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

[Knight Templar]

^All of those are interesting ideas that would explain why the creature acted the way it did. Someone mentioned that while in McCoys form, it argued in the briefing room with Kirk and Spock about the "creature" and that was evidence of its high intelligence.

Maybe it was simply repeating things it had learned from Crater in the past. I've really got to wonder what kind of endgame Crater was thinking of. Did he plan on living the rest of his life with "Nancy" on that planet? Was he having sex with it? What kind of warped man would do that with the very alien that had killed his wife no matter that they looked like? Maybe it was Crater who was the crazy one and his instability influenced the Salt Vampires view of humans.

 

[Timo]

That's a fascinating idea, too!

Some random comments, not intended to go against the idea itself:

What kind of warped man would do that with the very alien that had killed his wife no matter that they looked like?

It wouldn't be just the looks, though. The alien also either could assume a person's personality, or then conveniently fake it; essentially, Nancy would just have "moved on" to a new body which even looked and felt like the old one.

I've really got to wonder what kind of endgame Crater was thinking of. Did he plan on living the rest of his life with "Nancy" on that planet?

It seems the couple was quite accustomed to living all by themselves for extended periods of time. From the looks of it, they were prepared to die on a dig much like that one, out of old age, the strains of the work, or possibly even a suicide pact. Nancy "swapping bodies" need not have changed that much, especially since the new Nancy would be a complete "yes-man", mirroring and encouraging all of the Doctor's ideas.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Knight Templar]

That's a fascinating idea, too!

Some random comments, not intended to go against the idea itself:

What kind of warped man would do that with the very alien that had killed his wife no matter that they looked like?

It wouldn't be just the looks, though. The alien also either could assume a person's personality, or then conveniently fake it; essentially, Nancy would just have "moved on" to a new body which even looked and felt like the old one.

I've really got to wonder what kind of endgame Crater was thinking of. Did he plan on living the rest of his life with "Nancy" on that planet?

It seems the couple was quite accustomed to living all by themselves for extended periods of time. From the looks of it, they were prepared to die on a dig much like that one, out of old age, the strains of the work, or possibly even a suicide pact. Nancy "swapping bodies" need not have changed that much, especially since the new Nancy would be a complete "yes-man", mirroring and encouraging all of the Doctor's ideas.

Timo Saloniemi

I might believe that if Nancy simply died and the Salt Vampire took her form and her place in exchange for salt from Crater.

But Crater makes it clear that not only did the Salt Vampire kill Nancy, but Crater either witnessed it or came upon the scene immediately thereafter.

If I recall correctly his statement was

"When it killed Nancy, I nearly destroyed it.".

One might even infer that the Salt Vampire actually assumed Nancy's form NOT in order to bond with Crater as has been implied.....but to get close enough to Crater to kill him as well. But apparently Crater "got the drop" on the creature (perhaps with his trustly laser pistol he later fired at Kirk and Spock) and when he spared the creatures life, that was when their "arrangement" began.

 

[Timo]

The nature of the arrangement is also a bit unclear. Supposedly, Crater would give the creature salt from his supplies. But why would the creature need Crater for that? It would have even more salt if it killed the scientist and then ate both him and his supplies!

Crater could have argued that by keeping him alive, and by behaving, the creature could get a resupply each year. But clearly this didn't work too well, as at the arrival of a resupply ship the creature immediately began undermining the arrangement. Didn't Crater tell it how to act, or did its self-control simply fail? Why hadn't it failed earlier on, with Crater, then?

The beast fluctuates curiously between rational and instinctual behavior. Perhaps, instead of bleeding irrationality into the creature, Crater is feeding it with sanity - and thus each time the beast plays the "Nancy for husband" role, it acts more or less sane, but each time it assumes some other role (say, "Wrigley's girl for crewman" or "Nancy for McCoy"), it loses the sanity anchor? What role did it play when finally killing Crater?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Knight Templar]

The beast fluctuates curiously between rational and instinctual behavior. Perhaps, instead of bleeding irrationality into the creature, Crater is feeding it with sanity - and thus each time the beast plays the "Nancy for husband" role, it acts more or less sane, but each time it assumes some other role (say, "Wrigley's girl for crewman" or "Nancy for McCoy"), it loses the sanity anchor? What role did it play when finally killing Crater?

Timo Saloniemi

Now that is an interesting idea I haven't heard before. That the creature steadily loses its grip on sanity and/or civilized behavior the longer it stays "transformed".

It is also possible that when in the guise of "Nancy" and McCoy arrived, the Salt Vampire was confronted with something so far outside its experience (two human males that loved it) that it was pushed over the edge.

