I Don’t Watch This Episode Until…

[Spock's Barber]

As for "The Alternative Factor", it is next on my TOS rewatch list--unfortunately.

What do you think about this, Ash?

 

[Just a Bill]

I think they both have to get in that newspaper corridor together or the solution doesn't work, and if they didn't both go in there, the destructive events of blurry star graphics appearing at random and generating turbulence and wind (??) would continue to screw up everyone's weekend. Ingalls didn’t explain any of this, of course.

He surely did not, nor did GR (famous for massive rewrites) fix it. So I guess the headcanon would be that if bad Lazarus is in the corridor alone, he's out of place and the universe(s) are still out of whack, and this one man being stuck in purgatory, away from his normal universe, would still be enough to eventually shake our universe apart. Or both? Anyway, no matter how I try to head-canon it (and I have), I always seem to be self-rebutted by new questions. For example, if the problem is not really the two Lazari touching but rather the evil one being disconnected from his home universe — which, IIRC, is our universe (good Lazarus is the one from the negative uni, right?) — then why not just neck-pinch him, slit his throat while he's in our universe, and send good Lazarus back to his own. Everything's now right as rain, all parties are re-realigned with their source, and there's just a tiny database update in the form of one dead lunatic.

Brown, though, gave a good accounting of himself, picking up Shatner's probably 165-170 pounds almost as easily as Ted Cassidy.

Oh man, I totally forgot to credit Brown on my pros list. Dude put in an epic performance, under terrible conditions and with about zero prep time. There should probably be some kind of special "Is There an Actor in the House?" award for him, for Saul Rubinek in TNG The Most Toys, and maybe for Kate Mulgrew (Janeway's unlikability was on the writers, not the player). Anyway TAF's script was mostly a notch or two above Warm Trucker Bomb, but Brown committed to the role like it was Shakespeare in the Globe.