Turnabout Intruder
Stardate 5298.5: Visiting Dr. Coleman and the ailing Dr. Lester, a colleague of Kirk’s from Starfleet Academy who has always envied him due to her inability to achieve a captaincy in a male-captains-only Starfleet, Kirk is rendered unconscious by Lester. It turns out to have been a trap, and Lester puts herself and Kirk into an unknown device that transfers their minds into one another’s bodies. Lester, in the form of Kirk, doesn’t have time to kill Kirk (now in the female body). Lester and Coleman make every attempt to leave Kirk on the planet, but must bring “her” aboard to save face. Kirk, still suffering a severe shock from the mind transfer, is unable to warn McCoy about Lester’s plan to command the Enterprise (especially when Lester keeps ordering Kirk sedated). Lester, however, is unable to conceal her lack of knowledge of command procedures and, more specifically, Kirk’s character, and when Spock learns the truth and attempts to help Kirk, Lester has him placed under arrest and tries to speed Spock’s court-martial toward a conclusion which would have Kirk and Spock executed.
teleplay by Arthur H. Singer
story by Gene Roddenberry
directed by Herb Wallerstein
music by Fred SteinerGuest Cast: James Doohan (Mr. Scott), George Takei (Lt. Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura), Walter Koenig (Chekov), Sandra Smith (Janice Lester), Harry Landers (Dr. Coleman), Majel Barrett (Nurse Chapel), Barbara Baldavin (Communications Officer), David L. Ross (Lt. Galoway), John Boyer (Guard)
Notes: Only 47 days after the final episode of Star Trek aired, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
LogBook entry by Earl Green
The crew of the third American moon landing mission prepares for their flight early in 1970. At the last minute, command module pilot Ken Mattingly is declared unfit for flight due to possible exposure to the measles, and mission commander Jim Lovell can either make the flight with the backup pilot, Jack Swigert, or risk his entire crew being pushed back to a later flight. Lovell decides to replace Mattingly with Swigert, and even though Swigert has had less training time, he’s determined to make it a good flight. The launch goes off smoothly, and Apollo 13 is en route to the moon. But during a routine procedure, a huge explosion rips through the service module of the isolated spacecraft, draining the vital oxygen needed not only for consumption by the astronauts, but to provide electricity for the attached command module. Lovell, Haise and Swigert evacuate to the relatively tiny lunar module, which is meant to sustain only two men for less than a day – but they now face a journey of several days to return to Earth, during which they will have to shut down both the lunar lander and what’s left of the command module to preserve power. The three astronauts and their hundreds of landlocked flight controllers – including Ken Mattingly, who is most assuredly healthy and puts all of his effort into exploring possible survival solutions for his former crewmates – are focusing their energies on bringing Apollo 13 home. But time, physics, and the odds are all against them.
The Doctor and Ace have insinuated themselves into the staff of a London hospital in 2021, trying to discover what they can about a top secret project called “C Program,” which the Doctor suspects is using alien technology. The Doctor’s nasty suspicions about the origins of that technology come into sharp focus when Ace befriends a young medic nicknamed Hex in an effort to find out more about C Program, and a hulking humanoid tries to kill both of them shortly afterward. Ace lets Hex into the TARDIS, and he quickly becomes involved in the time travelers’ plans to find out what’s going on. He might even join Ace and the Doctor for more of their travels, if any of them survive the harvesting of the human race for the organs needed by an invasion force that could overrun Earth in mere weeks.
Galanar, traveling incognito as a doctor, backtracks Siy Tarkov’s two-decade journey, and decides to investigate the planet Skelanis, where “the Healers” are rumored to be fighting the NFS plague. On Graxis Major, when one of Commander Saxton’s crew refuses to obey a Dalek order, the Daleks show their true colors by exterminating him on the spot. Saxton and the surviving Wardens are rounded up and imprisoned, but Saxton stubbornly insists on formulating an escape plan. Without realizing it, Galanar is being spirited away to Skelanis VIII, which the Daleks have “geoformed” and turned into a massive medical facility. Having only heard Tarkov’s word that the Daleks are a force for evil, Galanar wonders if the Daleks – known here as the healers – are as bad as their reputation. And as Selestru continues to demand more information from him, Tarkov wonders precisely who his rescuer and benefactor is.
Mel is alarmed when the TARDIS materializes without the Doctor at the controls. After leaving her on Earth briefly to take care of unspecified business, he has vanished without a trace, leaving her a holographic message in the TARDIS instructing her to follow his trail to the Klyst Institute, a grim-looking mental hospital. Rather than risk trying to fly the TARDIS herself, Mel enlists the reluctant help of a rough-and-tumble cabbie who helps her as she breaks into the Institute. There, she finds the Doctor – but his mind is gone, and he speaks in almost nonsensical phrases. Mel and her new friend try to escape with the Doctor, but they find that the Institute is no longer on Earth, having transported itself to an asteroid in an instant. The Institute also seems to be bigger inside than out, and other aliens (and humans) have been captured for horrific mind-transfer experiments. Are Time Lords operating in secret on Earth? And if so, are they renegades like the Doctor…or something darker interference in human history going on with the Time Lords’ full knowledge?
