OLD SCHOOL STAR TREK RETURNS TO THE NEW YORK AIRWAVES (ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!!)

Fellow East Coasters, rejoice with me at the news that WWOR, Channel 9, has brought the original STAR TREK back to the airwaves.

A mainstay on NYC's Channel 11 throughout the seventies and eighties, STAR TREK has been absent for too long from local syndication across the country for a variety of reasons, most notably the Sci-Fi Channel getting it and padding each episode out to an hour-and-a-half (!!!) with cast interviews and other unwelcome geekery — that's what extras on DVDs are for, fucksticks! — but now it's back in the gorgeous remastered prints spruced up for the insanely expensive DVD releases. I don't have to tell you it's good shit, but in case you don't already know that, TRUST YER BUNCHE and watch the motherfucker already if it's airing near you. So check your local listings and be thankful that something good is on Sunday night TV, post-prime time.

Oh, and New Yorkers? STAR TREK airs on Channel 9 on Sunday nights at 11PM. They just started running this past Sunday, so you've missed "The Man Trap," but it only gets better from there.

Maybe now I'll finally get off of my ass and get back to writing this blog...

HELL, YEAH!!! SPOCK OUT WITH YOUR COCK OUT!

Mister Spock, the coolest space-hero of all time. Fuck Han Solo in the ass!

God DAMN, am I excited!!!

(pausing to calm down)

It's a good day for geeks. I just heard from a friend who attended the STAR TREK PANEL at the big San Diego convention last Thursday, and it's official: Zachary Quinto, best known as the uber-creepy Sylar on HEROES, will be playing the role of a young Spock in the upcoming TREK FILM.

Zachary Quinto, a no-brainer for the role of Spock.

And as if that weren't enough to have me masturbating like a coked-up circus monkey, Leonard motherfucking Nimoy is returning as the older Spock as well!!!

The meeting of the Spocks. And the world of geekdom did shake.

That makes me happier than...holy shit, I'm actually at a loss for words!

And while some of you may think I'm crazy, I hope they take this opportunity to finally give us the death of Spock — for real this time — in a way that hope is quiet and dignified, just like the man himself. Spock was never a man of action by choice, and he earned a peaceful demise many times over, so let's see it happen. I just need that kind of closure for a character I've loved my whole life.

Anyway, read the fucking transcript already!!! (Yer Bunche stops typing and runs off to raise a celebratory shot to the total excellence that is Mister Spock)

Folks-

there's going to be a bit of a delay until the next post, thanks to the company I work for being sold, and the anticipation of pretty much the entire staff being let go for cheaper people (is that possible?). I am therefore going to spend much of my free time seeking other opportunities, so the fun blog stuff will be done when I can get to it.

And don't worry, I've been through something similar about twelve years ago. A little thing that some of you may remember as "Marvelution..."

OUT...RIGHT...SHATNERISM!!!

It's at about this point in reviewing the original TREK thing that I'd like to take a brief detour from the individual episodes and focus upon one of the absolutely vital components of its deathless status. Whenever anyone discusses the original STAR TREK one of the inevitable topics to come up is the incredibly smarmy and frequently over-the-top thespic awesomeness of the one and only William Shatner. We may goof on his, er, "emotive" acting style, but STAR TREK would not be what it is without the inspired histrionics of Captain James Tiberius Kirk.

Face it, if you're reading this you know exactly what I'm talking about: The sleazy smirking.

Stilted delivery that comes off like Shakespeare Day at the stroke ward. Rapid-fire line reads that require a steady hand on the rewind to be fully comprehended. The "who, me?" feigned innocence.

The stiff movement during that crazy fight choreography.

The grimaces while in the clinch with an opponent or under extreme stress.




Screams that go on for days.


The ability to keep the straightest of faces while wearing the most outlandish of outfits.

A little somethin' for the ladies, oh yeah...

Ya just gotta love two space-Jews in Nazi drag.

And, last but defiinitely not least, the magical gift of being able to turn any speech into a classic, escalating rant of the highest magnitude. Yes, my friends, I'm talking about the gift to performance that I like to call (echo effect, please)
OUT...RIGHT...SHATNERISM!!!

Whenever I try to understand just what Shatner puts forth while chewing the scenery I'm reminded of the two foppish actors in the BLACKADDER III episode "Sense and Senility," Mossop and Keanrick, two egotistical uber-hams who explain that when playing a hero one must stand with legs wide apart — presumably to help one stay balanced while gesturing floridly — and "roar" before speaking. In other words, rock out with your cock out.

