Nerding Day: Star Drek - Turnabout Intruder (Patreon)

Last time on “Star Drek” - a guided tour of the very worst episodes the Star Trek franchise has to offer - we suffered through “The Alternative Factor” together and the shared trauma bonded us forever. However, it must be said that there was nothing overtly offensive about “The Alternative Factor.” It just sucked really, really bad. Well, I’m afraid that sweet, simpler time of inoffensive sucking has passed…prepare to be sucked till you’re offended!

This column, we’re warping all the way forward to the final Star Trek episode ever aired, “Turnabout Intruder.”

Setting aside the fact that the title sounds like you just hit the person who came up with “Alternative Factor” on the head and shouted “Again!,” it’s an episode so shallow and misogynistic that making it the de facto series finale of a sci-fi show dedicated to expanding human empathy is like writing a long wet fart into the end of the 1812 Overture. It’s like booking The Kingston Trio to close out Woodstock. It’s like trying to tell a story about “the plight of womanhood” by tossing three dudes into a room with a carton of cigarettes and a stack of Playboys.

“Hey Arthur! Gene! Herb! The sexist oppression of the female gender…what’s it all about, boys? Feminism: is there any way we can capitalize on this hot lady’s fad before it’s over?” Naturally, the first thing the episode does is make the worst part of the iconic opening monologue...

…a literalized reality. Just in time for the end of the whole series, “Turnabout Intruder” makes it Star Trek canon that women are barred from becoming Captains in Starfleet. After all, how can you take a brave stance against sexism if you don’t normalize its existence up to and including the 23rd century?

We discover this very un-sci-fi fact by meeting Dr. Janice Lester, the leader of a science expedition on Camus II. You may recognize that fake planet name as a reference to French philosopher Albert Camus, who believed that life has no inherent meaning and humans must create their own by act of will. Granted a similar freedom to shape the reality of their made-up show, Star Trek’s third season writers decided Janice Lester would be a maniacal, cackling, craven, murderous, vindictive bitch-on-wheels who proves exactly why ladies can’t be trusted with command positions.

…but I’m getting ahead of myself. Before all that stuff happens, the Enterprise crew beam down to Camus II to respond to distressing reports of widespread radiation poisoning. Dr. Lester is the latest to succumb, and hovers on the brink of consciousness in bed.

Captain Kirk sees her begin to stir, and immediately sits on her bed and tells her to please shut up. She hasn’t actually spoken yet, but you know how ladies like to squawk! Amirite, my best friend we all call ‘Bones?’

See? Our bro Boner knows. Kirk’s just nipping that shit in the bud like a bud!

Kirk then adds, “Those are the doctor’s orders, not mine” while hitting Janice with the full dismissive force of The Official Smile of the Patriarchy.

This statement confirms both that he’s not a doctor and unwilling to take ownership of his microaggressions. Later, it’s revealed that Kirk and Lester also had a tumultuous dating relationship at Starfleet Academy, which means Dr. Lester - herself A DOCTOR - woke up from a radiation coma to find her hated ex-boyfriend - NOT a doctor - telling her to shut up. Instead of simply heeding his sound advice, Janice insists on dragging the good Captain into a domestic squabble. They rehash some of their old space-quarrels…

…and Janice ultimately brings it back around to women being barred from the position of Captain. She points out the inherent unfairness of this, and without disagreeing Kirk instantly turns the story of her systemic marginalization into one about himself and his own hurt feelings. It’s real manly stuff.

The tension in the room becomes palpable enough that even Spock finds he suddenly has other places to be.

Once alone, Dr. Lester immediately and easily outwits Captain Kirk, forcing a body-swap on him against his will. It’s a textbook “Freaky Stardate 4372.5” situation.