The body of the mutilated Time Lord from Davidia is returned to Gallifrey in stasis – and in complete secrecy – for further study. Romana and Braxiatel discover that the experiment of opening Gallifrey’s doors to other temporal superpowers may have unintended consequences; one of Braxiatel’s alien students is caught trying to poison Gallifrey’s water supply in the name of the Free Time movement. Complicating matters even more is the fact that he’s caught by Andred, who is still on the run after having broken out of his imprisonment. The question of whether or not Romana will appoint Braxiatel to be the new Chancellor of the High Council is at the heart of Inquisitor Darkel’s latest political power grab, as she plays all sides against the middle and finds her most willing (if unwitting) ally in the naive Castellan Wynter. By preying on his fear that his inexperience will cut his reign short, Darkel convinces him to unleash the Pandora creature, which K-9 had managed to corner in a data partition in the Matrix. But in so doing, Wynter discovers in the most horrible way that the mutilated body from Davidia is himself – but even his attempts to deny Pandora a body and mind to inhabit will prove unsuccessful, as she seeks a victim who now sits in an even higher office.
The Doctor, Charley and C’rizz find themselves trapped in a maze-like prison whose occupants call it the Cube. The Doctor and the TARDIS are snatched away, leaving Charley and C’rizz to hide in the darkness with a trio of desperate prisoners. Once recruited to by psychically augmented to help their world win a war, the “prisoners” have now been banished to a Cube, as their recruiters can’t find a way to deactivate or control their psychic powers. Something called the brain worm stalks the Cube, killing its victims after burning out their minds. The prisoners insist that the Doctor vanished because he was the brain worm’s last victim. Charley refuses to believe it – and then C’rizz disappears, leaving her at the mercy of her fellow prisoners. The Doctor, however, isn’t in the clutches of the brain worm. He’s held prisoner, tortured and interrogated to Rawden, the man who operates the Cube and keeps the prisoners captive. And Rawden is just as worried about the brain worm as his prisoners are…
The Doctor and Lucie travel to 1984 to pay another visit to Lucie’s Aunty Pat, and Lucie discovers that Pat’s married to a former folk singer and running a secluded hotel – a marriage that Lucie’s never heard of before. Two other visitors to the hotel also catch the Doctor’s eye; Lucie tries to spy on them, and discovers that they’re Zygons – aliens who can shapeshift to resemble any human that they kidnap and put into their equipment… a fate that Pat’s husband Trevor has suffered, and a fate that now awaits Lucie. The duplicated Lucie tries to throw the Doctor off-course, but even with her interference, he soon discovers that Lucie’s Uncle Trevor is a Zygon warlord who has defected to Earth, taking with him the secrets needed to launch a terrifying new Zygon invasion. Trevor’s fellow Zygons want those secrets, and they’ll do anything, from exposing Trevor’s true identity to killing the human woman he has fallen in love with, to get them.
The Doctor and Lucie find themselves in immediate danger when the TARDIS lands aboard a human warship in the distant future; not only does the bedraggled crew find the newcomers supicious, but the ship is under attack by Wirrn. Having encountered them before, the Doctor is able to lend a hand, but it’s too late: the ship is critically damaged, and the time travelers have to don space suits to abandon ship – and hope that the TARDIS will make its way to the planet below with the wreckage of the ship. On the planet, a thriving Wirrn colony awaits its new prey, but the Doctor suspects that there’s more to this conflict than meets the eye. Left on her own with a wounded admiral and a paranoid, trigger-happy soldier, Lucie is about to discover if she’s learned enough from the Doctor to keep herself alive.
The Doctor takes Hex to the Crimean War, in the wake of the costly and ultimately futile charge of the Light Brigade. Ace understands why the Doctor has brought them here all too well: Hex can, at least temporarily, make a difference and regain his confidence about traveling in the TARDIS. But this adventure becomes more than any of them can handle when the three time travelers are separated; Hex takes charge of battlefield medicine at the front of the war, but when the TARDIS is lost at sea, Ace and the Doctor are captured by Russian soldiers. The Doctor is treated like a visiting diplomat, while Ace gets to recover from her injuries in a cell. The three time travelers have to use what they know about this juncture in history to try to reunite with each other without changing recorded events. For Hex, avoiding interference with history becomes doubly difficult when he is introduced to Florence Nightingale herself, and is then accused of collusion with the enemy. Hex’s accuser is eager to see Hex dead for this crime, whether he actually committed it or not, and this time the Doctor isn’t there to help him.
The Doctor’s worst fears are confirmed when he and Jamie are accosted by white robots: they are once again trapped in the Land of Fiction, where fictional characters come to life, but very real damage can be inflicted on visitors fromo outside Fiction. The Artful Dodger comes to the time travelers’ aid, but only when they encounter this character’s cohort do they realize who the real enemy is: Oliver Twist has been converted by Cybermen. The metal giants, trapped in the Land of Fiction by an intelligence that has yet to reveal itself, are laying siege to this dimension and converting the characters inhabiting it. Alice in Wonderland and Dracula have been drafted into service as soldiers, and Captain Nemo and the Nautilus are joining in the fight when it’s convenient to them. But none of them are fighting to defend any kind of real space. Another of the Doctor’s former companions – Zoe – appears and reveals that she is behind the Cyber-war over the Land of Fiction. But when she tells the Doctor how both the Cybermen and the Time Lord were drawn into the Land of Fiction, the Doctor realizes that the turf being fought for so viciously is the mind and soul of his companion.