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Episode
027
The Alternative Factor
When the Enterprise finds one guy who may be two guys (or two guys who may be one guy) on an uninhabited planet along with an undetectable source of radiation, it’s up to Kirk, Spock and McCoy to figure out the intricacies of “The Alternative Factor.”
Speaking of “Alternative” – It was during Trek’s second season that Gold Key launched it’s Star Trek Comic book line – making the 1st Trek version to be drawn BEFORE The Animated Series. While far from canon for a number of reasons, these adventures are quite, er… “fascinating.’ Long time Star Trek fan Curt Danhauser a website site in order to document the series and allow another generation of fans enjoy and learn all about them. http://curtdanhauser.com/Enter.html
Pictured above is issue # 8. Titled “The Youth Trap”-
the story has several crew member’s exposed to a ray beam which causes the aging process to reverse – turning them into teenager’s. Ironically – all the actor’s pictured on the left side of this cover are still alive, while the other four on the right have passed away. Spock’s last line was:
“One would have to be the victim of the Age-Ray Machine in order to believe in it’s existence!”.
Just started listening to M.L. in order &really enjoying it, but I had to skip ahead to this one. Because yeah… People who say Spock’s Brain is the worst episode must have wipped this one from their memory. & I envy them. I envy them….
Watching this, I remember a quote from MST3K when they riffed on The Undead (1957): “I have never known more about what is *not* going on.”
Enterprise security gets an “F” grade in this episode. Seriously how many scenes is this guy just left to wander around?!?
Just ask Khan and any of the others who are shown total freedom on board the Enterprise!
Yes, the “science” in this episode is just as bad as all the tech-tech nonsense “TNG” and especially “Voyager” got up to later on. But it was written by somebody who apparently doesn’t even know what the term “amplify” means. So what could we expect?
The drained dilithium crystals need to “re-amplify” or be “re-amplified”? What is that supposed to mean? “Recharge”, “regenerate” or even “regrow” would make sense – but “re-amplify”? And what kind of energy source do they use to recharge the crystals if that’s the case?
I’m not even going to try to understand what “winking space” is to keep my brain from leaking out of my ears.
Yeah, you know if you have something that is so powerful that it will “recharge” a dilithium crystal, seems like you’d build that right into the system.
Apparenty, the writers assumed Poetic License in penning Spock’s phrase: “Winking Out”. (Kirk wanted “answers. Not poetry”).
This episode remains very difficult to sort out thr plot. A very incoherent script and poor production results in what appeared to be an ambitious episode into probably the worst episode of that great first season
The worst thing about his episode is it is boring. Going back and forth to the planet and then back to the Enterprise does not make for a good show. I assume this show was a budget-saving episode? Just plain boring. One good thing is it does show a secondary character who is a minority and female, and one with actual responsibility. That was mighty rare in the 1960’s.
If either of the Lazarus guys is from an anti-matter universe. Then one must be anti-matter. So, given that both visited “our” STTOS universe, how can both survive the visits? One should have been immediately destroyed as soon as he stepped onto the ground of his opposite planet, or the decks of the Enterprise, or took the first breath of air, or grabbed some stolen dilithium crystals.
I can’t help noticing the inconsistency in the way that Federation and Imperial crew conveniently arrive in each other’s clothing. This allowed the Federation crew to bluff their way past the Empire just long enough to work out how to replicate these extremely rare and previously unknown conditions for their return to their home universes. But, how could a severe ion storm selectively transpose flesh and bone between parallel universes without dislodging garments from their original transporter pattern buffers? The answer could be key to solving the missing sock phenomena that has plagued laundry technology since the 20th century.