1x05 The Enemy Within

3.9/10. Hoo boy, if you want to get your episode off on shaky ground, premise it on giving William Shatner the acting partner of...William Shatner. Playing two characters who are different sides of the same person would be challenging for any performer, but it is just way outside the realm of Shatner's talents, and calling on him to play both a good-nature but indecisive Kirk and an evil impulsive Kirk is a recipe for so much ham you could ruin 10,000 bar mitzvahs.

To be generous, Shatner goes for broke here. There's nothing subtle about his performance -- it's all high volume and big on the obvious -- but he absolutely goes for it, with a leering, scheming bad guy Kirk and a tortured but ineffectual good guy Kirk. It's clearly his attempt at showing nuance and emotional range and while he never quite gets there, the attempt is intriguing if bizarre and, let's face it, not very good.

In fairness, the rest of the episode isn't especially good either. While the premise of a man being split into his component emotional parts is a solid premise for a sci-fi story, "The Enemy Within"'s examination of it is fairly shallow and trite. The whole discussions about the duality of man, particularly the back and forth between Spock and Bones, is written in such florid, stilted terms that it's amazing Nimoy and Kelly can even spit the lines out. Similarly, there's some interesting notions about the id (impulse) and the ego (altruism) as necessary parts of what makes a person who they are, with intelligence as the superego keeping everything together, but again, the episode doesn't really deliver on the promise of this exploration. And while Spock's speech about knowing the struggle well through his Vulcan detachment is, in the same vein, an interesting parallel to draw, it's more or less wasted here.

"The Enemy Within" is also a surprisingly boring episode for one with the premise of an evil twin rolling around and causing havoc. The main plot developments of the episode are over within the first 15-20 minutes, and then it's just a bunch of agonizing over what should be done and whether Kirk can go on. The ensuing forty-minute character study might be able to work in the hands of a different actor (not that the writers are blameless here), but for the most part it's a lot dull wheel-spinning before the inevitable conclusion, punctuated with Shatner overacting for two.

In the mean time, the episode creates a ticking clock in the form of Sulu (who's pretty amusing here) and an away team being stranded on a planet where the temperature is rapidly declining, waiting for Scotty to fix the transporter malfunction that caused this trouble in the first place. That's all well and good, but mostly creates a "when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?" mentality, and made me wonder why they didn't just send down a shuttle (which is pretty much just nerd nitpickery, I'll concede). To boot, the dog in a Halloween costume posing as an alien lifeform is some of that Sixties kitsch that, no matter how hard are try, makes it really difficult for me to take an episode seriously.

And yet, "The Enemy Within" presents what's been the most terrifying scene in the series thus far. Evil Kirk sexually assaulting Yeoman Janice is legitimately horrifying in its depiction, with a sort of cinema verite approach to it, without many cuts or changes in angle, that makes it feel uncomfortable real. It's hard to know whether to praise the show for its frankness or criticize it for being exploitative, but the moment stands out in an episode where little does.

Credit to Grace Lee Whitney, who offers the best performance in "The Enemy Within," both for the fear and desperation she sells while being assaulted, but also for the conflicted description of the power dynamics that were going through her head in that moment when she's being debriefed later. The gender politics of this 1960s show are, understandably, somewhat retrograde, and the affection hinted at in the end of the episode is a little gross, but "The Enemy Within" at least takes what happened to Janice seriously and treats at as the horrifying event it should be, which is something.

Still, one interesting element, and a potentially interesting premise can't save an episode executed this poorly. Letting Shatner essentially act in front of a mirror for forty minutes is a recipe for disaster, and the clunky writing did him no favors in tailoring the story to his limitations. "The Enemy Within" is the first truly awful episode of the show (and the first one to offer a wacky transporter malfunction), whose failings can be chalked up to a writer's room whose reach exceeds its grasp, and a lead whose acting talents are unsuited for pulling double duty in a shampoo commercial, let alone a full episode of network television.