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Some questions about Charlie X

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The two men could have been turned into statues. Or he probably skinned them. The woman's face was completely removed which means that she could not breathe and died.

It is possible that they were all restored at the end of the episode. including the woman that was turned into a reptile and the woman that aged rapidly. and the crew that vanished into thin air. The non-corporeal beings that took Charlie away said that the crew on the other ship were lost and could not be saved, but The Enterprise and her crew were.

Well Charlie didn't do anything to them as such (except scare them half to death) but he did make a part of the ship go away, even if it would have blown up in the near future anyway!
JB
 
What I always wondered was, how did the faceless crewwoman BREATHE? (If she couldn't, she surely wouldn't be able to walk upright or make sounds. Did she breathe through her ears, or what?) Perhaps it was too difficult, in terms of makeup, to make her merely mouthless...
I assumed she still had a little air in her lungs and was able to whimper as she lurched out into the corridor.

There were no deaths as such! Spock and Kirk confirmed this while planning on how to take Charlie out in the conference room! Maybe the woman with no face hadn't really lost it but had an extra few layers of skin plastered over her face instead? :biggrin:
JB
Either way, she was incapable of breathing.

This scene is the most horrifying one in all of TOS, in my opinion. The only way she could have been saved would have been an immediate tracheotomy - and there didn't seem to be anyone around to do that.
 
Charlie killed the crew on his previous ship by making that plate disappear. Pre-meditated murder. Murder IS "making someone go away". A lot of people were killed/disappeared. Then, surprise, his benefactors were able to reverse this.
 
But not the crew of The Antares! Anyone know where we could get a set of cards with Yeoman Rand on them like that too? :nyah:
JB
 
That moment with the cards stretches plausibility to the breaking point. You'd think that when the SEPARATE card is revealed to be in, ahem....that place, Rand would tell Kirk ''We've got a major problem, and HOW THE @#$% did he DO THAT?????''
 
Someone should have realized it was impossible for a normal person, who can't transmute matter or whatever it was, I suppose you mean. Yes.
 
She thought it was sleight of hand. Magicians do amazing things all the time, and her point of view didn't rule out a simple trick the way the camera seems to.
 
She thought it was sleight of hand. Magicians do amazing things all the time, and her point of view didn't rule out a simple trick the way the camera seems to.

In that case,you'd think she'd have been alarmed that Charlie had just had his hand down there, seen or not...
 
In that case,you'd think she'd have been alarmed that Charlie had just had his hand down there, seen or not...

I guess the scene has a whiff of Roddenberry's fascination with sex, which was most prominent in the early going ("The Cage", "Mudd's Women") and got dialed back as the show went along.
 
Making people disappear should not be taken as indication that they died for good - that's explicitly reversible, as we saw with Rand. And we can easily accept it as such as it involves nothing we could recognize as fatal. OTOH, blowing up a spaceship supposedly results in mutilated corpses, and that we can relate with and assume irreversible without the sort of divine intervention even Charlie and his parents appeared incapable of.

But being faceless doesn't appear particularly fatal. The poor woman could run on the oxygen in her bloodstream for a good while, and then survive indefinitely thanks to receiving one or two of McCoy's wonder medicines straight into her bloodstream (tri-ox might do that already, even if "Amok Time" doesn't quite explicate its function in keeping Kirk supplied). Beyond that, it would be a simple matter of plastic surgery to restore basic functionality, the effort required depending on how deep Charlie's modifications went. Whether she could regain sight, that is, functioning eyes, depends on whether the techniques Pulaski considered trivial in the 2360s (inability to gain working human eyeballs was never one of LaForge's problems) were already available in the 2260s. Artificial eyes would always be an option, even today.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Making people disappear should not be taken as indication that they died for good - that's explicitly reversible, as we saw with Rand. And we can easily accept it as such as it involves nothing we could recognize as fatal. OTOH, blowing up a spaceship supposedly results in mutilated corpses, and that we can relate with and assume irreversible without the sort of divine intervention even Charlie and his parents appeared incapable of.

But being faceless doesn't appear particularly fatal. The poor woman could run on the oxygen in her bloodstream for a good while, and then survive indefinitely thanks to receiving one or two of McCoy's wonder medicines straight into her bloodstream (tri-ox might do that already, even if "Amok Time" doesn't quite explicate its function in keeping Kirk supplied). Beyond that, it would be a simple matter of plastic surgery to restore basic functionality, the effort required depending on how deep Charlie's modifications went. Whether she could regain sight, that is, functioning eyes, depends on whether the techniques Pulaski considered trivial in the 2360s (inability to gain working human eyeballs was never one of LaForge's problems) were already available in the 2260s. Artificial eyes would always be an option, even today.

Timo Saloniemi
:wtf:

So people who can't breathe are in no real danger because they have oxygen in their bloodstream? Really?

This woman had no nose and no mouth. How the hell was she supposed to get oxygen? How could she even see anyone to ask for help? She would have had minutes, at most, and nobody seemed too concerned about her. 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.
 
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
 
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.
Everything of the sort is implied in that scene. There is ZERO mention from McCoy or anyone else that any of the crew are being treated for anything Charlie has done. The implication might be that this woman just wandered around the ship, whimpering until the Thasians restored her, but this goes way beyond my ability to suspend my disbelief. It worked when I was 12, but I remember watching this episode with my grandfather, and he was horrified.

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.
Did you miss my post where I mentioned a tracheotomy? Thing is, though, there was no mention of anything being done for her or anyone else. The only mentions were of things either Kirk or Spock witnessed personally, or questioned Charlie about. The woman in question wasn't on their list of concerns.

As for McCoy and his tri-ox, so what? McCoy hardly wanders the Enterprise with his hypo filled with everything he could ever possibly need.

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.
Her face was removed, not the skull or inside of the skull.

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.
Any of the medical staff should be able to perform a tracheotomy. Spock probably could. Maybe Kirk has such training; we never find out about that. But why would all the crew know how to do that? Is advanced emergency first aid on the curriculum for engineering, command, and the social science specialists? Would the geologists and physicists be expected to know how to perform one? Would the average yeoman?

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.
I wonder if Janice and Sam were merely zapped into an alternate dimension for a brief time, and the Thasians zapped them back. The Antares crew, being blown to bits, likely couldn't be restored. I would think that Tina Lawton (the one turned into a lizard) could be restored, since she wasn't actually killed. But the woman with no face... I don't see how she could have survived.
 
I can easily forgive someone for having such a nice nature that they'll bend over backwards to find some way to think No Face Lady survived just fine in the corridor. We should be nice people. We really need to go with what they showed us though, to glean what their intent was. This was not meant to be an "everybody's fine" scenario. It was meant to horrify. They show us a woman whose face has been made into solid skin, struggling and failing to breathe. CUT.
--------------------------
"But maybe an emergency team showed up an instant later!!" doesn't enter into it. It goes against the tone of what they show us.
 
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Ordinary physics are irrelevant. The woman without a face was kept alive by Charlie's powers, so she could live on in mental anguish from her condition of having no face, at least until Charlie decided to do something else to her.

Good explanation!
JB
 
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