3. Evil Captain Kirk - Star Trek, The Enemy Within
Throughout all of Star Trek TOS and the following six feature films, we frequently get glimpses into the duality of Captain James T. Kirk. At times a gentleman and scholar, at other times a fierce fighter and lover, and sometimes just downright bug-nuts, he was truly a man of all seasons, possibly with seasonal affective disorder. Part of what I believe allowed for this diversity of character within the good captain, was down to the Matheson scripted The Enemy Within, coming only five episodes into the shows initial season. The plot involves a transporter malfunction resulting in two Kirks, one mild-mannered and indecisive, essentially a wimp, and one a forceful, vicious megalomaniac who does plenty of dastardly things, including trying to rape Yeoman Janice Rand. Shatner, who has masterfully overacted before on something Matheson wrote, has great fun here suggesting some of the demons and tendencies that are usually held in check by the good captain. Evil Kirk gets to go full crazy in more than a few scenes, and the Shatner rage that is glimpsed during moments of Khan or in select aspects of the series, has an undiluted appearance here. The door was opened in this very cut-and-dry exploration of the Captains facets, and it allowed future writers and collaborators on the show to reverse-engineer more nuanced elements of Kirks character, building off the raw materials Matheson, Roddenberry and Shatner lay down here. Im also tempted to call this the birth of the divided soul plotline that permeates so much genre fiction; that gimmick whereby a character is somehow split in half and emerges as two people, one channeling all the positive aspects, and one the negative. The only weak spot for the episode has nothing to do with Kirks personality crisis, but with the belabored means of rescue for the away fleet on the planets surface. With a broken transporter, shuttles would be an effective rescue method. Alas, shuttles would not appear until later in the series run, despite apparently existing at the time of the incident.