Star Trek: The Original Series Season 1, Episode 2: “Charlie X”

Synopsis: The Enterprise is given the assignment to provide transport to a youth with amazing powers.

In my most recent re-viewing of “Charlie X,” in the early scene when Charles Evans, the youth who has been stranded for fourteen years alone on a planet, asks Yeoman Janice Rand: “Uh, are you a girl?”, it brought to mind the scene in Siegfried from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), or Ring Cycle, when Siegfried discovers Brunnhilde. For Siegfried, this was the first time he felt fear; for Charlie X, it was the first time he felt there was something that he could not have.

Like Siegfried, Charlie X has never seen a girl, or woman before. Also, like Siegfried, Charlie, as we learn at the end of episode, was raised by someone unlike himself. In Charlie’s case it was Thasians, for Siegfried it was the dwarf, Mime. Both were abandoned young: Siegfried’s mother, Sieglinde, died in childbirth; Charlie’s family died when their ship crashed on the planet, Thasus, when he was three. They also both have powers that they received from a superhuman source. Siegfried was able to understand the songs of birds and thoughts of humans after killing the dragon Fafner, and accidentally touching a drop of Fafner’s blood on his lips. He also obtained the Ring of the Nibelung, or ring of power, and the Tarnhelm, a magic helmet that makes the wearer invisible, both of which Fafner was guarding along with the hoard of gold. Charlie was given a similar power, the ability to transmute matter by the Thasians, so that he could survive.

Sadly, both in the end, after setting out on a journey, are unable to learn how to exist among others with their power and must be taken away in order to save others. In the last opera of the Ring Cycle, Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), Siegfried, after waking Brunnhilde, falling in love with her, and her giving him all her knowledge and even her steed, leaves her to go out searching for adventure. He met Gunther and Gutrune, and while under the spell of a love potion, deceives Brunnhilde, and for that fate was killed. Brunnhilde, follows Siegfried’s funeral pyre into the fire with the Ring of the Nibelung, and saves the world. Charlie, causing chaos aboard the Enterprise because he does not have the wisdom in the same measure as his powers, is recovered by the Thasians, who had not learned of his escape from their planet before it was too late to stop him. Charlie’s fate is to return to Thasus with them, and the crew of the Enterprise, and the galaxy is saved.

Original post created 5 January 2021