YMMV / Star Trek S3 E24 "Turnabout Intruder"

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• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: While the intended sexist moral is well-known, the episode could also be taken as noting that not all Domestic Abusers are male and not all survivors are female.
• Fan Wank: In all the decades since the episode aired, there's been a subsection of the fandom trying to argue that it's not really saying that Starfleet doesn't let women captain starships (or at least, supplying this as a Watsonian explanation while acknowledging the Doylist one). Mostly it boils down to "Lester's just nuts." Today we know she was dead wrong, but the stories that prove it came decades after this one aired; at the time, nobody said anything like "What?! You want me to call up Captain Alexander from the Saratoga and get her to tell you about Captains Hernandez and Georgiou?"
  • Word of God from Gene Roddenberry was that the line was simply sexist, that the supposedly utopian Federation had a glass ceiling, and that he came to regret the line.
  • Word of Leonard Nimoy was that Roddenberry meant every word of it.
    His goal was to prove, quote, 'That women, although they claim equality, cannot really do things as well, under certain circumstances, as a man' — like the command function, for example... What he set out to prove was that this lady, given command of the ship, would blow it. That's really what the script was about. Just that simple."
  • Nimoy voiced repeated objections to this during production. Statements made by the Great Bird, who was undergoing a bitter divorce at the time — including "all women are cunts who can't be trusted" at several story conferences, and a little-remembered dismissal of Nichelle Nichols's protest when he rewrote a scene so that Uhura wouldn't take the helm^note something she'd done in two or three early episodes — "You can't have females running a man's ship!" seem to bear this out.
  • Fan author/researchers Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath were obsessed with this episode and "Plato's Stepchildren". For a book on Shatner's career, they repeatedly asked Shatner and Roddenberry what they thought about sexual fantasies based on these episodes.
• Fanon: It's commonly speculated that Janice Lester was deemed too mentally unstable to command a starship and her psychotic mind twisted it into thinking that all women were forbidden from holding that position. This is more or less promoted to canon in Enterprise, which casually revealed that Starfleet does allow women captains (the first Enterprise episode showing a female captain takes place in 2154, 115 years BEFORE this episode chronologically).
  • In interviews for Shatner: Where No Man, Nimoy confirmed that Roddenberry was indeed saying Starfleet didn't allow women captains, that they cannot do all that men do. In numerous interviews, some published in The Fifty-Year Mission by Edward Gross and Mark Altman, canon creators and staff confirm that Roddenberry was not only outlandishly sexist in real life — even for his time — but that he was going through an extremely nasty divorce that led him to make numerous bitter, angry statements about women.
  • Another common fanon interpretation that disregards Roddenberry's blatant sexist elements is the first few lines between Janice and Kirk; Lester was doing her own space work (she's a xenoarchaeologist, like Picard) and wanted to continue it on the Enterprise when Kirk was given command, but Federation ships at that time did not permit families on board (Starfleet personnel only - civilians on starships like on Star Trek: The Next Generation weren't common until nearly a century after this), thus denying her an opportunity to explore the galaxy with him. It's also implied that this was why she tried for command herself.
  • There's a fan theory that the whole episode takes place in Lester's head.
• Fanon Discontinuity: While you won't find too many people who outright refuse to acknowledge the episode's existence — a few wouldn't mind shedding the episode's sexist implications about Starfleet, but it's more comfortable for Lester's rants to be written off as being nonsense even in-universe — some prefer to think of the prior episode, "All Our Yesterdays" as the actual series finale, as its stardate implies that it takes place chronologically after this episode, and its themes are more fitting to a series finale than those of this episode.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: No, this isn't a lost Ace Attorney story.
• Ho Yay: Kirk in Lester does the same fond smiles for Spock that normal Kirk has, and tells him that he’s the closest person to Kirk in the universe. Shatner had fun behind the scenes, replacing one of his lines with “Spock it’s always been you”.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Many have been quick to assume that Gene Roddenberry couldn't possibly have been responsible for the sexist elements of this story, and instead have assigned the blame to script editor and teleplay writer Arthur Singer. If anything, Roddenberry's original script for the episode was even worse than what was aired, and ended on a particularly facepalm-worthy bit involving Kirk complaining about his still-effeminate mannerisms after being returned to his own body, until a sexy female yeoman shows up for duty and causes Kirk to suddenly start acting masculine again.
  • Most of the gender equality messages in Star Trek came from Gene L. Coon and D.C. Fontana, not Roddenberry nor third season producer Fred Freiberger, who charmingly referred to the show as "tits in space". The 1/3 female crew were intended as Bridge Bunnies^note an early review even described the Enterprise as "a mammoth starship that has a Playboy bunny-type waitress", referring to Janice Rand and nothing else. Certainly not to promote the idea of equality. But what he gave us was women on spaceships, even if they weren't in the driver's seat. Without the least intention on the creator's part, Star Trek gave millions of little girls of all races the notion that they too could become astronauts, engineers, scientists and explorers.
• Moral Event Horizon: From Chekov's and Sulu's point of view, Lester-in-Kirk crosses the line when s/he begins to order executions.
• Periphery Demographic: As noted in the main page Kirk-in-Lester's-body is popular among some fans who like the idea of Kirk and Spock romance but who also view their canon genders as a stumbling block. More broadly it is also of interest to general fans of Gender Bender stories (though of course both sets of fans might find the idea more intriguing than the execution.)

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