Captain Kirk, Lt. Sulu, Geological Technician Fisher, and three otherEnterprise crew members are approaching the end of a routine, one-day geological survey and specimen gathering mission on the planet Alpha 177. Helm Officer Sulu is tending to a doglike creature indigenous to the planet. It is a homely animal with a horn in the middle of its forehead; a pair of multi-colored sensory tube antennae; a thin horny plate covering a portion of its withers; and a thick, inflexible tail. Near the landing party’s makeshift camp, Fisher, played by Edward Madden, falls from a steep slope onto a bed of not firmly attached magnetic ore and badly cuts his hand. As he gets up, we see yellow stains all over his loosely fitting excavation clothing. Captain Kirk instructs Fisher to immediately beam back up to the ship and go to sick bay to have his injury attended to. Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott and Transporter Technician Wilson, played by Garland Thompson, are at the operator’s console of the Transporter Room waiting to receive Fisher when a red warning light starts to blink, accompanied by a portentous beeping sound. The minerals scientist has trouble rematerializing. Scotty tells Wilson to engage the “coadjustor” to compensate for the possibility of an extra Doppler wave frequency shift. After Fisher coalesces in one piece, Lt. Commander Scott notices the many yellow smears on his shirt and pants, and tells him to have his uniform decontaminated.
Captain Kirk is ready to beam up, but Scotty is not yet convinced that the transporter machinery is safe. He asks Wilson to go and retrieve a “synchronic meter” for testing. But the Chief Engineer begins the transport process anyway. James T. Kirk reappears standing on one of the circular containment plates of the open chamber. The Captain looks weakened. He holds his left hand to his brow and stumbles down from the elevated landing. Scotty helps the palpably shaken Kirk out to the corridor, leaving the Transporter Room momentarily unattended.
A humanoid figure, bent slightly with its back towards us, assumes perceptible form on the same platform disc where Kirk became visible just instants before. The man turns around and we observe a second, more savage-looking Captain Kirk, with sinister eyes darting from side to side, resembling “a rabid animal just released from its cage.” (James Blish narrative version)
The duplicate Kirk walks directly to the Transporter control console and lustfully com munes with the technology that has accidentally given him life. He leers at the mechanism with which his existence is so intimately entwined. He gazes at the phase transition coils status display with wide eyes full of desire. He runs his fingers sensually over the imaging scanner and manual sequence controls, a lewd expression etched into his face. The wanton trance of intensive pleasure is interrupted by abrupt awareness of the Transporter Room doors opening as Technician Wilson reenters. Kirk-Two leaves the departure-arrival station, and takes his first steps into the world. “Weak Kirk” has gone to his quarters to take a rest and change his shirt, but “Evil Kirk” heads out marauding around the ship, in search of mischief and licentious adventure.
Evil Kirk goes to sick bay and grabs the on duty Dr. McCoy by the scruff of the neck, demanding a bottle of stiff Saurian brandy. After gulping down a substantial quantity of the potent liqueur straight from its unusual amber flask with the curved neck, Kirk-Two slips into the private lodgings of Yeoman Janice Rand, location 3C 46. He waits to pounce unsuspectedly on his demure, blond personal assistant after she returns from her work shift. Yeoman Rand is utterly startled when she catches sight of her superior officer standing next to her in front of the cosmetics mirror. She collects herself and addresses him formally. But the second Kirk replies in an exacting tone that “‘Jim’ will do here, Janice.” “You’re too beautiful to ignore,” he continues after a pause, “too much woman.”
