1967
Down on the Planet Kirk is talking to the Halkin council trying to convince them to join the Federation. They are peaceful and don’t really want to join, but Kirk leaves it open. A storm comes up and the landing party consisting of Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura decide to beam back up to the ship. When they do some flip flopping happens and the landing party are in different uniforms on an Enterprise with a bunch of meanies. Spock has facial hair, Sulu has a scar and everyone is really mean. Our landing party isn’t sure what has happened so they go along with it and pretend to be their evil counterparts. Kirk is supposed to destroy the planet below for not giving into them, but he puts it off and has the rest of the wicked crew wondering about his actions. Bad Chekov and some others try to kill Kirk to move up in position, but they are stopped and Chekov is thrown into something called the Agony Booth which I think means he has to watch the “Spock’s Brain” episode over and over. Bad Spock tells Kirk he has orders to kill him if he doesn’t destroy the planet below. Meanwhile the rest of the landing party is working on setting a way to rig the transporter so they can attempt to beam back to their Enterprise. Kirk has a consort and a device that kills people with a touch of a button-wait so where’s the down side of being this Kirk? Bad Spock is just as sharp as good Spock because he knows that something is up with the landing party and he’s keeping an eye on them. He stops Kirk and takes him to the others, they attack bad Spock and eventually knock him out. Scar face Sulu and some red shirts show up to kill the good crew members, but they get some help, red shirts die and Sulu is stopped. McCoy tries to give medical attention to bad Spock (dumb) while the others go to the transporter room to wait. Kirk’s consort tries to force them to take her, but they stop her. Bad Spock wakes up and gets McCoy, but he takes him to the others and offers to beam them back to there ship. Kirk talks to bad Spock about considering trying to change the way things are on this ship and bad Spock says that he will considers it. The landing party gets back to their ship and find out their evil counterparts were there but are now gone. Kirk runs into a new officer who looks like his consort. Roll the credits.
The negatives-We only see a tiny clip of what the mean Kirk and landing party are like on the Enterprise we know. I would have liked to have seen more of them.
The positives-We see the “bad version” of a character on different shows, but Star Trek plays it out a little differently with Kirk trying to talk Spock and Marlena into changing how things are done in their world. The basic idea may not be anything special, but how it plays how and our characters respond to the situation is what makes this episode so good. Seeing Sulu and Chekov being mean is pretty cool too. We actually see another Vulcan on the ship (even though it’s the bad ship) when we see Spock’s bodyguard with him.
For Spock this is an important episode despite the fact that it’s his counterpart we still see that even this Spock has a strong sense of logic and the part of him that is striving or at least thinking about improving himself and his situation.
Lasers, monsters and barbarians oh, my! 
One of my fave STTOS episodes, love this one!
Definitely. It’s probably in my top 10.
One of my fav episodes!!
For sure. They took a routine idea and made it fantastic.
Mr O and I watched this episode on the day Mr Nimoy died to celebrate his life.
Me too.
I’m ecstatic to see a write up on this. I just watched this episode this morning for same of the same points you made.
Cool, thanks!
Wow think all of us were watching this one yday, I love this episode and yes I was enjoying this one as well yesterday.
It’s a great one.
“Your agonizer, Mr. Kyle”