Yeah, it’s not a dealbreaker for me (obviously), but like it is for you it ain’t my favorite episode anyway. And the illogical nature of that particular dilemma always stuck out to me, even when I was eight years old. It’s valid Trek-nerdom fodder for criticism.
To your larger point that something has to go wrong with Transport or Comms for a crisis to occur planetside, I agree. And to me that’s plausible and fine. Most things are routine. The episodes are about crises. And those problems are going to lead to crises.
I would, if it weren’t for the fact that The Galileo Seven was a script built entirely around the shuttlecraft produced just a few weeks later than The Enemy Within. Even if the script wasn’t finished, the whole concept of the show was the craft.
Early on they were writing the writers bible along with the scripts. And it shows.
Funny story. They decided that every Vulcan name would be like Spock. Beginning S ending K. Thus Sarek. The list of names included Splick and Spook. Neither, thank the Great Bird of the Galaxy, was used.
Would the show have been better if they hadn’t told the audience there were two Kirks up front, and hadn’t made them recognizeably different? So that the audience was having the same confused reaction to the things the evil Kirk was doing? Some real mystery and suspense?
Except that, even in an hour show, they’d want to move things along. I also believe that they wanted things to be easy for the audience who were watching this unusual kind of show for the first time. Wagon Train to the Stars, remember?
Sure, but I think it would move along. Kirk beams up. Meets with Spock, then they split up. Then Kirk does a bad thing. Then Spock meets Kirk, asks him about the bad thing, Kirk doesn’t recall it. Is there something wrong with Kirk? Kirk says he’ll go to sick bay. Then you see bad Kirk in sick bay, doing bad stuff. And so on. Don’t string it out too long, but don’t reveal the nature of the crisis until you have to for resolution.
