Has there been any follow-up of the "transporter duplication" phenomenon in "The Enemy Within" since Claire Gabriel's short story, "Ni Var," in Bantam's ST:TNV?
Has anybody followed up on "The Enemy Within"?
- Thread starter hbquikcomjamesl
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Twice that I can think of, though in both cases, it's supposed to be a surprise.
"Foul Deeds Will Rise" by Greg Cox, and "Fallen Gods" by Michael A. Martin, though the latter case might've been a Tom Riker duplicate, not a good/evil duplicate, I don't remember the specifics. The one from "Foul Deeds" was definitely based on the Good/Evil process.
You are right, it's a Tom Riker-style duplicate in Fallen Gods.
Hmm. Reading the Memory Beta entry on Foul Deeds brings back memories of a novel I'd read and forgotten (forgive me, Mr. Cox).
But nobody has come up with a follow-up that explains the phenomenon.
I assume "Spock Must Die!" took some inspiration from "The Enemy Within".
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!
In the later novels featuring Janice Rand (ie. starting in "The Captain's Daughter") and Rand's various reasons for leaving the ship partway through the 5YM, there are references to her deceased child, Annie, who may or may not have been fathered by Kirk or perhaps his evil transporter duplicate.
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Annie_Rand
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Spock_Must_Die!
In the later novels featuring Janice Rand (ie. starting in "The Captain's Daughter") and Rand's various reasons for leaving the ship partway through the 5YM, there are references to her deceased child, Annie, who may or may not have been fathered by Kirk or perhaps his evil transporter duplicate.
https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Annie_Rand
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Let's just say there's a reason that book is dedicated to Richard Matheson.
Impossible. The duplicate didn't get further than tearing Rand's dress before he left -- 1966 censors would never have allowed it to go any further, and Peter David didn't actually imply anything of the kind in The Captain's Daughter. And the real Kirk would never have abused his authority by sleeping with a subordinate -- good grief, that was the entire point of the Kirk-Rand dynamic, that his duty forbade him from pursuing his attraction to her and he never would have done so in his right mind. I deeply disliked that implication in The Captain's Daughter, so I made a point of establishing clearly in Ex Machina that the father was someone else.
Yep. As noted in the Memory Beta page I linked.
Well, he did his usual PAD ambiguity - and fans pounced on it in all the myriad ways.
He implied that Kirk might be the father. He did NOT in any way make the ugly implication that the child was the product of rape.
Yeah, it's been a long time since I read it, but doesn't Rand look back on whoever the father is wistfully? To think this refers back to Enemy Within would seem to require willful misreading of the text.
She says she didn't want to sidetrack his career because she suspected he had a great destiny, and when Sulu asks her if he did so before he died, she gets "a sad look" and says "We all do."
I suppose if someone wanted to connect that to "The Enemy Within," it wouldn't specifically contradict anything in the passage. But it absolutely contradicts "Enemy" itself, since there was simply no opportunity for such a thing. And it would have to be something the reader projected onto the text themselves, since it's not suggested by the text.
There might be one ot two Andorian transporter dupes out there unaccounted for
I have seen someone repeat the idea that Rand leaving the ship because she was pregnant was a reference to "The Enemy Within" (and I have no idea if they read "The Captain's Daughter" and drew their own conclusions from the implication or picked it up second-hand from another fan), and that Rand's daughter died young because her father was a terminally unstable transporter accident so she had some kind of genetic condition. Of course, that person also said this was the actual-factual, secret-but-true canon reason Rand left the ship, which indicates a misunderstand of a number of things that are going on.
It's amazing that anyone could misremember the events of the episode that badly. I suppose it's remotely possible to believe that after the duplicate Kirk knocked out Technician Fisher, he returned to Rand's quarters and managed to complete the rape before security could arrive at the scene. But it seems profoundly unlikely that he would've had the time, and someone would have to really want to believe Rand was raped in order to read the episode that way.
In which case, would that individual even be a Star Trek fan? And if so, would we really want such an individual to be a Star Trek fan?
I have always read it as "forceful seduction," (q.v., Khan and Marla), shading into sexual harassment, but I find it difficult to believe that even Kirk's "wolf," freed from his "lamb," would go so far as rape.
I think that's going too far in the other direction. Rape was absolutely what the duplicate intended; I mean, he literally forced her down onto the floor and lay on top of her. But he didn't get any further before she got away and called for help. It's not that he didn't have the intent, it's that he didn't have the opportunity to fulfill it.
There have been a few times on here, that I've been really confused by how someone could be a Star Trek fan. I remember a while back there was a post on here who was pissed that there were women and aliens as character in the books and wanted crews to be nothing but human men. Which to me kind of goes against everything Star Trek is meant to represent.
But of course, my main thrust in starting the thread was what I spoiler-tagged in post #4.
Which is to say that we have
Which is to say that we have
a seeming violation of conservation of mass-energy.
At a guess, I'd say it's a combination of not having seen the episode recently (or forming the belief back in the pre-streaming, pre-DVD days when any given episode was catch-as-catch-can) so the memory has a chance to play tricks, along with reading between the lines (or taking the episode seriously but not literally, to coin a phrase), seeing what the episode was able to communicate in a 1960s family-hour TV slot and extrapolating it out into the "real world" of Star Trek that wasn't limited by those constraints, seeing the literal events of the episode as a sort of visual euphemism that the adults would understand without scarring the kids.
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