March 30th, 1967, "The Alternative Factor"
The fiver (by Derek)
Transcript
Memory Alpha
The episode:
* Again with the "photography" instead of "sensors." Ugh.
* Spock describes Lazarus as "human." Did "humanoid" not exist yet?
* This winking out phenomenon should've been studied further. I mean, think of the military applications if you could jam your opponents sensors, if only for a few seconds!
* So in this episode Starfleet can get information within a few hours from the entire galaxy and far beyond. Proof that no astronomers were on staff. Space is big, really big, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggilingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to--SLAP! Sorry. Let's assume that the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way were meant. They're 200,000 light years away (instead of the nearest real galaxies at 2.5 million light years)! So at this point subspace is so fast that it can go half a million light years in a few hours (both ways, remember?). That's 2 BILLION times the speed of light! A few different tech manuals for 24th century subspace says that it's Warp 9.9999=about 200,000 times the speed of light. Let's toss aside that the 24th century is more advanced than the 23rd, an order of magnitude doesn't matter much either way when you're talking about this episode, where somehow subspace communication has suddenly gotten TEN THOUSAND TIMES FASTER THAN ANY OTHER EPISODE IN ANY SERIES! Seriously, where were the TOS equivalents of Sternbach and Okuda on this one? Surely "at least a thousand light years" would endanger enough people to be a plausible threat and still be somewhat realistic!
* After the preceding rant, all other technobabble in this episode seems reasonable, even that bit where a lunatic can telepathically trigger an effect that can cover billions of cubic light years. And if that effect is caused by his ship (and if we presume that dilithium crystals by themselves are an energy source), that one small ship can cause this effect. Okay, so it's not so reasonable. Remember on Stargate when you had to destroy an entire planet made out of Unobtanium to get a signal that far?
* You gotta feel for the sane Lazarus, though. His only crime was being the doppelganger of someone on the verge of madness.
The fiver:
The "inconceivable" jokes and substitutions were funny, I won't repeat them all.
Lazarus: I was persuing him. He's my foe. The God to my Satan. The Holmes to my Moriarty. The Superman to my Lex Luthor.
Kirk: Should I be troubled by you attributing the good characteristics to him and the bad ones to yourself?
Yes, you should, although "counterparts" would be a better word that "characteristics" in this case.
Spock: We've discovered a rip in the universe
Kirk: So we need a tailor to make a stitch in time?
This has nothing to do with the fiver, but I do recommend the novel "A Stitch in Time", the "autobiography" of Elim Garak. We now return you to the fiver analysis already in progress.
Kirk: How about some answers. What's your ship?
Lazarus: It's a time ship.
Kirk: Your last name isn't Braxton, is it?
Lazarus: I'm hunting down another time traveller, who blew up my planet in the 29th century as part of a temporal cold war. Now I need your dilithium to get back to the year 1985.
Kirk: Why do I get the feeling you're just making this up?
Lazarus: I must stop the other, and his little dog too.
Wow. Voyager, Enterprise, Back to the Future, AND the Wizard of Oz. And apparently you misspelled "traveler." One "L." It's too bad it wasn't the other way around, or I could've made another Stargate joke!
Memory Alpha:
* First appearance of realtime two-way subspace communication. No wonder, since the thing is working TEN THOUSAND TIMES FASTER THAN--slap!