1.27 — “The Alternative Factor”
Plot: Oh boy. The Enterprise is orbiting an unnamed planet when the universe winks out, twice. Starfleet thinks this phenomenon, which occurred “in every quadrant of the galaxy and far beyond,” is a portent of invasion. Spock discerns that the effect is centered around the planet they are orbiting. There the crew finds an inconsistently hairy man named Lazarus, who has a problem: when the disco lights go groovy and the world starts to spin, he exchanges places with his interdimensional twin, a time traveler made of antimatter. Can the crew figure out the riddle before mad Lazarus makes the universe go boom?
Thoughts: There’s no getting around it–this episode is not good. There are reasons, for which I am again indebted to These Are the Voyages, TOS: Season One by Marc Cushman. The network and producers were seduced by the grooviness of the concept underlying the script and only belatedly discovered that they had something of a mess on their hands. At the time, the centerpiece of the teleplay was a romance between Lazarus and a shipboard chemist named Lt. Masters. When NBC discovered, days before shooting, that Trek had cast an African-American actress to play Masters, they foresaw trouble with their Southern network affiliates and asked for the part to be recast, or the romance to be written out. Producer Gene Coon opted for the latter, stuffing a good deal of plot logic and drama down the disintegrator chute with the romance, with redundant scenes of Lazarus running around the planet and falling off rocks added to replace it. The character of Masters was moved to Engineering, but still wears the blue of the science department, because wardrobe apparently didn’t get the memo in time. Displeased with the rewrite he received literally on the eve of shooting, the actor cast to play Lazarus, John Drew Barrymore (father of Drew Barrymore), refused to show up for work. Robert Brown, a friend of Shatner’s, was dragged in to play the part at the last second with no rehearsal. By this time, the production was so discombobulated that basic quality control over things like continuity and makeup went kaput.
I’m not sure this explains a myriad of other problems, or why the special effects are horrible, but it’s a start. Please feel free to entertain yourselves by pointing out the episode’s further shortcomings in the space below.
Not good in this case does not mean unwatchable, however. If you just let go and go with it, the episode is pretty entertaining. First, Shatner and Nimoy are troopers. They played the heck out of these scenes, unintentionally drawing the full comedy value out of the campiness. The director, Gerd Oswald, may not have paid much attention to continuity, but still directed his little heart out, rotating the camera around the actors and creating some wild arch lighting effects. Bizarre overuse of closeup shots adds to the feeling of psychedelia, as does the trippy organ score. And Robert Brown threw himself into the Lazarus role, thanklessly.
I see the episode playing out as a progressive rock opera. Lazarus is the love child of David Bowie and Bret McKenize, with a kettle drum leitmotif, who has to steal the magic crystals for the Star Druid so they can play the one magic power chord and restore balance to the cosmos. His dialogue already sounds like song lyrics, so that works. I can hear the climatic final song:
Pain drives a man,
Harder than pleasure.
How would it be?
How would it be?
What of Laaaaazarus?
I guess what I’m saying is, this episode may be terrible, but I would happily watch it again. I would not say that about “Shore Leave.” It should appeal to people who like the movie Zardoz (1974).
2 out of 5 dimensional warps.
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