The Enemy Within (Episode 05)

The duplicate Kirk appears on the transporter pad.

“He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.”

— “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde,” by Robert Louis Stevenson

It's not much of a walk from Robert Louis Stevenson to Richard Matheson's script for “The Enemy Within.” Eighty years had passed since Stevenson's classic horror novel had been published in the United Kingdom. The dichotomy of the human psyche has long been fertile fodder for writers. Stevenson and Matheson are only two in a long lineage of writers to explore humanity's capacity for both good and evil, probably going back to the origin of storytelling. The first principle of storytelling is that drama comes out of conflict. What better conflict than with oneself?

Richard Matheson was a veteran writer in the media of speculative fiction magazines and novels, television, and films. He was part of Rod Serling's stable of screenwriters, authoring sixteen episodes for The Twilight Zone in its original run. Two of those episodes cast William Shatner — “Nick of Time” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Because of the show's anthology format, neither time did he know Shatner would be cast, but with Star Trek that was different. He was writing a script knowing who would be playing his protagonist and that actor's skills.

William Shatner in Richard Matheson's “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Video source: The Twilight Zone YouTube channel.

As discussed in earlier articles, Gene Roddenberry's earliest concept for Star Trek was that each episode would be a report or recollection by the captain of a particular past incident. Scripts would be captain-centric. In his prior series, The Lieutenant, scripts were centered on the eponymous Marine Corps lieutenant, William Tiberius Rice. It would be the same with Star Trek — tales about the captain, a riff on the Horatio Hornblower novels. Other Star Trek actors would not have their moment in the spotlight until later in the series.

A 2009 interview with Richard Matheson about his work on Star Trek and other 1960s network television. Video source: Television Academy Foundation YouTube channel.

Matheson wrote only one Star Trek episode. In a 2009 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Matheson said he was unhappy with the producers adding the “B-story” about the landing party trapped on the planet surface. His script was all about the bifurcated Kirk. Matheson told the Academy, “I hate B-stories. To me, they slow a story down.” Matheson noted that Roddenberry recruited the top science fiction writers in town to develop scripts, but in the end concluded it was better to develop his own stable of writers. Matheson recalled, “I submitted other ideas but they never accepted them.” And so one of the most prolific and talented television writers of his time has only one Star Trek episode on his curriculum vitae.

The story takes place basically in two locations — on planet Alfa 177, and on the Enterprise. The first three regular season episodes produced so far all lacked a grand scope, narrowly focused perhaps to keep costs down while the production team figured out how to deliver an episode on time and on budget. Recall that the episodes did not air in production order. Although this was the third episode produced, it was the fifth to air. The two before it did not air until after this one; the earliest aired episodes have yet to be produced.

“The Enemy Within” begins with the landing party on the surface. Kirk's gold uniform is missing its delta logo insignia. In those early days, the costume department had a problem with the uniforms shrinking after every wash, so it may have been the logo wasn't replaced after washing. Or he's the captain and can wear whatever he wants. 😊

Sulu is holding a small dog costumed in an outfit to make it appear that it's an alien creature. I sure hope they fed it a lot of dog chow for putting up with that costume.

“Geological Technician Fisher” falls off a rock and cuts his hand. He's covered with a magnetic golden ore. Kirk tells Fisher to beam up and report to Sickbay.

Fisher beams up, but the transporter definitely doesn't like it. Scotty thinks it's a burnout.

Kirk then beams up, and stumbles dizzy off the pad. (And still missing his insignia.) Scotty escorts Kirk out of the room, despite the captain's warning not to leave the transporter unattended. (Boy howdy, will that happen a lot in future episodes …) As soon as they leave the room, the transporter comes on by itself, materializing a duplicate Kirk — the Hyde to our Jekyll. The script apparently referred to him as “Negative Kirk.”

Voilà, we have Star Trek's first transporter malfunction. But most certainly not the last.

This raises all sorts of questions that Gene Roddenberry probably would rather we not ask. How can the transporter create two objects out of one? Where did the matter come from to create a second person? If the transporter disassembles you and reassembles you as you were, then where'd the matter come from to create a second you?

If the transporter is simply a glorified copier machine, then the original you is destroyed and a duplicate made from some reservoir of raw matter. That would explain where the second person came from, but it also means that using the transporter is a death penalty.

This is why some writers (including me) prefer the term “speculative fiction” to “science fiction.” Speculative fiction is more of a “what if?” with less strict scientific rigor than science fiction. The latter requires a scientific explanation for how something works. The former just shows that it does.

I heard Star Trek writer DC Fontana once say that we don't need to explain how the phaser works. It simply does. Technobabble did not become a “thing” until The Next Generation.

Kirk's captain's log is a report from the future about what we are witnessing now. This was an early concept of how the logs would work — a recollection of past events.

“Positive Kirk” now has his logo insignia. In his quarters, he finds Yeoman Rand, who delivers the ship's manifest. Kirk dismisses her, but this foreshadows what's about to come.

Scotty informs Positive Kirk and Spock that the transporter created two versions of the space dog — except it's not a duplicate, it's “an opposite.” The rest of the landing party can't beam up.

At this point in the series, we've yet to see a shuttlecraft. Perhaps this episode led the producers to realize the Enterprise would have a Plan B if the transporter were down.

Negative Kirk shows up in Sickbay, also now sporting his insignia. He demands Saurian brandy from McCoy, further establishing a precedent going all the way back to “The Cage” that the captain drinks with the ship's doctor. This is the first mention of the alcoholic beverage.

The captain drinks on the job.

Wandering the corridors gulping from the brandy bottle, Negative Kirk slips into Rand's quarters. What happens next is, in my opinion, the most disturbing scene in the three years of the original series.

In her 1998 autobiography, Grace Lee Whitney describes it as “the rape scene.” Without his positive side to suppress his animal instincts, Negative Kirk assaults and pins down Janice on the floor. Grace saying “No!” appears to have been dubbed because her lips don't move. It's a brutal scene, painful to watch. Grace wrote that filming the scene left her with several bruises, because she did her own stunt work.

In earlier articles, we noted the early concept was that Kirk and Rand were attracted to one another, but suppressed it out of duty. In that sense, the scene acknowledges that Kirk feels an attraction just as much as Rand does. Rand may love Kirk, but what the opposite does isn't an expression of love. Rape is all about power and submission.

Rand reports the assault to Spock and McCoy, with Positive Kirk present. Grace wrote that, just before the scene, William Shatner stepped from behind the camera and slapped her without permission to shock her and make her cry. Two days had passed since filming the rape scene, so this assault was to put her back into the moment. Grace acknowledges the act delivered the desired performance but, in my opinion, there's no excuse for hitting someone without permission. Grace seems forgiving, which says more about her than it does Shatner.

Of greater significance is that the scene foreshadows what will happen to Grace during the filming of “Miri.” As noted in our last article, Grace was sexually assaulted for real by one of the show's executives after filming ended on a Friday night.

In his series These Are The Voyages, author Marc Cushman wrote that the rape scene was in Richard Matheson's original draft. The scene was most important to Matheson, who said, “What else could we show about this side of the Captain that would be more frightening?” Roddenberry worried that NBC censors might reject the scene.

Rand receives no counseling. Spock simply dismisses her. Sure, he's a Vulcan so maybe he's insensitive to her suffering, but still one would think that McCoy would advise counseling, therapy, a safe companion escort back to her quarters, etc.

“Negative” Kirk assaults Janice Rand.

In any case, Spock deduces that an imposter is aboard. Negative Kirk can be identified by scratches Rand left on his face, but in the captain's cabin Negative Kirk finds facial makeup he uses to hide the scratches. Why would Kirk have something like that?! Would our heroic captain have makeup for covering a zit?! Seems a bit odd.

Knowing the evil one is loose, why not station a guard in front of Rand's cabin? Might he not try again?

The landing party is slowly freezing to death … I understand Richard Matheson's point about the B-story being a distraction, but it did give George Takei and the extras some work and a paycheck. Producer Robert Justman complained in a memo that the landing party subplot was costing the production time and money, so he may have agreed with Matheson.

Negative Kirk clobbers a crewman and steals his phaser. Positive Kirk and Spock search Engineering for the opposite … Remember that, in The Wrath of Khan, Kirk said Khan's strategy reflected “two-dimensional thinking”? Well, Negative Kirk hides above them, climbing across the equipment. I guess Kirk's three-dimensional out-of-the-box instincts come from his negative side.

This is the scene that gave birth to the Vulcan nerve pinch. The script called for Spock to strike Negative Kirk on the head with the butt of his phaser. Leonard Nimoy felt this wasn't something a Vulcan would do. In his memoir I Am Spock, Nimoy wrote that he'd given thought to Vulcan culture and customs. He had decided that they were a touch-oriented society. As such, rather using brute force, Vulcans “were capable of transmitting a special energy from their fingertips. If applied to the proper nerve centers on a human's neck and shoulder, that energy would render the human unconscious.”

Leonard approached director Leo Penn and William Shatner about the concept. Give Bill credit for selling it, because he's the one who came up with the instant collapse. That's how it was filmed, and so a Star Trek staple was born.

Another Star Trek standard is uttered for the first time. Spock and Scott jury-rig the transporter to reassemble the two space dogs into one. The test seems to fail, as the dog beams up deceased. McCoy turns to Positive Kirk and declares, “He's dead, Jim.”

For the first time, Spock records a captain's log, but he identifies himself as the “Second Officer.” If he's the Second Officer, who is Number One?! An early blooper.

Spock hypothesizes that the test failed because the dog was frightened to death. It reacted out of instinct. A human, with his intellect, might understand and survive.

The two Kirks are run through the transporter, and our one whole Kirk materializes to take command. His first words are to order the landing party beamed up.

“The Enemy Within” is an early example of Star Trek trying to find itself. Gene Roddenberry and the producers are trying to find the right tone. The actors are trying to find their characters. The writers, all free-lancers, are flying blind. All they have for reference are a showing of the second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and a flurry of memos supplementing Roddenberry's 1964 16-page outline. Gene is up all hours of the night rewriting the drafts to align with his vision of what Star Trek should be.

This wouldn't be the last time Star Trek dipped its metaphorical pen into the “evil twin” inkwell. In the Season 2 episode “Mirror, Mirror,” yet another transporter malfunction would give us an entire parallel universe filled with evil duplicates of our characters. In the first season of The Next Generation the episode “Datalore” introduced us to Data's evil android predecessor Lore. TNG's sixth season episode “Second Chances” gave us Will Riker's duplicate Thomas, created years before in a long-forgotten transporter accident.

TNG also gave us the holodeck malfunction, something entirely new to go wrong, but that's for another time.