Mossop and Keanrick, from BLACKADDER III, making the literally fatal mistake of being rude to Edmund Blackadder.

That sort of old-school ultra-seriousness can be hilarious if done unintentionally, as Shatner (allegedly) does, but perhaps Blackadder himself summed it up best thusly:

Blackadder (on actors): You mean they actually rehearse? I thought they just got drunk, stuck on silly hats and trusted to luck.

There are those who refuse to believe that no sober man would ever turn in performances of Shatner's one-of-a-kind gravitas, but I say that the very drunken loopiness he may convey only adds to the image of Captain Kirk as being a "manly man." I don't think for one second that he was actually bombed but this guy was in many ways the logical descendant of the larger-than-life John Wayne-style cowboy hero, now finding a home in the space age and not stopping to look back on the western-dominated TV of the 1950's. No joke, Shatner as Kirk rocked out with his cock out, and aren't you thankful that he did? I just wish that somebody had videotaped his 1959 Theater World award-winning performance on Broadway in THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG, starring opposite France Nuyen (who would later memorably steam up the Original Series as Elaan of Troyius)... But since I don't have that I'll just have to be satisfied with my CD of the jaw-droppingly inexplicable THE TRANSFORMED MAN (1968), recorded while TOS was still in production.

Completely serious in intent, this is one of the most fucked-up records I've ever heard, and that's REALLY saying something.

To really go into the sheer insanity unleashed on this album would take a lengthy post of its own, but an absolutely dead-on review of it can be found on Guy's Music Review Site at http://www.guypetersreviews.com/williamshatner.php and just to give you a taste, here's how the review opens:

"Shatner's first album The Transformed Man still stands as a classic in the "novelty / celebrity camp" department and deservedly so, as listening to this album is an utterly perplexing experience. If the quality of an album would be measured by how loud the listener yells "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?" while hearing it for the first time, then this album would be one of the most impressive ones to ever appear on this website. Many celebrities - mainly actors, the vain breed - have recorded and released music (ever heard Leonard Nimoy, Don Johnson and Bruce Willis?), but no one did it with as much conviction, insanity and hubris as good ole Captain Kirk of Star Trek."

Trust yer Bunche and run out to the local record store immediately. If you love STAR TREK and Shatner for all the same reasons I do, then your life will not be complete without a copy of THE TRANSFORMED MAN.

But did the madness stop there? Oh, hell no, as anyone — like myself — who bore witness to Shatner's downright lysergic rendition of Elton John's "Rocket Man" on the 1978 Science Fiction Awards show can tell you in no uncertain terms. My thirteen-year-old brain almost totally shut down while trying to process that bizarre spectacle, and I will never forget that experience because it was the exact moment when I realized that Shatner was completely out of his mind. The segment has been hauled out of the mothballs many times since its initial airing — the only thing from the otherwise forgetable special that's been seen since — but it's impossible to explain to someone who didn't see it the first time around just how fucking crazy it was. It can be found in its entirety on YouTube and I strongly urge you not to watch it while drinking anything because you will spew said drink out of your nostrils as you keel over in disbelief. I mean, what's there to make of Wild Bill sitting on a stool, taking drags from a smoldering ciggie as he recites the Elton John/Bernie Taupin classic in his own inimitable style?

I mean, that scenario is loopy enough, but then he starts really getting into it, and all hell breaks loose at exactly this point:

"And I'm gonna be...HIGH...as a kite by then!" At which point the camera pulls back and we then see another Shatner stroll out onstage — gotta love those cheesy '70's video effects! — acting like he's as high as previously proclaimed, and this second hipster Shatner loosens his tie and tries to act "cool." But then — yes, it gets worse!!! — a third Shatner emerges, gets larger like he was the fucking head of God, joins the other two in their ever-so-serious emoting, and then all three stop to admire each other's sheer thespic awesomeness.


It was at this precise instant that I became a convert to the ways of OUTRIGHT SHATNERISM, a faith I have been utterly devout about for just under thirty years. Hey, after that Hiroshima of actor's masturbation how could I not? I'm telling ya, go to YouTube and check it out for yourself.

And after that, here are two quickies to bring you back to reality:

Kirk and Sulu bust an old-school move with "the Robot."

"I'll defeat the Gorn with a few righteous hits from this improvised bong!"