After taking a last satisfying slurp of the brandy and putting down the commemorative spirits bottle manufactured by the Dickel company of Tennessee, duplicate Kirk seizes Rand fiercely by the shoulders, then the back, and forcibly jerks her towards him. “Don’t fight me, Janice,” he commands. He kisses her hard on the lips and she tries to break away. They struggle and Evil Kirk wrestles the twenty year-old Starfleet officer to the ground. She scratches his left cheek tenaciously with her fingernails and flees from his grasp. Geologist Fisher is walking past Yeoman Rand’s door just as she manages to reach and open it, and he witnesses the violent and disgraceful scene. “Call Mr. Spock!” Rand shouts to Technician Fisher. Evil Kirk throws his victim to the floor and runs out into the corridor. He punches out Fisher, who was just at the point of calling the bridge for help from a wall-mounted intercom. Duplicate Kirk is now bleeding from his right hand as well as from the scrapes on the side of his face.
According to 1960s television legend, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry originally devised the transporter technology as a convenient way of saving money. The production costs of landing the Enterprise on a new planet each week, and having it take off again, would have been prohibitively steep. As an alternative, special optical shootings supervisor Darrell Anderson “turned a slow-motion camera upside down and photographed some backlit shiny grains of aluminum powder” that were inserted between the camera and a black backdrop. (Herbert Solow and Robert Justman) This visual effect, combined with the “shimmer” music composed by Alexander Courage, allegedly solved the daunting problem of personnel transport between the orbiting starship and the planets below in a manner that was action-friendly and aesthetically appealing, speeded up plots, yet was also inexpensive.
But in The Enemy Within, just the fifth Star Trek episode ever made, what is narratively expressed about the transporter are a deeply felt anxiety and a considerable amount of philosophical questioning regarding the inherent accident that belongs by necessity to this instrument of futuristic technoscience. What is manifested in the story itself is something rather different from any purported humanist optimism or self-congratulatory can-do euphoria over a job of thrift management well done.
The post-World War II cultural background of teleportation, especially within the military and maritime contexts, included the “mythological” story of the highly secretive Philadelphia Experiment, reputed to have been carried out by the U.S. Navy in October 1943. Extraordinarily advanced electronic equipment and massive electromagnetic fields were said to have been utilized in an attempt to achieve “camouflage invisibility” that instead ended up transporting the small vessel U.S.S. Eldridge from its dock in the Philadelphia Naval Yard to waters near Norfolk, VA in a matter of seconds. The bold application of Albert Einstein’s “Unified Field Theory of Gravitation and Electromagnetism” in an effort to make a warship imperceptible to the enemy during battle may have inspired Star Trek‘s concept of the Romulan cloaking device (see The Original Series episode Balance of Terror) and other similar tactical weapons. It also inadvertently resulted in an instantaneous arrival of the destroyer escort ship that was witnessed by a number of sailors on board the merchant craft SS Andrew Furuseth. As the fable has it, the Eldridgereappeared in Philadelphia some time later, but with several crew members missing, some spontaneously bursted into flames, and others either partly or wholly embedded corporeally into the metal infrastructure of the ship.
Scotty has been hard at work assessing the operational condition of the transporter. He concludes that a “complete breakdown” has taken place. After Captain Kirk was beamed aboard, Lt. Hikaru Sulu sent up the canine animal native to planet Alpha 177. Two nearly self-identical instances of the doglike creature with spiked horn reappeared on the raised transporter platform, one shortly following the other. One of the nonidentical twins is gentle and timid. The other is wildly agitated and violent, and must be tied down in a specimen case. “We don’t dare send Mr. Sulu and the landing party up,” explains Mr. Scott. “If this should happen to a man…”
Given the nonuseable state of the transporter, Sulu and the three other men are stranded on the planet’s surface. They face the life-threatening prospect of oncoming nightfall, when they will freeze to death from extreme temperatures which drop to 120 degrees below zero. They have no heating equipment with them. Using the limited energy in their hand phasers to generate warmth in some rocks provides temporary relief. But every hour that goes by brings with it a further diminishing of the chances that they will still be alive when the only vehicle that can rescue them is at last repaired. The Enterprise has as yet no shuttlecraft available.
The probable catalyst of the transporter malfunction was interference from the soft yellow ore containing “unknown magnetic elements” with “highly unusual properties” that had coated Technician Fisher’s jumpsuit. The unfamiliar mineral substance wreaked havoc in the circuits of the “ionizer components.”
