Yes I know this show had an unaired pilot with Captain Pike or whatever, and that this episode was filmed like after the whole rest of the series or something, but I will not be blogging here as a Star Trek expert, just as a guy who watches the show on youtube. And this is the first episode.
Let me say that I was a little let down by the title here. "The Man Trap" sounds a little (a lot) more like an episode of Sex and the City, and I was kind of expecting to hear Scotty and Sulu chat about how hard it can be to get a man to stay the whole night, and the McCoy walks in and claims that he tries to get the man to leave right after the sex, and Kirk has a secret (he prefers to go over to the man's house so he can leave early). Oh, them! I'm such a Scotty, you guys.
Anyway, not only was this episode not about doin' it (actually, a substantial portion of it was kind of about doin' it), but Scotty wasn't even around, meaning that the recent film reboot of the series stayed pretty true to the original by waiting too damn long to bring out that angry-ass Scot. The episode concerned The Gang visiting an ex of McCoy, who turns out to actually secretly be an alien slug who can take various human forms (or something?!).
When we first meet her, McCoy sees her as the thirty-something woman playing a twenty-something woman she was when he first met her. He keeps claiming she looks way young, and Kirk just laughs and laughs. 
But it's no laughing matter to the younger dude they brought along (his red shirt being in the wash), who sees the lady as looking like the woman he lost his virginity to after the Fleet Academy Delta Delta Delta frat rush week party.
Kirk sees her as the woman-who-McCoy-dated, but at what her present age would be, requiring some serious white hair dye from our hairdressing department, making this character look alternatingly twenty years younger and twenty years older than McCoy, suggesting to me that he was a teenager when they began dating, which is SCANDALOUS. Now, there is no reason on earth (or IN SPACE) for Kirk to have to see this lady as older, since she is actually a slug dealy, so here is my current theory: this slug appears to dudes as the sexiest lady they can imagine, and Kirk is just way into sexagenarians, a fact he finds so repellent that he must bang as many alien coeds as he can, just to prove that he's one of the bros.
Anyway, once we get onto the Enterprise (some other stuff happens first but this is not a play-by-play, I promise) the real magic happens. Uhura opens by being the most relatable character in 1960's television because she totally hates her job. She tries to flirt with Spock by mentioning this fact, but fun fact it is illogical to do a job you hate so he does not even get it. Also, it is illogical to flirt with Spock unless he's in heat which only takes place like once a year or maybe fifty years or something so bad timing again Uhura.
Later she gets to flirt in SWAHILI (awesome) with a really sexxxy black dude who is (SPOILER ALERT EXCEPT YOU KNOW IMMEDIATELY) actually the slug monster. Moments like these kind of make me wish the whole show was about Uhura, the only person not completely enamored with being aboard the USS Whiteboys who longs for someone to recognize that her linguistic/communication talents are manifold.
Possibly most importantly in this episode, we get to see Sulu's hella swanky greenhouse/bedroom, which must be the least sustainable thing about the ship. He hangs out with his BFF and apparently someone's private yeoman 
Janice Rand, who is known around the ship as being a woman with incredibly tall hair because she's a big fan of 
Amy Winehouse. She and Sulu form what seems to be the only non-flirtatious man-woman friendship on the ship, which is kind of refreshing, honestly, until you recall that George Takei claims he and Gene Roddenberry planned to make Sulu a gay character, and then you wonder if maybe he's meant to be the Standford to Janice's Carrie (what is WITH me lately and the Sex and the City references?).
Also in the "Enterprise people have awesome dorm rooms" file, we get a peek (according to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki, the ONLY peek) at McCoy's quarters. As anyone could anticipate, his is a room build almost entirely out of soft lighting and bottles of whiskey:
It is basically like one of those fake bedrooms out of the sixties (see Austin Powers or Down with Love), where you know he can flip a switch anywhere in the room and Barry White starts playing. When we cut a few moments later to his bed-area, which he has tastefully decorated by visiting maybe two garage sales, it is not hard to imagine that the bed just popped out of the wall at the same time the strobe light started.
The episode eventually devolves into Spock punching the hell out of this lady to prove a point to McCoy, and Kirk waxing philosophical on the buffalo. 
As far as setting the tone for the series, it actually totally excites me. Its directing is really pretty sophisticated, though it relies too heavily on severe close-ups, and more importantly, it shows incredible sympathy for its characters, even the villains. McCoy's judgment is clouded by remembering a time when he could form a lasting relationship with a woman and not have to just rub one out with a bottle of Jack in his non-dominant hand every. night. The dude they chat with back on the slug monster planet (there was a dude, sorry) turns out to have mostly known that the slug monster was a monster, not a sixty-something woman, but was really desperate for the company, so he didn't care (please see: Patton Oswalt on this past season of Dollhouse). And really, Kirk & The Gang try hard not to hurt anyone's feelings when dealing with this thing that basically just needs a lot of salt all the time but is KILLING PEOPLE TO GET IT.
