Trek Review: The Enemy Within

It's been quite busy lately with the wedding plans starting to come together among other things going on in the world. I'll get blogging on those as soon as I get a chance. Nothing gets in the way of progressing through our Star Trek and Thunderbirds episodes though!

The Enemy Within

This is one of those famous episodes as I can recall scenes from it but don't actually remember seeing it in its entirety. However, I was quite surprised at how good this episode was.

Surveying a planet, the Enterprise must beam up a landing party before the cold of night. A crewman with a minor injury beams aboard first for medical attention before Captain Kirk. Once aboard the ship, Kirk feels a bit queasy, so Scotty walks with him to the Captain's quarters. Unknowingly to either is that the transporter beams up another duplicate of Captain Kirk while the room is unattended.

This new Kirk begins roaming the ship and drinking Saurian brandy and attacks Yeoman Rand. Meanwhile, Scotty discovers a problem with the transporters when they beam up an alien dog (a dog, in an alien suit! So cute!) and an 'evil' duplicate appears.

The crew become aware that this must also have happened to Kirk and a Kirk on Kirk (or his lookalike) duel brings the imposter to sickbay for monitoring. Sulu and the landing party begin freezing on the planet's surface before Scotty attempts to combine the two dog (halves) together - unsuccessfully. It's with Spock's mathematical mind that Kirk is able to be saved.

This was quite a good episode in that the friendship between Kirk, Spock and McCoy is starting to begin to show and look natural. Kirk's interactions with the crew also feel more 'real' to me now.

The transporter malfunction is the first of many that will form the basis for a Trek episode in the future no doubt and the writers obviously hadn't thought of shuttlecraft at this point because no one thought to use one of those to rescue Sulu and the landing party!

In any case, this episode was quite well done.

Overall rating: 8/10

For those with the Blu-ray set, select the 'red button' from the disc menu for a music video of the new remastered special effects, in DVD quality format :