EPISODE #3-"WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE"

"Captain, how the fuck did we end up on the set for LOST IN SPACE?"

Seriously, doesn't it look like the lads are on the bridge of the Jupiter 2?

Definitely one of my least favorite episodes in the series, this was the second pilot for STAR TREK and it has a very cold and dark edge about it, much more "adult" than the far more space opera-flavored "The Cage" (more on that when I get to "The Menagerie"). Serious as a heart attack, there's little fodder here for my usual analysis of absurd elements but I’ll give it a shot.

The Enterprise receives transmissions sent by a recorder-marker launched from the SS Valiant, a starship lost two hundred years previous. They beam aboard the seriously abused-looking device and waste little time retrieving its info, judging from its condition that something destroyed the Valiant, but what?

A sad glimpse into the future design of the venerable Weber backyard grill.

Turns out the Valiant encountered a weird energy field at the edge of the galaxy — a huge barrier that may as well have been conveniently marked “TURN AROUND, DUMBASS” — so what does Captain Kirk do? He heads straight for it, of course, apparently mistaking its bright pink glow for an infinite, sideways space-pussy, despite Spock explaining that the Valiant’s crew was wiped out by some kind of oddball phenomenon that had something to do with ESP.

"Look, Mr. Spock! A space-pussy!!!" "Uhm, Captain..."

Imagine Kirk’s disappointment when all he gets out of the effort is one of his crewmen — best friend Gary Mitchell, played by the guy who later went on to get murdered by the H.A.L. 9000 computer in the much more interesting 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) — and visiting psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Dehner — played by the future “Hot Lips” Hoolihan from the movie of M.A.S.H. with a lack of emotion that Spock wishes he had — get zapped by unknown forces and receive psionic powers and creepy silver contact lenses.

How "Hot Lips" earned her nickname.

No need for sunglasses in the 23rd century.

Anyway, the Mitchell guy instantly decides he’s a god and wreaks all kinds of havoc, forcing a reluctant Kirk to ponder whether or not to blast a hole through his pal’s head before his powers develop to an unstoppable level. And as for Hot Lips, she goes along with Mitchell’s awesome godness crap but retains a bit of her humanity because she’s not burdened with testosterone (ya know, because she’s a chick and stuff).

After much rigmarole the whole mess is resolved on an abandoned mining planet as Kirk and Mitchell get into one of those patented Original Series fistfights — yes, a god lowers himself to duking it out with a guy whose grave, complete with inscribed tombstone, he just dug with his mind not two minutes earlier —

with Kirk gaining a break when Dr. Dehner zaps Mitchell, temporarily sapping his powers and sacrificing her life in the process. Kirk then uses a phaser rifle to blow down a cliff face, showering Mitchell with tons of rubble and causing him to topple into the grave meant for Kirk, a bit written to be ironic that never fails to make me laugh out loud for its sheer triteness. THE END.

As previously stated, this one’s waaaay serious, too serious for its own good in my opinion, and with the exceptions of Kirk and Mitchell every character comes off as either totally stolid or a bit of a snippy prick (yeah, I’m talking about you, Spock). And since this was the second TREK story ever filmed, none of the back-story of the characters had been fleshed out, a narrative point made painfully obvious with the benefit of decades of reruns, specifically when Spock makes excuses for being irritated with Kirk winning a game of 3-D chess, blaming his lapse in stoicism on one of his ancestors having married a human woman. That human woman was later established to be Spock’s own mother, but since this was early in the Kirk/Spock friendship Spock’s mixed-race status may not have been public knowledge (to say nothing of the fact that his dad was a well-known diplomat). Also there’s no Dr. McCoy in this pilot — his role being served by Dr. Mark Piper (Paul Fix) — so how good can this story be without Bones there to bitch about the human condition when faced with both a proto version of Spock and a couple of asshole gods?

And how the fuck do you follow one episode about a human with godlike psionic powers — the previous “Charlie X” — with another episode that’s pretty much the same thing, only with the added bonus of a godlike woman with whom the godlike guy can make Osh-Osh? If it were up to me I would have run this episode as the series opener, early characterizations, older uniforms and all, then the following week run “The Man Trap” with no explanation as to where the characterless Dr. Piper fucked off to. And “Charlie X” would have been saved for the mid-season, giving it enough time and distance from “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to be its own much better tale of a human with godlike psionic powers.

Whatever. Things got a LOT more fun from this point on.

