TOS: The Alternative Factor

[Trooper924]

Going by what it says on Memory Alpha, the woman was supposed to be Lazarus' love interest, but Roddenberry made them change it because he felt it was a repeat of Khan and McGivers' romance from Space Speed: "In both 'Space Seed' and this story, we have a crew woman madly in love with a brawny guest star and flipping our whole gang into a real mess because she is in love… do they have to do [this] in two of our scripts?"

[Durandal_1707]

Come ON. This is at least an episode with the familiar, lovable cast. While STD is filled with a collection of the most loathsome assholes possible. Give me this over the best of STD any day.

[Revolverman]

So... Why can't they just kill Crazy Lazarus? I know just killing someone isn't really a go to in Starfleet, but Sane Lazarus didn't seem like he was causing any problems, and if crazy Lazarus is dead, he can't do his boneheaded plan. I mean, condemning both to Limbo forever seems far worse anyway.

[Maximara]

Matt McKinney had a two parter on this called POS TOS #2 - The Alternative Factor back in 2011. Got to love the "let's speed it up more" comment regarding the wrestling scenes and the snark regarding the long 'let's wander around on the planet looking for the crazy man' scene.

[phantom000]

This reminds me of Masks from TNG; an intriguing idea that was not handled properly.

To be fair if they destroyed the ship while the crazy Lazarus was outside the 'corridor' he might find a way to build another ship and achieve his goal anyway but if he was trapped in the corridor then there is no way out. I guess you could argue that if either ship still exists then there is a way out, hence why they both had to be destroyed but why not throw the crazy guy into the corridor, destroy his ship with a phazer then the sane Lazarus destroys his ship on the other end so the crazy guy is trapped alone and the sane guy is free to live out his life in peace.

[Darth Wedgius]

So... Why can't they just kill Crazy Lazarus? I know just killing someone isn't really a go to in Starfleet, but Sane Lazarus didn't seem like he was causing any problems, and if crazy Lazarus is dead, he can't do his boneheaded plan. I mean, condemning both to Limbo forever seems far worse anyway.

They said that if one flying saucer was destroyed, the other one would be too. I thought that might mean that if one Lazarus was killed, the other one would die, too, for some BS cosmic balance type thing. It's a helluva stretch, but what in this episode isn't? Then again, death might be preferable to what happened to him, anyway.

[chaos42]

Ive always felt that the episode had some good ideas but where poorly executed it could have been fixed, just say that crossing into each universe changes some sort of charge on them, like their both + but if they go into the other universe they become - and when they meet the 2 cancel each other out and take the universe with them because the two cause it to expand out like all the forces that hold matter together get cancelled out with them. And because lazarus made the ship in the first place he knows that at some point his double will find him and when they meet everything is gone, the space between where there isn't a charge is the only place he can go were there is no danger of destruction and he decides to take his counterpart with him because he knows he is so crazy he might destroy everything in his mad attempts to destroy the sane lazarus. the other idea to make this work is make it so lazarus is effectively immortal because of what happened to them and only the two of them being brought together can destroy them outside the buffer area.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

SF Debris claiming the Spore Drive is somehow better than this parallel universe stuff in "The Alternative Factor" is just plain wrong, though. Yes, it's not "scientifically accurate," but he's a comic book fan. What does it matter as long as the episode is fun? Which this is.

Your missing his point neither the spore drive nor the Alternative universe in Alternative Factor are "scientifically accurate". The spore drive is as far as I can tell from your use of the terms, very much what you call high-concept, comic book-esque sci-fi, but arguably it works in a predictable consistent way.

The claim Chuck made is that the stuff in the Alternative Factor goes beyond being scientifically inaccurate or even divorced from how the world works at all (like magic, Chuck has no problem with magic in stories) he is saying the Alternative Factor is incoherent, inconsistent and gives one no reasonable way to figure out what to expect from it (including knowing what is at stake): that it proposes contradictory statements, premises and so on. x is x except it is also not x (you can only travel to the alternative universe via the saucer on the planet and you end up in the alternative saucer except no Lazarus does it from anywhere to anywhere), x implies y except no it does not (so Sane!Lazarous is helpful and thus on expects him to explains things when he and Kirk meet in the alternative universe except when he was on the Enterprise earlier and he failed to explain to McCoy or whoever what was going on even though it would be very helpful).

Not sure if you're overshooting this a bit.

He was just saying that as far as science fiction constructs, it's particularly not hard sci-fi if you take generic things and render them some conduit to satisfy the speculative fiction. Like, warp drive in Trek works off of established relativity theories, but hyperspace travel doesn't really.

[Robovski]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a distractingly bad fake beard like that anywhere else. You’d think the producers would have had the sense to NOT use it. Wouldn’t have helped the guest actor, it would have just had us even more focused on his disjointed performance.

I doubt anyone envisioned 4K resolution back in the 60s. The horrible beard probably wasn't that big a deal on a 60's era tube television.

The beard wasn't as bad, no. Watching this in the 20th century with as much as 480p resolution was more forgiving to many things in regards to makeup and effects.

[clearspira]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a distractingly bad fake beard like that anywhere else. You’d think the producers would have had the sense to NOT use it. Wouldn’t have helped the guest actor, it would have just had us even more focused on his disjointed performance.

I doubt anyone envisioned 4K resolution back in the 60s. The horrible beard probably wasn't that big a deal on a 60's era tube television.

The beard wasn't as bad, no. Watching this in the 29th century with as much as 480p resolution was more forgiving to many things in regards to makeup and effects.

Did you mean the 20th century or have I missed a joke?