As suggested by chaos theory, a system like the transporter may persist in working fine so long as propitious circumstances shield its too limited conception as a controllable sealed off system from the disruptive vagaries set off by wider environmental factors. The quantum teleportation connection is delicate, and “must be preserved by keeping the particles isolated from their environment.” An attempt is made through permanent vigilance to keep the system completely segregated and protected. But failure to sufficiently consider the impact of external changing quantities that interact with the managed causal system results in drastic disturbances. An “unaccounted for” outside variable enters into play as the provocator of an intrinsic accident. It reshuffles the complex system’s initial conditions and incites a reversibility of effects.
Still only obscurely cognizant of Kirk-Two’s existence, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Yeoman Rand convene with Weak Kirk in sick bay to weigh the merits of Rand’s accusation against Kirk of assault and attempted rape. Mr. Spock states that he found the bottle of Saurian brandy in Rand’s quarters. Weak Kirk maintains that he was not the perpetrator, invoking as counter-evidence the fact that there are no scratch marks on his cheek. Spock deduces that there is an imposter aboard the ship.
The split Kirk who was the first to come forth from the transporter mishap behaves with passivity and confusion. Spock begins to piece together that, as the consequence of having been duplicated, this incarnation of James T. Kirk has lost his strength of will and decision-making capabilities. Spock and McCoy hypothesize that Kirk-One is lacking his negative side. They conjecture that it is the base proclivities of the seemingly sociopathic and undesirable portion – towards violence, hostility, and lust – which, when “properly controlled and disciplined,” endow the Captain with his special ability to command a starship.
Weak Kirk’s escalating difficulties in making decisions are an ongoing slide into abjection that regressively consumes him as the episode proceeds. His worsening condition of disorientation and quiescence is a gradual debasement of losing parts of himself, similar to what befalls scientist André Delambre, the builder of a teleportation device, in the classic 1958 science fiction movie The Fly.
Delambre’s physical constituents, both anatomic and atomic, become tragically and “accidentally” mixed up with those of an insect. In the intriguing film adapted from a story by George Langelaan and later remade by director David Cronenberg, the French Canadian played by Al (David) Hedison fabricates a molecular disintegrator-reintegrator and tests it on himself as experimental subject-object. Delambre rematerializes with notable success in the arrival chamber. But the unforeseen strange attractor in his techno-scientific system is the factor of an ordinary housefly which buzzed into the departure chamber at the wrong moment. The fly’s molecules intermingle with those of the inventor, and the humanoid “it” emerges from the remote station with a Muscidae leg in place of one arm and a fly’s head upon its manly shoulders. What ensues is the slow deterioration of the scientist’s mind, loss of selfhood, and eventual mercy killing by his wife.
Kirk-One is finally shocked into taking action after it becomes undeniably clear that “something has happened to me.” He makes a statement to the ship’s crew via the “viewer” public address system that there is a dangerous imposter aboard the Enterprise “who looks exactly like me” and can be identified by scratches on his face.
Evil Kirk is in the Captain’s personal quarters when he overhears Weak Kirk’s announcement calling him the “imposter” through a visual display screen. Not being able to stand this designation as a pretender to their common identity, he explodes in rage. “I’m Captain Kirk! I’m Captain Kirk!” he furiously shouts while knocking over the desktop TV monitor and other objects in the room.
The duplicate Kirk applies a flesh-colored facial cream to his jowl to conceal the scrapes, and ventures out again from Kirk’s inner sanctum. Transporter Technician Wilson is passing by in the corridor. Evil Kirk asks him for his hand phaser and then delivers a knockout blow to his jaw. Acting with the instincts of a sly animal tracked by a posse of mounted hunters, Kirk-Two heads to the labyrinth of engine rooms on the Enterprise‘s lower decks to hide out. At the same time, Mr. Spock advises Kirk-One to ask himself the question of where “he” would go to elude a mass search, based on the deep knowledge of the ship’s layout shared by both opposite twins. Spock and the Captain’s meeker half also descend to Engineering on Deck 19.
