Star Trek Thoughts: The Enemy Within
Dec. 2nd, 2013 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I was recording Star Trek episodes off cable, I skipped over "The Enemy Within," the one where a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into a good captain and an evil captain. The handful of sources I was looking at to get a sense of what were "the good episodes" all seemed to be showing righteous indignation that in the "light-hearted" coda at the end, Spock was the one to show old-fashioned sexist reprehensibility in just how he brought up how the evil Kirk had tried to assault Janice Rand. (Later on, I found this exact same condemnation in three more sources.) However, once I had Blu-Ray sets of the series, I suppose I found myself thinking that among the "well, maybe" episodes left from the first season, I might yet try and step towards "acknowledging that one moment is condemnable shouldn't always place everything around it beyond the pale."
For my own part anyway, I suppose I can be conscious of this episode being not just "a transporter malfunction episode" but the first of them, just a handful of episodes into the original series, taking what I've long heard as an economical way to get the characters into action in a hurry and imbuing it with "magical" properties. (The thought experiment of "alien artifacts" did come to mind in thinking of that, but that does have its own multiple levels of difficulty, so I shouldn't say much more.) I may still be a little too conscious of the common sort of criticism by the end of the "second television era" of Star Trek falling back on "malfunctions in the bafflegab generators" to begin a story and adjustments to them to end it. However, I did come to think that with this particular episode, the reintegration was suggested to be a matter of "mind over matter" as much as Scotty tinkering things back together with the running time almost up. It also sort of caught my attention how the episode managed to have the evil Kirk captured and subdued well before the end, even if he did manage to get away for the final buildup of tension. As well, while William Shatner got to add to his legend as the evil Kirk, it was also sort of interesting to see him establishing the growing ineffectuality and struggles of the good Kirk.
For my own part anyway, I suppose I can be conscious of this episode being not just "a transporter malfunction episode" but the first of them, just a handful of episodes into the original series, taking what I've long heard as an economical way to get the characters into action in a hurry and imbuing it with "magical" properties. (The thought experiment of "alien artifacts" did come to mind in thinking of that, but that does have its own multiple levels of difficulty, so I shouldn't say much more.) I may still be a little too conscious of the common sort of criticism by the end of the "second television era" of Star Trek falling back on "malfunctions in the bafflegab generators" to begin a story and adjustments to them to end it. However, I did come to think that with this particular episode, the reintegration was suggested to be a matter of "mind over matter" as much as Scotty tinkering things back together with the running time almost up. It also sort of caught my attention how the episode managed to have the evil Kirk captured and subdued well before the end, even if he did manage to get away for the final buildup of tension. As well, while William Shatner got to add to his legend as the evil Kirk, it was also sort of interesting to see him establishing the growing ineffectuality and struggles of the good Kirk.