Star Trek: Let That Be Your Last Battlefied

Episode: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"
Series: Star Trek: The Original Series
Season 3, Episode 15
Original Air Date: January 10, 1969

via Memory Beta

As the series was winding down, NBC and Paramount executives wanted to use every available Trek script.   The story for "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" had originally been pitched and rejected for the show's first season but now it was exactly the sort of material required for the death spiral.  The episode is a heavy-handed racism fable, best-loved by the devoted for the guest appearance by Frank Gorshin who had played The Riddler on ten episodes of Batman.

While on a mission to decontaminate the planet Ariannus, the Enterprise encounters a stolen Federation shuttle craft.  The tractor beam brings the vessel into the hangar deck and Lokai, the injured pilot/thief within, is brought to sickbay.  Meanwhile, Bele (Gorshin), another being, has boarded the ship in his pursuit of Lokai.  Bele identifies himself as a police commissioner and has long sought Lokai as a political dissident.  Both men are white on one side of the face, black on the other.  Wouldn't you know it, they're exactly opposite.  Bele is black on the right side, Lokai is white on the right.  Thus all the trouble.

Eye roll inducing moments are definitely on the increase but there is still fun to be had.  During red alerts, the camera zooms in and out on the signal at a tilted angle.  This was allegedly done in tribute to The Riddler.

*****

via Batman Wiki

Frank Gorshin was born April 5, 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He got into show business as an impressionist, having mastered the mannerisms of film stars while ushering at a movie theater during high school.  He went to college at the school now known as Carnegie Mellon.  He was drafted into the army in 1953, serving a year and a half in Germany.

Gorshin's acting career took off after his army discharge.  Film gigs included Between Heaven and Hell, Hot Rod Girl and Invasion of the Saucer Men.  Apart from Trek and Batman, he made television appearances on Hawaii Five-O, Charlie's Angels and Wonder Woman among many others.  He debuted on The Ed Sullivan Show the same night The Beatles did. 

The impressions continued to the end.  In 2002, Gorshin played George Burns in Say Goodnight, Gracie, a Tony-nominated one-man show.  A notorious chain smoker (five packs a day!), Gorshin died in 2005 from lung cancer, emphysema and pneumonia.