The final indignity for the original series of Star Trek was the episode Turnabout Intruder where a bitter woman, Janice Lester, used trickery and an alien device to swap bodies with Captain James T. Kirk generating some of the series most over the top performances from William Shatner.

The body swap, a fantastical process where one person’s mind is placed into the body of another is tired trope and one that should always be understood as fantasy not science-fiction.

The core erroneous concept for this idea is that there is a separation between body and mind, that our ‘selves’ exist independent of our bodies and thus could be transplanted into a new form like a sapling being moved to a larger pot.

Our minds are emergent properties of our bodies. The subtle and complex interactions of physical experience, hormonal balances, and genetics give rise to the varied and unique personalities of the human race. There is not independent mind to move from one body to another. It is the body that generates the mind and with a different body, or a significantly altered one, the mind is different. Numerous brain injury and disease cases bear witness to this fact of life.

All of that said, I think I have found at least one, far out but barely plausible method of telling a body swap story. Now to see if I can make it work.