“The Enemy Within”
Written by Richard Matheson
Directed by Leo Penn
Season 1, Episode 4
Production episode 6149-05
Original air date: October 6, 1966
Stardate: 1672.1
Captain’s log: The Enterprise is in orbit around Alfa 177, performing an intense planetary survey. Geological Technician Fisher takes a fall, cutting his hand and also getting his uniform covered in yellow powder. Kirk orders him to beam up, but when he does there’s an odd transporter hiccup. Scotty and Wilson check over the transporter, and the former orders the latter to get a synchronic meter to be sure. However, the engineer feels safe beaming Kirk back to the ship, which he does. But Kirk feels a bit dizzy, so Scotty escorts the captain to his quarters—Kirk doesn’t want to leave the transporter unattended, but Scotty insists that Wilson will be right back.
After they leave, the transporter activates again, and another Kirk beams on board, but this one is underlit to make him look EEEEEEEVIL!
Wilson returns to see Evil Kirk, but the crewperson’s offer to help is ignored. Meanwhile Good Kirk goes to his quarters, where Rand has the updated ship’s manifest. He dismisses her and takes a nap.
Evil Kirk goes to sickbay, where McCoy cures Fisher. Evil Kirk pissily demands Saurian brandy from a nonplussed McCoy, and then lumbers drunkenly through the corridors until he reaches Rand’s quarters.
Spock comes to Kirk’s quarters to find Good Kirk with his shirt off, having woken from his nap. Spock is investigating McCoy’s report that the captain came to sickbay like a wild man, demanding brandy. Good Kirk denies it, and figures McCoy was playing a joke on Spock.
Later, Good Kirk (now wearing a green shirt so we can tell which is which) and Spock report to the transporter room. Sulu sent up a native animal through the transporter. But after it transported the first time, it transported again, only the second, seemingly identical animal is hostile and vicious, while the first is completely docile (and looks so very cute in Scotty’s arms). Scotty fears what would happen if a person went through the transporter, but of course the viewer already has that answer.
Rand returns to her quarters to find a lurking Evil Kirk, still guzzling brandy and leering a lot. He tries to rape her, and she responds by struggling and scratching his face. She manages to walk in front of the door when Fisher’s walking by, and the geological technician sees Evil Kirk toss her across the room. When he tries to report him, Evil Kirk jumps him and beats the crap out of him. (Fisher opens the intercom and insists on identifying himself as “Geological Technician Fisher.” If he’d just went with “Fisher,” he might have had time to get out a useful message before Evil Kirk jumped him. Stupid military protocols…)
Spock then reports to Good Kirk, having taken Rand’s statement and also having found the very bottle of Saurian brandy that McCoy says Kirk took in Rand’s quarters. Good Kirk goes to sickbay with Spock to talk to McCoy and Rand, leaving his cabin empty for Evil Kirk to use it to cover the scratches on his face and the blood on his knuckles.
Good Kirk doesn’t understand what’s going on—and neither does Rand, since she was sure she scratched her attacker’s face, but Good Kirk has no scratches. Fisher also insists that it was the captain. They realize that the transporter did, in fact, duplicate Kirk as well.
Scotty has no idea how long it’ll take to fix the transporter—which is a problem insofar as Sulu and the rest of the landing party are still on the surface, and it gets down to 120 below zero at night on Alfa 177.
Good Kirk is thumphering around, needing Spock to guide him, both in terms of how to search for Evil Kirk and reminding the captain that he can’t tell the whole truth to the crew, as they must view the captain as perfect and invulnerable. Good Kirk knows this—what he doesn’t know is why he forgot and why he needed Spock to remind him.
So Good Kirk simply says that there’s an impostor on board. Hearing Good Kirk make the announcement sends Evil Kirk into a rage. He attacks Wilson, stealing his phaser. Only after Wilson reports in does Spock realize that Evil Kirk knows everything Good Kirk knows. This means that Good Kirk might know where he’ll go next.
Good Kirk and Spock go to the engine room alone—Good Kirk doesn’t want anyone else in the crew to see Evil Kirk—and the three of them play cat-and-mouse for a while until the two Kirks face off. But Spock is able to stop Evil Kirk with a Vulcan nerve pinch. McCoy can’t risk giving him a tranquilizer, so he puts Evil Kirk in restraints.
Unfortunately, before Spock whammied him, Evil Kirk fired his phaser, damaging the transporter even further, screwing Sulu and the landing party over even more. Sulu’s doing the best he can—using phasers to heat rocks to keep them warm and keeping his sense of humor—but time’s running out.
Time’s running out for Kirk, too—Evil Kirk is dying and it’s becoming clear that Good Kirk is half the man he used to be (ahem). The strength of Evil Kirk is what makes him a good captain—although so is his intellect and compassion, which is also the source of his courage.
Scotty has gotten the transporter working again. They want to test it on the animal first. Spock and Wilson put both animals on the same platform, but while they rematerialize as a single animal, it’s as a single dead animal.
Spock believes the shock was too much for the creature to handle, but Kirk’s intellect should allow him to survive it. McCoy is concerned that there may be a biological or technological cause, but there isn’t time to do an autopsy on the animal or double check the transporter because of the landing party. Two of the party are unconscious, and Sulu’s in pretty bad shape, too.
Good Kirk makes the decision, and he tries to take Evil Kirk to the transporter room at phaserpoint, but Evil Kirk tricks Good Kirk, and changes shirts, and also scratches Good Kirk’s face. He goes to the bridge—after creepily offering to go to Rand’s quarters later to “explain” what happened to him—and orders Farrell to leave orbit, because there’s no hope for the landing party. Proving that Good Kirk got all the brains, it never occurs to Evil Kirk that McCoy might find Good Kirk and bring him to the bridge. It takes all of five seconds for Evil Kirk to break down and go batshit, and Good Kirk is able to convince him to come along to the transporter.
Spock runs him through the way they did the animal, and Kirk is one person again. His first order is to beam the landing party back. McCoy thinks they’ll live and Kirk is more than a little devastated at seeing a side of himself no one should see.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity?: The later notion of multiple transporter rooms and also of shuttlecraft and cargo bays that have transporters have not yet been conceived when this episode was written, so the only way on and off the ship is via the one transporter room, which is a problem when it breaks.
Fascinating: The Vulcan nerve pinch makes its debut here. The script called for Spock to “kayo” Evil Kirk, but Leonard Nimoy thought that was too undignified for Spock, so he improvised the nerve pinch.
I’m a doctor not an escalator: For the first time, McCoy says one of his signature lines, “He’s dead, Jim.” Amusingly, he says it about the space dog after the animal is reintegrated.
Ahead warp one, aye: Sulu is in charge of the landing party and it’s to his credit that he maintains his sense of humor as long as he can (asking for coffee or rice wine to be lowered on a rope, complaining that room service is being slow, joking about skiing season, and so on), which probably helps the morale of the three guys under his command, and also reassures the folks back on the Enterprise that he’s soldiering through.
I cannot change the laws of physics!: Scotty sees that there’s something wrong with the transporter, sends Wilson to get the scanner to check it out, but, what the heck, he beams Kirk back anyhow, and then leaves the room unattended so Evil Kirk can roam free. Good work, engineer!
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Evil Kirk immediately goes after Rand, trying to rape her and going on about the sexual tension between them. It puts Rand in an awful position, especially since he’s the captain on top of everything else, though it’s to her credit that she resists as much as she does, even wounding him.
At the very end, Spock makes a pointed and spectacularly creepy comment to Rand about how “interesting” Evil Kirk was, practically waggling his eyebrows at her. It is quite possibly Spock’s most repulsive moment in the TV series, implying that Rand probably enjoyed being raped.
Channel open: “Being split in two halves is no theory with me, Doctor. I have a human half, you see, as well as an alien half—submerged, constantly at war with each other. Personal experience, Doctor—I survive it because my intelligence wins over both, makes them live together.”
Spock using his dual heritage to explain the theme of the episode.
Welcome aboard: Recurring regulars DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, and Grace Lee Whitney are back, as is Jim Goodwin as Farrell, along with Edward Madden as Fisher and Garland Thompson as Wilson. Nichelle Nichols doesn’t appear as Uhura (some unidentified man in a gold shirt is at communications), but her voice is heard over the intercom once or twice.
Trivial matters: This is the only Trek script by Richard Matheson, who wrote plenty of other TV scripts and movies, but who’s probably best known as a science fiction author, with such classics as I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man in his bibliography. One of his other TV scripts was for The Twilight Zone’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” one of William Shatner’s most famous pre-Star Trek roles.
Matheson’s original script didn’t have the subplot with the landing party trapped on the planet.
In addition to “He’s dead, Jim” and the nerve pinch, this episode marks the first appearance of the engine room and Kirk’s alternate green tunic (which was created to differentiate Good Kirk from Bad Kirk).
James Blish’s adaptation in Star Trek 8 did not include the nerve pinch as it wasn’t in the script, and that was all Blish had to work with.
Greg Cox’s novel Foul Deeds Will Rise has a character use the transporter’s ability to split someone in two like this deliberately in order to create an alibi.
This is the first of several times Kirk will be duplicated in some way: it’ll happen again in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” “Mirror, Mirror” (kind of), “Whom Gods Destroy,” and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
In his log entry, Spock refers to himself as “Second Officer Spock,” even though he’s obviously the second-in-command, which would make him first officer.
During the confrontation on the bridge, director Leo Penn was forced to reverse the image of Evil Kirk due to a blocking error. Unfortunately, that meant that, in closeups, Evil Kirk’s scratches were on the wrong side of his face.
Plenty of other science fiction TV shows have done the split-into-good-and-evil thing. Two of your humble rewatcher’s favorites are Red Dwarf’s “Demons and Angels,” which goes to hilarious extremes with the “high” and “low” versions of the cast, and Farscape’s “My Three Crichtons,” in which the “good” (intellectual) version is actually the asshole and the “bad” (caveman-like) version is actually the “good” one.
