The Alternative Factor
Another episode to be filed under "what the hell am I supposed to do with this?".
The Saddest Joyride
We've been here before. Instalments that are bad, not because they are trying for something and completely miss the mark, but because they show no inclination to try in the first place. There are precisely two nice touches in the entirety of "The Alternative Factor". The first is the total refusal to care whether the special effects employed for the inter-universal tunnel are in any sense "realistic". I mean, obviously that word has no meaning in the context we're applying it to, but there's plenty of distance between "noble yet doomed stab at verisimilitude" and "absolutely bats-arse nonsense", and this episode lopes across the leagues to the latter with absolute glee. A spinning photo of a nebula, leading into a revolving smoke-wreathed room, realised by directly incorporating the film negatives into the episode? That's not a slice of serious sci-fi, that's the first video from a modestly promising '90s indie band. And yet here we are, a fact which provides me with no small delight.
The second unquestionable triumph is Lieutenant Masters. A second Black female officer is already a strong start. In addition, though, she pushes this episode closer to passing the Bechdel test than almost any other. Indeed, depending on how we interpret Masters sending a message which Uhura relays in the very next line, albeit across a change in scene, we could even argue the test is passed. If nothing else, then, TOS is continuing to put its money where its mouth is, representation-wise. Perhaps we should expect no less from an old mate of Roddenberry's. [1]
Whatever we can credit with Masters' existence, though, she can't carry the entire episode by herself. There's a fundamental absence here, in multiple senses. Both Scotty and Sulu are missing, for only the third time since "The Menagerie, Part 2". McCoy and Spock share no scenes, and the latter has at most one scene - him pointing out his assessment of Lazarus' dishonesty stems from simple logic deduction – that we might consider, as it were, “Spockesque”. The only thing here to distinguish Kirk from a generic action hero is that he doesn't really get to partake in any actual, you know, action.
In fact, there's almost nothing here to make "The Alternative Factor" a Star Trek story at all. Yes, it's clearly a Star Trek episode, but that's not quite the same thing. This story was filmed directly after Gene Coon gave us "Arena", an episode which isn't just strong on its own terms, it took great strides in delineating what makes Trek Trek. Even before that, we had Roddenberry's own vision for the show. "Frontier peace-keeping force with Christian undertones" isn't exactly my mug of raktajino, but at least it’s an ethos. "The Alternative Factor" reads like Ingalls just had a half-formed idea about identical doubles from different universes locked in an eternal struggle, and then lucked into getting to tell that tale here.
We've seen attempts to hijack the franchise before, of course. They can be frustrating, but that doesn't automatically make them uninteresting. While "The Slaver Weapon" tries to twist three of the regulars into new shapes, though (and in fairness, two of them didn't have much of a coherent shape at the time in any case), "The Alternative Factor" just tries to shut our heroes out of the narrative entirely. The plot here gives almost no agency to anyone other than the Lazaruses themselves. All Kirk gets to do here is search rocks, demand answers, and look confused, until anti-matter Laz gives him a plan to follow. Our protagonists are no different from the audience; they just have to sit there while a story is presented to them.
In light of the decision to render the regulars irrelevant within their own show, the standard complaints that this story makes idiots of our heroes seem essentially redundant. Yes, the idea that a ship on red alert because of a suspected incoming invasion by reality-warping aliens would just let a total stranger wearing no uniform wander around unchallenged is infuriating. But what does that matter? You can't have a plot-hole without a plot. All you can have is an absence growing wider.
Self-Negation
Nor is it just the regulars refusing to act in ways consistent with either their past behaviour, or basic common sense. The galaxy-wide "blip" is doubtless existentially terrifying, but the idea both Kirk and Starfleet command immediately jump to "incoming invasion" is ludicrous. Firstly, an invasion from where? And how does a moments-long space-out - of whatever diameter - actually help out the entirely hypothetical enemy's nefarious plan? Indeed, if Starfleet's reaction is typical, all it did was put the potential invadees on notice. This is just rampant paranoia masquerading as vigilance. Faced with such inexplicable behaviour, and lacking any other actual useful route into the story, I thought about trying to make the case that it's the composed Lazarus who is from "our" universe, and what we see here is the anti-matter equivalents of our heroes and their organisation dealing with the intersection of two opposing realities. You'd have to figure both universes would believe it’s the other which is made of anti-matter, after all. Sure, doing that would undermine the only other interesting choice "The Alternative Factor" makes, namely that it's "our" Lazarus that's the problem, but as the old saying goes, you can't scuff a turd. I even started thinking about writing from the perspective of an alternative Ric, discussing how this was the only episode of the show's first season that actually rang true, rather than seeming to stem from another reality entirely.
I had to give up on that idea pretty quickly. There's just no there in the elsewhere, nothing on which to hang the conceit. No coherent idea of what drives or differentiates the alternate reality is ever floated. The idea of what's happening across the universal half-way line while is left completely unexplored [2]. Like Elaine encountering the idea of Bizarro, there's no reason why some things are inverted, and other things are the same. This isn't an alternative vision for the show; it's an alternative to any vision for the show.
.
"The Creature From The Id!"
