Having just started my “foreign languages only” review of the original series of Star Trek, it’s interesting to note which of the episodes simply looks naff, or out-of-date, or implausible (e.g. The Man Trap), and which still shine through (to me, at least), as being really fantastically vibrant, and the kind of thing to which I might hope people return in another fifty years.

Charlie X is definitely one of these, and one of the things that particularly resonates with me at the moment is how brilliant a vehicle the script, and the episode’s content, would be to teach consent with boys in late KS2 or KS3.

The big question for me, though, is whether / which / how many 10 to 14 year-olds would get the ‘retro’ look of the episodes in a way that they’d find engaging.

Perhaps one partial answer is to use the episode’s very obvious (to us) ways that the special effects are done (with shots locking off before things disappear) to experiment with filmmaking about ‘making things disappear’. This would also tie in well with the final conundrum of the episode, about whether Kirk and co sufficiently took into account Charlie’s complete and well-acted lack of consent in going back to the Tholians.