The problem seems to be is that although we know why the Salt Vampire adopted the various disguises (deception and attraction) and we know the effect it often had on humans....we do not know what effect transforming into these people had on the creature itself. For example, when it turned into the big virile black man to attract Lt. Uhura it spoke Swahili to her. How did the creature know the language? Did it have a form of telepathy as well?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ The creature must have been at least partially telepathic, otherwise it would not have been able to tailor its disguises so specifically to its victims.

 

[Redfern]

I figure the effect was totally telepathic rather than a physical metamorphosis, otherwise, Kirk, McCoy and ensign "dead-shirt" would not have seen different forms at the same time.

Which does raise a question (among many). When they beamed up "Green", shouldn't the transporter have alerted the technicians they were retrieving "something" not human? At least until the creature materialized and thus could project its "influence" upon them?

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[Timo]

I'd argue that the creature emanates this telepathic camouflage on an infinitely broad spectrum. It doesn't just make people see what whey want to see - it also makes them hear what they want to hear, smell what they want to smell, and so forth. Necessarily, then, it would also make the transporter operator see a normal operation even when every klaxon is hooting like crazy and the flashing red lights are nearly blinding the operator.

A more likely scenario, though, would involve the operator noticing that something is amiss, and quickly compensating with a few keypresses, while simultaneously convincing himself that no keypresses are taking place. The monster certainly makes people do things without them realizing or acknowledging it - for example, it makes McCoy operate his arms in a certain way so that he can kiss "Nancy" even though he's actually kissing a creature of a significantly different size and shape.

For all we know, the creature never actively assumes any role. It just passively walks through life, and its victims and bystanders see the roles they want to see. In that theory, the creature never argues for its own survival when wearing the McCoy disguise; instead, Kirk wants to see an argumentative McCoy sitting there in the briefing room, rather than a vacant seat or a hairy and silent creature, so Kirk sees an argumentative McCoy, and also subconsciously invents all the arguments he wants to hear from this McCoy. Spock does the same, and either our two heroes get two different sets of arguments from the unreal McCoy, or then the arguments sort of average out to please the greatest possible number of "users".

But that's a somewhat unlikely theory, and I find it more plausible that the creature can affect the way it looks and feels like to a given victim. That is, it can actively decide to look older to McCoy after it realizes that the initial youthful Nancy disguise was a mistake that drew attention. Most of that can still be animal instinct, though, and not human-level reasoning.

The third theory is that the creature is wily as a coyote and indeed fools our heroes through human-style cunning - actively extracting things like knowledge of swahili from their brains to facilitate the scheming. But again I find that unnecessary for covering the witnessed facts, when animal instinct covers them better and is a simpler assumption overall.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Redfern]

Yeah, fooling the techs into "ignoring" the alarms is all well and good...once the creature materialized. But I guess I didn't make clear that the techs should have detected something strange when they first got a "lock" on the fake Green. I guess I just don't buy into the idea that the "creature" was a long range telepath, certainly not at something akin to orbital distances. But as some Doctor Who fans endearingly joke, "Sometimes it's best to just ignore the 'rat' and enjoy the rest of the story." (An inside reference to an underwhelming giant rat costume depicted in the otherwise highly praised "The Talons of Wang Chiang")

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[Knight Templar]

Did transporters really have the capability of automatically detecting "differences" during transport? We know they did in ST:TNG. They showed they could detect weapons and could detect extra people (as when Barclay grabbed the crewman suspended in the transporter).

But in ST:OS, the only time I remember action being taken in mid transport was in "Day of the Dove" when Kirk used a prearranged signal to Spock to order him to suspend the Klingons in midtransport.

Ih the episode where Kirk was split into two people, not only did transporter warnings not go off, but the transporter activated all by itself and materialized the "evil" Kirk.

Though this might've been some kind of failsafe for the transporter to automatically "not leave anything behind" so it materialized the other Kirk after a certain delay time was reached.

 

[Knight Templar]

Which was clearly a plot convenience to keep Scotty and the other Kirk in the dark, only materializing the moment they're gone.

The irony being that as a woozy Kirk was led away by Scotty, Kirk warned Scotty not to leave the transporter unattended but Scotty said the transporter operator would be right back in a moment.

 

[Timo]

techs should have detected something strange when they first got a "lock" on the fake Green

I guess it's more an issue of attitudes than of technologies. McCoy noticed something amiss with "Nancy", too, but Kirk didn't listen to him. And thus McCoy decided not to trust his senses, and accepted the views of his superior officer instead. The transporter operators could well have noticed that "Green" sort of "looked odd" when coming up. But when the Salt Vampire (rematerialized, at close range, not across hundreds of kilometers or from within a phased realm) convinced them that it indeed was Green, healthy and sound, they dropped the issue.

