You know, after watching The Cage I was thinking “man, Jeffrey Hunter is really good”. After watching Man Trap I was thinking “Fuck Jeffrey Hunter, William Shatner is the shit”. And, he really is. Typically it takes awhile for actors to get into the role. Sometimes you go back and watch the first few episodes of a series and you can see that the acting is a bit off. But, damn it Shatner had Captain Kirk down from day 1 (although technically, this isn’t the 1st produced episode with this crew … but Bill is just as good in that one as well). Captain Kirk is so pompous, funny, charming and somewhat of a bad ass. You have to love him, or love to hate him. The thing is, I don’t think that William Shatner is really even acting. His best line in the episode is when he tells Bones to “Stop thinking with your glands”.
The stardates for TOS are all over the place and I’m not going to be that crazy and attempt to figure out the real order to watch them.
“The Enterprise arrives at planet M-113 for routine medical exams of archaeologist Professor Robert Crater and his wife Nancy.” Nancy is McCoy’s old flame and he is acting pretty fruity (by the way DeForest Kelly as Bones is one of my all time favorite TV characters – very reminiscent of Trip actually). So Kirk, McCoy and um … Darnell go down to plant M-113 (which I swear is also the name of a Hispanic gang). While there, every guy sees Nancy as a different sexy woman, which is weird. And then surprise, surprise, poor Darnell dies.
So Spock comes on down to M-113 with um … Sturgeon and Green. Well guess who dies next? Everyone ends up back on Enterprise and now we see that Nancy can shapeshift into different people. Including different men, she turns into a fine black man and tries to suck off Uhura. They speak Swahili together … as if this language would even exist in the future?!?! People don’t even really speak Latin, arguably the greatest language ever constructed. Anyway, Crater explains to Kirk that this is really a creature that lives off of salt … she is sucking off these guys for their salt.
Again the insane sexism in the TOS series is shown as Rand walks down the hallway to the rude catcalls of the male crew. She nearly gets attacked by the salt-sucker but escapes. Finally Nancy (salt-sucker) attacks McCoy but Kirk jumps in and takes the attack himself. Bones has an opportunity to shoot, but he can’t because it still looks like Nancy. Spock arrives and yells the classic line “It’s killing the captain!”. Then in one of the weirdest scenes in all of Star Trek, Spock proceeds to repeatedly beat this woman in the face. Makes me laugh every time. Now we FINALLY get to see what this creature looks like, and it is one ugly muthafucka. It vaguely resembles Rod Stewart actually.
This is still one of my favorite episodes. They did remarkable things with a limited budget throughout this entire series. Something is comforting about the use of colors on the ship interior, the sets and the bright uniforms. This is one thing that Enterprise was sorely lacking. I don’t see how this show wasn’t an instant hit, just for its visuals … I mean what was the most eye opening thing on TV at this time, Bewitched? ….Interesting Note: Jeffrey Hunter was in a movie named Man Trap.
ST TOS COUNTDOWN: 2 down 78 to go
2 comments:
This is one of those episodes that sounds so stupid when it's described, but it's just so entertaining to watch. Classic Trek.
Exactly. Many of these episode look completely ludicrous on paper.
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