So people who can't breathe are in no real danger because they have oxygen in their bloodstream? Really?
That goes without saying, now doesn't it?
Now, if these people were to
remain unable to breathe for more than a couple of minutes... But nothing of the sort is implied in the scene.
This woman had no nose and no mouth. How the hell was she supposed to get oxygen?
By injection, initially. McCoy has a syringe for that in readiness even during a random planetside courtesy call; the starship herself would be well stocked.
Beyond that, it would be a simple matter of cutting a hole. Medics do that sort of thing every day, although typically through the throat rather than through magically appearing skin. The latter is naturally the simpler procedure, there supposedly being nothing vital inside that skin that one should try and avoid hitting with the scalpel, ballpoint pen shell or other instrument of utility.
That is, assuming that there was a mouth behind the skin. But we saw the jaw move, and we heard the noises being made by the throat, so the assumption of a cover being applied over a relatively intact head is a fairly safe one. If not, then one can always punch the hole in the thorax instead.
How could she even see anyone to ask for help? She would have had minutes, at most, and nobody seemed too concerned about her.
That's a separate issue: somebody ought to have been concerned, unless messing with their interest and initiative was part of Charlie's sadistic designs. But we don't see the minutes elapse, and even barring tri-ox injections, all it really would take is one punch with a random sharp implement. The procedure ought to be obvious even to the layman, and supposedly Kirk's crew has at least some sort of training.
Apparently she was zapped back to normal by the Thasians, as there was no mention of anyone but the Antares crew being permanently dead. So evidently the Thasians can revive some dead people, just not all.
Why there should be a distinction there is an interesting question. Is it a matter of a time limit, with Charlie's magic being reversible only for a specific length of time, or the time travel abilities of his "parents" reaching only so far into the past? Is it a matter of the type of damage done, with "natural" death and destruction irreversible, but cheap parlor tricks and relocations undoable? Something as trivial as the
Antares being too far away for the Thasians to bother? We aren't told, and Kirk dare not ask. But we aren't left with the impression that the Thasians would be deliberately holding back, or at least that Kirk could ever challenge them on that.
Timo Saloniemi