I was just watching this episode on blu ray and just wanted to make some comments about it. It is one of my fave episodes. I love how Kirk got split into two halves. I was wondering why they kept calling the dark side of Kirk an imposter. That would imply he wasn't Kirk at all but someone pretending to be him.
I love it, too; I think it's a fascinating meditation on the nature of a human being. According to Marc Cushman's
These Are the Voyages, the writer, Richard Matheson, was just intending this to be a re-telling of the Jekkyl and Hyde tale, so the episode was originally written with real Kirk and imposter Kirk. But Roddenberry -- who, from all accounts, knew very well what it was like to have a dark side -- rewrote the episode to split Kirk into good and evil and also added the "B" plot about Sulu's landing party on the planet. I think that treatment made the episode much stronger than it would have been just as a straight "Jekkyl and Hyde in space."
Also when Kirk is on the transporter platform holding the dark side Kirk, what does he mean "Mr. Spock, if this doesn't work...." What does he expect Spock to do?
I wondered that, too, so much that I actually made a thread about it a few years ago, asking people what they thought that meant. You can see what people replied
here.
My one big complaint in this episode is when Spock makes a comment to Yeoman Rand about the 'interesting' qualities the imposter had" you mean like being brutal to her and attempting to rape her? oh yeah, Mr. Spock, REAL interesting
I'm old enough (just barely! :-D) to remember what the world was like in 1966 and what the worldview of the time was. Mainstream American culture has changed ENORMOUSLY in that time. Really, if you haven't lived through it personally, you would not believe what a huge cultural shift there has been in only fifty years. (The cultures and mindsets of other countries have changed, as well; I mention American culture because Star Trek was mostly written and produced by Americans, so that's the culture whose attitudes influence what we see on the screen in the TOS episodes.)
One of the things that has changed a lot is in cultural attitudes towards rape. In my opinion, things still aren't where they should be in our culture's attitude towards rape, but we have a MUCH more enlightened attitude today than we did in 1966. In 1966, it was a truism that "all women secretly want to be raped."
Yes, yes, I know that's stupid and sexist and pernicious and WRONG. But it's what people thought back then. Star Trek was forward-thinking in many ways, but it was a product of its time in many other ways, and to modern eyes, it has moments of extreme sexism that apparently were invisible at the time.
The line assigned to Spock, about the "imposter" having interesting qualities, was a product of that mindset; Spock was saying, "It excited you that Evil Kirk tried to rape you, because we 'know' that all women secretly want to be raped." It's a horrible attitude to attribute to so ethical a character as Spock, but the mindset of the time was so pervasive that the writer -- we don't know if it's Matheson who wrote that line, or one of Roddenberry's edits -- probably didn't realize what a terrible thing he was having Spock say there.
It's clear with the benefit of modern attitudes that Spock wouldn't say any such thing. We don't know who, exactly, is responsible for that egregious line, but the "real" Spock, if there is one, never said any such thing; it was clumsy writing that put that line in the poor guy's mouth.
One of the interesting things about TOS is that it's a time capsule from fifty years ago. Some things have changed very little in that time, and other things have changed hugely. When something in TOS seems completely bizarre, it's often that time capsule element at work. While it hurts to watch so beloved a character as Spock speak such a horrible line, if we take a step back and view it as a bulletin from the past, we can see how much attitudes have changed in fifty years ... and rejoice that they have.