EPISODE #2-"CHARLIE X" (a story that unfortunately has nothing to do with Black militants in space)

If it were up to me to decide which episode would have been used to launch the series, I just might have gone with this one. Definitely one of the scariest episodes of the entire run, "Charlie X" owes a great debt to Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961), a landmark science fiction novel about a human raised by the very non-human Martians and given their bizarre abilities to enable him to survive on their world. In that story the human in question is a sweet-natured, mellow guy who wants nothing more than for everybody to share water, love each other, and get their hump on as often as possible, in other words a benevolent cat all around. Not so, the title character of this STAR TREK episode...

Young dork Charles Evans is transferred to the Enterprise from the survey ship Antares after being discovered on the planet Thasus. The sole survivor of a spaceship crash when he was a child, Charlie was raised by the mysterious natives, and as the story progresses we — and the crew of the Enterprise — discover that they have gifted him with incredible psychic/psionic powers that enable him to pretty much make his every whim a reality. Not a good thing for a hormonal and unsocialized adolescent (who looks like he's twenty-seven) to be able to do, let me tell you, and in no time flat Charlie starts getting all tingly "down there" whenever Yeoman Rand is present.

Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney), allegedly hot piece of 23rd century totty.

Let me now take the opportunity to say that I never got the big deal about Janice Rand. She always had a slightly-crosseyed and confused look on her face, sported a really stupid-looking hairdo reminiscent of a conical yarn spool, and had nothing whatsoever to distinguish her from any other woman on the ship except for her role as the Captain's secretary. There were legions of much hotter, far more interesting chicks infesting the Enterprise. Hellooooooo, Lieutenant Uhura, anyone? I mean, check her out:

Even Sulu's interested, for fuck's sake! I rest my case.

But this was very early on and the reign of Uhura had yet to pick up steam, so I guess Rand got by on the whole blonde thing until the writers realized that Kirk wouldn't have anything to do with her romantically since she's a part of his crew — hey, the guy's a professional — and thus wrote her boring ass out of the series. Whatever...

Anyway, Charlie's seething balls get him into all sorts of trouble, such as causing crewmembers to vanish (a move "borrowed" from STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND), making awkward and unwelcome advances toward Yeoman Yarnhead, and, in one of the most disturbing moments in television history, erasing a crewmember's face because her innocent laughter annoyed him.

This scared the shit out of me when I was eight.

Finally not giving a fuck about trying to fit in, Charlie takes control of the ship and sets it on a course toward Colony 5, a settlement where his only relatives reside, and Kirk resolves to stop him before he gets there and turns the place into his own personal, twisted playground. But what the fuck can Kirk do to stop a guy who's pretty much a god? (If Charlie had been a girl then the Captain might have had a shot, but dem's da breaks...)

As all attempts to reign Charlie in prove utterly futile, a ship from Thasus shows up and a Thasian who looks like bonghit smoke exhaled into the likeness of Bill Clinton materializes on the bridge.

Bubba, er, the Thasian explains that thanks to his powers and general assholism Charlie can never have a normal life among humans (well, DUUUUUUUH!!!), so he takes Charlie back with him, the lad's pitiful plea to stay echoing impotently until he discorporates, leaving Rand on the bridge in her rather revealing nightie.

Sorry, guys, I couldn't find a shot of just Rand in the nightie, so this one will have to do:

One of the highlights of the first season, CHARLIE X is solid from start to finish — I'll overlook the presumably omnipotent Thasians needing a spaceship — and genuinely creepy once Charlie's secret is revealed. I found it scary as a kid, but as a grownup the whole concept is perceived for all that it really means, and the image of Charlie bending Rand to his will, even if I can't stand her, is too horrible to bear. And for you K/S fans out there (more on that in another post), imagine the spectacle of the Captain being mind-controlled and giving Spock a sloppy rimjob, the stoic Vulcan bent over the Captain's chair, bracing himself on the armrests, trousers shucked down to reveal his chiseled buttocks and thighs, his tar-black hair glistening beneath the starlight that streamed through the observation skylight as he struggles to repress a lusty smile...

And while we're talking about the Vulcan, this episode features the first time he rocks out with his Spock out, accompanying Uhura's annoying warblings with his Vulcan harp.

Kirk may have gotten more pussy, but nobody was cooler than my man Mister Spock.