The transference leaves Kirk’s mind stuck in Lester’s comatose body, while Lester galavants around as Captain Kirk. In other words, the writers fridged the female actor as quickly as possible to make room for Shatner to do his best “conniving, grasping woman” character. Fortunately for any Pakleds watching, her behavioral palette also includes expositing aloud to herself things she knows just happened because she’s the one who caused them to happen that way.

Although it’s probably good she revelled in her success for a moment, because it’s the only one the writers will allow her to have. In every other regard she will prove a flustered, selfish, volatile and pernicious coward who can’t handle a simple strangling.

Lester-as-Kirk taunts the comatose captain for not having the “strength of will” to have murdered her for no reason in front of his Starfleet colleagues in the opening scene. Then she prepares to destroy her old body (with Kirk’s mind inside it) to fully realize her plan.

Just so it’s noted - this is a scene written by dudes where a dude strangles a lady they paid not to move while he goes “this is you, this is what you’re like” and pretends to be a duplicitous murderess.

In a grim echo of their first interaction, Lester starts to strangle Kirk with her own space-shawl and exhort him to die as quietly as the show currently is.

In another line written by a dude and delivered by a dude, Dr. Lester also posits that it’s better to be a goddamn corpse than a woman in today’s world. And remember, her “today’s” is the 23rd Century.

The glass ceiling is not only built to last, apparently it extends into the vast reaches of space! Here are some alternate lines for the above moment I wrote to amuse myself and you:

“Better R.I.P. than rockin’ a V.”

“Better two X’s for your eyes than your chromosomes.”

“Better the inevitable extinction of the entire human race than gender equality.”

Anyway, she fails. She botches the self-strangling, and not in the good autoerotic way. Maybe she’s clumsy with the new hands, or lacks the force of will she claims. Perhaps she is menstruating and distracted by the need to shoe shop. Regardless, when the others return, the body in the coma is just in an even deeper coma, presumably with a set of fresh strangulation marks that no one will ever notice or investigate.

Forced to come up with an excuse on the spot, the best Lester-as-Kirk can do is literally a word-for-word synonym for what really happened. Just terrible lying. “Maybe the trauma of realizing his dick is gone?”

Shh, you ditzy doll! You’ll give away the game! The game, it turns out, is primarily William Shatner doing “womanly mannerisms” to indicate how poorly Dr. Lester is adapting to her new role as both a Starfleet Captain and Certified Alpha Male. For example, she does some great coverup work by bro-ing out with Dr. Boners about how Kirk hit-and-quit Dr. Lester back at the Academy…

…buuut, she just can’t resist fussing with her hair at the same time. This confirms both that ladies be primpin’ and that William Shatner is an actor making acting choices. You simply can’t take that away from him. He’s not NOT an actor. Incidentally, realizing Janice once got his pal’s dick wet seems to light a new fire under McCoy, which is real weird.

“Oh, you had sex with and then discarded her? I didn’t know that; I’ll definitely try to not let her die now!” The vibes are reminiscent of that famous Eddie Murphy SNL sketch where he goes undercover as a white man, but instead of a sketch it’s the series finale of your high-minded, genre-defining science fiction drama. Lester quickly extricates herselves from the conversation and checks in with her henchman guy, and even he treats her as low-status.

This dude is an employee of Dr. Lester’s who is in love with her and has committed multiple murders at her behest, yet apparently feels comfortable calling her on her silly bullshit right to her purloined face. This doesn’t sit well with the big dog.

The big dog(tor [Lester]) therefore uses her newfound clout to force the grim duty back onto her lapdog, Dr. Coleman.

To drive home how petty and vindictive this is on her part, Shatner forces his eyes to look in different directions for the line, surely to represent the two faces of woman - whore and mother.

Because of what systems do to people, when Kirk wakes up in Dr. Lester’s body and new/female/EVIL Kirk orders her immediately sedated for no apparent reason, Nurse Chapel obeys without question.

