Synopsis (from the official Star Trek website):
While orbiting the planet Alfa 177, the U.S.S. Enterprise experiences a transporter malfunction when Technician Fisher is beamed up from the planet with some magnetic ore on his clothing. Scotty checks the transporter and finds nothing wrong, so Captain Kirk beams aboard. Kirk leaves with his officers and when the transporter room is deserted, a second Kirk materializes on the pad.
When a space animal is beamed aboard the starship and splits into two entities; one tame and one vicious, it is discovered that the same thing has happened to Kirk. While one Kirk is good and honorable, the other is evil and runs amok on his ship, committing violent acts, including the attempted assault of Yeoman Janice Rand.
The Enemy Within was an interesting episode. It was the first in what would become a frequent, overused, almost cliched plot device where a transporter malfunction would cause some sort of disaster. In this case, the transporter is somehow affected by the introduction of a bio-contaminant from Alfa 177. The transporter functions mostly as normal, but creates two copies of everything-one containing the good, noble, honorable side of a person, the other the evil, dark, aggressive, primitive part.
Putting aside the fact that the science of it (I know, I know. I keep going down the slippery fact of discussing science with science fiction) is absolutely absurd, even by Star Trek standards, and you actually get a surprisingly interesting, adult story. I very much appreciate it when Star Trek writers don't pull punches with episodes. All too often throughout the last 40 years potentially great, dramatic episodes have been ruined by forced humor. The Naked Time is an all-time classic that I never grew to love for that very reason. Fortunately, The Enemy Within does away with that staid convention, and is surprisingly adult for 1960's television. The episode features an assault on Yeoman Rand, and some deep, interesting conversation as to which part of a person's personality make up their "better qualities."
Perhaps what I appreciated the most was the fact that the writers didn't shy away from the obvious answer, the difficult answer. Everything about our personalities defines who we are, good and bad. If one facet of our being is forcibly removed (not through rehabilitation or personal choice), then we cease to be the person we were. James T. Kirk is a great man on Star Trek-an honorable, kind, gentle man, but even he is fueled to some extent by his inner demons. While Kirk could still be a good man without his "dark" side, he could no longer be the captain he once was. While this is an admittedly oversimplified way to look and good and bad or right and wrong, it has the advantage of being true for most people. We need both our good and bad experiences, memories both happy and sad, anger and happiness to make us who we are. James T. Kirk lost them and was a shell of his former self until he got them back.
William Shatner does a surprisingly good job acting with himself, and gives real depth to both sides of his character, including a rather touching seen at the end. While Shatner is often criticized and mocked for some of his peculiar acting tendencies, my overall impressions through the first few episodes of The Original Series are almost all good.
Continuity:
- We continue to sporadically see main characters. Some episodes will feature McCoy heavily, and Scotty will never appear, etc.
- Uniform color is still off and characters are not always wearing the correct colors for their positions.
- The transporter is portrayed as being far more primitive than we know it should be during the time period (of course this knowledge is 40 years of background story after the fact).
- The Enterprise is shown as having one transporter room (and it is repeatedly referred to as the only transporter room). This makes absolutely no sense for a ship who's crew numbers over 400. In later episodes the Enterprise appears to have more than one transporter room, and by the first movie we know that the Enterprise indeed has several. Early technical manuals published by Paramount indicate the same thing. At this point it must be assumed that one transporter room was used and discussed for budgetary purposes only and that the Enterprise has been retconned to have more than one transporter room.
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