To boldly go: “I’m Captain Kirrrrrrrrk!” This episode is nonsensical and stupid on the face of it. Pretty much the minute the transporter proved itself capable of something this horrible, every transporter in the Federation should’ve been taken offline until it was fixed so that this sort of thing could never happen again. (And maybe they were between episodes?) But also, how could the transporter have done this? From whence did it create the extra mass? Some minor lip service is paid to how weak both Kirks are, to the point where McCoy says Evil Kirk is dying, and Good Kirk is in pretty bad physical shape by the end of it, but that’s about it.
However, while this makes no sense from a scientific standpoint, it makes for a good story. Examining the different elements of humanity and sometimes splitting them in twain has been the subject of fiction for ages, most famously in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was Richard Matheson’s primary inspiration for the story.
Interestingly, this episode gives us the first look at the series’ staple of Spock and McCoy serving as the two sides of Kirk’s brain, with Spock on one side and McCoy the other. However, it’s not the usual Spock is rational/McCoy is emotional argument that we’ll see more often, as McCoy’s actually the one preaching caution and scientific inquiry rather than rush to try to reintegrate Kirk before he can do an autopsy on the animal, while Spock is barreling ahead in part because of the danger to the landing party.
But Spock can actually speak to two warring halves in one body, the first time his status as a halfbreed is examined in depth. In particular, I like the fact that he couches the differences between the Kirks in terms of what humans refer to as “good” and “bad,” because it’s really not that simple. Evil Kirk has lust and no filter and arrogance and is basically all id—but those are useful qualities in moderation. Evil Kirk has all of Kirk’s passion, which is a critical part of his personality, but not negative in the abstract. But Good Kirk has the intellect, the compassion, the filter—but not the ability to be decisive. It’s not so much good and evil as it is aggressive versus passive, and I wish Spock had taken it a step further and not just cast it as “Earth emotions,” but pointed out how the terms “good” and “evil” are imprecise.
It’s risky doing an episode where someone has to be out of character (twice over!) so early in a show’s run, but it works mainly because of William Shatner. Both versions of Kirk have recognizable qualities we’ve seen in Jim Kirk in the previous four episodes, just subdued in Good Kirk and over the top in Evil Kirk. But he does an excellent job here, as the different shirts aren’t even necessary to tell the two Kirks apart—Shatner’s body language does it just fine.
Finally, I wish to once again point out the easy camaraderie amongst the crew of the Enterprise, a hallmark of the early part of the show that was sadly lost as time went on. Besides Sulu’s bantering right up until he’s too cold to talk coherently, we also have the wonderful “What happened to you?” exchange between Wilson and Fisher in the transporter room. I really wish those little touches that showed the greater community of the Enterprise had remained the norm.
Warp factor rating: 7
Next week: “The Man Trap”
Keith R.A. DeCandido has a story in IDW’s forthcoming anthology The X-Files: Trust No One, edited by Jonathan Maberry. His story is a second-season tale called “Back in El Paso My Life Will be Worthless,” and the book is available for preorder from Amazon.
Maybe that is why the Enterprise starts packing shuttles by the time of
The Galileo Seven later in the seasons. You can see what happened, someone at Starfleet HQ got ambitious, thought shuttlepods were things of the past and obsolete once the shiny new transporter became so ubiquitous, and stripped out the shuttles (hence why they don’t have one to use to rescue the landing party, depsite them crashing every second week in the Enterprise era) and then this happened. Then suddenly there is a strip down of transporters, more incidents and issues comes to light, and suddenly every starship has both a pallet load of shuttles and a transporter chief to oversee the transporters fulltime.
I agree with pretty much everything you said about this episode, Keith. Especially the point that the different colored tunics are unnecessary. It’s very clear when he’s onscreen which version of Kirk Shatner was playing. In fact, I noticed the green tunic, but I’m not sure I specifically noted that they were different colors. It was just clear to me which was supposed to be which by mannerisms and following the plot as much as could be allowed (knowing that Evil!Kirk was in Rand’s quarters while Good!Kirk was in Sickbay, for example).
Also nice to see the introduction of such mainstays as the nerve pinch and “He’s Dead, Jim.”
How badly can a creepy moment, a problematic dialogue, an unfortunate thought damage an otherwise excellent episode?
Star Trek’s sexism is usually problematic, but with Spock’s line at the end it crosses the border into violently offensive. The original wording by Matheson was even worse http://www.orionpressfanzines.com/articles/enemywithin.htm .
This episode reminds me a bit of TNG’s “Disaster” in at least one respect: it sounds awful and stupid when you summerize it, but as an episode, it works. This is another one I’m always happy to watch when I catch it in re-runs.
@1,
Your comment reminds me of Apple’s premature decision to get rid of the floppy drive. Yeah, they were right that it was going to go eventually, but it wasn’t yet time when they put out a Mac with no obvious way to get the data off.
@3/Lubitsch: Oh yes, that would have been even worse. I also wish that someone, anyone had told Janice they’re sorry for her when she tells her tale in sickbay.
Anyway, thanks for the link – now I understand why I was always confused about at what point in the story the characters realize what has actually happened. It looks as if Kirk comes to the right conclusion as soon as he sees the two dogs, but then it turns out that he doesn’t… except that he originally did, before they swapped the scenes.
It would be great if they could swap them back in some future DVD edition.
How did the transporter make the 2nd copy? Easy. The transporter works by digitizing every atom in your body and putting it back together at the other end. Its basically a replicator. So when you step in the transporter, it digitizes you, which has the inevitable result of killing you. It then reassembles your pattern using available materials on the other end. McCoy is quite right in being a little oogy about using the transporter.
@6, actually, in canon, the replicator is a digital device that makes a copy of an object by converting an equal mass of stored matter in a holding tank of some kind into the desired object. But a transporter is an analog device that actually moves the original matter, reconstructing it based on an analog pattern that is higher resolution than a replicator digital pattern. And so the extra matter is a real problem to explain. I recall in the Tom Riker episode they handwaved about the pattern being partially reflected and the matter coming from an ionized cloud layer that caused the reflection or something.
In real life, of course, current physics can be used to describe a transporter that destroys and recreates, as you suggest. But that’s not in canon.
It is quite possibly Spock’s most repulsive moment in the TV series… No, I think it is very defnitely the character’s most repulsive moment in the series. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything else so offensive to the character and offensive to a woman character until Spock’s “mind rape” of Valeris in ST VI.
Apart from everyone’s absolute lack of sympathy for what Rand experienced (even, apparently, her own, since she is written to be more concerned about ruining Kirk’s reputation), this is a highwater mark of the first season in my book, although I don’t like the philsophical conclusion it reaches: “The intruder is back where he beongs, let’s forget about him.” Way to grow as a person, Kirk. Greg Cox revisits that moment in Foul Deeds Will Rise, too, and redeems it as much as anyone can.
I’m actually forgiving of the complete absence of Shuttlecraft as a plot-breaking device in this one. D.C. Fontana was candid enough to reveal they hadn’t been invented by the writers at this point.
What I can’t overlook, however, is the fact that they made a story about the captain being split into two different people as the show’s 5th episode. This should have been 2nd season material at the earliest, when we’d gotten to know Kirk a bit better.
Love or hate it, Shatner makes this entertaining. The costume color differences were certainly unnecessary.
And having a crew in peril B plot is the perfect way to raise the stakes (even though, that phaser blast from Spock was a blatant plot device; why in the world would a pivotal transporter conduit be routed through engineering?).
At the very end, Spock makes a pointed and spectacularly creepy comment to Rand about how “interesting” Evil Kirk was, practically waggling his eyebrows at her. It is quite possibly Spock’s most repulsive moment in the TV series, implying that Rand probably enjoyed being raped.
We didn’t get to know Rand well enough to account for her tastes (though we do know about Grace Lee Whitney’s exploits). And Spock wasn’t well defined at that point. The average Vulcan wouldn’t be above making this kind of statement, in a scientific analysis POV. The Spock we know wouldn’t be this callous or repulsive, but again, this was episode 5. They were still figuring out the characters.
What I find interesting is that you can see glimpses of Tasha Yar in this situation, given her backstory avoiding rape gangs on Turkana IV.
The problem is that Matheson was more a fantasy writer than an SF writer, for the most part. So he didn’t care about the technical side, he just wanted the allegory.
As for myself, I just assume the transporter swept up a quantity of atmosphere and dirt from the area where Kirk had beamed up before and rearranged it according to the Kirk pattern still stored in its buffer. The tricky part is explaining why the doubles’ brains were altered to give them different personalities. Maybe that part of the pattern split so that certain parts of the brain were missing or reassembled incompletely in one and complementary parts were lacking in the other.
As for the shuttle issue, I’ve seen it suggested that the winds over the landing party’s location were too intense to let a shuttle land safely. That seems like a perfectly good explanation to me.
This is that rare case of an episode that was improved by the syndication edits that cut out material to fit in more commercials, because one of the cut scenes was that really sexist scene in sickbay where Rand acted like a total doormat and all but said it would’ve been okay if the captain had raped her. Although those edits didn’t lose Spock’s final, leering remark.
A few years ago, I came upon a Google Books result for a book talking about portrayals of rape in ’60s TV, specifically in the leading TV soap operas, and it explained that society at the time (or at least the male half thereof) didn’t understand rape as an act of violence the way we see it today, but thought of it merely as the result of passion running out of control — “more as an unfortunate expression of an individual’s intense emotions than as a socially sanctioned wrong deeply rooted in a patriarchal disregard for women.” So what Evil Kirk tried to do to Janice wasn’t perceived by the writer or producers, or the viewers, as a brutal attack as we would understand it today, but merely an expression of Kirk’s desire for Janice let free of his discipline and inhibitions as a captain. That’s why Janice was written afterward as being almost flattered by the attention, and why it wasn’t considered shockingly creepy and insensitive for Spock to tease her about it at the end.