Of course it should be noted that Nurse Chapel is played by Majel Barrett, who’s also Lwaxana Troi, so she might fully be expecting them to all get down right now. Instead, she gets to hear Kirk use Lester’s body’s final breaths to call out what’s happening in no uncertain terms.

Not only that, but Dr. Lester uses Kirk’s big strong man-lungs to record a Captain’s Log in which she OPENLY DISCUSSES HER EVIL PLOT IN DETAIL.

In case you’re not a “Starkie” (dedicated Star Trek fan), I will confirm that yes, a Captain’s Log is an official military-style log the captain submits to his Starfleet superiors to listen to, not a CHILD’S SECRET DIARY.

Like, here she means “months of preparation” studying how to usurp the role of a Starfleet Captain, but she’s saying that in the middle of what has basically become a recorded confession. Lester then runs afoul of a woman’s worst enemy: logic. Pointy-eared, bowl-cut logic poured into about six feet of blue velour.

At Spock’s most gentle prodding, Lester immediately goes haywire and starts saying things like “I’m the real Captain Kirk or my name’s not Janet Lester!”

Wary, Lester retreats to “her” office where she uses Kirk’s body to blend in by…filing his nails.

Not only is that something Kirk has never done on the show, no one even knows where the file came from! A props-master wanders into frame at one point saying “did you replicate that, where did you get that?” But, ever confident in her fleshly guise, Dr. Lester only starts to sweat when Leonard “Boneyard Bonesy Boney-Boy” McCoy presses her into a medical exam.

When Doctaptain Kirkster demands to know why, Doctor ‘Rection explains that, well, basically, it’s because he’s been acting like a daffy broad lately.

Kirkster attempts to brush his suspicions aside by standing in as masculine a way as possible.

Meanwhile - while Shatner stands how he imagines he would if he had boobies - Sandra Smith is over on the sickbay set acting how she imagines James T. Kirk would if he realized he was a girl now. This turns out to be an identical reaction to if he’d woken up as a giant cockroach.

Kirk uses the brief moment of lucidity to explain the plot of Freaky Friday to Nurse Chapel…

…but it does little to win the woman’s sympathy.

Chilling stuff. One can almost envision Director Herb Wallerstein coaxing more intensity from his actress between takes: “Can you even imagine what that’s like, Sandra, to have your body at risk like that? To be violated like that? As a man, I mean?” Fortunately, Kirk remembers that with his smarter male brain-thoughts intact, it’s simple enough to outfox Chapel with a lie - woman’s native tongue.

Chapel easily sees through the ruse, but is stunned unconscious by Kirkster’s hideous goblin grin. That buys them enough time to track down Spock and Bones, who are busy validating to one another that their bro Kirk has been acting ladylike, and that “ladylike” is a term interchangeable with “irrational.”

Seriously, next time you’re in a fight with your girlfriend and want to holler “bitches be crazy,” try this one out on ‘em instead:

Kirk pilots Dr. Lester’s body into the room and, instead of saying what he just said to Nurse Chapel about body-switching, he lands on a vague cry for help that can be easily misinterpreted. Smart!

Lester uses the big strong man-body she’s hiding in to render the intruder unconscious with a quick disco dance.

Order restored, McCoy proceeds with a full battery of mental and physical tests on the Captain to prove and quantify just how big and strong his man-body in fact is. It gets pretty horny. Sorry…space-horny.

Bones opines on the Captain’s fine heart, organ health, overall pinkness, and stunning glands.

And to anyone claiming I’m stretching for comedy’s sake, I present this image:

That’s just never what you want to hear your doctor say with quiet force as you dress hurriedly to hide your inner femininity. Perhaps realizing his overstep, the good doctor translates his request into more clinical language.

“Um, I don’t know who Robbiani is, but I’m pretty sure ‘Dermal Optic’ just means ‘look at skin,’ ya creep.” Indeed, Bones gets a nice long look at Kirk’s phantom boobies as he literally puts his patient in the pink.

