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| "Kirk likes eggs, so I hate 'em!" |
Synopses
The Enemy Within
A transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two antithetical people. Sulu almost freezes to death. Frost doesn't form until 117 degrees below zero.
The Enterprise interferes with a business supplying wives to rich miners. "Venus drugs" are no more effective than a placebo. The magic feather was just a gag! You can fly! Honest, you can!
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| Ron Popeil invented a machine that clones people into robots AND rotisseries chicken. |
Nurse Chapel's former fiance starts turning people into robots with an ancient robot-making machine. Robo-Kirk infiltrates the Enterprise to yell at Spock.
Miri
The Enterprise finds a band of orphaned children living alone an identical copy of Earth. Kirk hits on a barely-pubescent girl.
Reactions
First off, there are two episodes in close succession in which there's an evil double of Kirk. Really?
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| If they dressed me like that, I would be angry, too. |
Third, "venus drugs" seem to just be pills that do your hair.
But mostly, I'm going to harp on the episode Miri. Everything about this episode was wrong.
Kirk is really flirty with Miri, a girl who is just hitting puberty. It's plainly wrong. He's obviously flirting with her, and when she starts to show some affection for him, the rest of the away team has to explain that to him. He's like, "Whaaaa? She likes me? Nah, that's crazy!" You've been flirting with her basically non-stop since you got here. Also, gross.
Then there's the fact that kids have been living alone, self-governing in weird little gangs, not aging, for 300 years. And they just ran low on food. What the hell kind of food have they been living on for 300 years with no agriculture or industry in their society?
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| No, no, no, no, no. |
In summary, John Kennedy was a Catholic.
Yeah, those episodes are so bad. The Enemy Within alternates between horror at how badly they handle a sexual assault investigation and hilarity at that ridiculous space dog. But I think when all was said and done, The Enemy Within was hands-down the worst TOS episode for me. I was just so angry at the way they forced a woman to work with the person who assaulted her and gaslit her about the assault and then Spock's smirky insinuation at the end that she might have liked it. It was like distilled rape culture. Ugh, ugh, ugh, please go away forever.
ReplyDeleteWith Miri, I think they were trying to temper the gross pedophilia stuff with the fact that she was "really" 300 years old, but it just didn't work. Maybe a more skillful actor could have used a kid's crush on him to get out of a tough situation without being a total creep (not flirting with her at the beginning would have been a good start), but not Shatner.