 |
| Kirk is attacked by a salt monster! |
Original Air Date: Sept. 8, 1966. Written by: George Clayton Johnson. Directed by: Marc Daniels.
THE PLOT
The Enterprise comes to an archaeological dig site on an otherwise uninhabited planet so that McCoy can perform routine physicals on the archaeologist and his wife stationed there. The archaeologist, Professor Robert Crater (Alfred Ryder), is far from pleased to see them, insisting that he and his wife are fine and that Kirk should just take his ship and go away. Kirk initially suspects that Crater might be harboring jealousy against McCoy, who was in love with Crater's wife, Nancy (Jeanne Bal), long ago. But then - very abruptly - a crewman is found dead, all the salt having been drained from his body.
Crater and Nancy insist the crew member died from a moment of bad judgment, from eating a lethal fruit from a local plant. But McCoy's medical scans simply don't bear this out. The reality is that the crewman was killed by the sole survivor of the planet where the Craters were stationed - a creature that lives on salt, and that has the ability to assume any form. When another crewman is killed, the creature poses as that crew member and gets aboard the Enterprise - whereupon it begins to feed on Kirk's crew!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Kirk: In a moment of uncharacteristic stubbornness, Kirk refuses to listen when McCoy is providing relevant information early on. I suspect this is a moment of heavy-handed writing, rather than characterization. Kirk displays both courage and recklessness by luring the salt creature with a handful of salt tablets. At the end, he reflects thoughfully on the buffalo, showing that he is more mindful than he had appeared about condemning a species to extinction.
Dr. McCoy: Though infatuated with Nancy - or, probably more accurately, with his memories of her - McCoy remains professional, doing his job throughout the episode. He is the first to note the discrepancy between how he first saw Nancy (as young as his last memory of her), and how Nancy appeared to everyone else... a clue that Kirk ignores because the plot isn't ready for the pieces to be put together yet. He does freeze at the climax, torn between his lingering affection for Nancy and his loyalty to Kirk. But he doesn't actually freeze for long, and reacts decisively when he un-freezes.
Villain of the Week: The Salt Creature can assume any form, and has enough low-level telepathy to shape itself in a manner that will be pleasing to its potential prey. Crater observes that the creature is intelligent, and insists that it is not evil. It is treated as evil here, of course. But its situation as the episode opens is a desperate one; it is literally starving throughout, and then spends the second half of the episode being increasingly hounded into a corner. A more thoughful script may have been able to play with ambiguities. Then again, 1960's television didn't tend to have much time for moral gray areas.
THOUGHTS
The first episode of Star Trek to actually air, even though it was surprisingly far down the production schedule. William Shatner, among others, has observed that of the episodes in the can, the network picked "the worst one" to air first. He has a point - this is not a very good episode, certainly not compared with The Cage, The Corbomite Maneuver, or Where No Man Has Gone Before. However, if one takes a moment to realize that to the network - and most U. S. television audiences of the time - TV science fiction was the generally creepy confines of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, it perhaps becomes easier to comprehend why this rather pedestrian installment was chosen to kick off the series.
George Clayton Johnson's script has a bizarre dichotomy. It is actually very well-structured. A scene-by-scene breakdown would show events proceeding in a reasonable fashion, building from beginning to climax. However, his dialogue is frequently cringeworthy. I have already mentioned the scene in which Kirk cuts off (a potentially useful) musing by McCoy to launch into a mini-tirade. There is also a leadenly on-the-nose scene between Spock and Uhura, in which Uhura needles Spock about his lack of romanticism to such an extent that I'd half-expect the first officer to upbraid her for insubordination. Then there's the characterization of Professor Crater, who is over-the-top from the very first scene, when a little cooperation would actually have been far more apt to have sent Kirk & co. on their way much, much faster.
It's probably best not to go too far into the relationship between Crater and the shapeshifting creature who provided companionship in exchange for salt. I suspect my mind is likely going to nastier places here than the writer's mind did. However, the Craters' archaeological dig does beg the question: Where is the rest of the archaeological team? A one-man dig (Nancy being purely characterized as wife, not as fellow archaeologist) seems quite unlikely, somehow, and yet that apparently is exactly what we are meant to accept. Admittedly, having a close friend who has done archaeological work may color my perceptions on the characterization of this dig, but I can accept the existence of The Salt Creature a lot faster than I can accept Professor Crater's one-man, planet-wide, archaeological survey.
In the end, a mediocre episode. Well put-together on a mechanical level, much of the dialogue falls flat, and the characters often seem to be cardboard figures put through the paces of the plot. It's competent... but only the dismal second half of Mudd's Women prevents me from completely agreeing with Shatner's assessment.
Rating: 5/10
Previous Episode: The Enemy Within
Next Episode: The Naked Time
Search Amazon.com for star trek
Review Index
To receive new review updates, follow me:
On Twitter:
On Threads:
Totally with ya'. An episode worthy of "The Thing That Ate the Blob" 50's B movie genre.
ReplyDelete