Of course, now we know better (well, most of us do), so those parts of the episode are painfully naive at best, intensely creepy and tasteless at worst.
@9./Eduardo Jencarelli:
The shuttlecraft had at least been conceived by the start of production. Matt Jefferies’ famous Galileo design sketch, as shown in The Making of Star Trek, depicts a crewman standing next to the craft for scale… and the crewman is wearing the “turtleneck” uniform from the first two pilots.
Conception, of course, is a different matter than execution, and the series didn’t have the budget to build the thing until a deal was struck with ATM; ATM agreed to build the Galileo mockup in exchange for the licensing rights for Trek model kits.
Even so, Dorothy Fontana and the other writers may well have been unaware of the shuttlecraft’s existence, even as a concept, when the first several scripts were written. It was most likely omitted from the series bible until it was available as an actual standing set.
I really, really want there to be larger themes here, and Spock touches on some of them. There’s great potential for even more. But there is so much silliness in this episode, it’s kind of hilarious. The effects are laughable – the red paint on Kirk’s hand, the dog in an alien suit, the dramatic lighting!!!, the idea that Sulu and company can survive in what they were wearing when it’s 50 below (I think they zapped the rocks at 75 below)…for me it all just turns into giggles. I want to explore themes, but when I watch this episode, it’s a comedy.
@8/Mike: The final dialog seems a little incoherent – on the one hand, you’re right, on the other hand, immediately prior to that, there’s this: “Thank you, Mister Spock, from both of us”. Which rather sounds as if he accepted that part of himself. So maybe what he actually meant was “Let the crew forget about him.”
@9, @10: Apart from the shuttle issue, I always wondered why they didn’t provide the landing party with lots and lots of woollen blankets or furs. Duplicating blankets would give them even more blankets.
The fact that there is enough matter for two Kirks is explained by
Banach-Tarski theorem.
It’s kind of funny seeing people trying to make scientific sense out of some of these episodes. I mean, I appreciate the effort, but sometimes you have to surrender to the fact Star Trek, among other shows, could be very silly back then, and unapologetically for the most part.
Which I like. There seemed to be a greater appreciation for the absurd in Sixties television.
@15/Patches: The thing is, though, Star Trek made an attempt to be more scientifically accurate and realistic than any other SFTV show ever had before. Roddenberry consulted with engineers and scientists and think tanks to advise him on how to build a plausible future. That’s why the ship has warp drive — many SFTV shows don’t even acknowledge the concept of the speed of light as a limit on interstellar travel speeds. (Look at Battlestar Galactica a decade later — lightspeed is said to be the fleet’s maximum speed, yet they travel through several galaxies in the course of a single season.) And it’s why the ship has a navigational deflector dish — because Roddenberry’s scientific advisors pointed out the hazards from space debris. (By the way, when the Smithsonian folks began their recent restoration efforts on the Enterprise miniature, they found that the deflector dish’s support strut is hinged. The dish was designed to pivot rather than pointing perpetually forward.)
Granted, Roddenberry did take a lot of liberties for dramatic effect, often choosing what he thought would make a better story over what was accurate. (But then, that’s not unusual — Christopher Nolan did the same with Interstellar.) And sometimes he did let some real scientific howlers through for the sake of the story. But it’s wrong to say that Star Trek was no different from all other ’60s shows when it came to credibility. It was the first adult-oriented SFTV show that even tried for any degree of scientific plausibility at all. (The only earlier show that did so, as far as I know, was the 1950 kids’ show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which had rocket scientist Willy Ley as a technical consultant.)
As Chris pointed out, Matheson isn’t a hard Sci-fi writer and this is no more plausible than shrinking due to atom bomb testing. But since it’s just the pretext for a good mythological story, it’s not that bad. I also can live with not yet existing shuttles, only the non-beaming of blankets is indeed a problem – even better would be some insulating material which could be made into some kind of primitive hut.
As for Janice I don’t even mind that she acts like a doormat, not all women are strong, that’s misunderstood and misapplied feminism in writing. But how the men act is first at the questioning bad and later on the bridge … I’d love to cut this out while recutting the first reel.
About the DRAMATIC LIGHTING: the whole series has a rather expressive approach, most obvious in the heavily coloured and massively unreal lighting. Or take the heavily accentuating close-ups which occasionally deliberately don’t match the master shots in lighting or composition. Or the aggressive scene changes in this episode especially Kirk’s arm cutting into the picture from nowhere. Naturalism isn’t the only mode of expression in drama films.
Shatner’s approach matches the basically mythological approach of the story and he plays it so well, he indeed neither needs the different shirts nor the eyeliner to make clear to the viewer whom we see. Just look in the engline room when evil Kirk holds his head slantingly, watching like a wild animal, oscillating between curiosity and fear. Or the marvelous finale at the bridge where he runs the whole gamut from initial aggressiveness to fear.
@16
And I’d argue all that technobabble has been just as much a hindrance to Star Trek as it has been a benefit (some of the later series really went overboard with it). Any fictional universe that gets this obsessed with technical manuals and how things work is getting a bit too far into the weeds, at least for me.
Also, I disagree Star Trek is “adult” science fiction—well, maybe for the Sixties it was. As this recent op-ed points out, it’s not for ordinary adults or kids; it’s for smart kids. That is, the smart kids in all of us who appreciate these kind of stories.
http://trekmovie.com/2015/01/11/editorial-the-future-of-star-trek-its-the-story-stupid/
@17/Lubitsch: It’s not “misapplied feminism.” Rand was supposed to be the female lead of the series at this point. Presumably a series lead character is someone who’s supposed to be strong, capable, likable, and worthy of our attention. But to modern eyes, the way Rand is written here is pretty pathetic, not the sort of thing we want to see in a leading lady.
As for the lighting… TOS’s director of photography for most of its run was Jerry Finnerman, who at the time was fairly young, but who had trained under some of the master cinematographers of the film noir era. So TOS’s lighting and camera work are basically noir cinematography with bright colors added.
@18/Patches: First off, it’s a huge mistake to equate “technobabble” with basic plausibility. A plausible story doesn’t have to be immersed in technical discussion, it just has to avoid impossibilities and absurdities. Indeed, the word “technobabble” was originally coined to mean pseudoscientific chatter that actually didn’t make sense but only pretended to.
One of Roddenberry’s basic rules for TOS, in fact, was that the characters wouldn’t devote time to explaining how their technology worked, because they’d already know it and take it for granted. His consultation with scientists and engineers was about getting the facts right, not putting the explanations into dialogue. I mentioned the navigational deflector as a key example of the show’s relative realism, but it was never really discussed in the show’s dialogue; it was a background detail that was simply there as a fait accompli. The science informed the show, but it did so almost invisibly. That’s why it’s completely missing the point to confuse plausibility with technobabble.
Second, yes, TOS was not a kids’ show. Roddenberry’s intent from the start, which is quite well-documented, was to provide an alternative to kids’ sci-fi shows like Lost in Space and to do science fiction as a naturalistic adult drama for the first time in a non-anthology format. In his series bible and network pitches, the shows he always used as examples for the type of writing he aspired to for ST were the classy adult dramas of the period, like Naked City, Gunsmoke, and Wagon Train. There is no doubt that his intent was to make TOS a show for adults.
Not to mention how aggressively sexy the show was. It was the NYPD Blue of its day, constantly pushing the envelope of network censorship in its depiction of skin and sexual themes. Come on, it did a whole episode about its second lead being overwhelmed by an irresistible mating drive. It even brought up contraception in “The Mark of Gideon” — that was extremely edgy stuff for the time. The sexual content in TOS seems tame to modern eyes, but it was extremely racy for the era.
Certainly there’s no denying that TOS ended up being quite popular with children. But that doesn’t mean it was specifically aimed at them.
@@@@@ 19 You’re right about Rand’s general role, I was just referring to this very special situation where the captain is involved and where she acted like a doormat because of the very specific constellation. In all other situations with other persons she might have behaved differently but not here. Not that it makes it any more acceptable from a modern point of view and it certainly makes no sense for a 23th century woman in a starship crew.
Finnerman had trained under Stradling who has essentially no involvement with Film noir and noir lighting at all (though this is a pretty stupid term anyway).
There’s a very interesting article about the Star Trek style here http://brightlightsfilm.com/minimalist-magic-the-star-trek-look
So did no one think to beam down a few tents and heating units? I think they’d still be useful even if they were split into passive and aggressive, there’s only so evil a tent can be.
The tricky part is explaining why the doubles’ brains were altered to give them different personalities.
My internal explanation has always been that, in Star Trek, this is proof of the existence of a soul – metaphysical or psychic, depending on your preference, but in either case a piece of the personality that exists beyond the physical body. The transporter could duplicate the physical body, but couldn’t copy the soul, so it got split between the two. You’d think that knowing that would be a bigger deal somehow :-)
This makes one wonder what Will Riker was like before he got split in half…
More about Matheson. Besides “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” he also wrote “Nick of Time,” another TWILIGHT ZONE episode starring William Shatner. (That’s the one about the guy who becomes obsessed with a coin-operated fortune-telling machine.)
And, yes, there was a reason why I dedicated Foul Deeds Will Rise to Matheson, whom I edited at Tor for over twenty years or so . . . .
@19
Intent is one thing. How it’s perceived is another. Again, read the link I posted. Even if you disagree with it, it’s still an interesting point of view. Not for adults or kids but smart kids, because a smart kid can handle most if not all the adult themes thrown at them by this show. I like that.
As for technobabble, yes, the original series handled it far better. And whether real or made up, it’s still “world-building” technological mumbo jumbo to make this fictional universe and its bizarro stories sound plausible. Do we care how a transporter works? Some do, I guess. I don’t. Something, something particles. Fine. Just get on with the story and whatever sci-fi O. Henry you’re trying to tell this week.
I found Spock’s comment particularly jarring because I did not think it was supported. I did not think Rand showed any interest in Id Kirk ( I prefer Super Ego and Id to Good and Evil) and he was not shown to be really much more than a bully and a coward, not someone really capable of even an Affably Evil charm.because he had no control of his appetites.
I find the idea that cowardice is part of the traits that makes a person decisive in the moment an interesting one. Spock and McCoy deferring to Super Ego Kirk as if he was the original is an interesting bias, as he really had no more claim to being Captain Kirk than Id Kirk. As soon as McCoy realized the truth of what happened he should have declared Kirk unit for duty and relieved him of command.
What does Spock think of the conclusion that a human requires emotion to function properly? Id Kirk being a ball of raw emotion and Super Ego Kirk being rather dispassionate.
Quoth ChocolateRob: “So did no one think to beam down a few tents and heating units?”
Spock reported at one point to Good Kirk that they beamed down heaters, but they were duplicated and useless. No mention of blankets, though Sulu and the gang were wrapped in blankets at the end….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@17/Lubitsch – I’m with you that Good Kirk and Evil Kirk were very differently acted, even before Good Kirk started turning into Wimpy Kirk. I think the shirts and mascara are still necessary, though, because humans pick up visual cues much more quickly. As soon as the camera’s on him, you know who he is – you don’t need to wait for him to move, talk, or anything. That all three are acted differently is a testament to Shatner’s abilities, but it’s not enough for television, where the viewer doesn’t have time to contemplate scene by scene which is which.
Our humble rewatcher references Farscape and Red Dwarf for comparisons of splitting characters in two – but I notice no-one’s yet mentioned that the same premise happens to B’Elanna Torres in an early Voyager episode. Is that a comparison in itself, or is there more to say about that?
@13/Jana: I like your interpretation of the final dialogue. Thanks for that. And I second your wondering about why, at least, the landing party didn’t beam down with sweaters! (Hey, don’t they still have the Pike-era gray landing party jackets in a closet on the ship somewhere?)
The shuttlecraft question is, of course, fodder for any number of no-prizes (maybe, a la “Generations,” they weren’t to be delivered until Tuesday). What I want to know is: why — in-universe — do Kirk and the duplicate initially beam up without uniform insignia on their chests? Maybe the Alfa ore screws up the rate at which things rematerialize on top of duplicating it!
One thing that struck me this time through, which never struck me before: Why is reuniting Kirk essential to getting the transporter working again? I know, this is the mythological, archetypal, don’t-sweat-the-science episode… but how does the transporter’s reunion of Kirk prove in any way that it can be trusted again? Especially since the reason Kirk survived reunion and the animal didn’t was that he wasn’t afraid. Did they have to tell Sulu et al “don’t be scared when beaming up”?
@26/Keith – The blankets were there from the beginning. Just watched again, and Sulu’s wrapped in the same orange blanket the whole time. My wife says they must be magic blankets…
@24: Again, you’re confusing two entirely separate issues: Whether the writer builds the world plausibly and whether the specifics of the world are discussed overtly in dialogue. Not all of a writer’s research has to go onto the page. Accuracy does not require having conversations about how things work, it just requires showing them working in a realistic way.
Case in point: Cuaron’s Gravity. Now, that film takes some enormous, even comical liberties with the physics of orbital debris and the proximity of objects in orbit to each other, but otherwise, its depictions of space are astonishingly realistic. But the realism isn’t told, just shown. For instance, no character gives a lecture about how sound doesn’t travel in vacuum — it’s simply illustrated by the sound design, by the way you only hear things when they come into direct contact with the viewpoint character’s spacesuit, say. Creating a realistic, well-researched background does not require one single word of expository dialogue. So we are not even remotely talking about “technobabble,” and it’s condescending and ignorant to claim that scientific accuracy gets in the way of telling a story. It doesn’t have to be explained in dialogue, it just has to make sense. If anything, it’s the distracting questions raised by bad science that tend to get in the way.
@29/Mike: Well, they couldn’t beam the landing party up until they were sure the transporter would beam them up intact and alive. McCoy’s interpretation of the space-dog’s death was that it was the transporter that killed it, that there was still something fatally wrong with the mechanism. Spock’s argument was that the transporter was actually fixed already and that it was the fear and shock of a subsentient animal that killed it upon recombination. In other words, Spock’s argument was that it was perfectly safe to beam up Sulu and the others. They weren’t even at risk, because they hadn’t been split at all and thus weren’t faced with the shock of recombination that killed the dog. So Kirk’s recombination and survival proved that Spock was right — that the transporter was not the cause of death and was therefore safe to use.
I agree with MikePoteet’s comment. Not only was Spock’s most repulsive moment when he mind raped Valeris, but that moment was also a major low for the entire core set of characters, except for Sulu who was on his own ship and conveniently reappears right after the incident. (I mean, were they trying to get everyone hate those character in the last film they would be together?) It was Kirk, whose objectivity was compromised by his recent imprisonment, who tacitly gave Spock the order, but Spock did not challenge or question him, though no one else did either. It’s as if Spock’s loyalty to Kirk was so deep that he had no concern for ethics. Getting that info from Valeris was logical–by any means necessary. As for the rest of the bridge crew, they are clearly uncomfortable watching the violation occur, and Scott and Uhura are clearly horrified, but no one says a word. As far as anyone knows, there was never any sort of Starfleet inquiry into the incident. It seemed that everyone was willing to look the other way since it was Vulcan-on-Vulcan violence. Imagine if Spock had forced a meld on a human (which he had sort of done with McCoy, but at least that was a friend and McCoy himself never made as big a deal of it as he probably should have).
It was hard to see Spock the same way after that, but really if you look at his character over time, it’s clear he was far from being morally pristine. There was no reason for him to say anything to Rand about anything that had happened, but he for some reason had the urge to make an inappropriate remark and come across as a complete jerk. It wouldn’t be the last time.
Yup, Shatner can act. And Kirk still hasn’t had any sex yet; attempted rape isn’t rape.
Red paint on the hands, lighting- it seems so far in the past now, but before cable and big beautiful digital widescreens were analog transmissions viewed on small, fuzzy, often not in color screens that jumped, flickered, and rolled while you watched. TV looked different then.
At least everybody *believed* Rand’s story, and no one tried to get her to just shut up about it. They took her seriously and investigated.
If you want to see a show that played fast and loose with lightspeed, watch Space:1999. The moon breaks loose from Earth’s orbit and goes galivanting across the galaxy. Every week the moon went through a different solar system, often taking days to cross it. Their little shuttles were able to visit the local planet, and still catch up with the moon before it got too far. So evidently they were going many times the speed of light between solar systems, yet slowing down considerably while in one.
@33/sps49 – Fair point on the red paint not being nearly as obvious in 1966, and no, “our” Kirk hasn’t had sex because that was Evil Kirk anyway, but something is rubbing me the wrong way when you say “attempted rape isn’t rape.” I suppose from a legal standpoint it isn’t, but what I infer from your statement is that Rand shouldn’t have been upset by what happened because she wasn’t “really” raped due to there not having been sexual intercourse. I’m hoping I’m reading you wrong, there.
@@@@@ 14/Athreeren
“The fact that there is enough matter for two Kirks is explained by Banach-Tarski theorem.”
Thereby giving further support to the popular notion that the legendary Captain Kirk has non-measurable qualities. ;-)
@35/MeredithP: I don’t think sps49 implied at all that attempted rape isn’t so bad. Merely that Evil Kirk hasn’t had sex because Janice fought him off successfully. (And he’s part of “our Kirk”, too.)
About the “easy camaraderie” falling aside, this actually helps address something for me. This crew encounters what I would assume are more than the usual number of strange occurences, experiences and near death encounters, to the point you would expect their stress levels to rachet up wtih each new episode. Maybe this is the evidence that it happens.
@32/Pikkewyn: The forced meld in TUC doesn’t change the way I see Spock, because I don’t see it as something Spock did, I see it as something out of character that he was forced to do by the screenwriters and the director. TUC was the first movie since TMP that Harve Bennett didn’t produce, and I think a lot of the characterizations in the film were off as a result — Kirk and the whole crew were suddenly far too racist toward the Klingons, Uhura was inept with languages, McCoy was okay with helping to engineer a lethal torpedo despite his Hippocratic Oath, etc. I don’t blame the characters, I blame the filmmakers that mishandled them.
@34/AwesomeAud: Once I would’ve agreed with you about Space: 1999, but on revisiting the show a year or so ago, I realized that you have to look at it (at least the first season) in the surrealist spirit that the producers intended. The series treated space as a mysterious, unknowable realm that was fraught with impossibilities and rendered our certainties and expectations meaningless. The mystery of how the Moon transcended interstellar distance was just part of that cosmic enigma. And it was implied more than once that the journey was being guided by some force of cosmic destiny.
Although on another level, the pilot did suggest that the magnitude of the nuclear explosion created an unknown type of magnetic field that had an antigravity effect, not so much thrusting the Moon out of orbit as severing its gravitational link to the Earth and the Solar System. If you wanted a rationalization, you could say that the antigravity effect created some kind of warp field around the Moon.
@38/Cecrow: On the other hand, half of the time the crew has no idea what’s really going on – e.g. in this episode where they are merely informed about an impostor posing as the captain.
Witrh regard to Spock’s forced mind meld on Valeris in Star Trek 6, it absolutely was effectively the same thing as rape. But I find it a very compelling event because Nimoy played the scene as being bad for Spock well. Spock is visibly shaken and revulsed by what he is doing; he presses grimly on out of terrible neccessity, but he’s not at all happy about it. And that makes sense, because a Vulcan mind-meld is such an incredibly intimate thing that it deeply affects both people, as we’ve seen in other films and episodes of various series. What Spock did to Valeris he also did to himself, and even if the writers weren’t thinking in those terms Leonard Nimoy clearly was it showed in his performance.
@21/ChocolateRob There is one line in the show about beaming down heating units. When the heaing units arrived on the planet, they didn’t work. (yes, I went out and got the DVDs, so I could rewatch along…)
RE Adult vs. kid show. I was a kid in the 60s. This was a show my dad watched. It aired rather late the first two seasons (8:30-9:30 PM) and way late the last season (10-11 PM). In those less permissive days, 9 PM was bedtime for most grade schoolers and 10 PM for younger high school kids. Kids only started watching the show when it went into syndication. Then it was aired (at least in my area) right before dinner. My mom loved it. She could call us home (all kids back then were “free-range”) and plunk us in front of the TV. We would set the table during the commercials, and dinner started as soon as the show was over.
Captain Kirk Pec Count: (so far) 3/4 shows
Where No Man Has Gone Before – Torn shirt
The Corbomite Maneuver – lots o’ bare chest
Mudd’s Women – no manly Kirk-chest to drool over
The Enemy Within – topless Kirk in his quarters
Shirts destroyed in the making of this series – torn: 1
Interestingly, evil Kirk does not bare his chest. Both Kirks change into the fancy new shirt…so either the Captain has spare shirts in his closet, or evil Kirk replicated one.
@31/Christopher: Hm. Ok. It makes more sense when you explain it than it ever has to me in 20+ years of watching the episode. Does anyone ever explicitly spell out Spock’s argument as you make it: “The transporter is actually already fixed, sir…”? That would have helped me a lot. (I feel dumb now. Reduce me two steps in geek rank!)
@32/Pikkewyn: Ooh, I’d never ever thought of the Valeris mind meld as a “logical” outgrowth of the McCoy meld. Whoa. That’s really chilling. A small step from “Sorry, Doctor, I have no time to discuss this logically…” to “by any meld necessary,” indeed. We also see Spock doing a meld of expedience (with, as I recall, no expression of “I hate to do this, but…”) in Trek09. What a long way we came from the artful and beautiful meld that Nimoy created in “Dagger of the Mind.”
@39/Christopher: I don’t see it as something Spock did, I see it as something out of character that he was forced to do… But you know that plays against the rules of Trek canon as this franchise handles them. If it happens on screen, it happened, and the characters did it. I agree with you, there is lots of mischaracterization to go around in ST VI. For all the reasons you mention, I’m in that apparent minority of fans who don’t believe it was a fitting “finale” to TOS at all. But, in-universe, it all happened. Now, what would be interesting are stories or novels that have the characters facing the consequences of those out-of-character actions (and I have no doubt there are some out there; perhaps you’ve even written some yourself). (Eric’s comment @41 gets at this some.)
@34/AwesomeAud: Good point.
@44/Mike: The key line is McCoy’s when they’re discussing the animal’s death in sickbay: “Suppose it wasn’t shock, Jim. Suppose death was caused by transporter malfunction. Then you’d die. They’d die anyway. Jim, you can’t risk your life on a theory!” Spock’s argument is that it was shock, so implicitly it wasn’t the fault of the transporter.
As for the “reality” of Trek canon, Roddenberry himself sometimes suggested that it should be interpreted flexibly, that what we saw was sometimes an inaccurate dramatization of the “actual” events. (See Roddenberry’s ST:TMP novelization, which he framed with the pretense that he was a 23rd-century producer who made ST as a fictionalized, sometimes “inaccurately larger than life” account of Kirk’s “actual” adventures. This was his way of justifying the changes in TMP, like the redesigned Klingons and more advanced-looking technology, by claiming that TMP was a more authentic dramatization.)
So by this view, what we see onscreen doesn’t have to be taken as indisputable gospel — especially when it contains clear errors or inconsistencies, as it often does. It can be viewed with more of a broad-strokes approach: The events happened, but the details might be imprecise interpretations by the people doing the dramatization. The same events can be interpreted in different ways — for instance, Jeanne M. Dillard’s novelization of TUC reinterpreted the Spock-Valeris meld by asserting that Valeris wordlessly granted her consent — I think because her bond of respect and trust with Spock made her willing to cooperate, or something like that. It completely transforms the meaning of the scene without changing the events of it in any way. That’s how powerful interpretation can be.
I love it how in the picture where Spock is holding it, the dog looks completely unimpressed at its own costume.
As for the nerve pinch, I knew it had been Nimoy’s idea (as I understand it, the script had him knock out evil Kirk with the butt of a phaser), but how did he improvise it, and Shatner knew he had to fall? Just going over his script without noticing what Nimoy was doing? A good, early example of how well they played off each other? Or does “improvise” cover him saying before the scene “hey, I have this idea”. As I’ve mentioned before, I read most of these episodes in Blish’s adaptations, and I don’t remember the pinch not being there… maybe I had Spock’s pinch (from the movies, or popular culture) so ingrained in my head, that I imagined it while reading it. (I’m the doofus who thought “Merry” was a woman for the first half of “The Fellowship of the Ring”, mentally substituting pronouns…)
Yes, Spock’s comment about Evil Kirk being “interesting” is very creepy, even by 60s sexist standards, and I find the addition of landing party subplot a good addition, as it increases the tension. And Shatner’s great as both halves of Kirk, he nails it.
@10 – CLB: Yeah., Matheson was a fantasy writer, but that’s why you need script editors or staff writers to fine tune this type of things for freelance scripts. And interesting info about rape in the 60s… I knew that now rape is considered a control issue, IE, the rapist wishing to control the other person, whereas before it was thought it was more about the sex part… but I didn’t know it was kind of “excused” as being “passion out of control”. Still, creepy Spock line. Having seen the uncut version (and read Blish’s version before that), I remember the Rand scene in Sickbay…
@12/30 – Meredith P: Really, you think it so ridiculous that Sulu and his men can survive in freezing temperatures when they’re wearing SPAAAAAAAAACEEEEEEE AAAAGEEEEE uniforms and SPAAAAAAAAACEEEEE blankets? :)
@13 – JanaJansen: I don’t know you, but I wouldn’t wand EEEEEVIIIIIL blankets anywhere near me!!!
@21 – ChocolateRob: Oh yeah? You have not been attacked by a tent, I see. They’re only slightly less dangerous than gazebos.
@23 – Greg Cox 2: I’ve seen “Nightmare…” but not “Nick…”, now I wanna see it! Also, why are you Greg Cox TWO??!? ARE YOU THE EVIL ONE!?!?!?!
@25 – Crusader75: They didn’t declare him unfit for command because they wanted to avoid the crew losing faith on their CO. As for Spock and emotion, it’s true that it wasn’t fully fleshed out at the time, but remember Vulcans do have emotions, they’re just in control of them. Very much in control.
@34 – AwesomeAud: Good point about people believing Rand.
@39 – CLB: TUC is one of my favorite Trek films, but all those things you say about OOC are true… I guess I just rationalize them out to enjoy the rest of the film. But isn’t Spock’s action of mind raping Valeris a “needs of the many” situation, however revulsive we (and he himself) find the action? That’s what is sometimes so scary about the “needs of the many” philosophy, that it can lead to “end justifies the means”…
@46/lordmagnusen: The neck pinch was improvised in the sense that the actors and director worked it out among them on the set as an unscripted action.
And yes, Meyer did direct it along the lines of excusing an act of torture as a necessary evil, but that doesn’t make it any less unpalatable, particularly with the implicit sexual component that Nimoy and Cattrall were playing. I read once of someone seeing the film in a theater and hearing a male audiencegoer yelling “Yeah, do it to her, Spock!” as if he were watching a porn film or something.
And the whole “torture as necessary evil” meme in fiction is vile, because it’s totally untrue. In reality, coercive methods don’t work particularly well as a means of getting information, since the person being interrogated may simply lie or may actually have their recall damaged by the stress of the torture. Competent interrogators prefer using positive incentives, convincing the suspects to cooperate in exchange for considerations like better conditions in prison, and building a relationship and getting the suspect to trust you rather than fear you. It’s more effective, but the pervasive meme that torture works and can therefore be justified creates a cultural climate that tolerates torture and abuse even though it serves no real benefit and is nothing more than a form of corruption. So it’s a toxic lie and it sure as hell isn’t an attitude I want to see endorsed in a Trek movie.
This is another reason I prefer Dillard’s version in the novelization. Not only is her version less rapey, but it’s more ethical otherwise and more authentic, in that Spock essentially gets Valeris to cooperate willingly due to the relationship they share.
@47 – CLB (can I call you Chris? Or would you rather I not?): I get the improvisation part, yes. As for Spock/Valeris, I agree that the sexual undertone is what makes it particularly disgusting, and I’m happy nobody yelled something like that when I saw it (particularly because I was watching it with my brother at home).
As for torture being valid or necessary, you’re preaching to the choir here, I know subjects will lie to avoid pain; but this is not torture (despite the violence). This is a (fictional) psychic ability that is supposed to be able to retrieve the real information from the subject’s brain.
I would prefer Valeris giving her consent, of course.
@45/Christopher: Roddenberry said that? Then I take TOS over TMP any day.
@46/lordmagnusen: What you’ve got to do, of course, is wrap up in the good blankets and make a bonfire with the evil blankets. Same with the tents.
@48/lordm: Even so, it can be taken as a fictional allegory for real-world issues, and that’s the troubling thing.
Besides, there are more forms of torture than inflicting physical pain. Rape itself is often used as a form of torture against female prisoners, and probably against male ones too. Anything that causes intense psychological duress is torture, even without physical pain or damage.
And even “reading minds” shouldn’t be as reliable as it’s generally shown in fiction, because minds are imperfect recorders of events, and their memories and perceptions can be distorted by any number of things. So the same point about memory being impaired by the stress of torture could apply to a forced meld as well.
Not to mention that we have Trek-universe precedent proving that Vulcans can resist revealing information to mental probing. Spock was able to resist the Klingon mind-sifter in “Errand of Mercy.” So if Valeris had wanted to, she might have been able to give false information to Spock in the meld. So even with a mind meld, you’re more likely to get reliable intelligence from a cooperative subject than one who’s fighting you.
@48/lordmagnusen – You know, I never asked what to call people on here…interesting. I always figure on people calling me Meredith, because who needs the P unless there’s another Meredith around, which there usually isn’t. And I don’t think we have another Christopher or Keith most of the time – but it never actually occurred to me before. I just figure anybody whose username is their name expects to be called by it, myself included. (Of course Keith’s username is technically “krad” but his name is at the top of the page, and he signs his comments anyway, so…I figure people know who that is.)
Though, like you, I was a bit worried by the idea of “Greg Cox 2” – how many can this world stand?! ;)
Edit: I’ve just noticed Christopher is calling you “lordm” so what’s in a name, anyway… :D
Spock has always had consent issues, even in the original series. Take Requiem for Methusalah, Spock takes it on himself to remove Kirk’s grief over the woman of the week (almost certainly something Kirk “I need my pain” would never agree too). I’m sure there are other examples too, which I half remember but not enough to give specific examples. I think we just have to accept that amongst our heroes there are many flaws, and one of Spock’s is that his definition of consent is a lot more flexible than the rest of us.
Incidentally I thought the scene from VI was done pretty well. We don’t really get any attempt to excuse it, we get the act and the reactions, and it is all done in public for the characters and the audience to decide for themselves whether the ends justified the means or whether it crossed the line. No attempt to hide it, in-universe or out-universe, and not attempt to excuse it either.
@49 – JanaJansen: Yes, if the evil blankets and tents let you. They fight back!
@50 – Chris: Yes, the allegory point is taken, and I know that rape is used as torture, you don’t have to explain that to me. :) Also, I understand the “memory is imperfect” point, but as this was not fishing for old memories, but rather specific, recent data… but yes, I agree that if we treat telepathy as a non-exact procedure, being forced to do it might cause the subject to provide false information.
@51 – Meredith: I thought you were a woman up to a recent comment where you mention your wife — wait, you could still be a woman. And since Chris called me “lordm” and didn’t say he prefers not to be called “Chris”… I call him Chris for the time being. Incidentally, my usual nickname is MaGnUs, I only take lordmagnusen when MaGnUs is already taken.
@45/Christopher: Thanks. It amazes me how much I have either forgotten or never picked up on over the years. I blame the fact that I first watched TOS in the syndicated edits. ;)
For the sake of pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, Roddenberry’s suggestion that events as we saw them had been exaggerated or dramatized was never on-screen, was it? So it’s not canon, either. ;) In all seriousness, though, no, of course, we have to make allowances for inconsistencies that simply cannot be explained away (like that vanishing uniform patch). But it’s more fun not to. As the Sherlockians say, it’s “playing the game.”
I admit I have not read Dillard’s ST VI novelization (though, finally having read her ST V book, I do want to someday). I’m not sure why Valeris would wordlessly grant consent after she’s just folded her arms defiantly over chest in an “I’m not playing this game” declaration — “A lie?” “A choice.” — and why she would look so bona fide terrified as Spock begins the meld if she were granting consent; but I’ll read it someday. I’ve no doubt Dillard makes it work.
@52/Random: Great link to “Requiem for Methuselah.” I love this rewatch; you all are really making me rethink what I always “knew” about this show and these characters, and we’re only, what, six episodes in?!?
@54/Mike: Valeris crossing her arms defiantly was the interpretation chosen by the director and actress, just as Valeris giving consent was the interpretation chosen by the novelist. Dillard was working from the script, not the actual film. And novelizations back then weren’t required to be as slavishly accurate as they are these days. Dillard (and her predecessor Vonda N. McIntyre) made a number of changes in her Trek movie novelizations; for instance, in the ST V novelization, she added material about Sybok rigging a shield modification to let the Enterprise pass safely through the Great Barrier.
I found a copy of an early draft of the script, from when Valeris was still Saavik and Admiral Cartwright was called Admiral Donald. In it, Kirk simply convinces Saavik that she’ll be court-martialled either way and has nothing to gain by staying quiet, so she just tells them who the conspirators are. Which is maybe a little weak, but it goes to show that there were other ways the scene could’ve been approached.
So, did Dillar manage to make STV a good story? :)
@31
To my original point, I was talking about fans like some here using Next Gen-esque technobabble like “pattern buffers” in order to make this story work. Well, a fan doesn’t have to go quite that far. You either enjoy it or you don’t. Because to appreciate these old TV shows sometimes you have to put your mind in the era, shaky science and all. (Though the sexism is not at all easy to give a pass.)
Otherwise, I bow to your expertise… in the field of expertise.
I don’t know about ST V, but I wasn’t a fan of Dillard’s take on the ST Generations novelization, and her attempts to show Soran’s point of view. Soran’s book narration doesn’t match either the dialogue or McDowell’s performance.
@55: What a find! Loved reading this. I’ve always tried to picture ST VI in my mind with Saavik in the Valeris role, figuring what her lines would be. I’m impressed they kept a surprising amount of the same lines for either character in the final draft.
lordmagnusen: In fact, MeredithP is a woman — as is her wife. Never assume. :-P
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I just want to know why Kirk keeps a pot of makeup foundation in his quarters.
It’s possible that Spock’s behavior was meant as a Twilight Zone-ish twist. Look! Spock went through the transporter! He’s been replaced by truly socially-inept Spock!
Actually, I’m going to give Spock this out, for what it’s worth. Although he usually copes very well, both Spock’s culture and his DNA both give him a problem when it comes to dealing with certain complex social interactions, especially ones that are heavily based on emotions. He’s been compared at times to people with Asperger’s or on the Autism spectrum. This is out of character enough for Spock, that I’m going to pretend he was trying for human social-emotional subtext and crashed and burned.
Spock (inner dialogue): OK, Rand has been through something traumatic. Normally, I avoid emotional situations like the plague, but she probably needs someone to talk to somebody pretty badly. From what I heard about idiots in sickbay, that somebody is me.
OK, Spock, man up, you can do this. Try to avoid triggers. Use neutral language. ‘Interesting’ is good. You can’t get more neutral than interesting.
Oh, and refer to her as ‘Yeoman.’ Right, no hint of objectifying. Emphasize that you see her as a Starfleet officer, a fellow professional.
Anything else? Oh, yeah, facial expression. Try for a facial expression. It’s hard, but something like this really requires it. Smile. That’s good. What did the book, “Humans for Dummies” say? Humans see smiles as warm and inviting.
Anything else? Oh, yeah, the eyebrows. Not the one eyebrow trick. That’s for putting people in their place. Use both. Eyebrows up is supposed to make a face warm and inviting. Hmm, eyebrow movement can also imply there’s-more-subtext-than-what-I’m-saying.
Yeah, that’s good. Warm, inviting, implying I’m ready for more discussion if she needs to talk. Right, I’ve got this. On the count of three. One, two, three–
@60 – krad: See? I knew there was a point to me saying “wait, you could still be a woman”! :)
@61 – Aloysius: As I remember it from the Blish book, he took the foundation from Rand’s quarters, but maybe that was just the book.
@61: Maybe in the future, men wear make up. If I’m not too much mistaken, men wore make up at times in the past. I think it’s totally a cultural thing.
About the duplicate blankets: the good blankets would be soft and cozy, but would not provide warmth, while the bad blankets would be perfectly warm but would be too scratchy to touch. You need to have both sides integrated to make a good blanket.
@64: Well, Spock certainly wore a lot of eye shadow.
As for the blankets, sounds to me like you could just put the good blankets under the evil blankets and it would work just fine.
@63/lordmagnusen – Keith is right @60, as he’s met both me and my wife. But I suspect there are far more female Merediths with same-sex partners than there are male Merediths – so it’s probably a safe bet that if a Meredith mentions a wife, it’s still a woman speaking. :)
JM Dillard doesn’t still write for Trek, does she? Was always impressed by the authors who took on the novelisations – a pretty thankless task.
Come to think of it – there was a whole slew of Trek prolific authors from the peak of the 90s who dropped off the map. A pity. Some were solidly fantastic. I wonder if the focusing of novels into the DS9/Titan/VOY arcs had anything to do with it.
No criticism of the current custodians of written Trek, btw – just wondering aloud is all. I didn’t realise the authors I missed until she was mentioned, and then you think of Diane Carey, Vonda McIntyre, Diane Duane, Judith and Gar, Peter David, John Vornholt, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (and it’s great that so many were women!), Christie Golden, etc. I’ve gotten more hours of ST enjoyment off the written page than I have from a screen. And that’s quite wonderful.
@66/Meredith: But you don’t know that if you’re from a different country, so due to insufficient data, I entertained both theories, too. :-)
@67/Kieran OC: Dillard’s last Trek novel to date was the TNG novel Resistance in 2007. Most of her writing these days is original historical fiction under the name Jeanne Kalogridis.
As for Peter David, he’s doing a new work in his New Frontier series, which will be published in 3 e-novella installments. So he’s still around.
@56/lordmagnusen: Yes, she did. (Some of us don’t think it’s really a bad story to begin with, frankly… Like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, all it really needs is a little love.)
@59/Eduardo: Oh, I would have been so heartbroken if Saavik had turned traitor in the end! I love that character, especially as Kirstie Alley played her (but I’m no Robin Curtis hater), and much prefer to think she played within the Starfleet fold.
@62/Ellynne: Ha! I love your interpretation of that moment. Kind of like Data just tries to fit in, and often fails, in TNG. Well done.
@66 – Meredith: I hope I didn’t offend by my assumption… which wasn’t one, though, as I actually considered both posibilities. Now, your statistics regarding female Merediths in a same sex relationship vs. male Merediths… yeah, you might be right. I actually tend to think of Meredith as a name with sizeable amount of male bearers, but maybe that’s because of Meredith Rodney McKay, from Stargate Atlantis. :)
I guess maybe every episode is about Kirk, so we don’t really need a Kirk category, but if you’re ever looking for name suggestions, I’d recommend “James F*****g Kirk!” When my friends and I rewatched TOS a few years ago, that’s what we said any time Kirk pulled off some awesome or improbable feat. “How’d he manage that? He’s James Fucking Kirk, that’s how!”
(Apologies to all for the profanity.)
-Andy
@71/lordmagnusen – No offense at all!
@72/AndyHolman – The moderation policy says “Using so-called foul language is OK, as long as it’s used intelligently and not to attack or insult others.” Damn, I love this site. (I think any kid interested in participating in this site’s conversations is intelligent enough to handle a naughty word now and then.)
Glad to hear that. :)
@70: I actually pictured Robin Curtis reprising the role instead of Kirstie. Mainly because she was the Saavik who had to witness David’s death in ST III and report it to Kirk. She’s the Saavik I picture being capable of betraying Federation ideals over David.
I even pictured different dialogue for Saavik during the interrogation scene on the bridge. She wouldn’t say the line “They killed your son”, which still was in the fifth draft. That line fits Valeris. Saavik would invoke his name instead, especially given all the time she spent with him.
@75/Eduardo: Interesting interpretation. Still, Saavik as we have her in canon (meaning Vulcan for all intents and purposes, although there is no explicit onscreen contradiction of her half-Romulan heritage) doesn’t, to my eye, seem all that close to David. I know the romantic angle is hinted at the deleted footage, and is fully present in Vonda McIntyre’s (excellent) novelizations; but would David’s death affect her so deeply that she would betray the UFP to get back at the Klingons for it years later? I am skeptical.
Good observation about the dialogue. I thought the original intent was to bring back Kirstie Alley in VI. But, I see in the script draft, Scene 25, Kirk has no idea who Lt. Saavik is. (Unless it was supposed to be played ironically or something). What’s up with that? Maybe this draft comes from a point when it had been decided the character would no longer be Saavik, but they were just leaving the name in as a placeholder?
MeredithP @35- Drawing inferences like that is being far to sensitive. Attempted theft isn’t theft, attempted murder isn’t murder, but hey! all are criminal offenses (everywhere I’ve been, at least).
My comment on the character “Kirk” is because I disagree with others who only know his reputation as bedding a different “babe” every week (the count for the whole series is TWO), and/ or think the portrayal of the character by William Shatner was copied accurately by Kevin Pollak et al, not exaggerated for Rule of Funny.
I regret upsetting you, but I don’t apologize.
AwesomeAud @34- I didn’t think anything of that, because it was portrayed as how it should be. No “did you lead him on” or such.
ETA: re: Valeris. I don’t see her as consenting to Spock ever, because if the information is going to be taken straight from her head she may as well just confess. The only reason to continue the charade is either to resist to the end or hope that Spock can not or will not proceed.
And I have never rewatched TUC because of this and the other characterizations.
@76: I didn’t even think it in terms of their relationship being romantic.
The way I see it, Saavik and David served together on the Grissom for the Genesis mission, and worked as a team, sharing their common goal of figuring out the planet and Spock’s plight. More like working colleagues who have learned to trust each other and be honest when needed.
Plus, Kirstie’s Saavik saved David in ST II from Terrell’s phaser blast. In a way, David saving Saavik from that Klingon knife was his way of owning up to that debt.
@77/sps49: The count may be either two or three, depending on how you interpret the scene with Drusilla in “Bread and Circuses”. Apart from that, I agree!
JanaJensen @79- I count Drusilla and Deela. You?
(errmigerrd, Kathie Browne in Wink of an Eye looks so much like an ex-GF….)
ETA: Ooops! I forgot Miramanee. Drusilla wasn’t by choice; I exclude her as a Kirk “conquest”.
@80/sps49: Deela wasn’t by choice either, it was she who had chosen him as some weird mixture of sperm donor and sex slave. He was simply making the best of a really shitty situation.
Which leaves us with Miramanee.
“I like the fact that he couches the differences between the Kirks in terms of what humans refer to as “good” and “bad,” because it’s really not that simple.”
Agreed! That had always intrigued me. Later on it reminded me of Nietzsche’s writings.
JanaJansen @81-
Good point!
@77/sps49 – I wasn’t upset by it, was just inferring something that seemed quite surprising, and thought I should check on your meaning. As for “too sensitive,” well, sensitivity is in the eye of the beholder. :)
I have 2 points to make:
1. The space dog is so cute! I want one.
2. Instead of heating up rocks with his phaser, why doesn’t Sulu use the phaser itself as a heater? I mean, if the thing has enough energy to power a shuttle (“The Galileo Seven”), then it should have plenty of juice to work as a space heater for three guys–although I know those things use a lot of electricity.
@85/luc: How exactly do you propose using the phaser as a heater? Shooting themselves with it? The only way I can think of to set a phaser to get hot itself would cause it to overload and explode, which would be somewhat counterproductive. They’re just not designed to work that way. After all, having the gun in your hand get too hot to hold would also be rather counterproductive, so they’d be designed to prevent that from happening.
I mentioned in comments to Mirror, Mirror that this episode and that one are linked up a bit in David Goodman’s Autobiography of James T. Kirk.
Goodman does a nice job of exploring the implications of this episode on Kirk’s psyche. Because he knows the evil-Kirk is actually part of his own personality, the re-integrated Kirk can’t forgive himself for his assault on Rand, and eventually engineers her transfer off the ship to avoid having to face her.
It’s perhaps a bit of political-correctness-in-hindsight (particularly considering the leering coda between Spock and Rand in the episode), but a neat extension of the character and a clever way to explain her disappearance from the show.
I will go to my grave firmly believing that Star Trek VI is the second best of the TOS movies. I was shocked at rewatching the Enemy Within and seeing Evil Kirk force himself on Rand and throw her around like a rag doll. But I just can’t get worked up about the Valeris forced mind meld scene: it’s a movie and she’s “the bad guy.” If Spock had started ripping her clothes off or beating her, then I would understand the revulsion. But for Spock to disregard Vulcan norms at a moment of anger, I don’t find as intrinsically offensive as watching someone commit a heinous crime such as sexual assault, which is what Evil Kirk basically does in this episode.
@89/Steve C.: There is, of course, the difference that we’re supposed to be shocked when Evil Kirk assaults Rand. The problem with this (otherwise great) episode is that Good Kirk doesn’t comfort Rand when she talks about it, he only insists that it wasn’t him, and that Spock treats it as a joke at the end.
I also don’t think that “it’s a movie and she’s the bad guy” is a good argument. One of the reasons why I like Star Trek is that the characters are believable, nice people by my real-world standards, and they usually treat the “bad guys” well. Although I must admit that they tend to force information out of them even in the TV show.
@90/Jana: “I also don’t think that “it’s a movie and she’s the bad guy” is a good argument.”
Nor do I. I have nothing but contempt for the idea that someone else’s bad behavior is some kind of a license to abandon your own principles and sink to their level. That’s a childish argument. We’re all responsible for our own moral choices, for living up to our own standards of right and wrong, no matter what anyone else does. And no truly good person should want a license to kill or torture or do anything so awful in the first place. Part of what should define good guys is that they treat the bad guys better than the bad guys would treat them.
Wow, I’m surprised I got two responses so quickly, on this old thread. ST VI isn’t exactly Shakespeare, notwithstanding the title and General Chang’s monologues. At the point of the scene in question, the plot is hurtling forward, Valeris becomes an obstacle to saving lives, and this is how the writers chose to resolve the dilemma. I don’t find Spock’s decision in this context to be disturbing because it’s entirely alien to everyday life. We may analogoze it to rape, but the analogy only goes so far, because one is a heinous event that happens to people in the real world every day, and the other is xfiction. My argument is that sometimes the guys wearing the black hats don’t make out too well in movies, and the audience doesn’t always need to do a whole lot of handwringing about it. In all fairness, I don’t think it’s any more childish than the argument that this isn’t really Spock, and it’s just the writers misinterpreting the character.
@92/Steve C: “At the point of the scene in question, the plot is hurtling forward, Valeris becomes an obstacle to saving lives, and this is how the writers chose to resolve the dilemma.”
Except they didn’t need that scene at all. The only information they sought from Valeris was the identity of the conspirators and the location of the peace conference. But Valeris didn’t know the location, and they got it from Sulu moments later. And the conspirators’ identities, other than Chang’s, didn’t have any relevance to the climactic action, so they could’ve been exposed at the end. So the forced meld didn’t actually reveal any useful plot-relevant information. It was entirely gratuitous.
Not to mention that the prison commandant was about to tell Kirk who was behind the conspiracy before he was beamed up. The writers could’ve just had the commandant give Kirk the information instead of having him beamed away so that he “had” to order Valeris tortured. Even without that, it wouldn’t have been hard for them to figure out that Chang, their eager prosecutor and a declared warmonger, was involved in the conspiracy against Gorkon. There were numerous ways the plot could’ve played out without the forced meld. (As I said in comment #55, there actually was an early draft where Kirk just talked Saavik into cooperating. They could’ve just kept that scene for Valeris.)
I don’t understand the ‘not scientific’ part. The transporter creates mass from energy, so I assume the malfunction simply made it expend more energy. I think this was a clever effort, and should have gotten a higher grade.
@94/Mikael: Creating a single gram of mass out of pure energy would require roughly as much energy as was released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Creating 70,000 times that much mass to create an adult human male would be prohibitive. And turning a human adult into that much energy and hurling it at a planet would essentially be like firing a doomsday weapon at it. That’s why the TNG-era tech advisors dropped the misguided “matter-energy conversion” idea and reinterpreted the transporter as simply breaking matter down into constitutent particles and reassembling them elsewhere. Which means the transporter would’ve needed to get an equivalent amount of matter from somewhere.
