When Star Trek: The Original Series premiered, it was not with the actual first episode of the series, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” but rather with the “The Man Trap.” March is Women’s History Month, and well, “The Man Trap” episode may seem like an odd choice as my kickoff column for it because it’s not exactly the most forward-thinking episode of the series, particularly when it comes to female representation. However, I think starting from the beginning has a great deal of merit because “The Man Trap” gives us a good baseline against which to measure the Star Trek franchise’s evolution over the decades.
Plot Ahoy!
“The Man Trap” opens with Captain James Kirk and Dr. Leonard McCoy beaming down to a planet currently playing host to a small research team, consisting of Dr. Bob Crater and his wife Nancy Crater. Mrs. Crater, hereinafter Nancy, happens to be an old flame of McCoy’s. Kirk ribs McCoy about it good naturedly, but Nancy’s arrival interrupts them. To McCoy, she appears as a much younger version of herself while Kirk sees her as her actual age. The crewman accompanying her sees her as a blonde woman he knew on Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet.
Nancy goes to summon Bob so that McCoy can give him a conveniently timed medical exam, but Bob is strangely opposed to the idea. All he wants from the Enterprise crew is more salt tablets. They’re all interrupted by a scream, and they rush outside to find Nancy standing over the body of the very deceased crewman. Nancy tells the assembled characters that he ate the Borgia plant, but between the odd circle markings on the man’s face and the lack of any evidence of alkaloid poisoning, McCoy doesn’t believe her story. What he does discover is that the crewman’s body is entirely devoid of salt.
Kirk returns to planet M-113 to interview Nancy again because Kirk refuses to let the man’s death slide. Bob Crater tries to put off Kirk’s interest, but it doesn’t work. Kirk insists that the Craters return to the Enterprise for their own safety. Spock contacts Kirk to confirm that the plant couldn’t have caused the crewman’s death. Bob takes advantage of their distraction to wander away, where he discovers a dead crewman and starts shouting about salt. Kirk and McCoy come looking for Bob, but they discover the dead crewman. Kirk decides they need to find Crewman Green.
The audience sees Nancy Crater as Kirk sees her, turn into Crewman Green and step over his body in order to rejoin Kirk and McCoy. Kirk has the three remaining Starfleet personnel beam back aboard the Enterprise, not recognizing that he’s bringing danger to his ship and crew. Green wanders the ship generally being salt-obsessed and weird, and he even manages to kill a crewman. He pops into McCoy’s quarters, where the entity reassumes Nancy’s form. Kirk and Spock go back to the planet to find Bob, but Bob threatens to kill them. Kirk stuns Bob, and they capture him. Bob eventually explains that Nancy isn’t Nancy but is rather a creature and the last of her kind. Bob explains that the creature killed Nancy a year or two ago and assumed her life. Bob argues that she’s just trying to stay alive.
Meanwhile, the creature is aboard the Enterprise in McCoy’s form, having sedated the real version, and is once again running amok. When Kirk and Spock return to the ship, they obviously involve McCoy in the confab as to what to do with the creature. Kirk orders McCoy to force Bob to identify the creature with truth serum. Spock opts to follow them, and he ends up attacked for his troubles. The creature leaves him alive because she finds his blood unpalatable. The creature incapacitates Spock and murders Bob Crater before throwing herself on McCoy’s renewed sympathy in his quarters. Kirk bursts in and explains to McCoy that Nancy is the creature and prepares to fire. McCoy stops him, and the creature attacks Kirk. McCoy freezes, and Spock bursts in to demand that McCoy kill the creature who then attacks Kirk again, prompting McCoy to kill her.
The Enterprise warps away, leaving behind a completely unoccupied planet.
Analysis
“The Man Trap” features at least two major themes—the question of whether the creature has a right to kill in order to survive and the creature as a representation of certain fears about women. I’d even go so far as to argue that the episode only pays lip service to the issue of the creature as the last of her kind except in service to that second theme. The episode’s title is after all “The Man Trap,” and that choice really tells us all we need to know about what the episode really wants to explore. Note, all of the salt vampire’s victims are men. She has the opportunity to kill Janice Rand and doesn’t. Yes, the vampire begins to seduce Uhura, in the guise of a beautiful man, but she gets interrupted by Rand and flees rather than engage. The only other of her intended victims to survive is Jim Kirk, and she gets a great deal closer to consuming his salt than she does Uhura’s.
We see from the beginning that she’s able to change her appearance to suit the tastes and fantasies of the people around her. In “The Glass Menagerie,” Amanda explains to Laura that “All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be!” That’s the trap in the episode’s title—that the salt vampire makes herself attractive to men in order to extract from them some form of their essence, in this case salt. The revelation of the salt vampire’s grotesque, true form only drives that point home, but that’s really grasping at low hanging fruit.
To get to the really dark aspect of the episode, let’s look at Bob Crater. The salt vampire kills his wife and offers to become her, and Bob takes the deal, ostensibly because he pities her for being the last of her kind. However, Kirk doesn’t believe him for a second, and neither should we. Kirk tells us that what Bob was actually getting out of the deal was a “wife, lover, best friend, wise man, fool, idol, [and] slave.” Bob basically offers to provide the salt vampire the salt that she needs and a form of what he calls love. In turn, she satisfies his every fantasy, cares for him, creates a home for him, and satisfies his needs. Does this sound vaguely familiar? If we were to distill patriarchal gender roles down their most basic and make them overtly transactional, the relationship between Bob and the M-113 creature would likely satisfy the requirements. The problem really arises when Bob decides to value his relationship with the creature over the needs of the other men in the story. She ultimately betrays him to survive, but given that she’s a trap, what else could you really expect?
I even wonder if we’re meant to feel a touch of sympathy for poor Bob given that the creature is more than willing to drop him like a hot rock when McCoy shows up with his much tastier emotions. However, if viewed from a transactional perspective, the creature is merely ensuring her survival by finding a different male target, and that’s where the issue of the creature’s right to survive comes into play. Despite Bob’s willingness to threaten a Starfleet captain in order to protect the arrangement he has with the salt vampire, she’s willing to leave him when someone who has something better to offer her comes along. In ensuring her own survival, she plays into a very real stereotype of a certain kind of woman and in killing the M-113 creature, McCoy metaphorically puts a violent end to that stereotype.
No, I’m not a fan of “The Man Trap” because the episode goes to a pretty dark place, but at least we know that the franchise’s trajectory can only go up when it comes to female representation. Right?
Rating:
Half a Vulcan lyre.
Stray Thoughts From the Couch:
- Uhura’s attempt at conversation with Spock has not aged well. Why on earth would you ask a coworker to ask you if you’ve ever been in love while at work? The sixties were wild.
- Oh, Beauregard, you’re a great representation of just how bad the special effects were in the ages of yore.
- Yes, I know that Nancy Crater was the creature’s first victim, but a) that happens off-screen and b) makes for the single female victim. I also realize that the creature was largely exposed to men, but c’mon, she could have snacked on Rand, saltshaker notwithstanding. She just preferred not to.