I promise I will never again write this much about one single episode. Sorry, internet. In conclusion, even though this is chronologically not the first episode ever, I like the way it sets a tone for a series. I'll end this post with a picture of Kirk looking smug and confident:
Let me say that I was a little let down by the title here. "The Man Trap" sounds a little (a lot) more like an episode of Sex and the City, and I was kind of expecting to hear Scotty and Sulu chat about how hard it can be to get a man to stay the whole night, and the McCoy walks in and claims that he tries to get the man to leave right after the sex, and Kirk has a secret (he prefers to go over to the man's house so he can leave early). Oh, them! I'm such a Scotty, you guys.
Anyway, not only was this episode not about doin' it (actually, a substantial portion of it was kind of about doin' it), but Scotty wasn't even around, meaning that the recent film reboot of the series stayed pretty true to the original by waiting too damn long to bring out that angry-ass Scot. The episode concerned The Gang visiting an ex of McCoy, who turns out to actually secretly be an alien slug who can take various human forms (or something?!).
When we first meet her, McCoy sees her as the thirty-something woman playing a twenty-something woman she was when he first met her. He keeps claiming she looks way young, and Kirk just laughs and laughs. 
But it's no laughing matter to the younger dude they brought along (his red shirt being in the wash), who sees the lady as looking like the woman he lost his virginity to after the Fleet Academy Delta Delta Delta frat rush week party.
Kirk sees her as the woman-who-McCoy-dated, but at what her present age would be, requiring some serious white hair dye from our hairdressing department, making this character look alternatingly twenty years younger and twenty years older than McCoy, suggesting to me that he was a teenager when they began dating, which is SCANDALOUS. Now, there is no reason on earth (or IN SPACE) for Kirk to have to see this lady as older, since she is actually a slug dealy, so here is my current theory: this slug appears to dudes as the sexiest lady they can imagine, and Kirk is just way into sexagenarians, a fact he finds so repellent that he must bang as many alien coeds as he can, just to prove that he's one of the bros.Anyway, once we get onto the Enterprise (some other stuff happens first but this is not a play-by-play, I promise) the real magic happens. Uhura opens by being the most relatable character in 1960's television because she totally hates her job. She tries to flirt with Spock by mentioning this fact, but fun fact it is illogical to do a job you hate so he does not even get it. Also, it is illogical to flirt with Spock unless he's in heat which only takes place like once a year or maybe fifty years or something so bad timing again Uhura.
Later she gets to flirt in SWAHILI (awesome) with a really sexxxy black dude who is (SPOILER ALERT EXCEPT YOU KNOW IMMEDIATELY) actually the slug monster. Moments like these kind of make me wish the whole show was about Uhura, the only person not completely enamored with being aboard the USS Whiteboys who longs for someone to recognize that her linguistic/communication talents are manifold.
Possibly most importantly in this episode, we get to see Sulu's hella swanky greenhouse/bedroom, which must be the least sustainable thing about the ship. He hangs out with his BFF and apparently someone's private yeoman 
Janice Rand, who is known around the ship as being a woman with incredibly tall hair because she's a big fan of Amy Winehouse. She and Sulu form what seems to be the only non-flirtatious man-woman friendship on the ship, which is kind of refreshing, honestly, until you recall that George Takei claims he and Gene Roddenberry planned to make Sulu a gay character, and then you wonder if maybe he's meant to be the Standford to Janice's Carrie (what is WITH me lately and the Sex and the City references?).Also in the "Enterprise people have awesome dorm rooms" file, we get a peek (according to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki, the ONLY peek) at McCoy's quarters. As anyone could anticipate, his is a room build almost entirely out of soft lighting and bottles of whiskey:
It is basically like one of those fake bedrooms out of the sixties (see Austin Powers or Down with Love), where you know he can flip a switch anywhere in the room and Barry White starts playing. When we cut a few moments later to his bed-area, which he has tastefully decorated by visiting maybe two garage sales, it is not hard to imagine that the bed just popped out of the wall at the same time the strobe light started.
The episode eventually devolves into Spock punching the hell out of this lady to prove a point to McCoy, and Kirk waxing philosophical on the buffalo. 
As far as setting the tone for the series, it actually totally excites me. Its directing is really pretty sophisticated, though it relies too heavily on severe close-ups, and more importantly, it shows incredible sympathy for its characters, even the villains. McCoy's judgment is clouded by remembering a time when he could form a lasting relationship with a woman and not have to just rub one out with a bottle of Jack in his non-dominant hand every. night. The dude they chat with back on the slug monster planet (there was a dude, sorry) turns out to have mostly known that the slug monster was a monster, not a sixty-something woman, but was really desperate for the company, so he didn't care (please see: Patton Oswalt on this past season of Dollhouse). And really, Kirk & The Gang try hard not to hurt anyone's feelings when dealing with this thing that basically just needs a lot of salt all the time but is KILLING PEOPLE TO GET IT.I promise I will never again write this much about one single episode. Sorry, internet. In conclusion, even though this is chronologically not the first episode ever, I like the way it sets a tone for a series. I'll end this post with a picture of Kirk looking smug and confident:
