Poor Lt. Grant. He was the sole redshirt sent down as security for Kirk, Spock and Bones in “Friday’s Child.” You wonder why any security chief would have sent down such a young and inexperienced (Kirk’s own words) crewman to protect The Big Three. Starfleet already knew the Capellans were experts with bladed weapons and had extremely fast reflexes. You can watch Grant’s facial expressions here as events unfold and you just know he’s doomed.
Grant was played by Bob Bralver, an actor who appeared in a few TOS episodes. He appeared in this episode as well as “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” and “The Tholian Web.”
You wouldn’t have known he was also considered to be an expert stuntman in “Friday’s Child.” (although he admitted in a Starlog magazine article that he did get a $25 stunt differential on top of the standard $129 for a day’s work for that episode). But in “The Tholian Web,” he and fellow stuntman Jay Jones have an excellent scene together. Take a look at Bralver’s leap from the the catwalk in Engineering, landing exactly on top of Jones’s back. That took some good timing, you must admit. Even the fight scene was well done. It did indeed appear he was possessed by so much inner rage that two other crewmen had a hard time pulling him off Jones.
Not only did Bralver appear in two episodes as an extra, he was McCoy’s stunt double in the episode “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” And he also did stunt work in one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and in eight episodes of Deep Space Nine as well as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Bralver began his career a few short years before his appearance in TOS. Here he is in the first episode of The Bionic Woman. During his early period, he also did stunt work for I Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Gunsmoke. After Bralver had honed his craft, he was hired on a regular basis by series such as Adam-12, Cannon, and Emergency!
Like Charles Picerni, Bralver eventually worked his way into being a stunt coordinator. He helped hire the talent and plan the stunt work for Kojak, Battlestar Galactica and Galactia 80 (that is Bob in the photo demonstrating a fall during rehearsals for G80 ), and The Fall Guy.
He appeared as an actor and stunt worker in Knight Rider as well as being their stunt coordinator for several seasons (above photo from his appearance in “Brother’s Keeper”). Bralver’s longest gig as a stunt coordinator was for the series Murder She Wrote - 136 episodes.
He has also served as second unit director, full director and a writer for many of those shows. Bob Bralver’s record as a redshirt in TOS may have been short-lived but his actual Hollywood career has lasted over fifty years and is still going strong today.
He still seems to be active in the convention circuit as well and often makes appearances in car shows. Here is one cute video of him with a Wonder Woman cosplayer. https://youtu.be/4bpsdXrRPyM
And the usual piece o’trivia at the end. While Bob Bralver was earning his Masters in Physical Education, he wrote a research paper on the physics behind the speed of a professional baseball player’s swing. When he first began working as a stuntman on television shows, he was teaching junior high P.E. classes. His son Stephen Bralver played college and professional baseball but eventually followed his father into stunt work.