In a dim, narrow space behind an anonymous row of auxiliary control units of the warp propulsion system, the two Kirks come face to face for the first time. Evil Kirk holds a phaser to Weak Kirk, but the latter summons an unexpected fount of courage. He fearlessly confronts his “negative double” with the inner conviction that neither of them can harm the other. “You can’t hurt me,” the first Kirk says. “I’m part of you. You need me.” Before we can find out if Kirk-Two is capable of shooting his counterpart, Mr. Spock furtively comes up from behind him and renders the frenzied split Kirk unconscious by applying the Vulcan nerve pinch to the base of his neck.
Evil Kirk is put under restraint in sick bay. He regains a waking state, but is engrossed by generalized fear. As he lies in bed screaming, we see on the biofunction monitor above him that almost all of his vital signs have spiked way above normal into a perilous range. Kirk-One sits down next to his mirror self and holds his hand, hoping to assuage the dread experienced by the technologically expelled thing. The first Kirk senses that he must reintegrate the accursed share being with his own incomplete self. “I have to take him back inside myself,” Weak Kirk muses. “I can’t survive without him.” Their tactile contact breaks the panic attack. The second Kirk’s bio-readings are back within acceptable values.
Evil Kirk is not so much an arithmetic, fractional half of the previously undivided Captain as he is Kirk’s internal radical other. He is a strong reminder of the biographical vicissitudes, interior volatility, relatedness to the alien and the strange, and inseparability of good and evil that make us human. The Enemy Within is a classic tale of the useful alienation necessary to the maintenance of the salutary habitat of being. It depicts the indispensability of the shadow, the mirror-phase, the sensuality of the body, and the evil twin of radical otherness to species life. The symbolic double and the awareness of death protect human existence within a certain survival zone where it resists being reduced to its predetermined future itinerary, operational statistical model, or redundant identity with myself or a series of self-same clones.
“Twenty-first century and beyond” technologies like unicellular genetic cloning; nano-robotic capillary scanning of dreams and fantasies from inside the brain; the uploading of “consciousness” into a computer network or artificially intelligent android “body;” or digitized audiovisual storage of memories for resale as entertainment cartridges intensify the prevailing reductive logic of the human being as equivalent to her formulaic informational definition.
We are primed for the eternal reproduction of all our possible xerox copies, delivered to the infinity of the same and its endlessly derived deconstructed differences.
Technology’s primary or mainstream trajectory precipitates the demise of the symbolic, artistic, and imaginary spheres as learning territories where we encounter instructive doubles. The mirror self teaches me about the potentialities of what else I might become or unknowingly already have been; the freedom to be other than what I am; and the responsibility to act in reciprocity with unfamiliar objects, others, and singularities.
Fortunately, technology has another, secondary dimension which is seductively teased out in The Enemy Within. We glimpse this possibility of wily stratagem and reversibility when Kirk-Two steps down from the transporter platform and ‘erotically’ embraces the control console in covert conjugation.
Evil Kirk is more than an accident in the sense of pure contingency. He istechnology. He is the revenge of artifice against the project of the world’s simplification in the service of which technology’s masters would seek to enlist technology’s collaboration. Technology is the domain of the radical illusion of the world, where the device evades its masters and turns its cunning against the facile convictions of its inventors who wish to “achieve their objectives” and rule a compliant world through technique. The tendency of technological reversion fights for the “objecthood” of the object, acting on its own behalf and in defense of reality, against human intention. The subject believes that he seizes, transforms, and interprets the world, but the world happily escapes this.
