Star Trek: The Original Series S01E02, Charlie X

Summary: A child raised by aliens with godlike powers is taken in by the crew, who attempt to teach him how to be a person and fail.

The Good: Watching Kirk explain to a teenager why you can’t go around slapping women’s butts all the time. There are actually some legitimate horror moments sprinkled throughout.

The Bad: Too long by at least 20 minutes. The kid makes a ludicrously derpy face every time he uses his powers. There’s a super weird musical duet between Uhura and Spock for absolutely no reason. The characters don’t actually do anything in the climax, just get saved by something completely unrelated at the last minute. The show has no idea how it wants us to feel about Charlie.

The Review: From such wonderful heights in the first episode to such staggering lows here. Look, everyone who knows The Original Series knows this episode’s reputation for sheer awfulness, so if you aren’t aware just avoid this like the plague. The episode is staggeringly stupid, and doesn’t even know what it wants the viewer to think or feel. The setup is actually quite good as these things go: there’s a human child (Robert Walker, Jr.) who has grown up with exclusively alien contact, and because of that exposure has terrifying psychic powers. Now he’s a teen, and finally being sent back to live with his own people again. That’s a great idea for some science fiction, capable of exploring the nature/nurture debate, the corrupting influence of power, or the monstrosity of youth from a thematic standpoint. This episode does basically none of that. It does make some attempts, but they’re feeble and are quickly overpowered by weirdness and bad screenwriting.

Most troubling are the bonkers sexual politics of the thing. The fact that this episode was written by a woman (and not just any woman, but D.C. Fontana, of “Journey to Babel” Trek fame!) baffles me. It just doesn’t scan from a modern perspective. My only theory is just to write it off to the vastly different time the show was made in. Most of the conflict in the episode is centered around Charlie being a super creepy pervert, slapping women’s asses and magically taking voyeuristic photos of them. In response to this the crew mostly grins and shakes their head bemusedly at that darn kid (although there is a joy of sorts in watching the notoriously libidinal Kirk explaining why you can’t just do that kind of thing without *asking* first). This is far from the only Original Series episode that will suffer from bizarre sexual cognitive dissonance to the modern viewer, but it is a particularly bad example.

More damning than that, even, is the entirely underwhelming conclusion. Without spoiling it (if you want to hate watch this one with some friends), the ending manages to combine an astonishingly stupid plot from Kirk (the kind that no rational person would ever agree to go along with) and a total lack of agency for the main characters in the actual resolution of the problem. I know that it’s always difficult to write a solution when dealing with a super-powerful being, but this feels particularly like a cop-out. Kirk’s plan does basically nothing, and the entire conflict is resolved by entirely external forces, leaving the viewer frustrated and disappointed. The only nice thing I can say for the episode is that it actually does have some nice horror moments when Charlie really starts to ramp up his deific temper tantrum (one scene involving faces is particularly visually memorable). They absolutely do not merit the time, however. Even the dedicated Trek viewer will miss nothing by giving this one a pass.

The Score: