That salt critter had a total disregard for intelligent life, and it deserved what it got. It was trying to kill again when McCoy shot it.
The Man Trap - Was Crater Right?
- Thread starter CoveTom
- Start date
That part I think could still be covered by "the critter wasn't doing anything, it was the heroes talking to themselves". Kirk and Spock must have had the arguments about the critter being "manageable" nagging at the backs of their minds, and they would project those arguments on themselves when the critter came to their midst and started emanating its "I'm harmless, either ignore me or like me" effect.
However,
I guess this is convincing enough for me. Perhaps the last survivor was a bit less civilized in the builder-of-civilizations sense than its ancestors had been, but yes, it might still have been enough of a conversationalist to actually do its own lines. And thus be somewhat culpable of realizing what the humans wanted of it and failing to comply.
Timo Saloniemi
I think the simplest answers are right there. The creature is an ALIEN, and as such it doesn't think like us. Who can possibly know what it thought, how it perceived the situation, and what kinds of emotions drove it. Think of it this way, it spends years in Crater's company, and that's its whole barometer for human behavior. Crater seems to dislike and distrust them, and they're brash and pushy. Given this, it's entirely possible the thing felt threatened by Kirk and company from the get go, and when they good Captain doesn't immediately fulfill the request for salt, maybe it believed there would be no salt, so it went after it.
The monsta made Crater happy for a long time after it killed Nancy. But she could have been like the poor, lonely beaver back home at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in my hometown of Tucson: she has a lovely home with fish and fowl for company, and all she can eat and great health care; but the keeper said she was still neurotic from being the last one of her kind left.
Neurotic! That's it! The monsta and all her/his kind were neurotic and ate everything in sight, 'til there was nothing left to munch.
Perhaps instinct trumped intelligence. The creature was receiving tablets of pure salt from Crater, not sucking it straight from his veins. Given the opportunity to get the "real thing", it just went nuts.
I start my answer legally with three premises;
a. that the creature is a descendant of the civilization that left the ruins, the ruins that Crater investigates. I come to this conclusion because the creature showed the ability to communicate in an intelligent fashion and to plead for mercy and help when it was cornered.
b. that the creature was aware that it was committing crimes; its whole argument to McCoy was that it was being mistakenly hunted down as some kind of murdering monster shows that it knows what murder is, and was afraid of being hunted down for that reason.
c. that the creature as soon as the science expedition landed made no attempt at first contact to attain help or trade for salt until it had murdered. Once it committed its first act of secret murder and made Crater, its accomplice, the legal/moral argument for it becomes moot. The argument then becomes, what form of punishment is sufficient for the crimes it committed?
My legal opinion is that enough evidence was present in Mantrap to convict the salt vampire of murder. Would capture and life imprisonment after trial be sufficient punishment?
Yes, it would have been; killing was only necessary due to the circumstance at hand where the life of another sentient was at risk. McCoy was morally correct to shoot.
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Some of the points made in this thread bring up more questions in my mind...
There was a civilization at some point. How long ago did it "fall?" Presumably the creature was not the absolute last of it's species at some point, what happened to the other(s)? Most of the thinking indicates an assumption of it's brethren dying (semi-?)naturally. Could the creature have been the alien equivalent of a criminal or psychopath? Did it desalinate the other(s)? What was the real relationship between Crater and the killer of his wife of many years? Pity/need? Control/hunger? Scientist/predator? Understanding/sorrow? etc...
There was a civilization at some point. How long ago did it "fall?" Presumably the creature was not the absolute last of it's species at some point, what happened to the other(s)? Most of the thinking indicates an assumption of it's brethren dying (semi-?)naturally. Could the creature have been the alien equivalent of a criminal or psychopath? Did it desalinate the other(s)? What was the real relationship between Crater and the killer of his wife of many years? Pity/need? Control/hunger? Scientist/predator? Understanding/sorrow? etc...
No doubt the creature had a limited lifespan, although perhaps a bit longer than the human one. It's theoretically possible that the cityscape we saw fell in ruins within such a lifespan, perhaps due to a radical climate change or the use of powerful weapons. But it's just as possible that the city had fallen generations prior, and that the last of the species had been living in assorted mudholes for those generations.
No matter how we assume the civilization collapsed, it would probably follow that transportation would cease towards the end. Thus, isolated communities would form; it's unlikely that "our" vampire would have made a major contribution to the extinction, then, even if it had cannibalized the last survivors within its reach.
It's quite remarkable, really, that Carter would find the last survivor in a city that apparently offered no nutrition, rather than in some sort of a remaining natural preserve. Perhaps we are to think that "our" vampire had found a cache of artificially stored salt (plus other foodstuffs) in the city, and thus outlived those who subsisted on the now-sterile natural environment.
Just musing. The soulscapes of the last of the species must have been even more interesting than the physical circumstances; perhaps somebody could write a Trek novel on that one day, once we get really desperate with topics...
Timo Saloniemi
No matter how we assume the civilization collapsed, it would probably follow that transportation would cease towards the end. Thus, isolated communities would form; it's unlikely that "our" vampire would have made a major contribution to the extinction, then, even if it had cannibalized the last survivors within its reach.
It's quite remarkable, really, that Carter would find the last survivor in a city that apparently offered no nutrition, rather than in some sort of a remaining natural preserve. Perhaps we are to think that "our" vampire had found a cache of artificially stored salt (plus other foodstuffs) in the city, and thus outlived those who subsisted on the now-sterile natural environment.
