Why didn't they just give the Salt Vampire table salt?

[CorporalCaptain]

Well put, Takeru.

The question I've always wondered is, what are the clothes that the creature is found to be wearing when it's finally revealed? The creature has fur, and the cloth is pretty loosely woven, not really much in the way of protection from the elements at all. So what is the purpose of the clothing? It seems like a strange dichotomy, fur and poorly made clothes. It almost suggests to me that the creature had begun adopting human mannerisms, from having read Crater's mind. Perhaps it made its own dress after having been Nancy for a time?

 

[Elder Knight]

One wonders if, due to health concerns, there'd be no table salt shakers in the 22nd century. You'd need a prescription to get it!

There were plenty salt shakers in sickbay.

No, those were sophisticated and futuristic medical devices!

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

The clothing would be remnants perhaps poorly maintained by the sucker-covered manipulative digits of its hands.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The clothing would be remnants perhaps poorly maintained by the sucker-covered manipulative digits of its hands.

Remnants of what? Clothes made by salt vampires with the same sort of hands from back when there were more salt vampires?

Oh, and the ruins? Were those built by the salt vampires, too?

 

[Captain Rob]

Think of the creature as a human dressed up like a banana living with a sentient orange that gives him nutrition pills that allow the human to survive. The human is smart, he will not eat the orange because then he has to starve, but imagine a spaceship arrives with more sentient fruits, vegetables and various meat with Captain Steak leading the away team.
Do you really think the human would wait for them to load off more nutrition pills and fly away, leaving the human and the orange alone for another five years? No way, Captain Steak will find the gnawed on cadaver of Ensign Apple within 30 minutes and all that's left of Lt. Sausage are his clothes and equipment.

The human (now dressed up as an asparagus) would obviously argue that the "thing" can survive on nutrition pills, it has done so for years, but he's just trying to save his ass, he can't stop thinking about the strawberry he saw walking down the corridor and it gets harder to not take a bite out of the captain with every single minute.

I have no doubt the creature the Enterprise encountered was intelligent, but it just couldn't help itself, it was suddenly surrounded by tasty food after it had to survive for years on a crappy substitute, of course it started eating the good stuff as soon as it was available.

I want to see this. This has Futurama episode writen all over it.

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

Remnants of what? Clothes made by salt vampires with the same sort of hands from back when there were more salt vampires? Oh, and the ruins? Were those built by the salt vampires, too?

We don't know, do we? Maybe the salt vampire is an alien. Maybe it's a mutant. But I'm not going to assume anything about its clothing or the ruins on the planet.

The bad costume reminds me of those worn by the sea devils from Dr. Who.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_45CQ84jr9DQ/TTw_KMtyEHI/AAAAAAAAByQ/P4WIFO4bdrA/s400/Sea_Devils.jpg

 

[CorporalCaptain]

But I'm not going to assume anything about its clothing or the ruins on the planet.

Yep, you're right. I was just thinking out loud, as it were.

 

[Knight Templar]

People have compared Capt. Kirk and companies attitude toward the Salt Vampire with that of the Horta.

Remember that Kirk was fully prepared and planned to kill the Horta and even argued with Spock over it. And BOTH Kirk and Spock fired on the Horta when it appeared to be attacking them earlier.

But when the Horta approached Kirk alone, it was clearly not intending an attack which caused Kirk to reassess his opinion of it. Despite Spock urging him over the communicator "Kill it! Kill it now!".

 

[Gil T.Azell]

One wonders if, due to health concerns, there'd be no table salt shakers in the 22nd century. You'd need a prescription to get it!

Given the fact that THE MAN TRAP takes place in approximately 2266 A.D. that would be the 23rd century, perhaps they've come up with a salt substitute for human consumption thats better that what we have in the 21st century?

 

[Captain Rob]

Once they figured out that the salt vampire was on board. They could have gone on the ship's intercom on asked for it to turn itself in. In exchange they could drop it off on a planet with salt-filled oceans, like ours.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

On the idea of the Salt Vampire being intelligent..

It's funny, I just always assumed when it took on the form of someone you wanted to see, it's words were just a variation on the same thing. Just somehow stimulating your brain to hear what what the creature needed you to.

As an example, when it was trying to reason with McCoy I never thought of it actually forming words in it's mind. I just assumed it would be thinking "not kill" or whatever and McCoy's mind would be filling it in as needed.

Probably just over thought it as a kid. Interesting that the majority of people here seem to see it as an intelligent sentient being.

 

[Maurice]

One wonders if, due to health concerns, there'd be no table salt shakers in the 22nd century. You'd need a prescription to get it!

Given the fact that THE MAN TRAP takes place in approximately 2266 A.D. that would be the 23rd century, perhaps they've come up with a salt substitute for human consumption thats better that what we have in the 21st century?

There's some debate as to if salt is actually bad for anyone at all (link).

 

[Takeru]

Interesting that the majority of people here seem to see it as an intelligent sentient being.

It had to be intelligent or it would have killed Crater a long time ago. Maybe it didn't really speak english and that was part of the illusion (although that wouldn't be a sign of lacking intelligence), but realizing that this one guy is your only food source and that killing him would result in your own death is a big deal.
If the reason it hadn't killed him was because it had enough salt it wouldn't have started killing Enterprise crewmembers, it still had access to Crater's salt at that time.

