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.

The Corbomite Maneuver

Written by: Jerry Sohl
Watch online on CBS.com

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ was the first episode of Star Trek as a regular series.

Premise

While mapping an unexplored region of space, the Enterprise encounters a cube-shaped alien device that homes in on the ship and starts emitting lethal radiation. After destroying the object, the Enterprise crew presses onwards in search of the device’s owner. They soon encounter a starship immensely larger and more powerful than their own, commanded by a being named Balok, who threatens to destroy them. 

Themes

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ is a story about deceptions and misunderstandings and moving beyond them.

The mind: Intellect vs emotion

As usual, intellect and emotion—more specifically, instinct or ‘gut’—are portrayed in opposition. As in the previous episode, this is expressed through a chess metaphor. In this case, poker is invoked as the opposite of chess.

What it means to be human: Irrationality

Spock’s reason leads to an almost literal dead end. Threatened with destruction by a far superior force, he is forced to conclude:

SPOCK: In chess, when one is outmatched, the game is over. Checkmate.

KIRK: Is that your best recommendation?

SPOCK: [...] I regret that I can find no other logical alternative.

It is then up to Kirk to think laterally and find an irrational solution to their problem, by lying to Balok and bluffing him out of destroying the Enterprise.

The mind: Mind vs body

Star Trek’s familiar dualism is evident both in the puppet that Balok initially uses to represent himself, and in his true appearance. The puppet has proportions similar to the Talosians of ‘The Cage’—a hugely enlarged head and a slender, frail body.[1]

When Balok’s true form is revealed at the end of the episode, the dualism is even more profound: Balok has the appearance of a human child, portrayed with a shaved and polished head. This style draws attention to his cranium, which is further accentuated by the headgear he wears. His voice is overdubbed with an adult, male voice. I do not think that we are meant to understand Balok as a juvenile of his species, but that the advanced nature of his species has gained tremendous intelligence at the cost of a punier physical body.

Benevolence

Addressing his crew, Kirk explicitly states an assumed correlation between a species’ advancement and its benevolence: ‘In most cases we have found that intelligence capable of a civilisation is capable of understanding peaceful gestures. Surely a lifeform advanced enough for space travel is advanced enough to eventually understand our motives.’

This assumption does not need to connote any particular morality, however. It could simply be that there is a self-selecting quality to the observed phenomenon to which Kirk refers. Spaceflight requires the harnessing of tremendous energies, and it could be that overly-aggressive civilizations tend to use those energies to wipe themselves out before they get a chance to explore the galaxy. The Drake Equation implicitly contains just such a notion when considering just interstellar radio communication, let alone starflight.[2]

What it means to be human: Fallibility

As Lt Bailey cracks under pressure, he represents a rare example of Star Trek attempting (however heavy-handedly) to portray a character reacting in a psychologically credible way to the events unfolding around them. The story’s conclusion provides an explicit acknowledgement of human fallibility, as Bailey prepares to join Balok for a time (emphasis mine, in bold):

BALOK: Ah. You represent Earth’s best, then.

BAILEY: No, sir, I’m not. I’ll make plenty of mistakes.

KIRK: But you’d find out more about us that way, and I’d get a better officer in return.

Kirk observes that humans are not what we are despite our flaws, but because of them.

Ethos: Mercy

Balok’s final test for the Enterprise crew is one to assess their mercy. After the Enterprise breaks free from the tractor beam of his ‘pilot vessel’, his ship appears to lose propulsion and life support. It transmits a distress signal so weak that Uhura doubts that Balok’s mother ship can hear it. Despite the Enterprise having been attacked by the buoy and repeatedly threatened with destruction by Balok, Kirk’s immediate reaction is to mount a rescue mission:

‘First Federation vessel is in distress. We’re preparing to board it. There are lives at stake. By our standards, alien life but lives nevertheless.’

He reminds McCoy:

‘What's the mission of this vessel, Doctor? To seek out and contact alien life, and an opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean.’

De-escalation

There are two separate and striking de-escalations of conflict in ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’. The first occurs after the Enterprise has destroyed the device that had pursued and irradiated the ship. Kirk discusses his next move with Spock:

KIRK: Care to speculate on what we’ll find if we go on ahead?

SPOCK: Speculate? No. Logically, we’ll discover the intelligence which sent out the cube.

KIRK: Intelligence different from ours or superior?

SPOCK: Probably both, and if you’re asking the logical decision to make

KIRK: No, I’m not. The mission of the Enterprise is to seek out and contact alien life. [...] Navigator, set a course ahead.

Protagonists in adventure series routinely encounter and overcome obstacles in pursuit of some goal. However, the goal here is of a fundamentally different kind from traditional adventure fare: Kirk is not seeking anything other than peaceful contact with a new civilisation. Now that the immediate threat has been removed, the conflict is thoroughly de-escalated and Enterprise continues on as if nothing has happened. There is no grudge here. I suggest that this is highly unusual in an adventure series, even today.

The second de-escalation takes place at the episode’s conclusion, after Balok sends his distress signal and Kirk leads a rescue mission to his ship.  In Star Trek’s signature style, what began as confrontation finishes with the former adversaries holding hands. In the case of this episode, quite literally!

Kirk doesn’t even seem to mind that Balok has been misleading him all along. The bluffs in ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ go both ways. Kirk successfully bluffed Balok out of destroying the Enterprise—or at least, thinks he did. When he finally gets to meet Balok, he learns that he himself has been duped. Most obviously and trivially, the visage they have come to know as Balok is a deception. More significantly, Kirk learns that  Balok has been testing humanity to verify the non-belligerency of our species. This means that Kirk might well have been fooled about almost everything Balok has said: Did he ever really intend to destroy the Enterprise? Was he really towing the ship to a First Federation planet (or just through deep space to see if Kirk would try to escape)? He was certainly lying in the distress call that Kirk treated as genuine. The episode concludes with a protagonist who has been thoroughly misled, but who still extends the hand of friendship.

Romancing the ship

The episode contains an explicit reference to the captain’s romantic relationship with the ship:

KIRK: When I find the headquarters genius that assigned me a female yeoman—

MCCOY: What’s the matter, Jim? Don't you trust yourself?

KIRK: I’ve already got a female to worry about. Her name’s the Enterprise.

Later, Balok identifies in Kirk a kindred spirit. At the episode’s conclusion, he says:

‘Now, before I bring back the Fesarius, let me show you my vessel. It is not often I have this pleasure. Yes, we're very much alike, Captain. Both proud of our ships.’

A captain’s relationship with their ship is cross-cultural in Star Trek.

As science fiction

The bluff at the heart of ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ relies on an encounter between groups of people who do not know each other’s capabilities:

‘Two groups of people meet. The more powerful group threatens to destroy the weaker. The weaker says that any attempt to do so will unleash a tremendous force that will destroy the attacker.’

For the premise to work at all, the more powerful group must believe that such a force might conceivably exist, and have no easy way of testing the claim without risk. The nature of the force is essentially unimportant: it could be magical, technological, or quite mundane (‘My uncle commands three legions and will avenge our deaths!’)

The strongest science-fiction element of ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ is actually in its meta-narrative. Kirk’s bluff—that there is an undocumented destructive material and device incorporated into his ship’s hull—is science fiction. Unable to match Balok’s power, Kirk relies on what we would now describe as social engineering to provide protection for his ship.

‘Dangerous, savage child-race’

Balok accuses humanity of savagery:

‘Your vessel, obviously the product of a primitive and savage civilisation, having ignored a warning buoy and having then destroyed it, has demonstrated your intention is not peaceful.’

I think it’s hard to make any charge of savagery stick to any part of this episode. On encountering the alien device, the Enterprise crew takes no aggressive action whatsoever; they simply wait and observe it. When it does not seem like there’s anything left to learn, they attempt to navigate around it peacefully. Only when the device actively pursues them and emits lethal radiation do they destroy it. Then, even after the device’s hostile actions, Kirk remains committed to making peaceful contact with the device’s builders. Kirk’s explanation of his actions rings completely true:

‘We destroyed your space buoy as a simple act of self-preservation. When we attempted to move away from it, it emitted radiation harmful to our species. If you've examined our ship and its tapes, you know this to be true.’

If anything, it is Balok’s (or, at least, his civilisation’s) motives that are morally suspect. The ‘buoy’ (if that is truly the purpose of the device) does not broadcast any kind of warning message, it pursues the Enterprise when it tries to withdraw peacefully, and it emits radiation lethal to life forms similar to those of its makers. Balok then goes on to terrorise helpless captives. Of course, this is all done in the context of ‘testing’ humans, but these are tests that would be unlikely to impress even a 21st century ethics committee.

Conclusion

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ offers the Enterprise crew plenty of provocation to offer violent resistance to Balok, but they never give into it. Indeed, they offer Balok assistance when they think he needs it.

Literary and mythic references

Balok explicitly refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He describes his menacing-looking dummy as ‘Mister Hyde to my Jekyll’. This cultural knowledge was presumably derived from Balok probing the Enterprise’s computer records earlier in the episode.

Other notes

Thank you to D for pointing out that the Cuban Missile Crisis was recent history when this show was written and aired. In ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’, Kirk dares Balok to find out whether the Corbomite device actually exists. The real-world superpowers knew each other’s destructive capabilities did exist, but dared each other to find out whether their opponent was truly willing to use those powers. Could this have been the real-world stimulus for this episode?

Mission objectives

This episode takes place entirely aboard the Enterprise and Balok’s pilot vessel, with no worlds visited, let along explored. Balok and the First Federation are, however, a first contact for humanity, and Spock explicitly states, ‘We are the first to reach this far.’

Objective	This episode	Series so far
To explore strange, new worlds	0	1 (33%)
To seek out new life and new civilizations	1	2 (67%)
To boldly go where none has gone before	1	2 (67%)

Previous episode: ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’
Next episode: ‘Mudd’s Women’

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Footnotes

[1] Indeed, Balok resembles the Talosians so much in general form that the action figure that toy company Mego released in 1975 to represent ‘The Keeper’ had a head and robe clearly modelled more after Balok’s puppet than the Talosian.

[2] The final variable in the equation, L, represents the length of time during which a technological civilization transmits radio signals into space. Carl Sagan called attention to the way that a civilisation’s tendency to self-destruct was necessarily a limiting factor on the value of L. Roddenberry was certainly aware of the Drake Equation as early as 1964, but I have not seen direct evidence that he had reached the same understanding of L that Sagan developed. On the other hand, if he had developed such an understanding, it could explain the assumption of generally benevolent aliens that forms a core part of the series’ ethos.