The Enemy Within

written by: Richard Matheson
Watch online on CBS.com (limited by region) 

Richard Matheson passed away while I was writing this post. I dedicate this small work to his memory in thanks for the many hours of enjoyment that his work has brought me over the years. 

‘The Enemy Within’ was contributed by prolific Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson. On that show, Matheson had provided William Shatner with one of his other most memorable roles: Bob Wilson, a nervous air traveller having a ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’. ‘The Enemy Within’ provided more great character moments for Shatner.

‘The Enemy Within’ also marked the (unscripted) debut of the Vulcan nerve pinch, improvised by Leonard Nimoy. It went on to become a signature part of Spock’s character.

Premise

An accident with the transporter creates a physical duplicate of Kirk and splits his personality between the two bodies. While ‘evil Kirk’ assaults crewmembers and creates minor mayhem around the ship, ‘good Kirk’ finds his decision-making powers gradually slipping away.

To put extra time pressure on the protagonists to solve this problem, a landing party is freezing to death on planet Alfa 177 below, with the transporter out of action.[1]

Themes

This episode is one of Star Trek’s answers to the question of what it means to be human. As Spock puts it:

‘We have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man. His negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence, and his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness.’

A Spock goes on to say a few lines later, a dichotomy of good an evil is rather too simplistic here, since the accident also gives Spock and McCoy the chance to observe:

‘What is it that makes one man an exceptional leader? We see indications that it’s his negative side which makes him strong, that his “evil side”, if you will—properly controlled and disciplined—is vital to his strength.’ 

The mind: Intellect vs emotion

The idea that the human psyche is composed of multiple elements that might at times be at odds with one another is at least as old as Plato.[2] The two-way split in Kirk is immediately obvious: ‘good’ against ‘evil’, aggressiveness against empathy. However, this story is really about a three-way split, because both McCoy and Spock understand ‘intellect’ or ‘intelligence’ as separate from the emotions; it is the aspect of the psyche that holds the two conflicting sets of emotions together. McCoy sees it first:

‘You have your intellect, Jim. You can fight with that!’

Then, in another scene:

‘GOOD’ KIRK: What do I have?

[...]

MCCOY: The intelligence, the logic. It appears your half has most of that, and perhaps that’s where man’s essential courage comes from. For you see, he was afraid and you weren’t.

McCoy here has quite explicitly separated intelligence from whatever other split has happened to Kirk’s psyche:

Finally, in yet another scene, Spock expands on this idea:

‘Being split in two halves is no theory with me, Doctor. I have a human half, you see, as well as an alien half: submerged, constantly at war with each other. Personal experience, Doctor. I survive it because my intelligence wins over both—makes them live together. Your intelligence would enable you to survive as well.’

Again, this points to a three-way split, not just a two-way one.[3]

The intellect is therefore portrayed as being in opposition to the emotions, both the baser emotions and the more noble ones. In a sense, this diminishes the split between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ because (as Spock says of himself) the split with the intellect is more fundamental still—a familiar Star Trek theme.

The mind: Mind vs body

Star Trek usually depicted mind–body dualism by presenting disembodied minds, or minds developed at the expense of bodies.‘The Enemy Within’ is a little different, but no less dualistic, in that it suggests that an exactly duplicated body might have an utterly different mind. If we understand mind and body to be a unitary whole, then duplicating the neurology should duplicate the consciousness emergent from it. ‘The Enemy Within’ instead shows Kirk’s mind and his body being affected differently and independently by the transporter accident.[4]

Career captain

‘The Enemy Within’ again portrays the need for the captain to be a paragon. When ‘good Kirk’ wants to reveal the full reality of the situation to the crew, Spock reminds him:

‘You’re the Captain of this ship. You haven’t the right to be vulnerable in the eyes of the crew. You can’t afford the luxury of being anything less than perfect. If you do, they lose faith, and you lose command.’ 

Brought to his senses, ‘good Kirk’ agrees.

Ethos: Self-sacrifice

At the climax of the episode, Spock and Scotty believe that they have repaired the transporter, and test it on an animal that has been split the way that Kirk has. The animal is  recombined, but dies in the process. With time running out for the landing party, ‘good Kirk’ decides that he has to risk putting himselves through the transporter to see whether a human will fare better than the animal. He hopes this will prove the transporter safe to bring the landing party home. Even as he steps onto the transporter platform, he acknowledges to Spock that he understands that he might not be coming back. Kirk proves his willingness to sacrifice himself for his crew.

What it means to be human: Fallibility

McCoy notes: ‘We all have our darker side. We need it! It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly, it’s human.’ The central message of ‘The Enemy Within’ is that the unpleasant, even evil parts of ourselves are still essential to who we are.

As science fiction

You have to reduce ‘The Enemy Within’ a very long way to divest it of its speculative fictional elements. At heart, it’s the story of a person forced to confront and come to terms with the bestial part of their own nature. This part you could tell as a person regaining their senses after an episode of psychosis or substance abuse and learning of some terrible thing that they did while ‘not themselves’.

With some magic thrown in to replace psychosis or drugs, and an element of physical transformation, it enters the realm of speculative fiction. Now it becomes the archetypal werewolf story of the last few centuries, or some of the more recent takes on vampires.

Replace the magic with a fictional pharmaceutical, keep the physical transformation, and we get Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. This is, at least in its trappings, science fiction.

Two things set ‘The Enemy Within’ apart from lost weekends, werewolves, and Dr Jekyll. First, Kirk does not periodically switch places with his other self; both versions of the character co-exist and even meet one another. This element is necessarily speculative fiction, but could be depicted as magic as easily as technology. Harlan Ellison used astral travel as the mechanism to split his protagonist in two in ‘Shatterday’.

The second atypical feature of ‘The Enemy Within’ is that by the end of the episode, Kirk has accepted his bestial side as an essential part of himself, and seeks desperately to be reunited with it. This is radically different from the standard beast-as-hated-other narrative. Of course, there’s nothing especially science-fictional or even speculative-fictional about this element.

The response of the protagonists to the crisis is really one of troubleshooting. Spock and Scotty work to jury-rig a repair to the transporter and test it. Even when the test fails, Kirk goes ahead to stake his life on the machine. There is no real science here, nor is the story concerned with exploring the philosophical or ethical aspects of transporter technology itself.[5] At best, this story is engineering fiction rather than science fiction.

‘Dangerous, savage child-race’

The savagery that lurks within the human heart is of course the point of this episode. What we see here is consistent with Star Trek’s position that human beings will not have changed intrinsically in the next few centuries, but that we will have learned to behave a lot better most of the time.

‘Evil Kirk’ acts purely on base impulse. His first act is to demand brandy from McCoy, which he swigs from the bottle as he roams the ship’s corridors. The very next thing he tries to do is rape Yeoman Rand. He assaults crewmembers as he feels he needs to, and attempts to murder ‘good Kirk’ with a phaser.

There is no savagery displayed by anybody else in the episode. ‘Evil Kirk’ represents everything that humanity has left behind.

Other notes

The treatment of Yeoman Rand at the hands of the central characters is pretty appalling. When she goes to sickbay after being sexually assaulted, she has to make her complaint to Spock and McCoy with Kirk right there present in the room. He quite literally stands over her, and challenges elements of her story even as she relates it. On the upside, Spock is immediately more willing to believe that there is somehow an impostor aboard the ship than to dismiss Rand’s story when it doesn’t match the available evidence. The circumstances of her questioning were very poor, but at least she is taken completely seriously.

At the end of the episode, Spock makes a suggestive remark to Rand, that ‘the impostor had some interesting qualities, wouldn’t you say, Yeoman?’ implying that she somehow welcomed or wanted the sexual assault that she had experienced only hours before. As Grace Lee Whitney (who played Rand) put it in her autobiography:

‘I can’t imagine any more cruel and insensitive comment a man (or Vulcan) could make to a woman who has just been through a sexual assault! But then, some men really do think that women want to be raped.’[6]

Mission objectives

Finally,  a perfect score! Admittedly, there’s no dialogue that explicitly states that Alfa 177 has never been explored previously, but the implication throughout is that this is indeed a ‘strange, new world’. If so, it further suggests that the dog-like animal is ‘new life’ and this world is somewhere that nobody from Earth has gone before.

Objective	This episode	Series so far
To explore strange, new worlds	1	2 (40%)
To seek out new life and new civilizations	1	3 (60%)
To boldly go where none has gone before	1	3 (60%)

Previous episode: ‘Mudd’s Women’
Next episode: ‘The Man Trap’

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Footnotes

[1] Shuttlecraft had not been added to the Enterprise’s equipment so early in the show’s run. In-universe, we can speculate that there was some other reason that precluded their use.

[2] In Book 4 of The Republic (c.380 BCE), Plato has Socrates distinguish between the part of the psyche that responds to basic appetites (the epithymetikon) from the part that seeks honour (literally, ‘spiritedness’ or ‘passion’; the thymikon) and from the rational part that governs both (the logistikon). (439d–441c). In Phaedrus (c.370 BCE), Plato (as Socrates again) uses the metaphor of the logistikon as charioteer, with the thymikon and epithymetikon as horses under his direction. (246a–254e)

[3]  Co-incidentally or not, the division of the psyche in this episode closely recalls Plato’s divisions. The chariot allegory describes Kirk’s situation precisely.

[4] For a contrasting view, see James Blish’s original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die! (Bantam, 1970). In this book, a similar transporter accident creates a duplicate Spock who is truly a mirror image of the original, right down to the molecular level. (Duplicate Spock can only live on left-handed isomers of the sugars in our food). Duplicate Spock’s loyalties and personality are also reversed.

[5] Spock Must Die! does touch on these issues. It was in these pages that, as a young boy, I learned the words ‘solipsism’ and ‘logical positivism’, as Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty have a debate about how we know whether the consciousness that inhabits a body after it is reassembled by the transporter is the same as the consciousness that inhabited that body before the transporter broke it down. McCoy becomes concerned that if they can’t be sure of that, ‘then every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder.’

[6] Grace Lee Whitney and Jim Denney (1998). The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy. Quill Driver Books: Sanger, CA. p.95.