I was thinking about split personalities the other day, after having a lengthy conversation about the M. Night Shyamalan film Split, and an old episode of the original series of Star Trek sort of worked its way into my brain, though I couldn’t remember the title. I’m a fan but not a fan if you know what I mean, but I was certain there was a show that had Captain Kirk ‘split’ in some way . . . so, a little research later and sure enough, I was right.
The episode is called The Enemy Within, from the first season show five, and it aired originally on October 6, 1966. I own the whole series (of course) – okay, a fan but not a superfan – so I plopped myself on the sofa with a bucket-a-hot salted popcorn and gave it a watch. It’d been a long time since I’d watched any TOS so naturally, I was a little giddy. I mean, those first notes from the opening theme . . . dang. That’s good stuff.
Anyway, the story goes like this. The Enterprise (I’m just gonna assume that if you’re reading this you’re already aware of what ‘Star Trek’ is and don’t need a general summary of the concept) orbits Alpha 177, a deserted planet where they are meant to do some geological surveys. All good until Technician Fisher (Edward Madden) slips and takes a nasty fall. He’s a scientist, not a rock climber. Bruised and bloodied, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) instructs him to beam back aboard and get some medical treatment. Good plan, but he brings with him a mysterious yellow substance on his uniform, the first sign that something isn’t right.
Not long after, Kirk also heads back to the Enterprise, and while he beams up seemingly yellow muck free, he arrives a bit dizzy and unstable. So much so, he’s led off to sickbay by Chief Engineer Mr. Scott (James Doohan). That leaves the transporter room unattended, which turns out to be a bit of a problem because just moments later, in beams another Captain Kirk. And this one has a strange look in his eyes. This is a Kirk up to no good.
As you can surely guess, the second Kirk is sort of a primal version of the original, and that original, now stripped of his rage, lust, and violence, is reduced to a docile, somewhat indecisive leader. That’s bad if you’re doing all the captainy things a captain needs to captain while Captain of a starship. Right away, Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) notices, and when the bad Kirk makes some, shall we say, unsolicited advances on the lovely Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) in her private quarters, well, it’s clear there’s a real problem on the ship.
In a nice twist, the story doesn’t play to the expected where the crew believes for the length of the show that the real captain has somehow gone off the deep end and is terrorizing the ship on his own. Instead, after a bit of a cat and mouse between the captains, the bad one is captured, leaving the other Kirk with a crisis of identity. It’s not like they can simply kill the bad Kirk and be done with it. How might that ultimately affect the real Kirk? And who is the original Kirk if he doesn’t have his “dark side” in him?
And this is where I must introduce . . . the pooch. See, the landing party have beamed up an animal specimen from the planet, a creature that is clearly a sedated lapdog in a furry costume adorned with candy cane antenna and a unicorn horn but serves a much larger purpose to the story than the giggles one catches in the back of their throat while watching it for the first time. (One can’t help but image the rounds of laughter the cast must have gone through when realizing they had to take this seriously while filming.)
Anyway, getting back to the serious, the dog-thing is the thematic parallel to Kirk’s plight, where the animal too had a second beam aboard that is just about ferocious, leaving the original practically inert. This gives Kirk and Spock the opportunity to further contemplate the Captain’s fate, and more importantly, a chance to test an idea that might be a possible fix to the problem. That this ends up in failure in the eyes of Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) and a success to Spock, speaks a lot to the excellent staging of hard science versus human emotion these two represent in the show, and creates a real bind for what Kirk should do about himself and the men on the surface.
Oh right. The men on the surface. There is a subplot involving others, including Mr. Sulu (George Takei), being stranded on the planet below, the nighttime freezing temperatures at risk of killing them all but helpless as the transporter malfunctions. It’s a little hokey and I’m not really sure why they couldn’t have deployed the shuttlecraft, but that’s not really important here (in truth, the concept for using the shuttle in this episode had been on the table but budget restrictions made it impossible and the shuttle wouldn’t make its first appearance in the series until eleven shows later – okay, okay, a superfan but not a Trekker). It’s driven to add some stakes to the tension of what to do with the two Kirks, no matter how unconvincing it looks that these men are supposedly freezing to death. Nice try, Sulu.
Yes, this two-Kirk plot would seem shallow at first, but it ends up far deeper, the docile Kirk wanting to find a way to help the angry one, recognizing how badly he needs it to survive, while the angry one only knows to be, well, angry, plotting to do away with the docile one. Spock, being his intellectual self, savors the idea of examining the roles of good and evil in humans and how one can’t truly make a person complete if lacking one or the other. I like the philosophical dilemma this leaves these characters in, and it’s a clever little spin for a low-budget sci-fi show in the 60s to get wrapped up in.
What you really need to watch is the great work Shatner does with this duality at play. Notice how he layers the subtle weaknesses of the good Kirk against the menace of the bad one, mostly with shifts in body postures and the look in his eyes. He’s an often underrated actor who may deserve a bit of the fun poked at him, but it’s actually his turn as Kirk that gave him the best opportunities to show off his chops, and this is a prime example of him at the top of his game, though I still believe what he does in the first two Star Trek films are his greatest achievements. (And let’s not forget that in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Kirk gets a second chance to face himself, though albeit under entirely different circumstances involving a shapeshifting bird woman with yellow eyes. Star Trek can be pretty weird.)
Back to the episode, this one, especially as it enters the third act, really finds its footing as the ol’ switchero does come about and the bad Kirk makes his way to the big chair. I won’t reveal where that goes but it’s good fun and not where it seems set up to go. Again, nice work from Shatner.
This is where I need to mention that the episode was written by Richard Matheson, who is best known for his critically acclaimed and highly influential sci-fi/horror novel I Am Legend. It was his only contribution to the Star Trek canon, but easily, one of the most memorable in the three-year run of the first series. This is a dense episode that, like many in the old days of Star Trek, put emphasis on the characters and story rather than continuous action, which I’m not saying can’t be done right, but one of the things I liked best about these original shows was how so much could be explored about the human condition through clever setups and smart dialogue rather than shooting and punching. Fan of science fiction or Star Trek or not, this is an episode that deserves a sit-through. Make it so. Oh wait. Wrong captain.