Writer: Don Ingalls
Director: Gerd Oswald
Producer: Gene L. Coon
"The Alternative Factor" is bad. Real bad. It could arguably be called the worst episode in Star Trek's first season, although there are other contenders. Adding to it being bad, it's played very straight, almost to its detriment, so there isn't even the kind of camp kitsch enjoyment that one can get out of Trek's other bad episodes.
That being said, it's also an episode that introduces a lot of cool and significant sci-fi concepts to the world of Star Trek, notably the idea of parallel universes, and the interaction between matter and antimatter. The basic synopsis is that the Enterprise meets a man named Lazarus (a way too notable literary reference that no one brings up), and he's actually two men - one calm and rational, one violent and mad - and it turns out one's from our positive matter universe, and the other from an identical negative antimatter universe, and if ever the two should meet (outside of a "corridor" which links the two universes and serves as a safety valve), all eternity shall be destroyed.
So why is the episode bad? For one thing, all of our characters have become idiots. The plot relies on people like Kirk and McCoy to allow a mysterious, dangerous, raving lunatic to wander around the ship unsupervised for no reason. It takes 40 minutes of the runtime before they understand what's going on, while the audience has had it spelt out for them much earlier. It makes our heroes look bad. For the second thing, Lazarus is the entire focus of the episode, to the point where our regular characters are almost unnecessary to the story, and he's not a good character. His motives are extremely ill-defined, even once the mystery of "what" is happening is resolved, the "why" never really is. And also he has the worst fake beard in the history of fake beards. Very little of the episode comes off as interesting, despite the continued insistences of dialogue that this is the most important thing that's ever happened and the biggest threat ever in the history of anything. Seriously, the way Starfleet acts at the start of the episode and the way the character talk about things, this is an apocalyptic level event and of the utmost import.
But then what we actually get is basically just an endless series of scenes of Lazarus wandering around on the ship, then on the planet, then on the ship again, then back to the planet, and because the two Lazaruses can't be in the same universe at the same time, we get continual "fight scenes" of the two of them struggling in the "corridor" and replacing each other. The episode makes it hard to follow which one is which, and in order to keep things mysterious, spends more time with the "crazy" Lazarus, who's a bit insufferable to watch really.
The biggest frustration is this is a story that throws around the hugest stakes (all reality will be destroyed!) but denies us actually understanding what's going on for the majority of the running time, so those stakes come across as largely toothless. The plotting is near incoherant, seemingly content to throw around sci-fi ideas instead of a serviceable story about anything in particular.
Ultimately what the story consists of is that both Lazaruses must steal the Enterprise's dilithium crystals so they can power their identical ships (which look like George Jetson's car more than anything out of Trek) and trap each other in the corridor, to fight at each other's throats for all time to keep eternity from ending. The main characters of the series have basically nothing to do with this story other than to observe it happening.
"The Alternative Factor" is real bad, and its confusing, and its boring. And boring is probably the worst sin of them all for a piece of entertainment like this. That said, by introducing the concept of parallel universes into Star Trek's inventory of sci-fi tricks, it leads us to episodes that explore that concept better, like "Mirror, Mirror". It's not this episode's ideas that are at fault, so much as their execution. Like "Miri" it's an episode where someone had a great high concept, and then failed to think of a story to go along with it.
Rating: 1 out of 4
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