Charlie Evans is trouble. Sure, he’s a good-looking kid. (Picture a young Peter Fonda with a far less egregious jaw.) He’s got admirable manners for a teenager — especially one whose only companion for the past 14 years was a talking computer — and he’s eager to be liked. But Charlie’s got issues. Charlie has a nasty temper. In fact, Charlie is something of a killing machine, and in “Charlie X,” the terrific first-season episode of the original Star Trek series, actor Robert Walker — in his mid-20s at the time — invests the 17-year-old title character with a bracing mix of menace and curiously endearing insecurity. On board the Starship Enterprise, after being rescued from the planet he’s occupied alone for more than a decade, Charlie starts acting out. He causes Uhuru to lose her singing voice, melts chess pieces telekinetically, literally wipes the facial features off several crew members who irritate him and, almost incidentally, destroys a cargo ship thousands of miles away using only his mind, killing everyone aboard. By the time a seemingly repentant but still scarily unpredictable Charlie is whisked away from James T. Kirk and Co. by a kindly Thasian (an ancient race who wield almost unlimited powers and whose training helped Charlie survive alone for so long), the viewer almost feels sorry for the poor, misguided little psycho. Almost.
Mini Miscreants: Top 10 Li’l Screen Villains
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages