The Enemy Within (TOS)

This episode really wants to be dealt with in three parts: The good, the bad, and the silly.

The good:
This is a big episode of firsts for Star Trek. The first transporter malfunction episode. First utterance of "He's Dead, Jim." First exploration of the duality of man.

Basically, a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into good Kirk and evil Kirk. Evil Kirk wants to drink medicinal brandy, rape Yeoman Rand, and basically make trouble. He doesn't want to command the ship, until the very end of the episode. He doesn't have ulterior motives, just animal instincts. Good Kirk wants to command the ship and do Kirk-y things, but he's lost the ability to make decisions and he seems kind of confused.

The audience might be a little confused too, but this strikes me as an impressively sophisticated way to handle such an inherently silly plot. Kirk's "evil" side is superior in some ways to his good side. It's the source of his ability to command. This is actually a very dark suggestion when paired with our normal view of Starfleet Captains as paragons of good.

Of course, the most sophisticated way to show a Captain wrestling with his dark side is a little less... literally. But, taking the sci-fi format for what it is, this is a pretty nice exploration of an age-old literary theme.

The bad
When Yeoman Rand complains to Spock that the captain just tried to rape her (not in those words, of course), no one is aware of the double. Starfleet apparently doesn't have any procedure in place for this kind of situation. No guard is placed on Rand's quarters, no guard is placed on Kirk, Kirk is told about the accusation and allowed to come see Rand in sickbay and interrogate her about the attack. To her credit, Grace Lee Whitney plays that interview jut about as traumatized as she should.

To make matters worse, the story seems to play up the insult on Kirk's character as more grievous than the really traumatic breach of trust and attack on the poor Yeoman. No wonder her character disappears from the show; I'd request a transfer too! Ship needs a counselor, yo.

The silly
Meanwhile, while Kirk is playing cat and mouse with Evil Kirk up on the ship, the rest of the away party (read: Sulu and some other guys) is stranded on the planet surface, because until they fix the transporter they can't beam them up. The planet's surface is getting colder and colder in order to build tension that the up-on-the-ship story doesn't have. So far, so good. Of course, the actual scenes of Sulu standing in the cold, getting progressively colder, and inexplicably cracking jokes at the Captain and anyone who will listen send a somewhat mixed message in the tension-building department.

So what did the away team do during the mission? Well, they captured a creature that looks like a Pomeranian wearing a unicorn horn and a reptilian tail. It's as classic a cheezy TOS animal as you ever saw, but what really makes it work is just how many scenes the animal is in. It's as if the director said "We're spending good money dressing up these dogs, we're damn well going to use them." In several scenes, Kirk is talking to his crew, and one of them is just holding a dog-monster for no reason. It's awesome.

Oh, did I mention that the dog monster ALSO got evil doubled? Because it did. In fact, they use the dog monster as a guinea pig for the de-doubling procedure, and when they try it on it, it dies. (First utterance of "He's Dead Jim" on the show? Refers to a dog monster.) I think this might have been the inspiration for the "But the alien is inside out ... and it exploded" gag in Galaxy Quest.

To sum it all up:
Good, bad, and silly all together, I had a lot of fun watching the episode straight through. It's easy to find criticisms, but it's also so easy to see what people loved about this show while it was on the air. The mix of action, cerebralness, and goofiness is a complex formula made to look easy, and it all adds up to an eminently watchable show.


Random Observations:

- A lot of no Uhura going on lately. Sulu and Scotty and Rand all get to shine here, but Uhura gets I think 5 seconds of screen time.

- Shuttlecrafts, man. There is absolutely no reason not to pick up the away team with a shuttlecraft. Which sort of suggest that maybe they just don't like Sulu very much.

- Speaking of which, theory: Sulu is the Miles O'Brien of TOS. I think he's gonna get tortured a lot.