1 – The Man Trap

Grade: C+

Summary

The Enterprise has arrived at planet M113, to check on a scientist and his wife, who have been studying the ancient archaeology of the planet. Dr McCoy has orders to perform a medical checkup on the planet’s two residents. McCoy and Captain Kirk quickly find out that the scientist’s wife looks different to them. While McCoy sees her as a much younger woman, Kirk sees her with gray hair. What complicates matters even further, McCoy used to be romantically involved with her, about 10 years ago.

Commentary

As a pilot, this episode really isn’t a great start to the series. It looks like they were still working out the details on where they wanted to go and how they wanted to handle the characters. The acting, directing, characters and dialogue don’t seem to be consistent with what we see later in the series. In my opinion, this episode isn’t that great, but it obviously was good enough to get the series started. Compared to what would come later, this episode wasn’t great.

I thought the plot was fine, however. If this had been a 3rd season episode, it probably could have been pretty good, since by then they had a very good idea about what they wanted to accomplish with this series and how they would go about it. Ultimately, I rated this a C+, which is quite a bit lower than what it gets on IMDB. Still, considering all 700+ episodes of the Star Trek saga, I’d say this one is just barely above average.

Of Note

Although The Man Trap was the first episode to be shown on TV, Where No Man has Gone Before is the episode that was originally intended to be the pilot of the series. NBC changed the order of the episodes because they thought this one would make a better pilot.