“See?” he seems to say, “I can tell you’re a girl inside because of this pink light!” He doesn’t say that, though. In fact, after the Rudy Giuliani Dermal Optic, McCoy says all mental scans prove that this person IS James T. Kirk, inside and out. That plot point is never refuted or resolved, a good reminder that the episode isn’t only sexist but also bad like bad stuff that’s just plain bad.

Over in sickbay, Spock’s finally gotten suspicious enough to wake and question Janice Lester. As always, the unfailingly logical Lieutenant Commander sets a high bar for burden of proof. In other words, he’s never seen Freaky Friday either.

Thankfully, in a break with millennia of legal precedent, Spock grants that “facts” qualify as acceptable evidence.

Oh nice, lucky break! Verified information will be regarded as such? What a brave new world we live in! As Kirkster points out, this is all immaterial because Spock can touch people and read their minds, an absolutely hilarious oversight this late in the story.

He does. It’s Kirk’s mind. He believes her now. That was SO easy.

Unfortunately, Spock’s dumbass plan is just to take her back to Dr. McCoy and talk it out again. Because she’s confined to sickbay by captain’s order, this requires going totally rogue and neck-pinching several security officers unconscious without warning.

Wait, no it didn’t! You could have just called McCoy on the comms system! Oh well, I’m sure this will only open his mind further to your outlandish body-switching claims.

With his superior Vulcan strength, Spock easily dispatches his crewmates. A klaxon sounds down the halls. Alert! Alert! With practiced speed, a second wave of security men arrive by turbolift. And this time? They sent the BIG GUNS.

Fortunately these two behemoths only beat Spock half-to-death instead of all the way, and a court martial is swiftly convened. In case you weren’t aware, fully one third of Star Trek episodes collapse into a courtroom drama at some point wherein a trial is held to determine what is right and wrong about space magic. This is one of the things we love about the show.

Although again, usually the attendant narration isn’t a Captain’s Log that would serve equally well as a taped confession. And we know Janice Lester is aware of taped confessions - at least in concept - because she’s about to try to use one to win the court case. Let’s watch! If possible, let’s watch with a look NOT so smug that any casual observer would assume we are both the defendant and guilty, if not in fact Satan himself.

As Captain and prosecutor, Kirk questions Dr. Lester on the stand. This yields a very precious thing: dialog written by male writers for a female actor playing a man mansplaining body-switching to a male actor playing a woman. This is the equivalent of trying to make a coherent artistic statement about abortion by having a midwife explain what her neighbor’s realtor thinks about it in a Nixon voice.

Finally, a show that sticks up for men’s bodily autonomy constantly being violated by ladies, amirite?! In fact, the mere idea that Shatner’s meat could house a lady-soul is enough to make the whole room burst into raucous pre-laughter.

For a Star Trek show, this is considered an extremely comedic beat. And hey, look, another nail file! Thank God that’s catching on; the main way I differentiate gender is by whether someone’s idly filing their nails (dame) or picking their teeth with the corner of a playing card (galoot).

Kirk again draws on his inner pool of Masculine Common Sense to explain a simple semantic nuance that Janice Lester, herself an astronaut and doctor, is too dumb ladylike to grasp.

Lester also mocks the very idea that a woman could even physically outmatch Captain Kirk, renowned as he is for being so DEEPLY in the pink. Have you seen this man’s glands?

“Yeah man, we have lasers now, look into it!” Clearly, Lester’s trying to lean into the very gender norms that have limited her Starfleet career in order to win the case and secure her new position. Feeling his captaincy slipping away, Kirk-as-Lester finally lets his own mask slip and says the quiet part out loud - that he hates this bitch. Not in a sexist way though! This particular bitch is just supremely hateable, you see.