Onr of the foundational assumptions of IDFC is that every episode is trying to do something, and what that something is matters even if it fails to land, or shouldn't have been allowed to take off in the first place. Ingalls must have had something in mind here. Even work done entirely for the paycheck requires, you know, doing work. So what was the underlying thinking?
The approach taken here seems to be accepting the idea of an endless internal struggle that exists within all of us, and then mapping it onto Trek. Call it Freudian, call it Christian (there is a dude named "Lazarus" here, after all [3]), call it whatever. Whether such a concept is even realistic, never mind worth giving the extreme metaphorical heft it is here, is worth debating. Fundamentally, though, what matters from our perspective is that Ingalls believed it was worth putting this much weight on the idea. Once you realise this is what's happening - a literalisation of a conflict that some believe has waged within every single human being since mankind itself came into being - it becomes harder to get wound up by all the ways in which the episode doesn't make literal sense. Literality is simply not what's being aime for here.
So yes, there's no justification in the script, at all, for the idea that the Lazares would be at each others' throats for eternity. Time clearly exists in the corridor, after all, otherwise they wouldn't be able to throw down in the first place. But if there truly does exist a struggle within ourselves, then it makes sense to frame that battle as being eternal, in the sense that none of us will outlive it.
The idea that it's specifically Lazarus meeting Lazarus that will cause bi-universal annihilation works according to similar principles, with "identical" being a determination not made on the molecular scale, but on a spiritual one. We can even use this approach to wave away the fact that naughty Laz can't even handle a mid-level hiking holiday [4], making it difficult to believe there's no way to stop him from accessing one specific spacecraft in one specific location on one specific planet. You might think that this entire episode could be resolved by just reminding Dr McCoy that the capacity exists to lock doors, or by the stable Lazarus destroying his own pod, but the metaphor doesn't allow for either such resolution. Pointing out "our" Lazarus could just shoot his opposite number and save both a lot of fuss and two entire universes runs into the same problem. You're measuring the episode against criterion it is explicitly rejecting as important. You might as well bitch about the costumes in a porn film.
So episode saved, then? Hardly. What holes "The Alternative Factor" beneath the water line isn't the inconsistencies and errors. It's that the big idea that justifies those inconsistencies an errors simply isn't very interesting. Even if you fully embrace the idea that we spend our lives struggling for dominance over a negative image of ourselves, what does "The Alternative Factor" offer on that front? It doesn't explore thie idea. It doesn't offer a new angle on it. At best, it provides an oblique argument that our internal struggles must remain internal, that not only can no-one else help with them, attempting to fight that battle out in the open would be disastrous. Which would at least mean this episode had a message, albeit an absolutely appalling one.
But even that can't stick. This story isn't an argument that your internal monologue should keep a stiff upper lip. It's just the random spread of hazy ideas we get here just happen to line up if you look at them in from one particular direction. Like the two Lazari, Ingalls' plot and Roddenberry's setting cancel each other out completely, leaving a fifty-minute stretch of absolute nothingness. That's thematically appropriate, admittedly, but all that means is something can work on two levels, both of which are total shit.
John Drew Barrymore was absolutely right to bail on this episode. Six months away from acting must have seemed like a pretty good deal to not have to act in this. The alternate universe in which Robert Brown hadn't stepped in at the last second, and the episode therefore having to be abandoned, sounds like a pretty decent place to live. Trek has been ropey in the past. It has been reactionary. On occasions, it's been downright evil. But it's never before felt this tired. So unwilling to even try to be about something.
Some episodes have made me wish the show was something other than it was. Others have made it clear the show itself isn't sure what it wants to be. This is the first time Star Trek seems to be comfortable with being nothing. Ulimately, Ingalls was no more successful in destroying Kirk's reality than Lazarus was. It certainly feels like he tried just as hard to, though, and came almost as close to succeeding.
Ordering
1. (The Storyteller)
2. (Ex Post Facto)
3. (Desert Crossing)
4. (The Infinite Vulcan)
5. (11001001)
6. The Alternative Factor
Series Ordering
1. Deep Space Nine
=2. The Original Series
=2. Voyager
4. The Next Generation
5. The Animated Series
6. Enterprise
[1] Though we should note that it's only thanks to Roddenberry himself that the new female crewmember in this episode didn't fall in love with the "evil" Lazarus, betraying the ship as a result. The intervention is to Gene's credit, although a) his issue was the similarity of this plot development with what happened in "Space Seed", rather than its more general problems, and b) he was entirely happy to return to this particular poisoned well early in Season Two.
[2] One can think of next season's "Mirror, Mirror" as taking everything this episode did wrong and making it actually work. There's something rather appropriate about taking the photo-negative of "The Alternative Factor" and it being really good, but we can't really count that as a point in this story's favour.
[3] The only person to come back from the dead in the Bible save Jesus himself, of course. The same person, but two distinct existences. Add in the anti-matter Lazarus wanting to sacrifice himself to save everyone who exists, and we might even be approaching a theme, were the idea of such a second existence treated as a source of conflict at best, and madness at worst.
[4] Is it some kind of crass joke that he's so "unbalanced" he falls off of rocky outcrops twice in the same episode? Either way, it rather softens the impact of the whole “He’s about to destroy two universes!” angle when you realise it’s only because McCoy keeps treating him that he’s so much as able to walk upright.