28. The Alternative FactorWHY WE LIKE IT: The final explanation holds some interest.
WHY WE DON'T: The worst beard in television history, and a story that's a mess across the board, from plot to effects.
REVIEW: I find it very difficult to watch this episode and care. The principal reason is that the main characters are little more than bystanders in this one. They experience the problem, but an explanation AND a solution are finally offered by the anti-Lazarus, and Kirk and Spock are basically relegated to pushing buttons and putting that plan into action. Aside from a good scene where they work out the twin universes theory, and Spock calling Lazarus a liar to his face, there's little for them to do.
There could have been more, but they're all on auto-pilot, letting an obviously deranged Lazarus wander through the ship or the planet surface unwatched, or in the final fight, watching Kirk wrestle the baddie without so much as moving to help. The whole plot is in fact a mess. Hard to understand until the final minutes, and meandering way too much. We travel to the planet and sickbay a couple times without adding anything to the storyline. And where's Scotty in this? I don't mind the character of Lt. Masters who got all his lines, but it's just odd that an important member of the crew would go missing like this, and be replaced by someone in blue (sciences).
To make matters worse, the special effects, while numerous, are terrible and confusing. The overlayed picture of a nebula that sometimes means we're "winking out", sometimes not; the blurry effect; the polarized figures fighting in the corridor; the spinning newspaper transitions... I kinda found interesting the idea of making the real universe location shooting, and making the anti-matter universe studio-bound, but with som many other things representing the clash between universes, you just don't know what's what anymore. The make-up isn't much better, with Lazarus sporting a terribly fake beard, a beard that can't even remain consistent from scene to scene, going from thick to thin and back again. Even the ADR is noticeably messy.
LESSON: I learned what to do next time I have a bout of insomnia.
REWATCHABILITY - Low: It might make a passable episode of the Outer Limits, but lack of focus on the Star Trek characters sinks this one even before you consider its other failures. Probably the only real turkey from the first season.
Comments
The alternate universe being set-bound wasn't even intentional; they just ran out of location shooting days because they were behind schedule, and Matt Jeffries rushed a set-bound replacement out to finish shooting.
Also, a major reason for the meandering story was Lt. Masters; she was Lazarus' love interest (and a chemist, hence the blue uniform). She was wooed by Lazarus, a man weary and lonely after so long on the hunt, helped him steal the crystals, and was trapped in the corridor with him by the time she realized he was insane. The climax was Kirk trying to rescue her and seal the corridor as the two Lazaruses fought.
However, the female crewmember falling for the guest star and betraying the ship was deemed to similar to the in-development Space Seed, and they cut down her part... then the network balked at an interracial romance based on the casting, so (still two years from Plato's Stepchildren), they chopped out the romance completely... taking most of Masters' point, most of Lazarus' sympathetic characterization and insight into his character, Kirks chance for a proactive role in the climax, and about 20 minutes of plot with it. (Necessitating writing a bunch of runaround where Lazarus goes back to the planet and falls off a rock AGAIN as replacement filler.)
Because of all this, John Drew Barrymore, hired to play Lazarus, quit the project when he saws the new script during a costume fitting... a fitting for him to start shooting THE NEXT MORNING. So, they brought in Robert Brown as a ringer the next morning, literally shoving a script into his hands as he was being costumed and made up, and then putting him right before the cameras.
All things considered, it's kind of a miracle we got anything... and the failures are definitely due to the actors or production staff, who did the absolute best they could with the mess the writers, studio, and mutinous guest star left them. :-)