STA Saturday — “The Enemy Within”

It’s Saturday, and I’ve been cheerfully re-watching the TOS-era episodes of Star Trek and trying to mine them for ideas for Star Trek Adventures as put out by Modiphius. It’s been fascinating to pay as much attention as possible to the episodes as I’m watching them—I confess to often drawing or doodling while I watch TV—but as I’m hunting for little idea seeds, I’ve just got my journal to one side to make notes as I go.

So, after The Man Trap, Charlie X, Where No Man Has Gone Before, and The Naked Time, I found myself staring down The Enemy Within.

Oof.

The Enemy Within (TOS Season 1, Episode 5… or 4?)

Okay, so to start with this is a technology-does-wobbly-thing episode, and it’s the transporter that’s gone buggy in this one, and basically the way it goes is this: Away Team on a slow-rotation planet where day is warm enough but night drops so far into the cold it’s freeze-you-solid territory, collecting samples, but a geologist falls, cuts his hand, and ends up covered in “a powdery yellow ore.” He beams up because he’s injured, and the transporter goes a little funny, but Scotty and transporter technician both find it in working order thereafter. Okay, was probably just the ore, so Scotty tells the geologist to decontaminate his ore-stained jacket and get his hand fixed, and Scotty sends the technician off to check a technobabble.

Kirk beams up next, and he’s woozy (also he beams up without the little Enterprise symbol on his chest—oops!). So Scotty walks him personally to Sickbay, conveniently leaving the transporter room empty and… another Kirk beams up, and he’s all snarly and grinning like a maniac and has on a lot of eyeliner and okay, look, what we’ve got is a Good-and-Evil Kirk problem, basically.

Scotty figures out something’s wrong with the transporter when they beam up an alien dog later (off-screen) who is being forced to wear the best “it’s an alien dog!” costume ever, because a second dog beams up and that one’s snarly and awful. Evil Kirk, meanwhile, goes hunting for Saurian Brandy and then—

deep sigh

—assaults Janice Rand.

Because she’s in this episode, so of course she’s victimized. Four for four on the ol’ Rand-as-Victim counter.

She scratches him (which becomes an identifying feature for Evil Kirk until his inevitable escape and use of make-up and stuff), and for an added bonus, there’s a heavy layer of “There’s no way Kirk would do that, he’s the captain!” gaslighting of Rand from everyone until a man backs up Rand’s accusations and hey, it’s the sixties again.

There’s a lot of pontification on two things: one, that Kirk can’t be seen as compromised or the crew will, I don’t know, mutiny or something? So they keep things close to the chest, refer to Evil Kirk as “an imposter” and meanwhile, without his evil side, Kirk loses even more of his power of diction (speaking… so… slowly…) and all ability to be a commander because… he’s got no fear and anger or something?

Also Spock is way into this. Like, he’s all “This is great! What a chance to dissect human psyches!” He’s practically having a sciencegasm.

For fuck’s sake, if you’re not going to send a shuttle, could you at least beam down a fucking tent?

Oh, and I forgot: down on the planet, Sulu and the away team can’t beam back up because the transporter would create doubles of them, so they’re slowly freezing to death.

Now, you may ask yourself: why not send a shuttle to pick them up?

… um …

ANYway, they’re stuck on the planet, which is the ticking clock problem, and supplies they beam down aren’t functional (“heating units” duplicate don’t work, though I have to beg the question as to why they don’t beam down stuff that doesn’t have moving parts, like, y’know, thermal tents/sleeping bags/what-have-you, but again, ticking clock narrative tension).

Ultimately, Kirk is reintegrated by technobabble and the courage to face his dark side, unlike the dog who dies in the attempt, and then Spock cracks a snide aside to Rand about her assault, saying Evil Kirk had his interesting qualities, eh? It’s such a horrible, off-key moment.

Definitely one of my least favourite episodes.

Scenario Seeds

Apart from the obvious: a transporter accident that affects one or more of the crew, at first I had a real struggle with this one, because it really just goes all-in on the Evil Kirk, Good Kirk thing, and there’s not a lot else even mentioned throughout the episode.

