The Enemy Within is a lot of things. Hilarious? Absolutely. Completely and utterly entertaining? Even more so.
Famous for Shatner's impeccably hammy "I'm Captain Kirk" routine, The Enemy Within exemplifies all there is to love about classic Trek. When a faulty transporter splits the Enterprise's Captain into two halves - one good, one bad - its crew have to band together to make things right, with the added caveat that the evil half isn't as agreeable about the whole thing as his kinder, albeit less authoritative counterpart.
Written by Richard Matheson and directed by Leo Penn, the fourth episode of the show's first season served as a fine indicator of what was to come in the series' immediate future. Evil Kirk roams around the Enterprise in a drunken, violent stupor until the good version and Spock track him down in the engine room, all while Sulu and other members of the Enterprise's crew are trapped in the worsening climate of a nearby planet, unable to beam up after the resulting battle onboard the Enterprise.
It's remarkably tense stuff, not just for the plight of the crew on the planet below, but for the zany duality of Shatner's performance too.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
