Yikes!
So, I remembered thinking "The Enemy Within" was kind of dumb from the last time I watched it, probably a good 10 years ago or more. It's the one where they glued some fake horns on a Pomeranian to make an alien critter for a transporter accident that splits creatures into good and evil twins. (The transporter also later renders some thermal heating units useless by splitting them in two, which maybe explains why the units are both "thermal" and "heating," although the consequence that neither a good nor an evil thermal heating unit would be functional is beyond my comprehension.)
What I didn't remember was the super-creepy attempted rape of Yeoman Janice Rand by Evil Kirk. Though scene made me pretty darn uncomfortable right from its opening moments, I told myself it could be excused as an entirely logical consequence of the episode's concept, and handled correctly would constitute legitimate drama. And the scene itself did play out in a more or less appropriate fashion -- clearly portraying Evil Kirk's behavior as horrific and very traumatic for Yeoman Rand, though she escapes before Evil Kirk takes things very far.
But then ...
At the end of the episode ...
Mister Spock kids Yeoman Rand about it.
I shit you not.
Now, this too could be viewed as logical within the context of the show, given Spock's detached curiosity about human emotions and his calculated analysis that Kirk's hostile, aggressive side is intrinsically necessary for his success as a commander. But the logic goes out the window after that point, because instead of being hurt or appalled, Yeoman Rand responds to the joke as if it's just another of Spock's ironic "oh, you humans" jibes.
And yet, while my jaw absolutely dropped that anyone would consider that joke okay, I came away from the episode with a sense of the positive.
All too often, I look around at the world and think, Good lord. We're getting nowhere. In fact, if anything, things are getting worse and worse. But the fact of the matter is, fifty years ago, a television show could portray the near rape of a female character as an acceptable springboard for humor -- and still be the most forward-looking thing on TV.
We are getting somewhere. Maybe not as fast as we should maybe not at warp speed, but we're making progress.
Cross your fingers for me, though. The next episode in the sequence is "Mudd's Women," and I see great potential for it to go wildly awry in comparison to my childhood memories of it ...
The attempted rape scene reminds me (mutatis mutandis, for after all Stevenson was a Victorian) of the scene in which Edward Hyde tramples the body of a young girl who happened to be in his way and then walks on without a care in the world until he is stopped by the bystanders and made to cough up a hundred pounds (between ten and fifty thousand pounds today, depending on how you figure it). But of course Henry Jekyll is not like Good Kirk: he is a much more mixed figure with a wild youth and an adulthood of constant struggle against that which Hydes within.
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