In the story itself, Star Trek expresses its profound ambivalence vis-à-vis the technology of the transporter. From the standpoint of the “good Kirk” – which is the position from which the highly-rated episode has almost always been interpreted – the malfunction is the transporter’s spewing out of negativity in favor of the positive. The transporter tries to exorcize evil. As a procedure, this is uncannily metaphorical of the dream of the digital or quantum teleporter’s normal functioning as a clean room clone system. The total and purified information that must become available for the system to be able to instantiate a new “me” has to be insulated from its environment and uncontaminated by strange attractors.
The standard explication of the narrative (by the official Paramount Pictures website and the Star Trek industry) as being about the splitting into good and evil Kirks never gets past Mr. Spock’s early impressions. The Science Officer at first mistakenly believes that Weak Kirk is the real Kirk and Evil Kirk is an imposter, an “extra double” who was discharged as detritus or “fraudulent illusion” by the apparatus. Spock initially thinks that what he is dealing with is a relatively trivial dualistic system of reality and its imposture, with no blowback reaction of the latter upon the former. In French dubbing, the episode is called L’imposteur, or The Imposter.
But Mr. Spock soon grasps that Evil Kirk is something more consequential than a fake, and that Weak Kirk is not the “real Kirk” either. One of Spock’s first comments pertaining to the feedback dependency between the two Kirk instances is his recommendation that the duplicate Kirk not simply be put to death as a solution. The effect of his termination on the first Kirk is unknown, and might be disastrous. With the realization among the Enterprise‘s senior officers growing that Weak Kirk is wanting in decision-making and command faculties, Dr. McCoy tries to get Kirk-One to comprehend that the wild man personified by Kirk-Two is indeed that “evil” within himself that he cannot do without. We would add that the second Kirk represents the ‘evil’ that is necessary to life, or precisely that impure ‘evil’ that the cloning system sketched by the digital-quantum teleportation technology planners of today would ban. “We all have our darker side,” McCoy tells the first Kirk. “We need it. It’s not really ugly, it’s human.” McCoy states his disagreement with the principle of good, which is really the principle of the separation of good and evil, as opposed to their mutual dependence or symbolic exchange.
According to Paul Virilio, every technology has both a rational, utilitarian purpose and a built-in accident “waiting to happen.” The accident is intrinsic or requisite, not incidental, to the given technology. An inquiry into the mishap can point the way towards understanding what is “essential” about that technology which otherwise remains hidden. For Virilio, the distended triumph of computerized and electronic media virtuality over traditional physical reality lays us wide open to the advent of “generalized” accidents, which unfold all the more quickly and virulently due to their delocalization and diffuse embedment.
We further distinguish contingent and necessary aspects of the technological accident, and speak of four stages of the analysis: (1) the ostensible design of the technology; (2) the seemingly adventitious accident which strikes as surprise and calamity; (3) the accident as sine qua non of the technology, as becomes clear after investigation; (4) the essence of the technology, as elucidated by perception of the innate accident.
Occurrences like the “worm” infiltration or “crash” of a computer network; an unanticipated new form of terrorist attack; the spreading of a mysterious disease or soldiers’ syndrome in a war zone; or the environmental hazard of radioactive nuclear fallout are first experienced as extrinsic to the assemblages which engender them. The timing or detailed characteristics of such disasters are unforeseeable, and one has the feeling of being “blindsided.” But scrutiny reveals a more primary “cataclysmic” dimension endemic to each system as intricate component or secret ruse, indicating the specific “loss” in what it means to be human that its invention has brought about. Virilio gives the name “dromological progress” to this anthropo-historical regression. He regards this process as being at least as momentous as the vaunted chronography of “technical progress.”
The rational purpose of the transporter technology is to streamline the strategic operations and missions of a starship, to beam people and objects quickly or stealthily to and from planets and other ships. The contingent accident or surprise of the transporter, in The Enemy Within, is the accidental production of the two Kirks. The necessary accident that is intimately and inextricably entwined with the technology itself is the persona of Evil Kirk, as suggested in the opening scene by his lascivious commingling with the operator’s console.
This is the side of a technology that is its ruse or sleight-of-hand, through which it will ironically destabilize or overturn our intended use and expectations of it. In this early Original Series Star Trek episode, the chicanery of technology rouses the principle of evil, of the vital necessity of evil for the survival of good. Evil Kirk is a required and integral portion of Captain James T. Kirk, not merely a remainder or excess. The deep-rooted accident of the duplicate Kirk turns a questioning spotlight on the “essence” of the transporter, which is the absolutist phantasmagoria of total knowledge of a person captured in a digital pattern image or “quantum physics” snapshot of their subatomic particles. Kirk-Two’s appearance brings into relief a deep-seated anxiety about the philosophy of cloning and the “too perfect” operational system of quantum information science and the coming digital-quantum teleporter. Techno-culture’s “vision” or fanciful goal of the transporter is the contemporary project of a wholly self-contained scientific system and hyperbolic construction of a fully self-referential human subject without real others. It is the dream of a human being understandable entirely through her information, identical to herself, and leading a completely knowable existence. The Enemy Within, as literature, questions this totalizing edifice through the tropes of the accident and the double.
Darkness has overtaken the side of planet Alpha 177 where the landing party is encamped, and Mr. Sulu and the others continue their journey to the end of the night. Their situation is getting more and more desperate, and two of them are already unconscious from the stinging cold.
Scotty the “Miracle Worker” has expedited some emergency repairs to the transporter. Using bypass circuits wired directly to the impulse engines that correct the velocity balance to within a “5-point variation,” he gets the system up and running, at least to the point of being able to try a test. The two duplicate doglike critters are placed together on a transporter platform disc, ready to be “sent through.” “Energize.” A few seconds of pause.
“Reverse.” Press a few buttons. One canine reappears on the landing plate, inert. Dr. McCoy examines the animal. “He’s dead, Jim.” Although the creature was rejoined into a single being, it did not outlive the shock of reunification due to its fear. “The animal was terrified,” Mr. Spock speculates. “It was split into two and thrust back together.”
But time is running out for the men on the planet’s surface. Kirk-One has to take the risk that the factor of his human intelligence disciplining his trepidation will make the difference between the animal’s death and his survival.
Weak Kirk goes to sick bay and releases Evil Kirk from his body restraints. He guards the negative twin with a handheld type-2 phaser, and tells him of his intention to try to go back together through the transporter to reunite them. But Evil Kirk pulls one last ruse. “I won’t fight you anymore,” he sighs. “I feel so weak. I’ll be glad when this is over.” He pretends to faint, and lunges forward onto Weak Kirk. They struggle. Kirk-Two shoves Kirk-One against a wall, then knocks him out with a pistol whipping. He claws at Kirk-One’s left cheek to produce bloody scratches resembling those that Yeoman Rand gave to him.
Evil Kirk goes to the Captain’s quarters and changes into a green shirt to match the one that the first Kirk is wearing. The second Kirk then goes to the bridge and tries to pass himself off as the real commanding officer of theEnterprise. “Prepare to leave orbit, Mr. Farrell,” he stridently orders the backup helmsman. Dr. McCoy and the first Kirk enter the bridge. The duplicate Kirk insists that he is the real James T. Kirk, but after a few moments of confusion it becomes clear to all parties just who is whom. Designated once again as the “imposter,” the second Kirk collapses into senselessness.
Weak Kirk must hold his listless double upright in his arms, seemingly with love, as they get ready to energize. He smiles to Spock, Bones, and Scotty, signaling that he has no fear. The Chief Engineer pushes down one of the three control console sliders. A long silence. Mr. Scott moves the slider back up. One Kirk reappears on the platform. We see McCoy’s tense expression, then an equally strained look on Spock’s face. “Jim?” asks McCoy hesitantly. “Get those men aboard — fast,” Captain Kirk authoritatively commands.
Sulu and the other imperiled crew members are beamed aboard, then carted to sick bay on stretchers. “Severe exposure, frostbite,” reports Dr. McCoy. “But I think they’ll make it.”