This is the one with the shapeshifting alien that eats people's salt.
This is also the first episode that actually has the famous cast of characters, Kirk, Uhura, McKoy or however it's spelled, etc. In fact, a friend of mine let me know that this is technically a second pilot episode after the previous one, The Cage, was retconned out of existence.
The first thing that I found striking about this episode is that, unlike The Cage, I think this was actually super fun. Or, at least, almost. It was a 45 minute episode, and paced painfully slowly without much happening. I think I'd enjoy an edit of this episode much more, cutting it down to 25 or 30 minutes. A friend actually pointed out that one of the reasons it feels so... empty is that there is no B story. B stories did a lot to make TNG feel like it existed in a living universe, and more than justified it's runtime.
This is going to be the last time I mention this, but the effects and stuff looked really impressive for its time, although the lack of tech of the time is also painfully apparent. So, props to them, but also it does look bad by modern, hell, by standards from 40 years ago (that is, the 80's). From this point onwards, I'm going to only bring this up again if I see something that's, like, amazingly done. Not necessarily by modern standards, but, like, if it looks like it'd have been done 40 years ago instead of, like, 60.
Once again, there isn't that much I can say about this episode, most of anything I noticed was kind of grains of something that might be bigger, but would only be worth pointing out if I see it in multiple episodes down the line.
Obviously, there were some sussy things in this episode to do with
very 60's and modern, although to a much lesser degree gender
roles. Uhura is the only woman who has any sort of important position,
she actually doesn't do nothing in the story, although she doesn't
exactly do much. But, like, I don't know if I really care about talking
about this. Cause yeah, the 60's sucked. This definitely feels like
something that's much more relevant to talk about when it comes to TNG,
because that feels closer to something that has the attitudes found in
the last 20 years. I feel like anything important to mention about this
has been said, probably although not necessarily by people
smarter than me. So I think that I might lay off this a little bit
unless I find something that's super egregious.
Related to this, however, there was something kinda weird in this episode that's maybe tangentially related to something I noticed in previous episode?
Nancy, the salt vampire, is the last of her species. This is because there was a salt shortage on her planet, although we never find out more details than that, which is a shame because I feel like this episode could have used the color to justify its 45 minute runtime. But alas. The dude that was married to her (well, to the original Nancy, and then stayed with the vampire shapeshifter) evokes extinct animal species on earth. The one that sticks for Kirk is buffaloe.
There's a kind of interesting thing that happens here. I'm not sure it's specifically bad, perse, but it might definitely be part of a broader negative theme in the series. Once they realize that nancy isn't human, she's referred to as "It" rather than "Nancy", "She", or "Her". Now, it/its pronouns are something that's becoming more and more normalized among non-binary folk of all different types. But at the time of the show, this was explicitly something which is de-humanising (perhaps less about being human and more about the value attached to sentience).
Except, there's an issue here. It gets kind of super weird. Nancy isn't a buffaloe, she isn't some unthinking animal, she's fucking sentient. They try and do a whole thing about whether saving the last buffaloe (ie Nancy) is worth it if she's murdering Kirk's crew. But it falls short, because Kirk doesn't give a shit about the fact she's sentient. Everytime Nancy's husband brings it up, Kirk counters with something along the lines of accusing him of thinking with the wrong head. Kirk does this with Dr McKoy (is it McCoy?) too, when he says some weird stuff about Nancy (which, notably, ends up being an important observation - that she looked exactly the same way that she did when McCoy last saw her).
Ultimately, I think Kirk's actions in the movie were correct, he was merely defending his crew. I think that there wasn't enough effort on his part to be non-violent about it, but the show frames it as if it's the only thing he could have done at that point. Taking that framing on face value, he was 100% correct.
However, I think it's important that we notice how that framing is set up, because I feel like those are weird at best and indicative of some pretty yikes assumptions at worst. Well, not worst, but what's just above worst. At worst, the framing itself is explicitly bad. And yeah, Kirk only cares about sentients who are, like, more human-like. Nancy is treated as nothing more than an animal with some dangerous and advanced natural weapons. Like, we fucking know she's sentient. I wonder if Kirk would have reacted to a similar human being, or Romulan, or Klingon, or whatever going round murdering his crew.
The best she gets is Kirk looking somberly through the viewport as the Enterprise leaves orbit, wondering if what he did was right. It's the kind of thing that Star Trek (and, to be honest, probably a bunch of other media) does to give Pike, Kirk, Picard, or whoever an aesthetic of grappling with the morality of their actions. But it feels really hollow, when the episode itself did little to think about those actions, or even give Nancy depth.
As the episode stands, Nancy was an obstacle that had to be overcome. Nothing more, nothing less.
There's more to be said about the fact that literally every line that Nancy gets is meant to deceive men. More to be said about the siren trope. But I'm not gonna lie, it's like 07:00, I've just come off my night shift, other people have probably talked about it, and I'm gonna go to sleep.
I'm still not entirely sure how I want to format all of this. But, despite the fact that I feel exhausted at the moment, I think this one came out ok. Not sure if I'll agree with myself when I wake up, but right now I think it's less stream of consciousness messy than the previous post.