Podcast Enterprise: S1E27 The alternative factor

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

Okay, I’m gonna have a bit of trouble summarizing this anyhow, let me try. So what happens here is when this episode opens, you have the Enterprise approaching an uncharted planet, and they know nothing about this planet. It seems to be an Iron-Silica type planet, and it’s the only one in that quadrant.

As the Enterprise approaches this planet, everything winks out for a few moments. You know, everything blinks in and out, and there seems to be some sort of non-existence as Spock and Kirk discuss and everything winks out of existence, and then everything comes back into existence.

So while they’re discussing this, they also find that there’s some sort of life down there on that planet, or more specifically, there is one life, one person down there when there was no life there before. So, and it also because of this winking in and out of existence, it seems that Star Fleet command is worried about an alien invasion or something of that sort, some sort of invasion status.

And they want Kirk to investigate. They also want the Enterprise to be bait. So Kirk decides to beam down to that planet. And try to figure out what this singular life form may be. He finds a man called Lazarus and he has something like a UFO, some sort of contraption, some sort of spaceship type thing that looks like a UFO.

Lazarus mumbles something to Kirk and he falls down a cliff and he’s taken back to the Enterprise and into the sick bay where they find that he rants and raves about monsters and some sort of creature destroying civilizations. And the Enterprise must help him stop it, and it all gets very confusing at that point, even for Kirk.

So eventually what they find is that…, okay, what we see is that Lazarus also seems to wink in and out of existence. There are scars on his forehead that appear and then disappear, and his nature theoretically keeps changing. But he’s still insane throughout and for some reason, to cut a long story short, he’s taken to the bridge.

He learned something about what is going on. He wants dilithium crystals of the Enterprise to try and cut through space time, go into a parallel universe, and stop himself. And then Kirk is outraged at this idea. Eventually, Lazarus does manage to get the dilithium crystals. He wants to fit them into that UFO type craft of his, which he claims is, I don’t know, it travels between time or it travels between universes. He says both. He wants to go from this universe to the other universe and stop himself, but in a fisticuff that follows kirk falls through the wormhole and finds himself in the parallel universe. He meets the other version of Lazarus who’s supposed to be very sane.

And then with that Lazarus’s help Kirk somehow tricks the Lazarus in our universe to go into some sort of fugue plane, some sort of limbo where they fight each other for all eternity. Back to you, Bala.

Oh boy. I don’t know how you managed to summarize that, but, but it did make a lot of sense already.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Acknowledgements

1. Intro music: Music from anchor.fm
2. Shotcut for editing the podcast
3. References: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/