EPISODE #1-"THE MAN TRAP"

Our first exposure to the U.S.S. Enterprise and her crew was actually the eighth episode filmed, and I rather like how it just drops us into the TREK universe with no explanation other than Kirk's "five-year mission" spiel during the theme segment. We're just deposited into a typical day for the Captain and crew, a day where you just know that something awful is going to happen and at least one member of the crew will find himself tits-up dead.

Kirk and the gang make a stopover on Planet M-113 to drop off supplies and conduct routine medical checkups on Dr. Robert Crater and his wife, Nancy — who used to be Dr. McCoy's favorite squeeze, that being the only thing stopping Kirk from inviting her to check out the Captain's Log — who have been there for five years perusing whatever cool shit they find on an archaeological survey of ruins left behind by some presumably long-gone civilization, ruins that look suspiciously like the Styrofoam set for a minimalist (read "no budget") production of JULIUS CAESAR.

"Et tu, Brute?"

Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and crewman Darnell beam down and meet the Craters, and are somewhat put off by Dr. Crater's insistence that they need nothing other than a re-stock on their salt supply — I guess they needed "training wheels" when doing Jose Quervo shooters — but before they can really get into it over that, Mrs. Crater shows up, and Nancy is perceived by each Enterprise crew member as a different woman; McCoy sees her exactly as she looked when he last saw her twelve years previous — and doesn't appear to find that very strange, so his medically trained eye goes out the window when confronted with the gal who introduced him to zero-G Osh-Osh while wearing black leather assless chaps — Kirk sees a middle-aged chick who otherwise corresponds with McCoy's vision, and crewman Darnell stands there absolutely cuntstruck, Johnson practically in hand, and tastefully blurts out that Nancy looks just like a girl he reluctantly left behind on Wrigley's Pleasure Planet (no, I didn't make that one up), Mrs. Crater this time seen as a hot, blonde Nordic type who would have been right at home, butt-nekkid in the water tower on PETTYCOAT JUNCTION.

Nordic Nancy (Francine Pyne), looking for Billie Jo, Betty Jo, and Bobbie Jo.

Shoveling Darnell's tongue off the dirt and back into his mouth, Kirk urges him to take it outside and rub one out behind a boulder or something, leaving the Captain and McCoy behind to give Dr. Crater his physical. The Nordic Nancy follows Darnell outside, they chat for a moment and then the remainder of the landing party hears Nancy's horrified scream and they come a-runnin', only to discover the corpse of crewman Darnell, unaware that he's just made TV history by becoming the very first in a loooooooong line of one-shot crewmen to get offed by the Alien of the Week.

Crewman Darnell (Michael Zaslow), forefather of the "Red Shirts."

Such crewmen have since entered the lexicon as "Red Shirts," but although he was the first such bit of cannon fodder, Darnell can't accurately be classified as a red shirt since he's sporting the medical/science officer's blue tunic. But why quibble? If some White people can be "Black on the inside," I guess the same theory can be applied here.

Anyway, the motherfucker is dead.

When Darnell's cadaver is found — inciting the very first "He's Dead, Jim!" — his death is blamed on him having allegedly eaten a piece of Borgia Plant fruit, a highly toxic bit of produce similar to the terrestrial Nightshade (presumably Deadly Nightshade, since not all varieties of Nightshade are toxic, but who really cares?). Strangely, the guy's face is festooned with red, sucker-shaped marks that are not common to Borgia fruit poisoning.

If you ask me, the guy looks like he got hickeyed to death on a prom night gone horribly wrong.

The landing party then beams back up to the ship with the stiff, and McCoy's autopsy reveals that Darnell was actually killed by the removal of all the salt in his body, kind of like he got attacked by a, shall we say, salt vampire... Soon enough, Kirk and McCoy return to M-113 to continue the physicals, this time with two Red Shirts, er, crewmen, Sturgeon and Green, along as armed security. Concerned that there's some salt-sucking whatchamawhoozits running around, Kirk demands that the Craters hang out on the Enterprise until the coast is clear, at which point Dr. Crater runs off in search of his wife. Meanwhile, Crewman Sturgeon has been found mysteriously killed, and then Crewman Green also bites the dust, at which point we see Nancy turn into the just-deceased crewman. Kirk and McCoy question "Green," and then the three of them fuck off back to ship, the Captain unwittingly bringing the salt-glutton to a smorgasbord of some 400-odd crewmembers.