Just musing. The soulscapes of the last of the species must have been even more interesting than the physical circumstances; perhaps somebody could write a Trek novel on that one day, once we get really desperate with topics...
Timo Saloniemi
If this is in response to my musings, I did not mean to imply it could have had any appreciable affect on the extinction... until the very end. Say the species is down to the last 20 or less, what if "our" Nancy got a little bit hungry.
And on the "when" of the fall of their civilization, that could contribute greatly to "savagery" of the species before our Nancy was the last. If it had been years/decades/millenia, the species may've devolved (but not to the "Horney Braga Gecko" stage). It could've degenerated all the way down to the Mad Max stage! (without the G'day's of course)
Since the species was just one being away from becoming extinct anyway, does it matter all that much?
If McCoy wanted to be cruel, he could have just injured the creature with the phaser... and then poured salt in the wound.
If McCoy wanted to be cruel, he could have just injured the creature with the phaser... and then poured salt in the wound.
Mr. FalTorPan. Your agonizer, please.
I thought that killing the creature was totally the wrong move. They should have just given it the salt it needed, like they would feed a hungry animal, and let it live its life. Being the last of its kind it was doomed anyway.
Brilliant analysis, really--what makes "The Man Trap" such a scary and atypical episode is that it makes such a strong argument for a certain level of xenophobia. The salt vampire isn't much different than Ridley Scott's Alien. Indeed, with its ability to reflect back the users own mind at him (three men see three different women based on what they want to see, Uhura's crewman knows Swahili plucked from Uhura's mind), there's no telling how much of the salt vampire's behavior was based on what we would call intellect and how much on a very highly developed form of telepathic instinct.
Freaky.
For the record, Kirk's introductory log entry identifies the planet as having an ``ancient and long-dead civilization''. I know this doesn't contradict what you're saying, but I do want to establish how long the lifespan would have to be for the creature to have lived before the city died.
As long as we're getting into questions of moral culpability I'd like to point out we don't have evidence that the salt vampire was one of the species that built the civilization, rather than being the trusty pets of that species. Note that it's compared to the buffalo and the passenger pigeon rather than, say, the Last Neanderthal. Many people will have different feelings about killing a dangerous person compared to killing a dangerous animal.
Perhaps the Salt Vampires of whom Nancy was the last specimen dwindled to extinction after suffereing an intellectual "devolution" (just as certain of our comparatively feeble muscles were no doubt more developed in our robust pre-hominid ancestors, so may the brains of our descendents be much feebler than those we now have) and thus would be akin to the aquatic humans of Vonnegut's Galapagos or the green Sleestak of Land of the Lost (as opposed to Eneg the brown time traveler). Intellect may have evolved into a razor fine animal cunning. (This kind of evolution of intelligence seems highly plausible to me--look how far such a mutation took George W. Bush and he's successfully reproduced. See also C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" and even Idiocracy.)
Good point, I was going to ask if the creature was the last of the planet's superior civilisation. Maybe it flourished with them and died off, having evolved to live off them. Or more likely the planetary disaster that appears to have taken out most plant life too did for them.
For all we know, Nancy was the victim of a starship crash, or a marooned criminal from a passing vessel, and had nothing to do with the planet.
All the "hard data" we get regarding the salt vampire comes from Dr. Crater, and we have no idea how Crater came to that data, apart from the salt vampire telling him. And as we know, the vampire is extremely skilled at showing and telling what people want to see and hear, as opposed to the so-called objective truth.
It is a bit difficult to see how a bunch of creatures like this could have formed a stable society. If they all sucked inorganic salts that came in local K-Mart cartons, what need would they have for their telepathic predation skills? If they all preyed on each other, how did the society work? Or did they have another type of sentient prey that they needed the telepathy against?
It's slightly easier to believe in a secretive subsociety analogous to the classic vampire one of Earth mythology, but that, too, presents a few biological and social points that are hard to sell. It would be easiest of all to think of this monster as an external element on the planet as much as it was an external element on Kirk's starship...
Timo Saloniemi
All the "hard data" we get regarding the salt vampire comes from Dr. Crater, and we have no idea how Crater came to that data, apart from the salt vampire telling him. And as we know, the vampire is extremely skilled at showing and telling what people want to see and hear, as opposed to the so-called objective truth.
It is a bit difficult to see how a bunch of creatures like this could have formed a stable society. If they all sucked inorganic salts that came in local K-Mart cartons, what need would they have for their telepathic predation skills? If they all preyed on each other, how did the society work? Or did they have another type of sentient prey that they needed the telepathy against?
It's slightly easier to believe in a secretive subsociety analogous to the classic vampire one of Earth mythology, but that, too, presents a few biological and social points that are hard to sell. It would be easiest of all to think of this monster as an external element on the planet as much as it was an external element on Kirk's starship...
Timo Saloniemi
I've read Kornbluth's story and apparently understood him far better then you seem to understand.
I've also read this:
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2008/June/Pages/Waning2235.aspx
Not that I like President Bush's peculiar politics, or his governing style (incompetence), either, but that was just about the most scientifically indefensible comment you've written, that I've read in a long time.*
This is The Trek Nation, not the DailyKos!
* Suffice it to say that you might not know the exact difference between the cultural progression of mores and customs, versus actual biologic common descent.
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