Certainly Kirk's crew in this early episode showed more personality and less professionalism than later on. They had lines, they had relationships, and they misbehaved whenever the officers looked the other way. A transporter operator deciding that a report on an odd reading was not worth the hassle would be right in line with a blueshirt who wanders off with a random blonde when not explicitly ordered not to.

As an aside, when groups of people are beamed up, the operator in general is not in a position to "judge" the beamees. After all, he is normally simply told to beam up "three" or "six"; the officer giving the command might wish for himself and five nearby pigs to be beamed up, for example, and it's a galaxy-endangering hurry and all, so the operator cannot start second-guessing the command just because some instrument tells him there are five pigs in the beam.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RandyS]

I never understood in the Man Trap why Kirk and crew felt they had to kill the Salt Vampire. They lured it with table salt, so obviously it could feed on table salt, so why didn't they just give it a lifetime supply of all you can eat table salt???

Because if they had, the episode would have been over in five minutes.

 

[YARN]

Did transporters really have the capability of automatically detecting "differences" during transport? We know they did in ST:TNG. They showed they could detect weapons and could detect extra people (as when Barclay grabbed the crewman suspended in the transporter).

In The Enterprise Incident they were initially uncertain which person to beam when they were trying to get Spock back. Vulcan and Romulan physiology are very similar so the scanners were having a hard time isolating which person to lock in on. In the same episode, Kirk tells Scotty to simply avoid beaming him into a bulkhead because they don't know exactly where he should be on the Romulan ship.

It seems that this equipment would have to be very sensitive and "information rich." I mean, you have to precisely locate what you want to transport. You have to positively identify it, its relative location in its frame of reference relative to your frame of reference. You have successfully turn matter into energy and then back again which means that you have to have all the information about how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again -- this is no mean feat. You have to know where every atom, every molecule, and every cell is. There is a pretty big difference between a salt monster and a human.

It's hard to say with certainty what they officially knew, but it would seem that they should have known quite a bit. At the very least, it seems highly implausible that the salt monster physiology would not tip off the transporter operator. And this implies that the monster had an effect on human minds at a significant difference - we have to assume the monster on the planet was specifically influencing the mind of the one person on the Enterprise that it needed to influence in precisely the way that it needed to influence that person - and this last bit requires conscious intention/intelligence on the part of the creature. It seems it has to have the "at a distance" sort of telepathic abilities that we've seen in in Troi on TNG.

It's not the best bit of writing in Star Trek history. It would've have been much more plausible if they'd happened to have taken the shuttle craft that day.

As things stand, the implication is that the creature was highly intelligent and could purposefully act on human minds at a great distance.

 

[Timo]

...Yet the point about transporter operating procedures stands. The operator isn't in a position to comment on what is being transported, not in the general case, and not in this specific one.

The first beam-up: two men and a corpse:

Kirk: "Lock onto us. Three beaming up."
Scott: "Locked onto you, Captain."

No mention of one of the three being dead.

The second beam-up, two officers and a Salt Vampire:

Kirk: "Transporter room, Kirk speaking. Three to beam up."

And soon thereafter, an equally vague double command:

Kirk: "Break out the surface search equipment. I want co-ordinates on two people.
Spock: "Acknowledged."
Kirk: "There's a body down there. Sturgeon."
Transp. operator: "We'll bring him home, sir."

Kirk doesn't bother to tell Spock who he wants located - and gives the transporter guy no coordinates for the beacon-less body. With such reliance on telepathy or clairvoyance on part of his crew, Kirk would probably end up with Spock happily reporting the coordinates of Dr Crater and Sturgeon's body, and the fact that the Weekly Monster has left the planet would go unnoticed!

No, I don't think the beam-up incident is implausible in the slightest, not in the Star Trek context. Now, any other scifi show with teleporters would have to face closer scrutiny. But cock-ups like this are built into the Star Trek format (or in in-universe terms, into standard Starfleet procedures).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamdan]

The Salt Vampire was malicious, that's why.

 

[Timo]

...So were Klingons, and Kirk never shot to kill when face to face with one.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Redfern]

No, he just kicked one straight in the face with the heel of his boot (3 times, no less) sending him plummeting into a river of molten lava.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

[Knight Templar]

...So were Klingons, and Kirk never shot to kill when face to face with one.

Timo Saloniemi

"Friday's Child"

Kirk readying an arrow in his bow.

Kirk: "There's just one thing I want".

Spock: "The Klingon?"

Kirk: "One of us must get him."

Spock: "Revenge captain?"

KirkL "Why not."

 

[Bob Karo]

"The vampire doesn't want to be fed, it wants to hunt."