TOS S01E27 – The Alternative Factor
Dir. Gerd Oswald, Wri. Don Ingalls
The Summary: Kirk meets a time-hopping, dimension-jumping Lazarus who needs his help to save the multiverse.
The Good: Unfortunately, most of the good in this episode is going to have to be in praise of its ideas instead of its execution. If I just read the above summary without context, I would assume this would be a favorite of mine. The core idea of a mythological figure being run through the filter of science fiction is a great one (and will work out better for Trek in some future episodes). The ending of the episode is also an attempt at poignancy and at an interesting message. There are a few decent laughs in the episode (but it’s hard to tell how many of them are intentional). The episode also does add some to Trek canon about the multiverse, which is at least conceptually interesting. You can tell that the creators were trying with this one; it’s not bad because it’s phoned in. They really were trying to make something excellent here, and the nicest thing I can say about the episode is that their enthusiasm is clear.
The Bad: Lazarus (Robert Brown) is a special kind of bad actor in the Trek series. He is attempting to operate at that Shakespearean level that sometimes works for the series, but doesn’t here. Everything is a bit too forced, a bit too elevated, and just becomes ridiculous as a result. All of the long, pontificating speeches about the fabric of reality and its fragility just come off as absurd and laughable. The episode has repeated psychedelic fist fights that are eye-bleedingly bad (like, will literally make you need to look away from the screen at times if you have inner ear issues). The makeup effects are some of the worst in all of Trek, with Lazarus’s beard changing significantly from scene to scene. This is further complicated by there being two Lazaruses, both of whom are always inconsistently bearded, often rendering the episode an incomprehensible mess. The actual characters in the episode have nothing to do and nearly no agency. This is just something that is happening around them, which reads rather transparently as an opportunity for the writer to play around with cool sci-fi ideas but with no compelling involvement from the cast we actually care about. Almost nothing actually happens, plot-wise. Most of the episode’s runtime is close-ups of crew members spouting technobabble, and that’s never fun.
The Review: I feel like the people making this episode felt like they were making 2001: A Space Odyssey, but accidentally made Manos: The Hands of Fate instead. Their intentions are clear: they wanted to tell a story that expanded the Trek multiverse, while waxing philosophical about the nature of reality and the science of matter and antimatter. What they actually made was 50 minutes of a man in a terribly-glued-on beard, somehow managing to be both wooden and manic while monologuing about antimatter. Then Kirk strokes his chin and says, “I think I see what you’re saying.” It’s just that for almost an hour. A lot of the problem is a very limited understanding of matter and antimatter that was inevitable writing in the sixties. I’m a film critic, not an astrophysicist, but even I can see that the writing is gobblety-gook from a modern perspective. Since actual knowledge on these topics has advanced pretty significantly, the absurdity of the techno-babble has aged even more poorly than usual. I don’t even think I would recommend this one for a joke-watch, frankly. It’s really just kinda sad. It’s obvious that the creative team had passion for the ideas, but everything just went so terribly wrong in the execution that this one is an all-time stinker of Trek. I leave you with the many beards of Lazarus, which I reiterate are not used to distinguish between them, but are a mere accident of cosmic chance, which is rather fitting for the episode, I suppose.
The Score: 