 

[Gov Kodos]

Interesting that the majority of people here seem to see it as an intelligent sentient being.

It had to be intelligent or it would have killed Crater a long time ago. Maybe it didn't really speak english and that was part of the illusion (although that wouldn't be a sign of lacking intelligence), but realizing that this one guy is your only food source and that killing him would result in your own death is a big deal.
If the reason it hadn't killed him was because it had enough salt it wouldn't have started killing Enterprise crewmembers, it still had access to Crater's salt at that time.

Not necessarily. We have no idea how aggressive a predator it might be in its natural environment. The creature's natural prey (assuming it normally feeds off living creatures) may have survived feedings as many creatures do from attacks by vampire bats. Humans may be fatally depleted, but who knows if the natural food source would have been. We also don't know why the creature's natural food source is gone. It's odd that nature didn't recycle the salt from waste after feeding. It may have been old, and or sick, propelling it to attack in desperation beyond what it might if its food source were more secure. Assuming the creature is only responding to its prey's emotional state, rather than as a rational being, it may have been acting out of Crater's fear of the salt running out rather than a real threat of loss of food.

 

[Sindatur]

I always assumed the Salt Tablets was like a Hamburger (Or Blood sucking Vampires subsisting off squirrels and other animals, rather than Humans). When extra Humans came along, The Salt Sucker just couldn't resist the Prime Rib dangling in front of it's nose, hamburgers are fine, but, you don't want to eat them everyday, and never get another steak again.

 

[Redfern]

I suspect if I've imagined the following, then surely someone else has already depicted it, but...

Imagine McCoy discussing a daignosis with a patient. It could be nearly any human crewman, but it might work better with an unnamed "redshirt".

McCoy: "Nearly everything checks out...except your blood pressure seems a tad higher than desired. Looks like you need to reduce your sodium intake. But to alleviate the immediate condition, I'm introducing a new therapy. You may enter."

Yup, you guessed it. The "salt vampire" (very much alive and wellfor the purposes of this silly visual) enters the room. Needless to say, the redshirt is looking rather nervous!

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[Knight Templar]

Not necessarily. We have no idea how aggressive a predator it might be in its natural environment. The creature's natural prey (assuming it normally feeds off living creatures) may have survived feedings as many creatures do from attacks by vampire bats. Humans may be fatally depleted, but who knows if the natural food source would have been. We also don't know why the creature's natural food source is gone. .

Good point.

While Crater compared the Salt Vampire to "buffalo" which brings to mind large, mainly docile creatures slowly roaming the great plains, I think a more proper comparison would be far darker. For example, if thousands or even hundreds of Salt Vampires survive when the salt on the planet was finally exhausted? If so, perhaps they cannabilized each other for salt until the one we see in the episode was the only one left. Thus the final salt vampire was not a docile plant eating "buffalo" but the best and deadliest killer of the entire race.

something else worth considering is that the Salt Vampires experience with humans was apparently very limited. Only with Nancy (whom it apparently killed not long after encountering) and Mr. Crater who was apparently overcome with grief most of that time.

So its knowledge of humans was limited at best.

 

[Timo]

Crater found this supposedly last creature in an area where stone buildings were barely standing against the elements. What sort of a scenario could result in one individual surviving against hunger for so long that the buildings around him or her collapse and are buried in sand?

IMHO, an "everything edible was consumed, most of the Vampires died of hunger, and the Vampire infrastructure then decayed due to lack of maintenance" scenario is unlikely, because it would take too long for the buildings to decay. "Nancy" seems to be starving despite fairly regular feeding, after all. On the other hand, "she" is clad, possibly further suggesting that "she" used to be civilized not particularly long ago.

Perhaps all the decay is due to a fairly abrupt disaster, then? Two cause vs effect possibilities here: either the climate went haywire very quickly, leading to starvation and to extremities of weather that destroyed the cities - or then starvation prompted a Salt Vampire war that destroyed everything fairly recently. The Craters seemed to be a small-scale operation, concentrating on archaeology; it might be plausible for them to have failed to identify the nature or timetable of the disaster and/or war, and thus the implications.

A completely different theory is possible as well, though. Perhaps the Salt Vampires were not behind the civilization at all - but were behind its downfall? Ecological pressure could have driven them to move from preying on easy animals to tackling the local civilization, in a bloody conflict that bears a closer resemblance to the fate of tigers than to buffalo. The cornered beasts became man-eaters - but unlike the tigers, they stood a chance. But eliminating the civilization was too little, too late: the biosphere was already ruined (by the civilization or by climate change from some other disaster), and the Salt Vampires subsisted on the other dwindling fauna while the buildings decayed.

Also, one wonders if we ever saw the true form of the beast. It reflected the thoughts of its victims - and when the victims saw the monster, they were thinking of monsters! If the hairy monster was an illusion, then the "clothing" on it may have been that, too. It would be something Kirk would expect on the last individual from the culture down below, after all, even if the beast in reality was unrelated to this culture.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Perhaps this creature was just some random mutant of whatever species lived on that world?

 

[Timo]

Unless we assume it treated Crater completely differently from all the other humans it met, we can safely bet it lied to Crater about everything, including its very nature and the history of its species. The "millions, now gone" idea might be a completely false one, too - a figment of Crater's own imagination. For all we know, the beast wasn't even a native, but rather an alien invader, castaway or deportee.

Timo Saloniemi