Then I remembered the planet of massive day/night temperature variation where Sulu uses a phaser to heat rocks where apparently alien doggies have still evolved to live, and then I considered the yellow ore. Like every other interesting transporter accident effect we see in Trek, it occurred to me someone with bad intentions could weaponize it—assuming they could recreate the accident.

Seed One: Slow Rotation and/or Extreme Temperature Planets

I’ve dropped some “Eyeball Planets” into my Star Trek Adventures games in the past, but instead of a planet that doesn’t rotate and develops a band of “middle-ground” temperature, this would be a planet like Alfa 177, where there’s an extreme to the day/night temperature fluctuations (and/or a very slow day/night cycle tied into that).

A Slowly Tilting Planet—If the day/night cycle is super-slow and that’s why the temperature rises and falls to such extremes, you’d could end up with something similar to the “band of habitable” you might theoretically get on an Eyeball Planet, but have it be in motion. Lifeforms like the space dog of Alfa 177 might have evolved to hibernate through the extended night-slash-winter, or perhaps they stay in constant motion: a species endlessly migrating to stick to the “warm” zone that moves across the planet as day becomes night, evolving to know to keep the sun at a particular “height” on the horizon—which would assume there’s a way to keep moving across the entirety of the planet throughout the entire day/night cycle—including very important land-bridges, or perhaps chains of islands where life-forms (or even humanoids) have to move from one to the next to stay ahead of the freezing night, but not get too far ahead into the blazing day. A planet such as this would mean people (say scientific or geological survey teams like the ones we saw in this episode) are (a) on a real clock for any singular location of the planet’s surface, and/or (b) need to keep in motion. If humanoids lived or evolved on such a planet, and now utilized slowly-moving structures (ocean-going city-sized vessels, or a kind of “caravan” city on a massive rail) rather than their ancestral migratory methods, were something to go wrong with any of those technologies, they’d be facing a massive problem—and one on a scale not easily solved by shuttles or transporters, if the populations are large enough.

Seed Two: The Yellow Ore

The ore found on Alfa 177 was decontaminated and dealt with on Enterprise before it could cause more trouble, but if someone got ahold of records or learned about or encountered the ore some other way, the player crew could come up against some new iteration of a very old problem.

Weaponized Yellow Ore—Enemies of the Federation, were they to learn of the ore, might be able to ensure they go through a transporter carrying the substance prior to the important arrival by transport of a target. This could mean (a) a diplomat intended to hold the line in tense negotiations ends up beaming in, only to find themself feeling a bit light-headed and weakened, but they head into the talks (likely after a player medical officer gives them a once over), only to fade and become weaker-willed as time goes by. Meanwhile, the enemies have snatched the “second” beamed-up version of the diplomat, the one with all the anger and fury and willpower. Once the crew first track down the source of the issue with their diplomat (likely starting with breadcrumbs leading to a missing transporter operator, given the enemies would have to deal with the chief or have infiltrated/replaced them to capture the second version of the diplomat), a dive through the history records only gives them the method of restoring the diplomat before it’s too late—but they’ll need to track down the ever-deteriorating “negative” version first. Or, (b) when meeting up with a transport carrying valuable cargo they need to get to a colony on a tight schedule, the crew find the small vessel adrift, cargo gone, crew all dead. Six people—three pairs of twins, which is unusual. Also, half the deaths appear to be violent in nature, paint a confusing crime scene, offering up little in the way of clues. However, records only list four crew in the official manifest, and none are twins in Federation records. Was the fourth crewmember responsible for utilizing the yellow ore to cover their own theft of the cargo? Are they a secret agent—Cardassian, Orion, Ferengi—out to ensure the cargo doesn’t get to the Federation colony in need? Was it an accident—and is the fourth (duplicated) crew still out there somewhere, one fading and trying desperately to outrun the violent negative version giving chase—the cargo in the shuttle the “good” crew managed to liberate when the evil duplicates first attacked them?

If you’ve got a Star Trek Adventures campaign, have you used a transporter fluke in your stories at all?