The Alternative Factor

This packs just enough weirdness for an episode of The Twilight Zone, which of course means that it doesn’t have anywhere near enough to sustain an hour-long Star Trek.

Though the Enterprise is constantly being dispatched to this or that corner of the galaxy, this time the phenomenon it’s been sent to investigate is potentially serious stuff. In a localized area, it looks like the universe itself is coming apart. Something is causing ripples in the space-time continuum that, if they get bigger, could tear reality itself apart.

The source of the problem turns out to be a guy. Or to be more precise, two guys. One is from our universe, and the other is his evil doppelganger from a parallel plane. The bad guy found a corridor between realities, and if both good and bad unite anywhere except inside the corridor, both universes will be destroyed.

It’s an interesting premise, but the execution falls flat. For starters, the two guys are so similar that with all the winking back and forth they do it’s hard to tell which one we’re looking at. Indeed, Roddenberry and company resort to the cheap expedient of sticking a Band-aid on one of them as sort of a pre-apocalyptic cheat sheet. The special effects aren’t exactly the best in the series, either. The corridor is presented as an eerie world of color negative footage and fog machines. And the guy’s spaceship looks like a cheap blend of a phone booth and a carnival ride.

But the real disaster is the writing. The premise alone was enough for maybe 20 minutes’ worth of show. And writer Don Ingalls doesn’t add anything to keep it interesting for the remaining running time. Instead we get a lot of random wandering (both on the planet and in the hallways of the Enterprise) and other time-wasting stunts that do nothing but stretch the story out to the required length.

Not for the first time I found myself wondering if on occasion it mightn’t have been smarter to cut the filler out of the weaker plots and crunch them together into a two-tales-per-episode format.

Episode rating:

Stardate: 3087.6

Episode type: Dangerous alien

Written by: Don Ingalls

Original air date: March 30, 1967

Errand of Mercy / The City on the Edge of Forever

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