It's taken me over 11 years, but I have watched all 79 episodes of the original Star Trek, not counting "The Cage". I note that my original post in 2015 had me planning to watch "The Cage" after finishing Season 1, but I managed to completely forget about that, probably due to some changes with on-demand video service.
I am going to come back to that after I've done The Animated Series and so close out the TOS era on TV, which will, along with the rest of the Star Trek reviews going forward, be done via a single combined review for each season with a paragraph dedicated to each episode. These things do take a while to write.
So, we've seen strange studio worlds, sought out odd life and unusual civilisations and boldly gone where no costume designer has gone before.
(I'm not even done with William Ware Theiss either, as he did the first season of The Next Generation.)
So, it's the end, but the moment has been prepared... sorry, wrong show. It is time to lower the curtain.
It is time for "Turnabout Intruder".
The description on Netflix does not do this one justice.
Have you ever been at the tail end of a buffet lunch and there's some food left over? You feel a bit full but decide to have just a bit more because it will otherwise go to waste?
Well, this episode is rather like that, but with scenery chewing. The axe fell right in the middle of production - with "The Joy Machine" that was next to go in front of cameras, with Shatner directing, not being produced. Shatner would eventually direct The Final Frontier, but that's not exactly a good Trek movie even by his admission. Sets were being dismantled even as filming was finished. Uhura doesn't even appear due to Nichelle Nichols having a singing engagement, being replaced by a "Lieutenant Lisa".
Shatner was also suffering from a bad case of the flu at the time, but seems to have powered through a difficult shoot.
Responding to a distress call at a research base, Kirk encounters an old girlfriend of his from Starfleet Academy who is apparently seriously ill. She says:
"Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women."
Apparently this should be read as "women can't become starship captains" rather than the "being a starship captain means you can't maintain a long-term relationship". A line that makes no sense really - why would Starfleet bar women from high command? They certainly don't in Strange New Worlds or Discovery. Roddenberry admitted in later years that the line was simply sexist and a lot of the episode has been read that way by fans since.
Anyway, it turns out that she is not seriously ill and in fact has lured Kirk into a trap, where she uses an alien machine to swap bodies and impersonate Captain Kirk for the purposes of revenge, as well as taking the opportunity to be a starship captain that she was denied.
Thus we get William Shatner playing a woman pretending to be a man, something that would have been quite common in the days of Shakespeare with any production of Twelfth Night.
Now a "Freaky Friday" plot like this requires two very good actors to pull off, ideally people that have known each other for a while and so can imitate the other, down to the physicality. Unfortunately, Sandra Smith and William Shatner are not those people. Smith makes no attempt to mimic Shatner's body language and Shatner is just chewing the scenery.
Not to say that Shatner chewing the scenery isn't glorious here and playing a woman like that was very progressive for the time. Unfortunately, the planned transmission of the episode was pre-empted by the death of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and this final episode aired 3 June 1969, missing the Emmy cut-off by three days. Shatner would have to wait until 1999 to get a nomination and eventually won two for playing Denny Crane, his role in The Practice followed by spin-off Boston Legal.
Also, there's a massive logic problem - Lester seems to know extensive details about a ship class she's likely not encountered, gets everyone's names right despite having not met them before and can even make an attempt a court-martial. Could she have studied all that and still kept up her day job.
Speaking of logic, this is a good Spock episode - he believes Kirk-in-Lester is speaking the truth even though he's never seen an actual example of the "essence transference".
The climax is fairly good as the crew mutiny against Lester-in-Kirk's insane orders and the transference reverses... but then the episode basically just ends. There's not even anything that could be deemed a good-bye.
Conclusion
Another episode that would have worked much better with a few more drafts.
5/10
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