Nah, couldn’t be the fact that it’s the year fucking 2300 and we’re a galaxy-spanning hegemony where women are still treated as second-class citizens. Dr. Lester simply “hates her own womanhood” and “craves” a position she doesn’t “merit” because she hasn’t been trained. Cut to a cartoon internet goose yelling “WHO DIDN’T TRAIN HER? WHO DIDN’T TRAIN HER MOTHERFUCKER?!”

Spock then stands and calmly explains that he’s literally READ HER MIND and she’s Kirk. This completely settles the issue and seemingly could have been said at any time, making the entire sequence pointless.

This doesn’t sit well with the big dog.

As previously alluded to, she then springs a devious trap based on her knowledge that everyone aboard the Enterprise is constantly being taped and held accountable to those tapes.

The recess gives Lester enough time to go file her bosoms and tape another damning Captain’s Log, all while Scotty and Boney step into the hallway to loudly discuss how bitches be crazy and Kirk be acting like a bitch.

“Hysterical” of course is the 1960’s code-word for “dizzy dame.” Calling everyone back into the room, Lestirk plays their conversation back to them and uses it as a justification for fresh treason charges against both men.

The Captain sentences them to death, which is expressly forbidden by the Starfleet charter because the guys writing this story could easily foresee a day where capital punishment is considered primitive and barbaric, but not a day where gals will be allowed to drive in space.

While the prisoners are prepared for execution, Evil Woman Imposto-Kirk charges to the bridge to continue cementing her credibility by doing things like calling bridge officers by their first names…

…and crowing over her victory like Snidely Whiplash intentionally throwing The Trolley Problem.

Sensing that she’s acting even more histrionic than usual, Dr. Lester realizes she’s losing her mental grip on Kirk’s body. This is conveyed to the audience via jazz hands and a frozen rictus of fear. Maybe he’s trying to do a dilophosaurus thing.

Like a dear in the deadlights!

See, it turns out Spock is able to help Kirk project his consciousness into the mental realm to do psychic battle with Lester, and naturally, he’s winning. Deep inside, Janice knows the time has come to either kill Kirk-as-Lester or lose the new position she’s worked so hard for. Tragically she is of the fairer sex, and therefore lacks the stones to actually murder someone herself, forcing her to turn to her lackey Dr. Coleman for support.

Lestirk outright orders Coleman to execute Kirkster, and he hesitantly agrees. Incidentally, this is a huge setback to the scientific and medical communities, as he’s forced to abandon the important work he was doing on a big glass cylinder of shit, just human shit.

When he objects again on the way to the brig, Kirk tries to force Coleman to murder Lester with a hypospray at gunpoint, which is odd considering she just sorta proved she doesn’t have it in her to kill anybody. She sure can yell for you to do it, though!

Just in time, the REAL Captain Kirk flexes his mental might once more and pushes Lester from his brain-meat, and her back into the nest of spiders she calls a mind. Re-feminized, she of course collapses immediately into babyish sobs, craving the strong arms of a man to console her and make her feel safe.

For a while, there’s nothing but the soft sound of Lester crying. All the dudes stand around and stare at her in what’s known as a “cowboy shot,” revealing no feeling whatsoever. No one tries to help her or cares that this is happening; they just kind of feel vaguely awkward that so much emotion is on display. Scotty farts silently, one assumes.

Then, because apparently there’s no consistent legal apparatus among the stars, they straight-up GIFT HER back to Dr. Coleman like a broken toy. Seriously, he asks if instead of a trial or anything he can just “keep her” and Dr. McCoy says “yes sure, that’s fine.” Why is he allowed to say that?!

Like it’s wild that she’s not held to account for the many murders she committed on Camus II, but it’s even wilder that once caught her punishment is to “belong to” the creepy nerd she’s kept friend-zoned the whole time. Kirk watches Coleman take her away, a shattered woman now. It is a somber moment, a time to reflect on what’s really important: Why none of this was his fault.

“...just not as rich as ours, right men?!” Then they all cackle and high five with their penises. Spock’s balls are pointy. The End.

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