@89 Steve C,
I’m inclined to agree with you about Spock’s behavior. It was a horrifying moment, but rather than saying that Spock would never have done that, I’m more inclined to say that was Spock having the worst moment of his life ever. I’d have to view the movie again to be sure, but my memory of Spock’s own reaction is that he himself was horrified by what he had just done. And I assume it was not “need to know” that pushed him over the edge here, but a deep sense of personal betrayal coupled with the knowledge that his trust in her had put her in a position to threaten all their futures.
By the way, in the Requiem for Methuselah episode (Flint, Rayna, Ritalin) ending where Spock applies a touch to Kirk and says “forget”, I seem to be one of the few people who didn’t consider that a mind meld at all, just an offer of comfort. What was he going to do: give him a hug, or suggest they go have a drink? Its a guy thing. I mean, Vulcan thing.
@96/Keleborn: Except that Spock very carefully placed his hand on Kirk’s temple in what had long been established as a “mind meld” position (although the term “meld” was only used twice in TOS and didn’t become the standard term until the movies), having to position his arm in a slightly convoluted way to achieve it:
If it had just been a gesture of comfort, he’d probably have put a hand on Kirk’s shoulder or something. Plus he definitely has a look of concentration on his face.
@97 ChristopherLBennet,
Hey, thanks for providing the image! That is definitely a more aggressive and controlling posture than I remember. The obvious conclusion is that I rejected that as unacceptable, did a quick little rewrite in my mind, and now remember the rewrite rather than the original.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; I know that I often do this kind of thing. Whoa, I can’t tell you what a headache I gave myself trying to reimagine The Walking Dead to be what it could and should have been, until I finally gave up.
It will be interesting to revisit The Undiscovered Country and see how much my memory of that differs from the original.
Has anyone read Sean Williams’ Twinmaker trilogy? They are YA novels in which the equivalent of the transporter(and the replicator) is normal everyday technology. You can, for example, live in Sweden and go to school in the US. However… there are some serious problems in the transporter system – the kind of serious that might lead to the end of the world. No good and evil halves, just copies…and more copies… recommended! I won’t go into detail here, just read them.
I saw the moment with Valeris as being more like an interrogation, which it was…and shouldn’t anyone with half a brain been able to spot Evil Kirk from his behavior from the first moment?
Didn’t they have any way for the technician who injured himself to clean up before he got in the transporter? Wouldn’t Scotty have been worried about the yellow ore beforehand?
Why did Spock feel the need for the captain to appear invincible? He was often injured on the show, and spent his fair share of time in sickbay.
Other shows where people were twinned include Voyager (past and “present” versions of Captain Janeway) Picard on Star Trek TNG (where he’s “twinned” by a form of time travel and meets his other self) and Stargate SG1 (multiple teams coming through the wormhole including an “evil” one.)
@100/mspence: My thoughts on this:
“[…] and shouldn’t anyone with half a brain been able to spot Evil Kirk from his behavior from the first moment?”
At first they didn’t know that there was a second Kirk, so they couldn’t spot him. Later he had learned to play-act.
“Didn’t they have any way for the technician who injured himself to clean up before he got in the transporter? Wouldn’t Scotty have been worried about the yellow ore beforehand?”
I don’t think they anticipated any difficulties, and clothes are probably easier to clean on the Enterprise.
“Why did Spock feel the need for the captain to appear invincible? He was often injured on the show, and spent his fair share of time in sickbay.”
Being injured isn’t the same thing as being ill, either physically or emotionally. I don’t know if the idea that leaders may not appear vulnerable is still around, but it was certainly a common belief when I was young. I think the idea is that you have to appear strong for people to trust in your leadership, whether you’re a politician, a starship captain, or a parent.
People who were twinned in other shows: Riker was twinned by a transporter accident, and stayed that way. As mentioned in an earlier comment, B’Elanna Torres was once split into her Klingon and human part. Much earlier, the same happened to Spock in the story “Ni Var” in Star Trek: The New Voyages.
There’s actually no reason for the different colour tunics because Evil Kirk wears the Eyeliner of EVIL so he’s fairly easy to identify.
@102/Bernice Mills: Keep in mind that 1960s TV sets were smaller with lower resolution, often subject to signal interference, and often black-and-white. We can make out the fine details like makeup far more easily today, which is why TOS’s makeup often looks so exaggerated by modern standards (like Spock’s pronounced use of eye shadow).
Indeed. I never noticed that Cesar Romero kept his mustache under the Joker makeup as a kid on my crappy tube-based television, but it’s impossible to miss now.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I grew up with only small black-and-white TVs in the house until I was about 13. I only saw Star Trek in color when I was visiting a friend or a doctor’s office or at a hotel. I still remember the vacation I took around 1980 when I got to see “The Immunity Syndrome” in color for the first time. I was amazed by how vivid and colorful the space amoeba was. I also saw a second-season Jason of Star Command episode and was startled to discover that Commander Stone’s skin had been blue the whole time.
More recently, I saw most of Deep Space Nine and Voyager in first run through fuzzy images beamed over the air from 50 miles away, since our local stations didn’t carry them. When I finally got to see them clearly years later in syndication, it was a revelation how good they looked.
It’s a shame that an otherwise great episode is marred by such a backwards attitude on sexual crime. Spock’s “being split in two halves” monologue is one of his defining moments but then the character is sullied by the dialogue at the end.
You’d think they’d have already had a shuttle craft on hand…also, isn’t the transporter supposed to work at a “quantum level” so that the original person isn’t killed?
Did Id Kirk and Superego Kirk each have half the mass of Total Kirk? That might explain why the two disparate Kirks were dying toward the end of this episode. Also, if Id Kirk and Superego Kirk each had the same mass as Total Kirk, what happened to the extra mass when the two disparate Kirks were re-integrated back into Total Kirk?
Forgive me if these queries have come up before.
I got pretty far in a next generation rewatch, and then decided to switch back to this to get a better sense for what the original crew was like. This is episode six (I think) on Netflix, and from the perspective of getting a better sense of the characterization in the original the beginning of this season has been a somewhat frustrating string of episodes.
Episode 1 was a completely different crew.
Then there is an episode that seems to have been filmed before the characters were really established, the uniforms and a lot of other details are different.
Then we get an episode where everyone gets drunk and acts crazy.
And finally this episode where Kirk gets split in half and acts crazy.
So basically we have one or two episodes out of the first six where the normal characterizations are being established. It’s and odd choice.
Despite that I am enjoying it. I will probably skip season three, but even the worst espisodes of this first season and kind of charming.
@109/yeebo:
There are some decent episodes in the 3rd season that I think are worth a watch. If anything, some of the best season 3 episodes are better than the worst season 1 episodes. My personal favorites are “Spectre of the Gun”; “The Empath” (I believe I’m in the minority on this one); “Day of the Dove”; “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (again, I’m in the minority, but I like the message and I like the performances of the two guest stars); “Requiem for Methuselah”; and “All Our Yesterdays”. Also, many commenters on here have high praise for “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” Even though I personally find it kind of plodding.
‘Enemy Within’ has always been one of my favorite episodes and I wish Richard Matheson had written more scripts for ‘Star Trek.’ As a kid, I misunderstood this story – I thought the ‘good Kirk’ was the ‘real Kirk’ and the ‘bad Kirk’ was some evil double. Took me a while to realize that the ’good Kirk’ was not the real Kirk either – but he was the only one that Spock and McCoy could reason and communicate with. Most of the criticisms of this episode have been covered by other commenters – but I have another one. When Spock openly describes his split personality (obviously used as exposition) it seemed out of character. I doubt Spock would explicitly discuss something so personal and embarrassing to him like that. They should’ve had McCoy do that. Oh, and what other prime time show in 1966 would depict a rape?? How did this ever get past the censors??
@111/Palash Ghosh: “Oh, and what other prime time show in 1966 would depict a rape?? How did this ever get past the censors??”
In fact, attempted rapes were pretty common in the TV of the day. It was kept implicit, but the threat of sexual coercion was one of the most common ways of menacing women in fiction for generations. It’s one of the standard plots, the mustache-twirling villain cackling as he carries off the hero’s girlfriend with the intention of doing vile and unspeakable things to her, or forcing her to marry him. And the whole reason a gentleman would never let a lady go unescorted was because it was implicit that any woman out in public alone was in constant danger of rape. The phrase “defending a lady’s honor” was a euphemism for defending her from sexual assault.
This isn’t even the only TOS episode to feature an attempted rape — see also Don Juan going after Yeoman Barrows in “Shore Leave,” Uhura coping with Lars the drill thrall in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” Nona getting attacked by the villagers in “A Private Little War,” and Chekov’s assault on Mara in “Day of the Dove.”
I’m Captain Kirk!!!!!!!
YAM CAP-TAIN KIIIIIIIIIIRK!!!!!!!!!!!
Great episode where the use of shuttle craft, or transportation of jackets or firewood would have made things easier for all involved.
And we KNOW they can make firewood, cuz “We can manufacture a TON of these (jewels) on our ship for you, Korab… they mean nothing to us!”
And another thing! Even after Scotty tells them that the Space Dog was replicated into two good and evil versions in the transporter, it still takes them like 30 minutes to figure out that there’s a, “Captain Kirk” going around violently demanding brandy and raping yeomen!
“How can this BE!? It MUST be an, ‘intruder’.”
IDIOTS!!!!
Then LATER!!!! Spock pinches out Evil Kirk in the engine room, and Evil Kirk reflexively fires his phaser into some equipment.
Then like 20 minutes after that, Scotty calls in, “Oh, Captain, we found some ‘new trouble’ with the transporter…..there’s a huge hole torn out of the ‘ionizer casing’ ….Kinda like as if maybe someone possibly fired a phaser or something into it!?”
“OH!! YA DONT SAY!!!????
I CAN NOT imagine how THAT happened.”
Thanks for the big heads up there, Skip!
What a show!