What gender was the creature from The Man Trap?

[CorporalCaptain]

Ensign No Face put me over the edge. I was watching reruns of "Charlie X" between my knees.

 

[Balok's Decoy]

I think it's very important that we settle this issue of the salt vampire's gender, in case any of us might want to date it.

I don't know about you but the entire reason I joined TrekBBS was to figure out the gender of the salt vampire alien because it's not like a) it doesn't matter (IT DOES!!!) or b) that a salt vampire alien might not fit into the gender spectrum of human beings. I mean, that would be crazy right?

 

[Duncan MacLeod]

It's neutral. Like Gozer the Gozarian from Ghostbusters. It can be whatever it wants to be, whenever it wants to.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to watch this episode again now that the idea that those things on its finger might be genitals has been planted in my mind.

 

[Qonundrum]

No gender was established. At the very most we can speculate on its survival strategy. As far as anybody knew, it was the last of its kind; perhaps its actions would reflect a strategy of continuing the species? In Star Trek, that's possible even between random species (of biped humanoids), and the creature might have been aware of that, depending a bit on its level of sapience.

It had paired with the male Crater after killing his wife - signs of a female trying to breed? Yet it had not bred with Crater. Prospects down on the planet might not have been good for that. After gaining access to Kirk's ship by killing several males, at least one of whom it tried to woo in the guise of a female, it settled in - and tried to woo Uhura in the guise of a male, and McCoy in the guise of a female. Does this mean that statistically, it was female, and Uhura was just food or competition like Nancy Crater? Or is this just an artifact of it being whatever its victims wanted to see, and Kirk's crew mostly consisted of heterosexual men?

Beyond all that... No telling.

Timo Saloniemi

The last of its kind, its genetic pool would still slowly be diminished over generations and would still become extinct. It's still a clever and realistic approach to delay the inevitable but delays allow time for better solutions to come up. The episode didn't really explore that avenue, but given how 1960s television is so single issue-focused and how (at least for TOS's novel approach) "monsters of the week" are more than just monsters, the "salt vampire" - merely an alien species that requires salt to live and has to resort to desperate measures - was given the focus, for the horror value as well as showing that monsters aren't all cardboard but have motivations that can be very human and how patterns repeat across the universe.

It's a very underrated episode.

And a tragedy, there's no reason the episode couldn't have ended better had the salt creature merely fess up. Salt was all that's needed, there could have been a better way.

As for Uhura, I didn't pick up on any conscious selling of "remove female competition" as much as the being was starving for needed nutrients and went after anyone it could corner and trap. Uhura seemed the closest at the time. Ditto for McCoy, as he was often alone (from memory, I'm now wanting to go back to my blu-ray to rewatch this episode) but given his relationship with the Craters he was not going to be prey unless absolutely no other options presented themselves.