"Is something wrong, Captain?"
"I was just thinking about the buffalo, Mr. Spock."
Out of context it sounds like a bad joke. Oh that crazy Kirk and his buffalo-thinking ways! But in context, the final two lines of "The Man Trap" form a surprisingly melancholy exchange. Our first three episodes of the series proper—full cast in place (okay, Walter Koenig won't show up until the second season, but this is as close as we'll get for a while), everybody wearing the appropriate uniforms, Spock finally settling into his expected, stoic self—show Star Trek at its best and worst, mixing grand ideas and grander passions with antiquated sexual politics, bad hair, and in one case, a distractingly familiar storyline. The episodes are sometimes sad, in ways you might not expect; it's not like "salt vampire" is a phrase that lends itself to tragedy. (There's a bit in one of Shakespeare's unpublished plays about "yon slumbering saline succubus," but it doesn't scan, and most critics think it's something Harold Bloom stuck in there to screw with our heads.)
"Where No Man Has Gone Before" may be Trek's official pilot, but "Man Trap" was the first episode to air, not that you could tell from watching it. Apart from one hilariously forced conversation between Spock and Uhura, there's not much effort made to introduce us to the various crew members, or even the Enterprise herself. We get some standard exposition as to where the ship is, and why it's visiting this week's planet, and there's some obvious backstory thrown into the banter, but it's the sort of backstory that would've popped up regardless of where the ep fell in the show's run. That's not to say the story's not hard to follow, or the characters aren't immediately recognizable; it's a nicely wound script, delivering just as much information as is required each scene to let you know what's at risk, and the cast already seems completely at home in their roles. The banter between Kirk and McCoy may be on the corny side, but it still comes across as natural ribbing between old friends. One of the original Trek's great strengths—and it's something that none of the spin-offs were ever quite able to capture, though some came closer than others—is that feeling of immediate camaraderie. Some of the actors are better than others, and sometimes the whole boy's club atmosphere gets annoyingly thick, but hanging out with this crew is like going to a family reunion; only, here it's the reunion of a family you actually like.
TOS (the accepted nomenclature for Trek the original) has been credited as an influence on pretty much every genre series to hit TV since it originally aired—some sort of Velvet Underground parallel could made, I guess—and while that influence may have been exaggerated, it's not hard to draw a line between something like "The Man Trap" and at least a dozen different X-Files episodes. (The connection gets even more obvious with "The Naked Time," which isn't at all what it sounds like.) The structure is familiar; our leads arrive at a new location, mysterious deaths occur and minor inconsistencies build up, a monster is discovered with a clear modus operandi, the threat strikes home, and ultimately, the creature is dispatched in a climactic confrontation. Come to think of it, that's the plot of half of the sci-fi movies ever made. And for good reason—it's logical, and, when done well, works like gangbusters.
"Trap" is done very well, I think. Back when I first bought the set, this episode was one of the few that I'd seen but didn't remember very well; watching it again then (and now), I was impressed by its efficiency and its pathos. It doesn't have the gimmicky brilliance of "City On The Edge Of Forever"—the threat, an alien that can change its form and needs high quantities of salt to survive, is clever but not exactly mind-blowing. But it's solid, and some of the additional touches are quite effective. In particular is the pathos I mentioned earlier that culminates in the Kirk/Spock exchange. When the Enterprise arrives in orbit around M-113, they find Professor Crater and his wife Nancy, exactly as they were expecting, hanging around doing what appears to be frontier science in the ruins of a long dead civilization. Unfortunately, it's not that simple: it takes the deaths of three crew members before anybody catches on, but the Prof's wife (who happens to be a former flame of McCoy's) actually died a year ago. The woman everybody thinks is Nancy is actually a creature native to the planet, and now she's going about killing folks. What makes this interesting is that while faux-Nancy is a very definite threat, she's also the last of her kind; and after killing Crater's wife, the two formed a bound out of the Prof's grief and the creature's apparent need to be loved.
That's some pretty dark stuff. The buffalo idea comes from Crater, trying to explain why he protected his unwife for so long. See, once upon a time, there were millions of buffalo. And then white guys showed up, and they started shooting, and eventually, the buffalo died. There used to be millions of salt vamps on planet M-113—and now, but for one, they're gone. We don't know what killed them, but we do know that Crater's pet is the last of her kind, and that once she's gone, her species will be gone forever. Crater's reasons for keeping Nancy 2 around are probably more personal than philosophical; he's lonely, and she doesn't seem that easy to kill. But that the show makes extinction a consideration at all is noteworthy, and makes Kirk and his crew's victory something less than a triumph. There's an ambiguity here that isn't just lazy writing. When Crater tells us the creature needs love, he's telling the truth, but that doesn't change what happens.
There's a bit of ambiguity in "Charlie X" too, but it doesn't work quite as well. It's not a bad episode, but I'd say it's the weakest of today's three. Our Story: The Enterprise meets up with the Antares, a science vessel with an unusual passenger, Charlie Evans, the lone survivor of a transport ship crash, left marooned on an apparent desert planet for over a decade. That Charlie survived is a miracle; he's a bit rough on manners and has a tendency to wander around the ship like a yokel in Times Square, but he's just a teenager, so it's not like it's that surprising. Unfortunately, he also has the ability to transmute matter with his mind, and he's good enough at it that he can destroy space ships, disappear anyone who gets in his way, and do moderately impressive card tricks. Yeah, that's gonna be a problem.
"Man Trap" marks the first appearance of Yeoman Janice Rand, but it's in "Charlie X" that she really takes center stage—and man, there's a reason nobody remembers her. Grace Lee Whitney is a competent actress, but her character represents some of Trek's most egregious offenses against feminism. She brings people lunch, is available to be menaced when appropriate, and gets easily flustered, which happens a lot in "X" after Charlie develops a crush on her. There's a "hilarious" gag when Charlie slaps Rand on the ass, and nobody can explain to him why the gesture is inappropriate; the fact that Rand can't say a simple, "Kid, you shouldn't whack somebody," is embarrassing. Charlie's infatuation makes sense, if you can overlook Rand's hideous basket-style hairdo (nobody gets off too easy in the looks department on this show, but I'd say the women get stuck with the worst wigs), but her inability to handle the situation like an adult doesn't really fit. Of course, handling things like adults is not the Enterprise crew's strong suit, but it takes some of the fun out of things when you look at all those officers and realize that, apart from Uhura, not one of them is a woman. And Uhura's really just a glorified receptionist.