1.2 — “Charlie X”
I think this is a very strong episode. I didn’t realize what a pleasure it would be to watch new (to me) episodes of TOS!
Robert Walker, Jr. sells the part of Charlie Evans extremely well–what an accomplishment to make us feel conflicted over this character, who could easily be seen as just irredeemable or obnoxious. Walker had a long career on television (and early films, including Easy Rider), and, according to IMDB, worked just last year in a USA network TV movie.
The episode builds slowly, but has a very convincing sense of menace. The sub-genre of the week seems to be psychological horror. Charlie is at the developmental stage teenagers reach where he can no longer be physically controlled. He’s capable of making up his own mind about his actions, but lacks the emotional maturity to make appropriate decisions. I imagine a lot of parents shudder thinking about their children at this stage. Teleplay writer and future Star Trek script editor D.C. Fontana ups the ante by giving him god-like powers–he can destroy a starship by telekinesis from the limits of transmission range without even having line-of-sight! What limits are there? So it’s a problem that he’s a psychopath.
But don’t a lot of teenagers seem like psychopaths from time to time? Fontana, who is a woman, doesn’t hesitate to push further into stomach-churning territory to explore the theme of abuse of male power. The scene in Janice Rand’s quarters gets a little rapey. The whole progression of the Charlie/Rand scenes is convincingly repulsive, building right up to the point when he decides to make Rand “go away”–making the whole second half of the episode hard to watch. I love it, though, that the creative people involved are all willing to go after the juice of the scenes and push it to that uncomfortable place. I feel like TNG would have found a way to take the edge off and make the whole scenario more bland and palatable (this may be unjust–I freely admit I have seen few TNG episodes after the first season). As a result, the distasteful solution to the ship’s Charlie problem proposed by the Thasians at the end feels like a real dilemma, fully earned by the preceding scenes.
Captivating as the character of Charlie is, this episode may be most memorable for Uhura singing her song about Spock (!!), the introduction of three dimensional chess, Spock and Bones bickering for the first time on air, and that half-naked judo scene in the ship’s gymnasium… OH MYYYY. Between recreation room six and the gym, the producers are definitely trying to show us new areas of the Enterprise, world-building furiously as they go, creating that sense of a real starship that makes the Enterprise a co-lead of the series with Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley.
There really was some heat between Spock and Uhura in these early episodes! The ages of the actors when the episode aired (35 and 34) are essentially the same as the ages of Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana upon the release of Star Trek Into Darkness (36 and 35). The difference is that Nimoy and Nichols play their characters as if they are adults.
I thought we had seen the first death of a crew member wearing a red shit–but all of the Enterprise crew members were apparently restored at the end of the episode (the crew of the Antares, not so lucky). What did you think?
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