Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 1 Episode 2
Original airdate: 15 September 1966

KIRK: “Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can’t have. It’s no fun facing that, but that’s the way things are.”

CHARLIE: “Then what am I going to do?”

KIRK: “Hang on tight and survive. Everybody does.”

I’m only two episodes in and already it’s clear that the Enterprise’s security is pretty fucking lax when it comes to welcoming aboard dangerous folk who could wreck the joint.

You’d think with all its sophisticated technology on the ship they’d have some sort of beam they could use to scan visitors and see if they’re actually normal human beings with no strange, fatal secrets.

This time the walking red alert is Charlie, a 17-year-old lad who’s hastily passed over to Kirk and co by members of the Antares, the ship that discovered him.

When Charlie was a wee tot he was the sole survivor of a transport ship that crash-landed on the planet Thasus. He grew up alone there for his entire life, learning how to talk via the ship’s computer systems.

Because of this, Charlie’s a bit socially awkward. He doesn’t like when people laugh at him, he doesn’t like when Uhura sings about him, and he essentially has no clue how to deal with women.

This is demonstrated in the most hilariously awkward way when he smacks a female crewmember’s arse, leading to a scene where Kirk struggles to explain to him why he shouldn’t do that sort of thing because “there’s no right way to hit a woman”.

There’s one other little quirk Charlie has: he can make things appear and disappear and control people with his mind.

It all starts fairly innocuously, with him pulling perfume out of thin air for the aforementioned female crewmember.

Before too long, though, he’s blowing up nearby spaceships and making anyone disappear if they look at him the wrong way. And given the face he pulls when he does it (as seen above), he’s got a cheek to criticise anyone for looking at him funny.

I enjoyed this episode but the ending was a massive cop-out. By the end Charlie’s got Spock uncontrollably reciting Shakespeare, turned someone into a lizard and made all the phasers on the ship disappear.

“How in the shit are they going to stop him?” I wondered to myself. Not out loud, mind, I’m not crazy.

Turns out they don’t stop him. A ship from the planet Charlie grew up on turns up and pretty much says “sorry about that, we gave him powers to survive on his planet but they’ll fuck you lot up if he stays here so we’ll just take him back, k thx bye”.

And with that, Charlie leaves the Enterprise, all the people he made disappear are brought back and all is well with the world again.

Pishy ending aside, I liked this one. I love me some cheesy sci-fi so I’ve got high hopes if the rest of the Original Series is going to keep up this level of zany hijinkery. I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts because I’d imagine the ‘90s stuff will get all serious and philosophical.

Other thoughts

• Captain Kirk is actually a bit rubbish. He can’t find the way to tell Charlie that you shouldn’t slap a woman’s backside, and ends up passing all the Charlie-teaching stuff to poor McCoy. I like McCoy so far. He takes a lot of shit but deals with it.
• Spock and Charlie play 3D Chess in this episode. I did some Googling and discovered you can buy it in real life, because of course you can.
• The woman Charlie skelps on the arse is apparently a Yeoman called Janice. She was in the first episode too. I’ve never heard of her but I wonder if she’s a regular character who just never became famous for some reason.
• I don’t know what a Yeoman is.

Up next – Star Trek episode 3: Where No Man Has Gone Before