The First Step in a Long Trek

Let’s get this straight: I am not doing the full Star Trek pilgrimage, by which I mean that I have no intention of writing in detail about every episode of the original series, even though I have just embarked upon watching it. That would just be too much like work, I’m afraid, and one sure way of draining any real fun out of an undertaking is to blog about it every step of the way.

However, writing is one of my main methods of making sense of the world, and it would feel foolish not to say something about a particular episode if the mood took me. So, yes, this constitutes an official announcement that I will definitely, perhaps, be writing about an indeterminate number of Star Trek episodes at some possible future point. (Perhaps I should have put out a proper press release.)

Oh well. One of the curious realities of embarking upon the Trek pilgrimage is trying to work out which order to watch the episodes in – or, to put it another way, what exactly is the first episode of Star Trek? There are, obviously, multiple candidates – you’ve got the original unaired pilot, The Cage, which obviously has historical value but (crucially) no Shatner, the second pilot (Where No Man Has Gone Before), which is a bit more like it, and then the first episode to actually be broadcast, The Man Trap. Approaching this venture with my usual commitment and attention to detail, I find I can’t be bothered to muck about on Wikipedia looking at authoritative lists of recommended viewing orders, and so I am just going to watch them in the order they’ve been put in the DVD box set. So there.

The Man Trap it shall be, then, a fairly straightforward creature feature. The Enterprise arrives at the snappily-named planet M-113, which is home to space archaeologist Professor Crater and his lovely wife Nancy, an old flame of Dr McCoy’s. Kirk, McCoy, and the first in a long line of Walking Dead Men (though kitted out in blue rather than red) beam down to check them out, but directorial jiggery-pokery reveals that something odd is afoot as far as Mrs Crater is concerned: each of the visitors is seeing a different woman.

Then, sure enough, the blue-shirted Redshirt turns up dead in mysterious circumstances. It eventually transpires that Mrs Crater is not what she appears and has in fact been replaced by a salt-loving alien monster with the ability to telepathically make others see it as – well, whomever it wants, really: either a particular individual, or just a generic Fit Person. The limits of this power aren’t really gone into, but it seems a fairly potent trick, appearing in different guises to different people simultaneously, and being able to telepathically learn languages from its victims (or is it just projecting the illusion that it’s speaking the languages?). Professor Crater does not seem overly distressed by the demise of his wife, and seems relatively happy to be shacked up with this sucker-fingered salt-devouring chameleon. I suppose the recreational possibilities are endless, but network standards and practices mean that this is not explored (‘Thank God,’ some might say).

This is a solidly-made piece of pulp SF, but it would have been a brave person who watched it on first transmission and instantly declared it to be the first fruits of what would ultimately prove to be an unstoppable legend of both pop-culture and screen SF. A little judicious rewriting would render The Man Trap perfectly fit-for-purpose as a standalone episode of an anthology TV series, while it definitely seems to owe a vague debt to earlier pieces of SF – the basic premise (space cruiser visits archaeologist-with-a-secret on remote, seemingly dead world) inevitably recalls Forbidden Planet, one of the most obvious donors of Trek‘s narrative DNA.

It holds up pretty well as a no-frills piece of genre TV, even today. I’m not going to go on and on about how the original effects have been replaced by CGI for the DVD release (that’s a topic for another time), but it is inescapably true that however much money and effort has gone into making the Enterprise swish convincingly past the camera, the benefits of this vanish when one key effect in the story is still realised by someone with their hand in frilly glove hiding under a table and pretending to be a sentient alien flower.

One of the things I’ll be particularly looking at whenever I do write about original Trek is what the series actually is. The popular perception of Trek – the Authorised Version, as it were – is that this is some sort of liberal, progressive manifesto, with every virtually episode delivering some kind of thoughtful allegory about life in 1960s America. Someone once said that all real SF basically constitutes an extended debate as to what it fundamentally means to be human. I wouldn’t say all Star Trek meets that definition, but if you were to suggest that the original series is a series of conversations as to what it means to be a man in 1960s America, I’d be prepared to give you a hearing.

The Man Trap is notably lacking in the sort of resonant subtext or moral dimension you might expect from vintage Trek – the plight of a species on the verge of extinction is raised, the parallel given being the buffalo of North America (nowadays known as bison, they must change the name back at some point in the future), but this doesn’t really work – the bison were hunted to the edge of oblivion, but the salt-suckers just seem to have exhausted their own food supply (probably best not to think too much about the details of this). In the tag scene Captain Kirk reveals he has been thinking about the buffalo, but doesn’t go into detail. And no-one asks him to elaborate, which if you ask me just shows that the writers couldn’t think of a particularly relevant point to make, either.

What is interesting is that The Man Trap is framed almost entirely from a masculine point-of-view – it’s called The Man Trap, not The Person Trap, after all. The conceit of the salt-sucker as some sort of predatory vamp isn’t sustained throughout – the creature disguises itself as a bunch of men, too – but it’s in the Mrs Crater form that it proves most manipulative and cunning. Other than the monster, the most prominent woman in the story is (note her title) Miss Uhura, who gets some rather startling dialogue with Spock like ‘I’m an illogical woman who’s beginning to feel too much a part of that communications console… why don’t you tell me I’m an attractive young woman, or ask me if I’ve ever been in love?’ It’s all very roll-yer-eyes-ish, but all too easy to imagine the dreaded Abrams watching this scene and getting the idea for the Spock-Uhura thing from the re-jiggle movies.

So it’s very competent, and it’s fun, but The Man Trap remains quite sexist, and while it has a neat (if hardly inspired) premise, it’s hardly what you’d call deep. Then again, I think it’s probably safest to think of Star Trek as pulpy genre TV first, and a delivery system for progressive and/or sophisticated ideas second. This initial episode is certainly much more the former than the latter.