The Enemy Within - CDST problem

[Wingsley]

CDST - Contradictions and Discontinuity in Star Trek, a plague that naturally occurs in any TREK series, rears it ugly head when there's an obvious goof in a story that cannot be explained away.

With "The Enemy Within" now out on HD-DVD and also posted screencaps on TrekCore, this classic TREK's biggest goof would have to be...

Why didn't they just rescue the stranded landing party with a shuttlecraft? Why don't the Enterprise crew even discuss the possibility of using a shuttlecraft? And how could one incident affect all transporter rooms on the entire ship ???

Are these classic TREK CDST blunders, or much ado about nothing?

 

[Plum]

Oh yea, the ole' "Why didn't they just send the shuttlecraft" thing is indeed a Classic Star Trek conundrum.

The thing is, that's such an early first season show the truth is, not a blunder, the writers just hadn't invented the shuttlecraft yet. Oh so I hear.

Don't worry, someone will be along to fill you in with more detail.

 

[Wingsley]

Could there be another, plausible reason?

Obviously, not even mentioning the shuttlecraft is ridiculous. But could there be a reason why the characters wouldn't bother? The escalating winds making planetfall impossible, maybe?

 

[Christopher]

The usual fan explanation is that the planet's winds were too strong for a shuttle. (Given how easily those things crash, that makes sense to me.)

As for the transporter thing, it's not the only time that a story assumed either that there was only one transporter on the ship or that they all fell prey to the same problem. Bottom line, the transporter was invented as a money-saving convenience (to avoid the need for model shots of the ship landing), but it made it too easy to get out of a crisis, so ways often had to be contrived to render it unusable.

 

[ClayinCA]

I always assumed that in this story, when (for example) Scotty says, "I found a new problem with the transporter," he's not just talking about the transporter room in which Kirk was duplicated, but the transporter system of the whole ship.

As for the shuttlecraft, maybe they weren't going to be ready until Tuesday.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

^^^ The entire transporter system for the ship was damaged by the phaser hit in Engineering.

Yes, perhaps they could have used another transporter room before that happened, but when Spock neck-pinched evil Kirk (btw, that was also a series first), evil Kirk's phaser discharge blasted a hole in some critical piece of machinery in Engineering that services all the ship's transporters, thereby knocking them all out of commission.

There is an even more fundamental question here, though: Why didn't they beam up the landing party anyway (before the Engineering phaser incident) with an eye towards sorting out the duplication problem later? Yeah, so you get an evil Sulu and a nice Sulu... isn't that better than one (very dead) Sulucicle?

 

[Wingsley]

"Sulucicle", huh? I wonder if killed Sulu would be considered Sulucide.

Sorry.

I wonder if the "evil" Sulu woud've had a thing for Uhura...

 

[Nebusj]

Professor Moriarty said:
There is an even more fundamental question here, though: Why didn't they beam up the landing party anyway (before the Engineering phaser incident) with an eye towards sorting out the duplication problem later? Yeah, so you get an evil Sulu and a nice Sulu... isn't that better than one (very dead) Sulucicle?

Fixing a broken transporter is a relatively known problem, and the supplies beamed down to Sulu meant his party was alive -- frostbitten, granted, but in remarkably good health given the circumstances -- for a good long while. Finding a way to merge two people into a single entity would be a vast problem they couldn't be sure there'd be any way to solve until, well, the transporter was fixed.

 

[Noname Given]

Nebusj said:

Professor Moriarty said:
There is an even more fundamental question here, though: Why didn't they beam up the landing party anyway (before the Engineering phaser incident) with an eye towards sorting out the duplication problem later? Yeah, so you get an evil Sulu and a nice Sulu... isn't that better than one (very dead) Sulucicle?

Fixing a broken transporter is a relatively known problem, and the supplies beamed down to Sulu meant his party was alive -- frostbitten, granted, but in remarkably good health given the circumstances -- for a good long while. Finding a way to merge two people into a single entity would be a vast problem they couldn't be sure there'd be any way to solve until, well, the transporter was fixed.

the one thing that bothered me was that while mechanical devices ceased functioning - what kept them from sending gown insulated tents and warmer clothing/jackets, etc.? All though the episode, it's Sulu and his frozen crew in ship's uniform clutching ONE thin wool blanket.

 

[Nebusj]

Noname Given said:
the one thing that bothered me was that while mechanical devices ceased functioning - what kept them from sending gown insulated tents and warmer clothing/jackets, etc.? All though the episode, it's Sulu and his frozen crew in ship's uniform clutching ONE thin wool blanket.

It's obviously not ``one thin wool blanket'', despite appearances. Sulu and party are in temperatures explicitly given as 117 degrees below zero, getting near about when the oxygen condenses out of the atmosphere, and while he was frostbitten he was alive. That's absolutely phenomenal protection against the cold.

 

[Outpost4]

Noname Given said:
the one thing that bothered me was that while mechanical devices ceased functioning - what kept them from sending gown insulated tents and warmer clothing/jackets, etc.?

Pattern buffers in the transporter specifically block plot devices. Sorry.