Dear Johnny Fanboy,

In the original series of Star Trek, an episode called The Enemy Within has Captain Kirk being split into a good Kirk and an evil Kirk due to a transporter malfunction. Until Scotty works out a way to fix the problem, the transporter is declared unsafe to use, and so Mr Sulu and the rest of his landing party have to freeze their asses off down on a planet's surface.

Why don't the crew just send down a shuttlecraft to rescue the landing party? I know that in reality the makers of the TV series hadn't created the shuttlecraft yet (that didn't appear until The Galileo Seven). But we see shuttles in common use in Enterprise, which is set a century before Star Trek, so surely they would have had some on board in The Enemy Within.

Lindsay Ryan

Johnny Fanboy replies:

Let's assume that in some unrecorded scene(s) the crew determine that it is also unsafe to send a shuttlecraft down to the planet. Perhaps the planet's atmosphere or magnetic field possesses some property that would damage a shuttle's systems and could cause it to crash.

This might not be a coincidence. The magnetic properties of the ore that caused the transporter to start misbehaving in the first place might also operate on a global scale to prevent the use of a shuttlecraft.

That's my crafty excuse anyway!

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