The Man Trap

The vague scent of Forbidden Planet wafts off this episode as the Enterprise shows up at M113 to provide supplies for a colony to find only Professor Robert Crater and his wife, Nancy, still alive. Turns out that Nancy isn’t herself. Instead of being a woman McCoy once dated, she’s been replaced by a vampire creature with an overpowering lust for salt.

One might think that the needs of such a creature could be easily met without all the carnage. Indeed, if transported back to Earth it could desalinate sea water, which could then be packaged as “Vampire Water” and marketed to goth kids. But no, apparently this thing’s taste is to latch onto people’s faces and drain the relatively small amounts of the stuff that can be gotten from their bodies.

The only real surprise, then, is that it takes as long as it does to catch such a stupid, greedy creature. If it wasn’t able to read its victims’ minds and shape-shift into people they trust, it doubtless would have been stopped even sooner than it was. On the other hand, the creators of this episode deserve at least some praise for waiting until the very end to show the creature in its true, terrible form.

Episode rating:

Stardate: 1513.1

Episode type: Dangerous alien

Written by: George Clayton Johnson

Original air date: Sept. 8, 1966

--- / Charlie X

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