Turnabout Intruder

[MikeS]

I have searched for an exsisting thread about this episode, but there does not appear to be one.

I finally got around to watching this last night. Like most of season 3 (which I want to get through before Christmas) it has evaded me for years.

Two questions;

1. Did they know this was going to be the last episode when it was being written/shot?

2. What does "Turnabout Intruder" reference? It's an odd title and I don't get it's meaning.

It was a disapointing end to TOS. Very sexist and a Deus Ex Machina ending (I found myself looking at the clock with three minutes to go, thinking, "how are they going to end this!"). They should have ended the series with "All Our Yesterdays", which I also saw last night and thought to be far superior.

Any thoughts/opinions?

 

[Char Aznable]

At times, the episode does feel very self aware. I'm wondering if, even if they weren't sure, perhaps the episode was written and shot with a sense of an ending in mind. Spock's speech referencing all the adventures they'd been on for instance.

 

[MikeS]

It is the first episode of TOS I can recall referencing any past adventures (The Menagerie excepted, as The Cage hadn't aired at the time). As well as Spock, Sulu and Chekov make reference to the General order from The Menagerie that allows a death penalty. All the referencing really stood out.

 

[RandyS]

It is the first episode of TOS I can recall referencing any past adventures (The Menagerie excepted, as The Cage hadn't aired at the time). As well as Spock, Sulu and Chekov make reference to the General order from The Menagerie that allows a death penalty. All the referencing really stood out.

Chekov did misremember the General Order though. he called it number four and in The Menagerie, Kirk calls it number seven.

If it's past references you're looking for, By Any Other Name contained a brief reference to A Taste of Armageddon.

 

[Char Aznable]

^ Obviously the order got bumped up due to Spock's shenagagens.

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

The actors became aware of Star Trek's cancellation during the filming of the episode and that it would be the last episode. Shatner had already been told that HE would be directing the last episode, and it really pissed him off that it wasn't. To make matters worse, in the courtroom scene where Kirk storms off, Herb Wallerstein directed Shatner to exit the scene in a direction that had been previously established as a wall. In other words, Kirk exits through the wall. Shatner got really beet red about it. I've always wondered how much of his anger he channeled into to Lester/Kirk's hysteria.

I've also wondered that if there were a couple of more episodes originally planned but not picked up by NBC what those scripts were and whether or not they ended up in "The Animated Series."

 

[Captrek]

It was a disapointing end to TOS.... They should have ended the series with "All Our Yesterdays", which I also saw last night and thought to be far superior.

One of many reasons I prefer stardate order to broadcast or production order. In stardate order, AOY is the last episode.

 

[BillJ]

Always liked Turnabout Intruder, especially the performance Shatner gives as Janice Lester.

 

[Too Much Fun]

I still like this better than "All Our Yesterdays" and think it was good series finale, far superior to those of "Voyager" and "Enterprise". The actress who played Janice Lester looked fantastic and Shatner gave one of his most entertaining over-the-top villain performances. There were also some nice quieter character moments for Spock, Scotty, and McCoy. I can kind of understand the complaints of sexism, but it was subtle enough for me to easily overlook.

 

[skylark14]

I always thought Turnabout Intruder was a decent title, better than the episode itself. I took it to refer to each being an intruder in the body of the other, and turnabout in the sense that you have a gender turnabout as well as a whopping turnabout in the fact that Lester is now the commander of a powerful starship and Kirk is now in the position of being helpless and seen as a lunatic.

I used to hate this episode but it's grown on me a little bit over the years to the point where it's watchable. I just take a lot of the absurd things Lester says as the ravings of a madwoman. Maybe women can be starship captains; maybe they can't; though the episode makes me lean toward believing that indeed they can't. That does fit with a lot of the other things we see and hear through the series. But lines like: "It's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman!!" Pullease. Way too over the top.

