If you have any comments on this review, please email me at the address at the bottom.
A landing party is visiting the surface of Alpha 177 to gather samples of the flora and fauna on the planet. It's a nice scene reminding us of the Enterprise's exploratory mission. One of the crewmen falls and injures his hand, so he beams back to the ship for treatment. He's covered in some kind of "ore", which seems to cause problems with the transporter equipment, but he arrives safely.
The transporter checks out OK, so Scotty beams aboard Kirk next. Kirk seems dizzy when he arrives, so Scotty escorts him out of the transporter room, conveniently leaving no one there when a second Kirk materializes moments later. The music and lighting leave no doubt that the second Kirk (I'll call him evil Kirk and the first one good Kirk) is not a good guy.
Evil Kirk initially starts moving around with jerky, animal-like motions, but when he starts interacting with the crew, he pulls himself into a more dignified appearance. However, he storms into sickbay and rudely demands Saurian brandy from McCoy. Not only is this out of character, but he does so in front of a low-ranking crewman and then manhandles McCoy when he doesn't comply quickly enough. Then evil Kirk leaves sickbay and wanders the halls drinking (apparently unnoticed by the crew) until he happens upon Yeoman Rand's quarters. He enters her quarters to await her return.
Meanwhile, good Kirk has gone to his quarters for a nap. Spock visits him and relates that McCoy said Kirk came by demanding brandy. Kirk says he wasn't in sickbay and McCoy must be pranking him. Spock agrees and leaves rather brusquely. I did appreciate how evil Kirk's odd behavior with McCoy wasn't ignored, and at this point it seems pretty reasonable that this incident would be shrugged off.
Rand returns to her quarters, and evil Kirk reveals his presence. He immediately sends all the wrong signals, displaying the nearly-empty bottle of brandy and saying she should call him "Jim". Evil Kirk cuts to the chase pretty quickly and starts sexually assaulting her. I will give Rand a lot of credit here for fighting back immediately and doing everything she can to get away from him. She scratches his face and manages to open the door to the hallway and call for help to a passing crewman. Evil Kirk rushes out to knock out the crewman - apparently Rand got away at this point. (The poor crewman was the same one that got injured on the planet and inadvertently started the whole problem. I suspect that this was economy in not paying for too many extras, but it's also kind of nice to see a somewhat familiar face.)
Rand reports the assault to Spock and McCoy. She is understandably upset and also understandably very uncomfortable to be accusing her captain. She does stick by her story. But when she mentions that she scratched his face, good Kirk points out that he doesn't have scratches. This confuses everyone.
Meanwhile, Scotty has beamed back a small animal from the planet - this is some of the worst costuming, as the "animal" is clearly a small dog in an animal suit. Scotty discovered that a duplicate of the animal materialized shortly after, and the duplicate is mean and aggressive. While they don't reveal it to Scotty, good Kirk, Spock, and McCoy put the pieces together and realize that Kirk must have been duplicated in the same way. Moreover, Spock has deduced from observing good Kirk's increasingly indecisive behavior that evil Kirk is not a duplicate, but a complementary "half". The good Kirk half is composed of what we consider to be the "good" components of human behavior, such as compassion, and the evil Kirk half is composed of the "bad" components, such as aggression and lust.
Scotty says that they'll have to figure out what is wrong with the transporter before they can beam back the rest of the landing party. Since the planet's surface gets deadly cold at night, a solution needs to be found rapidly. Sulu and three other crewmen are trapped on the surface. The Enterprise tries to beam down some kind of heaters, but they are duplicated and for some reason will not work. It's not clear to me why they couldn't beam down matches and materials to burn, but hey. Sulu and the others on the planet start using their phasers to heat up rocks to keep them warm, but this is only a stop-gap measure.
Good Kirk orders a ship-wide search for an "impostor" that looks exactly like him, except for scratches on his face. Of course, evil Kirk hears the announcement and finds makeup to try to hide the scratches. Spock and good Kirk make the educated guess the evil Kirk will try to hide in engineering, so they go there to search. They capture evil Kirk in fairly short order, but not before evil Kirk accidentally shoots his phaser and damages another transporter circuit. (I liked this economy of writing - it seems like usually on TV shows, people shoot weapons and there's no consequence to it. But here, it served as another setback.)
Evil Kirk is restrained in sickbay. McCoy says that he is slowly dying for an unknown reason; presumably this means that good Kirk is dying, too, although they don't say that. It becomes even more urgent to fix the transporter, although it's not clear why a working transporter would be able to "fix" the problem of two Kirks.
Scotty gets the transporter fixed, and they put both animal creatures into the transporter. They dematerialize the two animals and when the beam is rematerialized, there is only one creature - but it's dead. Spock and McCoy's initial conclusion is that the shock of recombining the two halves killed the creature, but McCoy orders a more thorough autopsy.
But the crewmen on the planet are in critical condition and can't wait for the autopsy results. Spock opines that Kirk's intellect and knowledge of what is going on will prevent the kind of shock that the animal had. Good Kirk decides to combine his two halves in the transporter beam.
Through some poor judgment on good Kirk's part (I suppose that's sort of the point of the episode), evil Kirk escapes and goes to the bridge posing as the "real" Kirk. He is more convincing than in his original attempts, acting relatively civilized toward the bridge crew, including Spock. But then McCoy shows up with good Kirk, and the jig is up. There is a rather painfully drawn out scene of evil Kirk begging not to die and good Kirk reassuring him, until they are able to grab evil Kirk.
In short order, both Kirks are on the transporter pad. Spock himself beams them away and rematerializes them. There is a big pause when the single Kirk arrives, until he says decisively that they need to rescue the crewmen on the planet, and we know that the whole, real Kirk is back.
The crewmen from the planet are badly injured, but will survive. Kirk and Rand have an awkward reconciliation. And then bizarrely, Spock comments to Rand that evil Kirk had some interesting characteristics. Say what? This was a very odd ending to this episode.
This episode is a classic TOS parable, using the technology of science fiction to explore humanity. Here, technology was used to somehow split Kirk into "good" and "evil" halves. "Good" and "evil" may be too simplistic to describe this. Perhaps it was more "civilized" and "primitive" halves. The "civilized" half could consider things such as the welfare of others, the pros and cons of taking specific actions, and possessed empathy. The "primitive" half focused more on satisfying immediate urges, through drinking, violence, and sex. The "civilized" half could think long-term, while the "primitive" half did not.
The crux of the story is that good Kirk appears to lose his decision-making ability when he loses his "evil" half. Do good leaders really need a "primitive" side to them in order to be effective? It's an interesting hypothesis, and possibly correct. A good leader must make decisions that take risks, potentially harm some people while helping the greater good, and can't please everyone. There is a certain level of controlled ruthlessness that is required. Good Kirk got so caught up in the possibilities, possibilities that might lead to various bad outcomes, that he couldn't choose between them. He empathized with his evil half and with Sulu and the others on the planet and became paralyzed with worry for everyone.
Related to this was Spock's conversation with Kirk about the captain not being able to show any weakness to the crew. I think it is very true that for such independent, large vessels that often operate for long periods without close contact with their own civilizations, the captain must appear confident and capable at all times. The crew must feel like the captain always knows what he's doing, or discipline, morale, and the chain of command begin decaying. It's not often talked about quite as bluntly as Spock does here, but Spock can be quite frank. It fits very well with Kirk's character that he recognizes that he was going astray in this aspect of captaining, and rectified it immediately. Also, note later how the idea that he might be so paralyzed in his decision-making that he was relinquishing command seems to knock some sense back into him. As established in "The Naked Time", his greatest fear is losing command.
I enjoy the episode's take on splitting a person's personality like this and seeing how it plays out. However, the episode does drag out a little long, especially after evil Kirk is captured. The idea of evil Kirk escaping from sickbay and going to the bridge, where good Kirk must confront him again, seems a bit superfluous.
This episode is often pointed to as an example of stereotypical William Shatner bad acting. However, I think he creates an effective contrast between the two halves of Kirk. A lot of the "badness" of the evil Kirk's acting can also be attributed to the cheesy lighting and music whenever evil Kirk takes an action, which is part of the campiness of TOS. I wouldn't want to watch evil Kirk forever, but it's effective in this episode.
Now, the episode does have a number of plot holes. How could the transporter separate a being into two halves that are opposites in temperament? First, there is a significant problem of conservation of matter: where does the matter for the second being come from? The atoms forming evil Kirk had to originate somewhere. Second, how does an error in the transporter result in the split of temperament? This can really have no good explanation, and fortunately the episode doesn't try to explain it beyond calling it a malfunction.
The second big plot hole is that there is no use of shuttlecraft to rescue Sulu and the other crewmen off of the planet. This episode was early enough in the series that the idea of a shuttlecraft had not yet been introduced. However, it's pretty ludicrous to think that the transporter beam is the only method of transport on and off the ship. It may be the quickest and most efficient in many cases, but it seems like a more reliable and traditional method of a smaller shuttle-type ship for transport would exist, if only as a back up. And in fact, later in the first season, we do see that the Enterprise has shuttlecraft. Poor Sulu and the others - they almost froze to death and no one thought of the shuttlecraft!
The last issue in the episode that I will comment on is the treatment of Yeoman Janice Rand in the episode. I mentioned above in the episode description that I was pleased to see her fight back when evil Kirk began to attack her. While he started out trying to kiss her against her wishes, the aggressiveness of the scene leaves little doubt that he intended to rape her.
Women on TOS are generally treated as less capable and reliable than the men, despite assertions to the contrary in the show. This is clearly due to the show being made in the less-progressive 1960s - they tried to show "equal" women, but couldn't quite envision it. Given that backdrop, I thought the show treated Rand pretty well after her attack by evil Kirk. Spock and McCoy clearly did not believe Kirk would commit such an assault, but they never flat-out told her she was imagining things or made it up. Even when good Kirk arrived, he protested his innocence and showed that he did not have the scratches on his face, but he didn't discount her story. This was the key to good Kirk, Spock, and McCoy realizing that there was an intruder/impostor on board.
But, the relatively good treatment of Rand immediately after her attack was reversed in the last few moments of the show. Spock seemed to make a very out-of-character and in-bad-taste joke at the expense of Rand's attempted rape. I will chalk this down to TOS's need to try to end every episode on a joke, but it was really jarring and distasteful.
avondale@astro.umd.edu