You've gotta love a sci-fi series that opens its world to regular viewers with an entire episode focused on trapping men--that, apparently, primal but enduring fear of being captured and contained by something or someone so alluring you almost want it to take you. The passionate problem, then, would seem to be not the worry of simple kidnapping, but of being consumed by your own desires. The theme of enslavement and kidnapping piqued Roddenberry's interest from the beginning with him writing it as a central component of his original pilot. Now, in the first aired episode of the original series, we see it as a theme again. Also common to both the original pilot and this first episode is the question of misused intimacy. Star Trek, it would seem, suffers early on from a kind of trust crisis.
Quick Plot Summary
The ship has traveled to an archaeological site on a distant planet in order to provide routine medical check-ups to both the archaeologist, and his wife, Professor and Mrs. Crater, that live and work at the site. "Routine except for the fact that Mrs. Crater is the one woman from McCoy's past." Kirk's voice over warns us. Mrs. Crater, it turns out, had been the love of McCoy's life ten years before. Beaming down to the planet ten minutes early, the away team--Kirk, McCoy, and ensign Darnell--is unable to locate the Craters initially. The teams early arrival, however, makes them unsuspicious since surely the Craters will appear on time.
As the moments pass a high pitched singing is heard followed by the appearance of a woman. The singing here, of course, alludes to the Greek myth of the siren's song. It's our warning that something is not just typical with this woman that has appeared. She will surely stand as an attractive destructess. Quickly, we discover that she appears differently to each of the three men from the away team. McCoy sees her as the love he always had, the ensign sees her as a young blond familiar to him as a previous romantic interest, and Kirk sees her as a slightly older version of McCoy's vision. Mrs. Crater finally leaves, apparently to go and get her husband for his medical examination. Mr. Crater arrives irritated by the Star Fleet visit, demanding the crew leave them a load of salt for the heat, and then depart. Kirk convinces Mr. Crater to undergo the required medical exams, and the three of them--Kirk, McCoy, and Crater--begin discussing Crater's wife. In the meantime, the blond figure the ensign had seen has lured him away from the others. In the course of the conversation the changing vision of Mrs. Crater starts to become apparent to Kirk and McCoy as they disagree over what she looks like. Just as the two men might have made progress in their insight, and as McCoy attempts to continue with an internal examination of Crater, a woman's scream is heard. The men run outside to discover the ensign has died mysteriously with Mrs. Crater at his side. Immediately after explaining the death of the ensign, Mrs. Crater's demeanor changes again as she asks desperately for salt. Kirk and McCoy beam back to the Enterprise with the promise to return the next day to complete the medical examinations. After returning to the Enterprise we discover that the ensign's death is unexplainable. Though Mrs. Crater has done the work to imply he'd consumed a poisonous plant, McCoy's autopsy in inconsistent with any cause of death until finally he discovers that the ensigns body is completely devoid of salt. And so the mystery begins. Eventually we discover that Mrs. Crater is not only able to make herself appear differently to different people at the same time, but is also more generally a shape shifter.
Episode Tidbits
O the thrill! I love that we'll also start the series with a McCoy episode, that is, insight into the psychology of the most cranky character in the history of the Star Trek universe. The episode opens with McCoy and Kirk dialoguing about McCoy's personal situation. As such, we get insight into the very comfortable and close relationship these two characters have already established. Kirk's semi-coy demeanor shows itself here as he teases his friend and makes jokes about how to interact with ex-girlfriends. We get to see too Kirk's deep independence as he is the only one of the away team that, in the beginning, at least sees the Mrs. Crater apparition as lovely but unaffecting. Kirk, too, is the one of the men that can see Crater's effect on the other two.
The episode serves as a wonderful introduction to personality tropes for each of the main characters. We're exposed to Uhura as a woman desiring of more than simple outer space adventure, with a tension between her and Spock. The moments in which we see them interact for the first time serve as ample fodder for the relationship shown between their alternate timeline characters in the recent movie. Wisely, the writers of the new film saw the potential brewing in these early episodes for Uhura and Spock's further development in relationship to each other. With the death of the ensign we also see in Spock's controlled response to the announcement that there was "one death" (unnamed) in the away team the early seeds of his character's response to the disruption of Vulcan in the new movie. The character traits exhibited in this early episode seem well utilized by the writers of the recent movie.
It is interesting how heavily the early Star Trek focuses on the worry of illusion. The Mrs. Crater character accomplishes much of her destructive success because of her ability to perceptually deceive people of the ship. Her successful illusions, however, are not merely a matter of appearance. The kind of illusion the series flirts with here depends on the illusionist having intimate knowledge of the person going to be fooled. Star Trek, then, would seem to be suffering from a kind of trust complex. It's not simply a symptom of traveling through unknown climes and locales as the series motif of outer space exploration might suggest. The kind of trickery the series is concerned with strongly depends on being fooled by another that knows us too well, not as a stranger in a far off land simply different from us, but as an intimate that would use the shared personal understanding for ill.
Episode Quotations of Excellence
"Dammit, Jim!" --McCoy yells his famous line for the first time in the Star Trek universe
"Bones! Quit thinking with your glands! We're beaming back to the Enterprise." Kirk's response to McCoy's pleading that they locate Mrs. Crater before leaving the planet
"You suppose he's going space happy or something?" Sulu's personal assistant, Janis, commenting on how strange ensign Green is acting (Green is literally not himself since it is actually the shape shifter impersonating him)
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