Though this was aired in front of "Where No Man Has Gone Before," it's not the first Trek story to feature a human being acquiring extraordinary powers - that would be the aforementioned 2nd pilot for the show. The angle with this episode is that the human being in question is a teenager, 17-year-old Charles Evans (well played by actor Walker, in his mid-twenties at the time). It's bad enough when adults get delusions of godhood; when it's a teen, all bets are off. Kirk brings on a sector worth of trouble on board his ship when he accepts a transfer of a young guest from a smaller ship. The Charlie character spent all his years up to this point on some planet without other human beings. His introduction to the fairer sex (Yeoman Rand - probably Whitney's best episode) is painful in itself; his growing pains are accentuated by his complete ignorance of common social customs.
All this is uncomfortable to watch because Walker imparts an uneasy, twitchy psychosis to his character but then, in the second half of the episode, he reveals his unlimited powers - he literally seems able to do anything, whether making people disappear or transforming them into lizards. The story now begins to take on a more horrific tone; in his frustration, Charlie is not beyond torturing crew members, terrorizing the entire ship. This is alienation taken to the nth degree. The episode makes a strong case for the issue of parental control - even more on the topic of maturing without parents (think of the story of Superman/Clark Kent, for example, and if he'd grown up without the influence of the Kents; this has been on display for the past few years on the series "Smallville"). In this particular episode, the parental duties fall on Kirk, but it's too little too late - far too late. One drawback of this episode: an extended scene of Uhura singing about Spock and then Charlie - the one point that Charlie's surreptitious use of his powers seemed warranted.
As with most of the Trek episodes in the original series, the strongly structured scripts included excellent endings, as is the case here. There are no pat unrealistic conclusions, i.e. a happy ending, where-in Charlie is somehow able to remain with the human race (due to the miraculous removal of his powers, for example). No, even in this sector of space, you reap what you sow and things are not solved for you. There's a genuinely tragic tone to the ending - Charlie's main weakness, after all, was just a great need for other people to like him. That need will never be fulfilled at the end. As with the previously aired "Man Trap," total incompatibility between two sets of entities shows that some things are beyond our ability to set right, even with future technology.
All this is uncomfortable to watch because Walker imparts an uneasy, twitchy psychosis to his character but then, in the second half of the episode, he reveals his unlimited powers - he literally seems able to do anything, whether making people disappear or transforming them into lizards. The story now begins to take on a more horrific tone; in his frustration, Charlie is not beyond torturing crew members, terrorizing the entire ship. This is alienation taken to the nth degree. The episode makes a strong case for the issue of parental control - even more on the topic of maturing without parents (think of the story of Superman/Clark Kent, for example, and if he'd grown up without the influence of the Kents; this has been on display for the past few years on the series "Smallville"). In this particular episode, the parental duties fall on Kirk, but it's too little too late - far too late. One drawback of this episode: an extended scene of Uhura singing about Spock and then Charlie - the one point that Charlie's surreptitious use of his powers seemed warranted.
As with most of the Trek episodes in the original series, the strongly structured scripts included excellent endings, as is the case here. There are no pat unrealistic conclusions, i.e. a happy ending, where-in Charlie is somehow able to remain with the human race (due to the miraculous removal of his powers, for example). No, even in this sector of space, you reap what you sow and things are not solved for you. There's a genuinely tragic tone to the ending - Charlie's main weakness, after all, was just a great need for other people to like him. That need will never be fulfilled at the end. As with the previously aired "Man Trap," total incompatibility between two sets of entities shows that some things are beyond our ability to set right, even with future technology.