television I saw in The Cage.

I found it incredibly humorous when Yeoman Smith asked the captain who was to have been Eve. That was a nice note of levity after a fairly dark and heavy episode.

It was a heavy episode. Star Trek history notes that NBC turned it down for being "too cerebral", and I can't say that I disagree. I don't know how audiences were back in the mid-60s, but if they're anything like audiences now then nobody tunes into TV to think, and I sure as hell didn't either. Many say the strength of Trek lies in its morality plays and the depth of subject material, but I believe that's a half-truth at best; there is always a large part of the audience tuning in for the alien TnA and pew-pew laser fights over "what is it to be a man?"

I'm not really ashamed to say I fall into the latter category sometimes; after all, I felt the second pilot (Where No Man Has Gone Before) was a much stronger episode for having gone almost straight into the action and ending in a physical confrontation. What can I say, I'm a man of my time.

I don't find Star Treks strengths to be in the morality play, although that certainly is a strength of the franchise it's not necessarily the foundation; that belongs to the interaction between characters and their development, and that's just not here - Where No Man Has Gone Before may be comparatively brainless, but it also has the tragedy of Kirk's friend becoming a callous god and Kirk having to put him down like a dog to save his crew. (THAT would have been a better movie than Into Darkness.)

Without the charm of the characters and interactions though, The Cage is sort of bog standard sci-fi.

Personal Rating: 3/5, skip.

While it's not necessarily a bad episode, it's a very boring episode and only a hardcore Trekkie (or an acolyte determined to watch all of Star Trek such as myself) should view it, and even then there is no real reason (other than perhaps hipster irony) to watch it more than once. 

END

NOTE: It's been a few days churning this out, editing information from my original post on reddit discussing it and trying not to sound like a raging plebeian. I'm a little backed up in reviews, but I'll try to push one out per day, maybe every few days as I continue to boldly go where millions have gone before. Right now I'm probably 20 minutes into The Enemy Within, with intention to finish by Thursday and have at least two more entries in my log posted by then. 

To Boldly Go Where Many Have Gone Before

Everybody with an internet connection and a certain amount of free time (and possibly loneliness) since the 80s has had a Star Trek watch and review blog.

Indeed, in this new millenium of smart phones and 24/7 media saturation, many have moved forward to awful likebait YouTube reviews and podcasts - some good, most (like the blogosphere of Star Trek reviews that preceded them) unmitigated garbage. 

So what makes this one any different?

Nothing!

It provides an outlet for me, Ashland Roadwarrior (also known as NX01-EbonHawk) to talk about Star Trek.

My Star Trek Discovery

I began watching Star Trek in a very stilted and obtuse way. The year must have been 2003 or so, and I was a socially awkward (like in therapy for it) teenager with a life worthy of an after school special who desperately needed friends, family, and other healthy support systems. 

I didn't get them, but that's okay because I discovered Star Trek! One lazy afternoon I caught the UPN afternoon movie: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. All I knew about Trek prior to this momentous event was what I had absorbed via pop culture osmosis, and I don't really remember my reaction to it except that here was some good sci-fi in the year of the worst Star Wars movie since The Phantom Menace. 

Not long after I began watching TNG and DS9 reruns on Spike TV on summer afternoons - I was lucky enough to catch Encounter at Farpoint for my first TNG episode, and even though I was apprehensive, I was soon hooked. That fall I tuned into the third season of the oft-maligned Enterprise. 

When Enterprise ended, so did a lot of things in my life, and I was forced to move on without Star Trek. When things stabilized a few years ago, I signed up for Netflix and once more dived into the Star Trek universe with TNG and ENT, then DS9. I've never been able to stomach Voyager, but I've made it through TOS once and the films uncountable times - despite differing opinions on quality, taken as a whole the TOS cast films are a charming and stylish phase of fun and action between the archaic originals and the somewhat experimental and ultimately codifying next generation of shows. 

Now I'm re-watching EVERYTHING, from The Cage to These Are the Voyages..., from Trekkies to Discovery and everything in between. 

You see, I have a confession: my viewing of the franchise has become something of a background noise half-attentive affair. I fire up DS9 or TNG and I get on a video game or reddit or something, but that's no way to give something you love its fair due. 

Earlier this week, I started with The Cage. I had never bothered with it before, and though I was ultimately unimpressed, I was inspired to sit down and watch everything Star Trek, to become the Trekkie I was born to be in the uncertain summer before 9th grade. 

So now I am going to write my thoughts, opinions, and reactions to each and every piece of Star Trek televised/filmed media I can consume over the next few years. I am currently on TOS 01x05: The Enemy Within (NOTE: I count The Cage as 01x00, rather than 01x01 as Netflix numbers it) - that is, it's next to watch. I will post my reactions and thoughts on the preceding episodes after this introductory post. 

I doubt many will read this, but in case you are reading this (and if you're actually following it you mad man) I welcome you. Please feel free to comment, call out my bullshit, and offer your own interpretations and insights on each and every episode. 

I shouldn't have to tell commentators to keep racism and bigotry to themselves, I try to run a clean ship here and it is inherently antithetical to the spirit of Star Trek. Don't debate "Gene's Vision" either; Gene was an idea guy, not exactly a story guy, and I respect him for starting the Star Trek universe with his vision but I'm not broken up about his guidelines being disregarded for the stories to move forward. 

Mild cursing allowed. 

An in-progress google spreadsheet of my episode ratings can be found here.