Watched this one again last night and found myself impressed.
With this well-scripted teleplay, Star Trek checked the box for women’s liberation, almost the only relevance theme that the series hadn’t dutifully and opportunistically exploited. (Drug abuse was omitted.) In this third season we had hippies (“The Way to Eden”), racial prejudice (“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”), antiwar (“Day of the Dove”), “overpopulation” (“The Mark of Gideon”), and (in the second season) automation and unemployment (“The Ultimate Computer”). All of these were pretty obviously little shows about Current Events.
“Turnabout Intruder” seems to me by far the best of the relevance bunch. The script is tight, the acting is adequate to good, and the relevance theme stays in second place compared to an interesting, suspenseful story.
In 1969, we heard a lot about so-called women’s lib, specifically the accusation that women were being deprived of the chance to do jobs that women could do well but were “disqualified” from simply because of their sex. Be it noted that this issue is dispatched in the first few minutes of the show when Kirk agrees with Janice Lester that it is unfair that no woman may command a starship.
That leaves the rest of the show for the cleverly done duel of wits between two people, the real Kirk, and his formidable opponent, Dr. Janice Lester. (Sherlock Holmes’s great opponent was a “doctor” too, Dr. Moriarty.) Janice Lester makes a fine foil for Kirk – she prepared well for her impersonation, she keeps in charge of things under tense circumstances repeatedly, and she is one of the most ruthless villains of the series, able to engineer the deaths of the potential witnesses on the planet (with her colleague’s help), and prevented from strangling Kirk (in her body) only by the return of others to the scene.
Casting for the Janice Lester role was excellent: the attractive (not cutie-pie) Sandra Smith looks the right age to be an old flame of Kirk’s -- and she brings the role of the villain to life. Not all actors can convey exceptional intelligence very well, but Smith does. She conveys also the bitter hurt about their broken relationship, which by now has turned into passionate vengefulness. During her possession of Kirk’s body, Lester increasingly faces the threat of an unbearable awareness of her unfitness for starship command; Sandra Smith well performs her clever and desperate ploys to hide the truth from others and probably from herself. Lester contrives to destroy the credibility of Scotty and McCoy as witnesses for Kirk, but at last overreaches when she demands their executions.
As one watches, one doesn’t think about the skillful use that is being made of existing sets; one is absorbed by the story, and the familiar Enterprise settings allow the story and the actors to come forward impressively. At the beginning, the brief glimpses of the planet station are acceptable and not too sound-stagey (unlike all too many second- and third-season shows). The alien machine looks truly alien, although the switch on the side is a bit corny.
Some viewers will disagree with me, but I thought Shatner’s performance as Kirk’s body inhabited by Janice Lester’s soul was pretty good overall. Remember, most of us watching this original broadcast were seeing it on small screens – in fact, often on black-and-white sets. Shatner is a television actor, cranking out a new show every week, not a high-profile film actor. He conveys the initial self-congratulation of Lester and her subsequent gradual loss of control of the situation. We see that being a controlling person (a problem never suggested as being peculiar to women) was a key element of Lester’s personality. The nail-filing incident might annoy some viewers as invoking a stereotype of female vanity and concern with personal appearance, but for me, at least, it worked as an early indication that this is not really Captain Kirk.
A few small dialogue changes might have been appropriate. Most people in 1969 won’t know that the word “hysterical” encodes a reference to a relatively modern theory of women as prone to emotional problems because of their physiology, but some other word could have been used. At the end, Kirk could have said that Lester’s situation is sad because she could have had a life as rich as “anyone’s” (not “any woman’s,” which brings us out of the story we have been watching and into contemporary politics). Also, time permitting I would have liked to hear Spock say, early on before the crisis of identities really emerges, that a Federation team will need to investigate the deaths on Camus as a routine matter – and then one would see “Kirk” look startled for about half a second. It will be important for some viewers to perceive that, at the end when Lester is committed to Coleman’s care, no one yet suspects that the two are responsible for the deaths on the planet. Their crimes might or might not be uncovered. It would be interesting to know if Lester and Coleman got away with them.
Coleman himself gets little screen time, but his character is developed beyond the plot requirement of an accomplice for the main villain. It is interesting that the Lester-Coleman relationship reverses the perhaps more common one in which it is a charismatic bad man who leads a young woman into danger and possible criminality; Lester certainly possesses the dominant role in the relationship, with Coleman reacting to her and yielding to her. He loves her but from her point of view he’s a useful colleague, not an object of romantic interest.
I haven’t been rating the shows, but would probably put this one down as 4/5. It’s way better than the third season average and, with its emphasis on the battle of wits rather than “action,” a bit more adult than many Star Trek shows.
