I'd forgotten that one entirely. Thank you for reminding me. But Geordi and the Romulan survivor could at least communicate with each other. Here, in "Darmok," and in Enemy Mine, the two had to figure out a way to talk to each other.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x09 - "Terrarium"
Quite true, Picard and Dathon weren't enemies, although when Dathon offered him a weapon, Picard did wonder if they were . . . until "the beast" showed up.
You'll note that novel actually does have a vague reference to this episode.
Except that they take a much deeper dive into "shoot first mode" in "The Man Trap." In "The Devil in the Dark," even the miners eventually realize they were in the wrong.
Kirk and the miners are, in fact, either brutal or stupid throughout.
The debate is over when the Horta takes the pump. Spock explicitly points out the obvious: the Horta is intelligent and fully understands the technology of the invaders.
"The miners come around:" they cut a deal for free indigenous labor that will make them rich.
None of that is implicit, assumes anything not in evidence, or is open for meaningful debate. It is, as fans so like to proclaim, "canon."
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And yet how does Man Trap end?
The only good alien is a dead alien.
Kirk in "The Man Trap" basically calls Professor Crater a soft wuss and a Snowflake for valuing the life of the Salt Vampire and the continued existence of its species. Trek usually takes the "respect alien life and try to preserve it if possible" angle, but in that early TOS episode our lead hero is basically, "it's killing my crew one by one. I'm capping this thing with extreme prejudice and you're gonna help me, screw the value of this thing to science."
Precisely. And the good parts of "The Man Trap" were the parts that had nothing directly to do with the plot: Kirk snacking on the bridge, while advising McCoy to try his own prescription, and Sulu and Rand in the botany lab.
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I think the real point Kirk was making was Crater was keeping it with him as essentially a pet. A pet who can turn into anybody he wants, "And you win all the arguments." It's not a bad deal for him, keeping it around as a personal pet for whatever use he wants in the moment.
If Crater was really as altruistic about preserving the Salt Vampire as he was trying to appear, he wouldn't have kept it as his 'wife' for at least a year and try to trick at least two crews. (Since he had to be medically checked once a year by a starship doctor, he tricked at least 1 previous crew, plus the attempt with the Enterprise. He was not even sure if Nancy was killed 1 or 2 years ago when he told Kirk how long it had been since she died, so it cpuld be 2 previous crews.)
And had Crater been upfront about the Salt Vampire with Kirk (or any of the previous crews) from the start, NONE of Kirk's crew would have been killed.
Crater is not the hero some people think he is.
I've never thought he was a hero. He was a creep who had suffered the trauma of losing his wife but allowed himself to be turned into an enabler for an alien creature that took innocent human lives and threatened to turn on him if he didn't.
Guy has always weirded me out, but then that was the point of the character. Good guy turned apologist for something destructive.
Guy has always weirded me out, but then that was the point of the character. Good guy turned apologist for something destructive.
I've heard someone call Crater 'somewhat heroic' before due to his wanting to keep the Salt Vampire alive. (Not sure where, and it's been a while.) I wasn't directing the hero statement to you, though it probably seemed that way based on how I worded it. My fault there.
You're fine, I worded that trying my best to avoid sounding like that.
Crater and Cochrane could have had an interesting debate. Each had a creature that imitated or inhabited the form of another and stayed with them; one lived with it, the other recoiled at the idea initially.
Suffice it to say that "The Man Trap" was a lousy episode. Bad Star Trek, going against everything the show stood for, and bad science fiction, as implausible as "Doc" Smith's whole business of radium as a currency/jewelry metal, and iron -- the most stable nucleus in the whole periodic table -- as an energy source. And a nightmare-fodder monster. NBC led with it, even though it wasn't the only episode that had made it through post, precisely because it was exactly what the benighted network executives thought science fiction was all about.
How can an early episode go against everything the show stood for? That makes no sense.
Actually, it was.
Think about it. "Doc" Smith could be forgiven for postulating iron as a source of the insanely huge amount of energy needed to bypass Special Relativity, because the pre-Lensman version of Triplanetary predated the "Chicago Pile-1" experiments in a squash court under the stands at Stagg Field (by nearly a decade), and even then, nobody knew enough about nuclear reactions to understand that iron cannot produce a net release of energy by fission or by fusion.
But "The Man Trap"? Common salt is an ionic compound, consisting of sodium cations and chloride anions. The sodium cation and the chloride anion are two of the most soluble ions known, and they have a strong affinity for each other. While a real-world life form that uses common salt is easy enough to find (there aren't many that don't), one that metabolizes salt, and takes it permanently out of the environment is preposterous. So is one that can quickly (and painfully) extract it from another life form. Likewise, a life form that can simultaneously present three different appearances (one radically different from the other two, and all three radically different from its natural appearance) to three different observers wouldn't fool sensors, while a true shapeshifter would only be able to present one appearance at a time.
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