By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The internet is filled with hot takes about Star Trek, including plenty of my own. Because of that, it’s always refreshing to hear what the actual actors thought about some of their craziest onscreen appearances. One of those actors is Grace Lee Whitney, who famously played Yeoman Janice Rand in The Original Series. Like many of this franchise’s talented performers, Whitney went on to write a memoir about her experiences: The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy. In that book, she revealed some truly surprising takes on the franchise’s most controversial moments.
The perfect example of this comes from the episode “The Enemy Within,” where a freak transporter accident splits William Shatner’s character into two halves: a good Kirk and a bad Kirk. While it’s an iconic story (heck, it pretty much invented the “character must fight evil doppelganger” trope), it’s also full of shocking moments, including evil Kirk assaulting Rand. To help her have the appropriate onscreen reaction, Shatner actually slapped her without any warning. Whitney wasn’t mad, though, and credits this for helping her give a great performance. What she was mad about, though, is Spock’s reaction, one which made it seem like the Vulcan had been replaced by an evil doppelganger of his own.
Kirk v. Kirk
“The Enemy Within” is a Star Trek: The Original Series episode with a delightfully crazy premise. In a sci-fi send-up of Jekyll and Hyde, the story has the transporter accidentally split Kirk into two halves. They aren’t exact duplicates, however. One is an evil, animalistic Kirk who won’t hesitate to hurt the crew while he roams the Enterprise like a predator. The other is a good Kirk, but one who has lost some of his confidence and command capabilities. In the episode’s most shocking moment, evil Kirk tries to force himself on Yeoman Rand; she scratches his face, a tech calls security, and the dastardly doppelganger’s plans are foiled.
It’s kind of insane, and in order to help her portray the right emotions (specifically, hurt and scared), Rand actor Grace Lee Whitney wrote in her memoir (The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy) that William Shatner slapped her in the face without warning. Incredibly, she didn’t scratch his face or try to cancel him; instead, she credits his action with helping her to give a “terrific performance” in just one take. However, she ended up much angrier at the episode’s writer, Richard Matheson, for some Spock dialogue that made him sound like the biggest misogynist in the galaxy.
Towards the end of the episode, Spock asked Rand a pointed question. “The impostor had some very interesting qualities, wouldn’t you say, yeoman?” In her memoir, Whitney didn’t mince words about how this dialogue made her feel. “I can’t imagine any more cruel and insensitive comment a man (or Vulcan) could make to a woman who has just been through a sexual assault!” She went on to lament how “some men really do” believe women want to be assaulted like this. Despite ultimately liking the episode, she hated that it “gives us a leering Mr. Spock who suggests that Yeoman Rand enjoyed being [assaulted] and found the evil Kirk attractive!”
She’s not wrong: no amount of context can make Spock’s words any less problematic. They are of a piece with later stories like Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where the Vulcan isn’t afraid to forcibly invade a woman’s mind in a deeply uncomfortable scene. Every now and then, Trek writers go out of their way to write Spock as every bit the womanizing jerk that casual fans often accuse Kirk of being. Fortunately, these moments are few and far between, and a combination of (mostly) good writing and a killer performance by Leonard Nimoy helped Spock become one of the most iconic pop culture figures of the 20th century.
