Stardate: 1672.1
Quick Summary: While a survey team is down on Planet Alpha 177, there is a transporter malfunction and not only does Kirk beam back aboard the Enterprise, but so does his evil duplicate! The race is on to, first, capture the imposter, then, to figure out how to re-combine the good and evil Kirks back together again - all before Sulu and the away team die on the freezing planet. Of course they're successful, and all it takes is reconfiguring the transporter. How shocking.
Review: In case you can't already tell, the ending was pretty disappointing, predictable, and unimaginative. But can someone please explain to me, where the heck is the friggin' shuttle-craft all episode??? I also want to take issue with the transporter malfunction as the central protagonist. We're told in Next-Gen episodes later down the road that there have never been serious transporter issues in centuries of records. Holy inconsistency. And Sulu making repeated bad jokes about things like wanting hot coffee in the face of imminent death was too much. But I digress...
Haven't we all at some point, when no one was home, screamed into the bathroom mirror, "I'M CAPTAIN KIIIIIIIRK!!!", as the evil imposter does here? Ah, it's a fun moment to watch, reminiscent of my still-single bachelor days. (sigh)
The heart of this episode is the overtly psychoanalytic take on the two opposing sides of Kirk's personality. When facing his alter-ego face-to-face he states, "You can't kill me, I'm a part of you". As the good Kirk loses his strength of will and ability to make decisions, Spock observes with enthusiasm that "it's his negative side which makes him strong". This is great fodder. Later, the good Kirk realizes, "I have to take him back inside myself". There's even a Gollum-style LOTR-type camera-panning between his two "faces" to highlight his multiple personalities towards the end.
Isn't this so profound? Um, no. It's a bit too manufactured for my taste. The writers were trying too hard and, as a result, lost the subtlety that the truly profound episodes are able to muster. I do, nevertheless, think it's a pretty cool idea that the strong decision-making ability that ultimately makes Kirk the captain stems from his evil side. This is a new lens through which I'm going to watch and analyze future epsiodes. How often does Kirk's evil side really come to the forefront? How many times does the bad side save humanity through decision-making when the good side's timidness would have killed millions? Wouldn't that redefine the two terms? I want to explore this further.
Be forewarned... The evil Kirk wants to live!!!
Review: 3 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment