Star Trek, the Double in Literature, and the Enemy Within

And What This Says About the Human Condition

Feb 03, 2025

After 9/11 I struggled to find a way express my anguish over a number of current events. I didn’t want to be one of those preachy poets who think they can change the world with mediocre poems they rush off in a vain attempt to be “relevant,” so I decided to create an alter ego called Eduardo who himself is the alter ego of a first-person narrator who also happens to be my alter ego. Did you get that?

This Eduardo is a hapless numbskull, the personification of all of the sociopathic meanness and self-absorption that is becoming more and more the American Way.

Here are the the first two prose poems from that sequence:

I.

This cave—my sadsick head—everyone fixed on a dark day when Death’s face shone forth like a show dog’s wet nose. For once the eye before the “I.” “Try to keep busy,” Eduardo says, wanting to cheer me up. “Stalk a beautiful girl, stroke her red hair, praise the curve of her shoulders in a hastily learned foreign language.” “Forget the girl,” I say. “Forget the TV, especially.” “How ’bout them ghosts,” Eduardo chants, my head about to explode. And here’s Mother Earth with fiery celestial balls bearing down on her; here’s the American Sphincter Muscle as loose as a goose. “I’m talking about fear, Eduardo, about doomsday devices which may or may not exist.” “Fly, then, false shadows of Hope, I shall chase thee no more.” What drama queen said that? Nowadays we’d settle for a second-hand miracle, like last night on the outdoor patio, munching corn chips and guacamole, no fuel-filled planes overhead, no skunks hiding in the bushes. Voluptuaries of all ages, of every species and sex: “Welcome!” And this is how we spend our days …

II

Eduardo, wash that finger if you plan to cook tonight … I always wanted a friend, even an enemy, named Eduardo. I’d show him off to people, cause a ruckus. Create a chaos like an upswelling of a well—really swirling … Before we left the cleaners we got the bad news: skunks had caused a landslide at the dumpster. There I stood, beat-up cat carrier in one hand, trusty nine-iron in the other. This could’ve been my much-anticipated photo op, but Eduardo had left the camera at home. He stood behind a grimy milk truck, carving out WASH ME with his right index finger. Which might suggest Eduardo is a punk. But Eduardo is my friend, Eduardo is my enemy.

[from While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems While the Undertaker Sleeps

As of late, I’ve become more disturbed than usual by modern-day examples of man’s inhumanity to man. I’m sure that my concerns stem partly from America’s choice to sign up for an agenda based on meanness and cruelty run by a cast of hoodlums and fruitcakes right out of A Clockwork Orange—guys, and they’re mostly white guys, who are ready and willing to inflict physical, emotional, financial, and reproductive pain on people just because they can.

None of this human cruelty is new of course, but it does seem to be on steroids at the moment, fed by the frightening tag-team of Anger and Violence. Sometimes they act out individually, but when in the ring together, they are a formidable duo.

Which brings me to the double in literature, which has always fascinated me. Novels with alter egos had their days during the Gothic period with books based on the idea of the duality of human nature, that is, the potential for good and evil within each of us. There is a reason that my Master’s thesis was a translation of the little-known Latin epic Psychomachia written by Marcus Aurelius Prudentius in the early fifth century AD. Psychomachia means, literally, “the battle for the soul.” In this thousand-line Latin poem, mimicking the dactylic hexameter of the battles in Virgil’s Aeneid, the virtues battle the vices in an epic confrontation. In short, the action in the poem, metaphorically, represents the struggles humans experience while balancing their good and evil sides.

In Gothic literature, we see this conflict appear in doubles or alter egos, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, William Wilson, and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs. This doubling even controls the psychology in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the Monster being Dr. Frankenstein’s alter ego. In each case, the ideal ending would involve good triumphing over evil.

And yet the situation is more complex than this, as exemplified in one of the original Star Trek episodes called “The Enemy Within,” written by the iconic science fiction writer Richard Matheson, most famous for his vampire novella, I Am Legend, made into a great movie starring Will Smith.

A summary of the episode might go like this: While beaming up from planet Alpha 177, the transporter malfunctions and splits Captain Kirk into two Captain Kirks. One is the "good" Kirk, whose unconditional goodness makes him weak and indecisive, which becomes a problem because his crew is stranded on Alpha 177, and he needs to make life-saving decisions. The other Kirk is pure evil, characterized by violent outbursts, bullying, sexual deprivation, and all kinds of lying and chicanery. (Sound like anyone we know?)

What follows is confusion and mayhem because the crew doesn’t realize that there are two Captain Kirks wandering around. Finally, both the good Kirk and Spock figure it out, but the question is: how does one put Humpty Dumpty back together again. You can’t kill the bad Kirk because that will leave you with a good Kirk who incapable of captaining the Enterprise or inspiring the loyalty he needs to do that job.

And here’s where the episode becomes fascinating.

Two things happen. First, Scotty figures out a way to send the two Captain Kirks through the transporter and bring them back as one, though there is a risk that both Captains might die. Secondly, and this was a stroke of genius by Matheson, the good Kirk himself realizes that he needs the evil Kirk to make him a whole person and give him the strength and fortitude to be the heroic Captain Kirk that is a hero to his crew.

Consequently, he tries to convince the evil Captain Kirk to go on this transporter journey with him, which entreaty of course fails. Instead, the bad Captain Kirk attacks the good Kirk and a mano a mano battle ensues, which, metaphorically is also a psychomachia. Eventually, Spock intervenes, stunning the evil Captain Kirk with his phaser.

But here’s the cool part. The good Kirk drags the bad one over to the transporter and, literally, embraces his double, as they are beamed off the ship, then returned as one whole individual. In other words, the good Kirk, because of his decency, embraces the worst part of himself, which is a lesson for all of us. For us, the trick of living an authentic life is to embrace our dark side (the Freudian Id) without letting that side run wild.

This giving oneself up wholly to the Id, I think, is what happens during the worst moments of human history, like Nazi Germany, and I fear we are not far from one of those moments now. For whatever reason, it appears that Americans are willing to accept leaders who are liars, sexual predators, conmen—in general, mercenaries when it comes to the triumvirate of sex, money, and power. I am sure there are many decent people who voted for our current president, but I have this nauseating inkling that they too would like to let their ids run wild for a day or two, and I have reluctantly come to believe they even enjoy the mayhem that is about to happen over the next four years. They view this chaos as “Entertainment,” not believing it will unfortunately end as a tragic limited series instead of a one-off stand-up dark comedy special.

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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