Star Trek: “Charlie X” (Desilu Productions, Norway Corporation, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Oddly, after watching the Lifetime “premiere” I stumbled around the channels and found a MeTV rerun of a quite chilling episode of the original Star Trek: “Charlie X,” the third show in the first season in terms of actual air date. (Many of the original Star Trek episodes were not shown in the order in which they were produced, and apparently that was due to the way the scripts varied in terms of the number of special effects required: with no in-house effects department at Desilu Studios, where the original Star Treks were filmed, producer Gene Roddenberry had to farm out the effects work and so the more elaborate episodes took longer in post-production.) “Charlie X” was one of the very best Star Trek episodes and it was the first one that used a conflict Gene Roddenberry and his writers would return to again and again: the destructive innocent who appears human but has powers far beyond those of normal humanity — and who uses those powers in terrible and anti-social ways not because he’s malevolent but because he simply doesn’t know he’s not supposed to. This was the first time I’d seen “Charlie X” since I finally caught up with and read Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and the parallels were obvious — especially when Charlie (Robert Walker, Jr.) uses his superpowers to vaporize various Enterprise crew members (this episode was probably the first in which Star Trek introduced the infamous “red shirts” — so called because in the color scheme of Starfleet’s uniforms red meant they were part of the security detail — who would get themselves killed because they were so unimportant they could be got rid of without it impacting any of the series leads) and Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) has to explain to him that in Earth culture that sort of thing is called “murder” and is very much frowned upon.

I was surprised, however, when I looked up the imdb.com page for “Charlie X” and found that at least two trivia posters had identified an even earlier antecedent for this story than Stranger in a Strange Land: “It’s a Good Life,” a 1953 short story by Jerome Bixby that had been adapted for an episode of the TV series The Twilight Zone in 1961 and might have inspired both Stranger in a Strange Land and “Charlie X.” Though Bixby isn’t credited as a writer on “Charlie X” — Star Trek creator Roddenberry is credited with the original story and Dorothy C. Fontana (who signed her scripts “D. C. Fontana” so she could get writing assignments on action series for which the producers wouldn’t have knowingly hired a woman — I know this because I heard her speak at the 2016 ConDor science-fiction convention in San Diego which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, and later Harry Potter creator Janice Rowling pulld a similar stunt) with the script, Bixby did get credit on four subsequent Star Trek episodes (“Mirror, Mirror,” “By Any Other Name,” “Day of the Dove” and “Requiem for Methuselah”) and it’s possible Roddenberry knew about him and promised him work if Bixby would let him recycle the premise of “It’s a Good Day” as a Star Trek episode.

The great irony is that Charlie Evans — to use his full name — was given superpowers by the people who raised him, energy beings from the planet Thasius, so he could survive in their environment. But at the same time he’s a typical teenage male Earthling, going through hormonal changes and feeling sexual desire for women (including the scantily-clad Yeoman Janice Rand, played by Grace Lee Whitney in a series of diaphanous costumes that always seemed to be on the verge of a wardrobe malfunction; a lot of people assumed her real function on the starship Enterprise was as an animate sex doll for Captain Kirk, since she seemed to have no other crew function) while having no knowledge of Earth customs, in particular how to approach a woman in whom you’re physically interested. Charlie gets more and more unhinged and sadistic as the show progresses, and by its end he’s glorying over his ability to take over the entire Enterprise and get the crew members to do whatever he wants them to — until the Thasians who raised him and gave him his powers suddenly reappear and take him back, saying that if he were allowed to live among Earth people either he would destroy them all or they would be obliged to destroy him to save themselves from his powers. Charlie’s last-minute whine over his fate, and particularly his lament that he had no fun among the Thasians because he was the only one with a physical body, is a marvelous touch. Robert Walker, Jr. was the son of Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones, and though he was 26 in real life when this episode was filmed he’s totally credible as a teenager. Indeed, Walker, Jr.’s performance here is a tour de force rivaling Walker, Sr.’s work in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Strangers on a Train, and while Walker, Sr. lived to make only one other movie, My Son John, after Strangers (and didn’t even finish it — Hitchcock had to give My Son John director Leo McCarey outtakes from Strangers to complete Walker’s part), Walker, Jr. worked steadily until his death in December 2019 at the age of 79 but mostly remained ghetto-ized as a guest star on TV series. Judging from his work here, he was a fine, edgy actor who had the chops for a star career!