The storyline gave me no reason to accept that Lester had once been the kind of woman who had apparently made Kirk fall in love with her for a long period, and had made her associate fall so desperately in love that he would help her commit murder and accept her desire to live as a man. I was always amazed the censors didn't cut out the bit where Lester in Kirk's body is touching her lover as she tries to influence him to continue helping her.

This could have been a really thought-provoking episode played straight with Kirk living as a woman for awhile for some reason. It would have been fun to see the crew interacting with him as captain and as female.

It does seem a little like a final episode, especially the way the end credits show the ship flying into the heart of the star cradle or whatever it is, though I guess that was done post-production anyway. But also the way they have all the regulars who were in the episode together in a lot of the scenes of the court martial.

 

[Mytran]

...To make matters worse, in the courtroom scene where Kirk storms off, Herb Wallerstein directed Shatner to exit the scene in a direction that had been previously established as a wall. In other words, Kirk exits through the wall. Shatner got really beet red about it. I've always wondered how much of his anger he channeled into to Lester/Kirk's hysteria.

Actually, in Way To Eden one Adam the Space Hippys exited from the room in the same way, and there was a door there!

(from around 32:26 into the episode)

It does seem a little like a final episode, especially the way the end credits show the ship flying into the heart of the star cradle or whatever it is, though I guess that was done post-production anyway.

Actually, that scene only appears in the remastered episode. The original just has the standard "Enterprise flies away from the camera" shot.

 

[skylark14]

Thanks - I didn't know that. I was wondering why it hadn't caught my eye before. Nice touch though - I'm glad they did that.

 

[Char Aznable]

^ IIFC, it's the same one they used in the remastered version of WNMHGB.

 

[Willieck]

I thought little of this episode. I just thought that the whole series fizzled out instead of going out with a bang. I guess that they probably did not know that this was to be the final episode but that is just my conjecture.

It was discussed briefly in early August.

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=124775&page=10

 

[Mytran]

^ IIFC, it's the same one they used in the remastered version of WNMHGB.

Also in The Cage. Done deliberately, as a sort of start/finish visual framing device.

Kind a thing

 

[Danny99]

Funny timing, sfdebris on YouTube just did his review this past Saturday.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzx1c4TQQyQ[/yt]

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

...To make matters worse, in the courtroom scene where Kirk storms off, Herb Wallerstein directed Shatner to exit the scene in a direction that had been previously established as a wall. In other words, Kirk exits through the wall. Shatner got really beet red about it. I've always wondered how much of his anger he channeled into to Lester/Kirk's hysteria.

Actually, in Way To Eden one Adam the Space Hippys exited from the room in the same way, and there was a door there!

(from around 32:26 into the episode)

Actually, that's the "recreation room" not the "briefing room" although it's a redress of that set. To be honest, there's not a door there. There's no wall. You can see this on p. 102 of The Star Trek Sketchbook. But that doesn't change the "fact" that there's supposed to be a wall there as Shatner asserted. There are several sets such as Sickbay where there's no wall in reality, but supposed to be one.

 

[skylark14]

Thanks for sharing the You Tube clip. Lots of belly laughs, but also lots of spot-on observations. Please tell me this guy has one of these up for every episode?

 

[sevenstars]

I hated Turnabout Intruder. It would have been horrible anywhere in the series, and to use it at the end was just a betrayal. There was an awful lot of tension/ambiguity about women in Star Trek; for this episode to have the last word... it still makes me furious. Luckily it doesn't really seem like a finale, as has been pointed out.

 

[Mytran]

Actually, that's the "recreation room" not the "briefing room" although it's a redress of that set. To be honest, there's not a door there. There's no wall. You can see this on p. 102 of The Star Trek Sketchbook. But that doesn't change the "fact" that there's supposed to be a wall there as Shatner asserted. There are several sets such as Sickbay where there's no wall in reality, but supposed to be one.

Fair enough, but the last time we actually saw that wall (with the big viewscreen) back in Space Seed, if I remember rightly. Plenty of time for some interior rennovations!