It sure takes them a long time (all of Act One!) to twig to the fact that there’s an “impostor” (actually, an evil double) on board, and that it’s all due to a transporter malfunction.
Scotty knew something was wrong with the transporter as soon as Fisher beamed up, and even ordered a diagnostic to be run on it. But he still went ahead and beamed Kirk up anyway. Pretty slack on Scotty’s part.
Kirk and Spock are just about to blast a hole in the transporter circuitry and fail to report it to their Chief Engineer. But hey, I didn’t write this episode. Did anyone?
Screw the shuttlecraft! What about blankets? Or shelter? If the transporter splits the blankets into two piles, just use the ones that insulate rather than the “evil” ones.
The reason they didn’t send the shuttle is that they hadn’t been “invented” yet. But that bugged me even as a kid, because I’d seen the episodes out of order and knew they had shuttles.
Hell, from the beginning the *Enterprise *had those big hangar doors at the stern of the ship. What were they keeping in there, a classic auto collection?
Yeah, the shuttle bay was intrinsic in the final design of the Enterprise. Thing is the special effects involved in showing an actual shuttle were very expensive and the production company wasn’t ready to spend the money just yet. Interestingly, model kit maker AMT volunteered to pay to build the full size shuttle mock-up and studio model in exchange for the rights to make & sell Star Trek ship model kits. Turned out to be a wise decision.