From that point on it's pretty much a matter of time until the creature is found out, and "Green" wanders about the ship, eventually running into the comely Yeoman Rand and drooling over her lunch tray's shaker of salt rather than her rocket-like tits, a move that visibly distresses her. Along with that loopy moment we also meet Beauregard, a Weeper plant that Mr. Sulu has cultivated.

Beauregard, one of the phoniest aliens in sci-fi history, and THAT'S saying something.

Beauregard is a carnivorous plant portrayed by some guy's hand in a frilly glove that's been shoved through the bottom of a table and out of a dime store flower pot, and I wish I had found a picture of it with the fingers open so you could see just how incredibly bogus-looking the damned thing is. Plus it purrs when Rand shows up — hey, he may be a plant, but he's no "Friend of Dorothy," if ya know what I mean — and screeches in a truly annoying way when the disguised salt-vampire shows up, raising an already ridiculous segment to new heights of silliness. Seriously, George Takei and Grace Lee Whitney deserved Emmys for keeping straight faces during shooting (no jokes about George Takei keeping a straight face, thank you very much).

Anyway, the shape-shifter trawls the corridors of the Enterprise in search of a suitable victim, appearing as a different person to each crewmember it meets, eventually running into Lieutenant Uhura and turning into the Brutha of her dreams (I didn't buy that; I always kinda noticed her checking out Spock's ass in those tight, black bell-bottoms as he bent over his science station). They have a brief and annoying exchange in Swahili to remind us that they are Negroes, and just as Uhura's about to have the Big O just standing there, the monster runs off for reasons that I forget at the moment (I was having a hard time with a stubborn beer bottle cap when I was re-watching this particular bit, so I was somewhat distracted). It soon ends up in sickbay where it appears to McCoy as Nancy, lulls him into a false sense of security, drugs him, and then takes his place.

And so it goes until we find out the creature's secret: Nancy Crater was actually killed by the salt-sucker about a year earlier, an act that her husband, now revealed to be quite insane, blithely writes off to the creature just trying to survive since it was the last of its kind. It's highly intelligent, and "needs love just like we do" — do the math, kiddies — so essentially, for the past year the guy has had this shape-shifter thing becoming anyone he desired and has been getting his hump on with it. In other words, this guy:

has been fucking the living snot out of this critter:

Those lips show some promise, but let's examine the information that we have about this creature for a moment; if it is seen by several people at once and each of them sees someone different, its shape-shifting abilities have to be telepathically controlled because it couldn't physically be three different forms at once. That suggests that the Tina Turner circa 1985 suckface alien is the constant base-form, and since its illusions have been both male and female projections the creature does not necessarily have to be equipped with anything resembling what we know of by way of genitalia. So for all we know, Dr. Crater could have been mind controlled into believing he was getting the best pussy this side of Altair IV — and if you've seen FORBIDDEN PLANET you know what I'm talking about — when in actuality he was getting a handjob from those sucker-lined mitts and been none the wiser.

All together now: Eeeeeeeeeew...

But before the audience really has time to ponder all of that, the monster is exposed and looks to a still-besotted McCoy for protection.

The creature sure is resilient, shrugging off multiple double-fisted blows to the head from the superhuman Mr. Spock and sending his pointy-eared ass flying across the room and into a wall with an effortless backhand, all while being perceived as Nancy. As Spock goes down for the count, the Captain rushes in with phaser pistol drawn (probably hoping for sloppy seconds) and is promptly hypnotized rigid, allowing the creature to begin feeding on him.

Finally seeing Nancy for the Lower East Side crackhead-looking fishmouth that it is, McCoy dispatches it with the Captain's phaser and the day is saved.

THE VERDICT: more of a murder mystery than is usually found on STAR TREK, "The Man Trap" is a decent episode, but I can tell you flat out that I might not have given the show a second look if I'd seen this one first. Even though I liked the way they just dump you into it cold, there's a lot going on here that clues the viewer in to the fact that the stories, when seen in retrospect, are not run in order, with some subsequent episodes that were actually shot earlier but run later giving us the lowdown on what's up with the dude with pointed ears and other details about the ship and crew that are are not discussed here. And even with the sci-fi trappings as gravy, I've never really been a fan of mysteries, so this kind of story just isn't my thing, good though it is. In fact, if not for the need to sit through it again for this review, I could probably go the rest of my life without seeing this episode again.

But I have to give it up to the writer for managing to sneak the notion of some kinky inter-species sex past the censors, especially of the incredibly grody quality on display in this episode.