Alternative Character Interpretation: Lokai is supposed to lose sympathy on the basis he killed innocent people in his rebellion. While that would be the case, the problem is this is said by Bele who is still shown to be an apologist for the oppression. Since everyone else on the planet is dead, we're not entirely sure if he killed innocent people or if they were oppressors that Bele saw as innocent because they shared his views. Bele claims Lokai killed children, but we only have his word that he isn’t making that part up.note Would you believe a white police officer from the 1950s who claimed a black civil rights protestor did this?
Anvilicious: Think this might be a commentary on black-white racial relations in the US? Note that this was just one year after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.. The message of the utter futility of hating another being of your own species for something as insignificant as the color of their skin is still a potent message to this day.
Narm: A few times in the episode, when Red Alert is called, the camera zooms back and forth on one of the red lights as an Actor Allusion-based Shout-Out to Batman (1966) (which also starred Gorshin). Unfortunately, it instead ends up looking really out of place for the show.
The ending features Lokai then Bele running to the transporter inter-cut with shots of a burning city. Neat in theory, but the way they suddenly act winded looks like they're more flopping about the halls after a few drinks than an act of pure hatred.
Unintentionally Sympathetic: Although the show tried to make it seem that Lokai and Bele were just as bad as each other, it's impossible to not take sides with Lokai, due to the fact that Bele's race pretty much had been oppressing his from the get-go for arbitrary reasons.
Values Dissonance: Well-intentioned as it is, the episode can be pretty cringe-inducing with its portrayal of both sides of the racial divide as being equally responsible for the hatred between them, even as it also clearly portrays one race as having put the other under horrible oppression. The Watts riots were still a recent memory at the time, but at our current remove from that, it can easily come off as putting undue blame on black people in their fight for equality. Granted, tying in to the Watts riots context, the real problem is that it's simultaneously trying to drop a big ol' aesop about racial-based conflict between heavily armed powers having a terrible risk of leading to global extinction — i.e., it was trying to comment on the ever-present US–Soviet tensions and the not-even-decade-old Cuban Missile Crisis — but the obvious white/black thing muddles that part of the message.
There are plenty of instances in reality where two ethnic groups have ended up in Evil Versus Evil (oh, how ironic that naming), where both sides committed massive numbers of atrocities such as the Yugoslav Wars or other Cycle of Revenge cases. There's no moral superior there. As pointed out above, the episode's basic message that "hatred of other races is foolish, irrational, and ultimately destructive to both sides" is still perfectly valid.
Lokai's speech explaining how the children were stolen and given just enough education to serve the masters, with the ultimate goal of annihilation and genocide, has as much or more in common with The Stolen Generations and the Native American and First Nations residential schools as with the enslavement of African people.
