They have one villain, the major new character, and they have the primal storytelling need to have a bad situation escalate to worse and finally to a crisis. But Star Trek doesn't have that kind of time. One may want a more nuanced examination of the qualities women would bring to command: and on that basis, you will certainly be disappointed with the episode.
STAR TREK TURNABOUT INTRUDER TV
To make it work for their TV show, they simplified Ellison's script, pruning extra characters and paring the story down to one straight thru-line. That was one of the issues with Harlan Ellison's original version of City on the Edge of Forever. But by the time that situation is established, we have less than 40 mins of storytelling time left, and a lot to get done, and frankly we only have room for one villain per episode.
STAR TREK TURNABOUT INTRUDER PLUS
Star Trek shows us a woman who is capable of running the Enterprise, plus shrewd & ballsy enough to wrest command from Kirk. But again I give this episode a pass, and on much the same grounds: that this is an adventure TV show, not a womens studies journal, and they ony have so much time to get their storytelling done. The other criticism has more substance, that the only woman in command we ever see in TOS is a PMS psycho bitch. But if we eschew the cliche's and stereotypes, we probably won't be telling it as economically.
40 years later we might choose to tell this story differently.
That's just brutally effective visual storytelling. And yeah, they go with visual shorthand: which is to say, cliche's. This episode hangs on the non-visual idea that Kirk's body has been hijacked by someone else, and to sell that idea they have Shatner do something IN EVERY SCENE to remind us. There is not a lot of scope for subtle storytelling. I mean, you have to keep in mind that this is a pulp TV show. His performance is skilful and effective. Shatning in every other episode is our society's definition of being a ham: but in *this* episode it is an anti-feminist screed? Nonsense.Īnd frankly, I think Shatner does fine work here. It is utterly silly to ascribe some kind of anti-feminist message to Shatner's acting in this episode, when his acting thruout Star Trek's run became a cultural touchstone of parody. But I re-watched the episode last year, and those criticisms strike me as hypersensitive.įirst, Shat's performance. Now, I first saw this episode as a little kid, and I bought into it completely. Frankly, neither of those things bother me. She casually murders people to get the job, she's obsessed with her ex-boyfriend, and she's bitchy when people disagree with her – bitchy to the point of court-martialling them and trying to have them executed. The other is the story structure, where the only woman we see who rises to a position of command in Starfleet (whether legally or the way Janice Lester does it), turns out to be a psycho bitch on the worst PMS rampage you can imagine, and she can't handle it. The first is Shat's performance: the nail-buffing, leg-crossing, etc. The notion that Turnabout Intruder is some anti-feminist tract that sets women back decades, is based on two things. Also some smart-ass remarks, which fit in with the tone there. What's the policy on cussing, at these boards? Blue language was in keeping there, so there's some here. The comments were on the AV Club's review of this episode, written by Zack Handlen, the "Zack" I mention a couple times below. In multi-parts, because those comments had a character limit. Originally posted in the comments on the Onion AVclub. Turnabout Intruder, Feminism, and Command
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