Tuesday, September 20, 2016

"Charlie X"
15 minutes
.6 mi
2.5mph
3.0 elevation

I'm still sore from biking 32 miles on Saturday, so I'm calling it a win that I got on the treadmill at all today.

Today's episode, "Charlie X", is yet another alien who gets inside people's heads -- though this time it's a human boy that was somehow messed with by aliens, and who can make reality do/be what he wants.  He makes people disappear, makes Mr. Spock recite poetry rather than give a report, changes the cards for a magic trick.  Janice Rand is the first girl he's ever seen, and he falls for her hard -- and exhibits every "nice guy" trick in the book, figuring that he's entitled for her to love him back, right up until she slaps him and he vaporizes her.  Charlie wants Janice and he wants to go to Colony 5, where he'll have more people to work with -- and he's perfectly willing to make whatever changes he needs to make that happen.  Charlie is eventually defeated when the aliens who raised him come to get him and take him away (and bring Janice back, along with setting right the other changes Charlie had made).  Turns out that Charlie was escaping from them.

Of note:
*  Kirk giving a 17-year-old dating advice is just painful to watch.
*  The episode is ultimately sympathetic to Charlie, doomed to live out his life with incorporeal beings he can't touch, who don't have the emotions he does.  Janice cries for him.  But it also seems pretty convinced that the universe just wouldn't be safe with Charlie roaming free.
*  Teleplay by DC Fontana!  Woo!

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